MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-16 19:03:32+00:00
Not quite. It is in a way (very visible when we talk about invariants), but it is not, well, semantic. A good notation for those steps would allow me to make only the distinctions I care for and ignore the distinctions I do not care for. So, for example, if I want to describe the greatest common divisor algorithm, I would only focus on the arithmetic part and define the domain of the parameters as "positive integers" (or maybe "non-negative integers").

A real programming language has a different goal: the code must run and do something useful. So I am unlikely to be able to define the domain like that (won't be able to make important distinctions) and, at the same time, will likely have to attend to things I do not care about (will have to make unimportant distinctions). All this will cripple and obscure the logic. This is what happens now and as a result we have a different implementation of everything for every programming language.
by grogenaut | 2025-12-16 19:03:35+00:00
I wouldn't buy a mach-e to baby it and feather the pedal, like what's the point.

I have several fun to drive relatively fuel efficient cars that are sunk costs. I work from home, they're just getting old. I have a pickup to go do dirty things like duck hunting.

The ev seems great for driving to work (I work from home) or around town. I was very unimpressed with it's short trip range and efficiency on a hill (whole trip empg was 44). I spent half as much time at the charger as I did driving. I'm sure it'll get better. Much higher charging speed would help a lot (Mach-e is limited to 150). The extended range battery would help.

Any other sub 3.5s 0-60 under 70 evs out there? If you can't tell I don't care about pure efficiency, I care about a fun to drive car that's got better efficiency than an IC and a usable range.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-16 19:04:12+00:00
You don't trust devs to run things, to have git hooks installed, to have a clean environment, to not have uncommitted changes, to not have a diverging environment on their laptop.

Actions let you test things in multiple environments, to test them with credentials against resources devs don't have access to, to do additional things like deploys, managing version numbers, on and on

With CI, especially pull requests, you can leave longer running tests for github to take care of verifying. You can run periodic tests once a day like an hour long smoke test.

CI is guard rails against common failure modes which turn requiring everyone to follow an evolving script into something automatic nobody needs to think about much
by nodesocket | 2025-12-16 19:04:16+00:00
Is there any included free amount of platform minutes for private orgs/repos? Currently using Blakcksmith with arm64 and do around 600 minutes a month (very small). I get 2,000 free minutes of GitHub runner time for free, so maybe have to switch to using GitHub native arm64 runners.

That being said even with no free platform minutes my Blacksmith usage will only $1.20 a month in platform fees, so inconsequential.
by nly | 2025-12-16 19:04:16+00:00
A good write up, but a preallocated MPMC queue can be built without using CAS on every push and without fixed size slots and without multiple rings.

While even SPSC ring buffers are simple they are not particularly efficient in the case where the consumer is keeping up with the producer (the ideal case for a queue) due to all the cacheline ping pong. They are not the lowest latency solution
by cedws | 2025-12-16 19:04:46+00:00
I wonder if players like Depot could sidestep GHA by using webhooks instead of acting as a custom runner, in other words build their own compatible control plane. I guess it would probably break a lot of workflows.

What I'd really like to see is some new CI/CD systems though. Actions is garbage in multiple dimensions. Can't somebody do something clever and save us from this flaky insecure YAML hell?
Show HN: Agenteract – Drive mobile apps with LLMs using UI trees (no vision)
by mribbons | 2025-12-16 19:04:49+00:00
Hi HN,

AI agents excel at web tasks because they can read the DOM. But when you point that same agent at a mobile app, it hits a wall. There is no DOM to read. Some have tried to use computer vision, but it is slow, expensive, and flaky.

I built Agenteract to give mobile apps a "DOM" that agents can actually read.

Instead of taking screenshots, Agenteract instruments your app to "self-report" its view hierarchy through a secure local WebSocket. It serializes the UI into a token-efficient JSON tree.

On top of this, Agenteract provides a clean CLI that enables agents to interact with the app with minimal context overhead.

Here's a normal flow of using the CLI to interact with the app:

npx @agenteract/agents hierarchy your-app

Simplified response example:

{ "status": "success", "hierarchy": { "name": "main(RootComponent)", "children": [ { "name": "ViewStuff", "children": [ { "name": "Text", "text": "Home" }, { "name": "Pressable", "testID": "test-button", "children": [ { "name": "Text", "text": "Simulate Target" } ] } ] } ] }, "id": "296d657e-f5e8-49d1-a7ab-62815a" }

Then tapping the button:

npx @agenteract/agents tap your-app test-button

If the interaction is successful, the agent receives:

{"status":"success","message":"Tapped test-button"}

Alternatively, the agent could retrieve the view hierarchy again to see the updated state.

We support the following actions: - tap - input - scroll - longPress - swipe - wait - log - cmd (send keystrokes to dev servers, eg reload)

Why not just use screenshots? * Speed: JSON is instant; processing screenshots takes seconds. * Cost: Text tokens are orders of magnitude cheaper than image tokens. * Reliability: Deterministic targeting means no hallucinated coordinates.

Supported Platforms: * React Native / Expo (via Fiber tree introspection) * Flutter (via Widget tree traversal) * Native iOS (Swift/UIKit/SwiftUI) * Native Android (Kotlin)

Repo: https://github.com/agenteract/agenteract

Docs: https://agenteract.io/docs
by saulpw | 2025-12-16 19:05:08+00:00
I read the article before I commented, and I reread the definition just now, and I still think that effort/exertion/tension/whatever you want to call it, is a necessary stage along the journey to mastery. Maybe Mozart or whatever preternatural prodigy from birth managed to fit this stage into preconsciousness, but I can virtually guarantee that Katie Ledecky had to over-exert in order to build herself into the powerhouse she became. There is no way she expended "zero effort", either by normal use of the word "effort", or by the definition in the article.
by thoughtpeddler | 2025-12-16 19:05:11+00:00
If you read the original post, the author actually gives the sort of credit to Doctorow that you're providing here, and says it is precisely because he is so well-liked (justifiably) that it's important for him to offer better prescriptions to his followers. I myself am a huge Doctorow fan but agree with the linked author's claim that "AI isn't going away" in the way Doctorow and other public thinkers making similar claim have been saying. Their words ultimately come from a good place, but what to do about it will likely be different than what's recommended so far.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-16 19:05:46+00:00
It's even worse on desktop. You have to scroll the entire screen (with mousewheel or arrow keys) to move the selection. I spent 30 seconds thinking it was bugged because the intuitive solution would be to click once, then simply click where you want to place it, but the "place" button only showed up on the one you already "picked". Fine idea, worst conceivable execution of UX I have ever seen.
by klinch | 2025-12-16 19:05:49+00:00
I agree that it’s probably not a big amount. But note that it can be potentially quiet a bit more than the 90$. Task runtimes are always rounded up to the nearest minute.

For example, in our pipeline we have 5 different linter tasks (for different subprojects), running each only a few seconds. Nonetheless, we’ll get billed for 5 minutes on every commit.
by Ugyen_Tech | 2025-12-16 19:06:25+00:00
Hi, Ugyen here from Bhutan... I have been working on an interesting problem that I repeatedly faced while building AI agents for banks and airlines. Their systems were very old and outdated, which made integration extremely difficult. To solve this, I started building a gateway between modern AI agents and these legacy systems...

While working on this, I realized many others might be also facing the same issue, so I decided to turn it into a product. As an added benefit, it also optimizes and reduces payloads to include only what the AI agent actually needs and helping significantly reduce API costs.
by paulhebert | 2025-12-16 19:06:50+00:00
Hey, thanks for playing!

1) This is an interesting idea! I’ll play with that when I have time.

2) I am experimenting with this but have gotten mixed feedback from players. Some people don’t like it. I’m curious what you think! If I don’t do this I’ll explore other options: https://sunny.garden/@paulhebert/115698266272946749
by stuffn | 2025-12-16 19:06:57+00:00
This isn't said in bad faith but there is a few things that seem to be unanswered here besides surveillance is bad.

1. You have no expectation of privacy in public.

2. People carry surveillance devices in their pocket.

It is somehow simultaneously bad that the government uses public surveillance, but completely fine the public does. I don't think it's acceptable these target "flock". It's completely useless doesn't solve the greater problem. The greater problem in my eyes is:

1. I can't move around my own neighborhood without being recorded by 200 personal cameras whose data is uploaded an analyzed by various security companies.

2. I can't go to someone's house without their internal cameras recorded my every move and word.

3. I can't go outside without some subset of morons, that seem to always exist, bringing out their pocket government tracking device to record everyones face, movement, location, and action.

4. I can't say or do anything in public without risking some social justice warrior recording me, cutting it up, and using it to destroy me.

The greater problem is the proliferation of surveillance devices in every day life. Flock is such a small player in the grand scheme of this. These websites are simply art pieces and do nothing to solve the actual, pervasive, problem we face.

So do we just stop at Flock and raise the Mission Accomplished banner? Or do we forget this nonsense and target the real problem.
by dpark | 2025-12-16 19:07:32+00:00
> Why is it so hard to just admit that trucks and SUVs do in fact offer greater utility and convenience in most situations than small sedans? And that this utility and convenience, even if not needed all the time, is the main reason people are buying them?

In general I agree that they do offer a lot of comfort. This is actually a common criticism of these trucks, that they are “pavement princesses” that never haul anything more than groceries. Ironically, a lot of trucks have gotten so tall that they need a step for short people to get into, though, putting the claims of comfort into question.

Personally I think a lot of the justifications about big trucks are true but also not why people buy them. They see more convenient (sometimes; they are a bitch to park in cities). They are more comfortable. They can haul. They can go off-road. But these being true doesn’t mean that’s why most people actually buy them.

Marketing folks understand that. That’s why truck ads show manly shit like rocks being dumped into the back of the truck and off-roading around a mountain even though that’s not how they get used. Consumers are buying the feeling. Just like BMW sells sports cars but showing them whip around mountain roads rather than sitting in traffic.

It’s very much like guns. People who buy guns justify the purchases by saying they need them for self defense or home defense. But the reality is that most guns are never used for any of that and most people who buy guns would move somewhere else if there actually thought they needed them. They are bought because people like guns and find them fun to own. These are of course not mutually exclusive reasons. A gun can be fun and also quell feelings of fear about hypothetical home invasion.

> I mean, your contention is that the average American, no doubt hard up for money, is so dumb they are willing to pay a 25k+ premium to feel “manly”.

Is that actually hard to believe? Americans are notoriously terrible with money and many buy dumb stuff as status symbols when they are missing rent payments.

Again, marketers don’t seem to have any trouble grasping that most money is spent on feelings.
by Ifkaluva | 2025-12-16 19:07:46+00:00
I’m not sure if this is true.

At the company where I work (one of the FAANGs), there is suddenly a large number of junior IC roles opening up. This despite the trend of the last few years to only hire L5 and above.

My read of the situation:

- junior level jobs were sacrificed as cost cutting measures, to allow larger investment in AI

- some analysts read this as “the junior levels are being automated! Evidence: there is some AI stuff, and there are no junior roles!”

- but it was never true, and now the tide is turning.

I’m not sure I ever heard anybody in my company claim that the dearth of junior openings was due to to “we are going to automate the juniors”. I think all of that narrative was external analysts trying to read the tea leaves too hard. And, wannabes like Marc Benioff pretending to be tech leaders, but that’s a helpful reminder that Benioff is simply “not serious people”.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-16 19:07:48+00:00
>I just wish it had AWD for the winters where I live.

Why? People always say this. AWD doesn't help you stop faster. It won't help you get around the corner. You aren't on a racetrack.

Buy better tires. A real set of winter specialized tires will do better than any powertrain option. If you are absolutely insistent that no really you are totally special, get studded tires.

The best snow performance I've ever had out of a vehicle came not from the AWD trucks people around me owned, but from $34 walmart winter tires on a Dodge Neon. Because being light is a benefit.

Or, and this is the big one, stop being so bad at driving! My mom would spend $350 a tire on the best best best snow tire money could buy and fill it full of studs and still feel like she was out of control in the snow, because if you put your foot down on the pedal, any vehicle with more than 20HP will spin the tires.

Learn how to steer in the snow and slightly out of control. It's pretty intuitive IMO and fun.

Just be gentler. Press the pedal less to start. Or don't, modern ESC has no problem modulating the throttle for you.
by d1l | 2025-12-16 19:07:52+00:00
I still use it (shout out taviso iykyk).

https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm...

Someone made a full cde style desktop with fvwm: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates.

Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-16 19:08:02+00:00
Again, in my experience, that simply never happened, at least not with regard to junior positions.

During COVID we were struggling to retain good developers that just couldn't deal with the full-remote situation[1], and afterwards, there was a lull in recent graduates.

Again, this is from a EU perspective.

[1] While others absolutely thrived, and, yeah, we left them alone after the pandemic restrictions ended...
by colechristensen | 2025-12-16 19:08:12+00:00
I read this and I'm thinking I should just get Claude to write me my own GitHub (with blackjack! and... nevermind)

I'm in the era of writing my own tools, not to share just for me or whatever group I'm working in. If you're going to charge me for something rife with annoying struggles, I might as well be annoyed by a tool I control.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-16 19:08:13+00:00
> Even if construction would be zero it wouldn't make more than a dent in the overall trend because the investments are done into land not houses.

This is fairly simple arithmetic. Suppose we attribute the cost of a single family home (one housing unit) entirely to land, and then the cost of land doubles. Obviously the cost of the single family home doubles.

Now suppose construction is cheap and zoning doesn't prohibit this. For 10% of the cost of the land, we could build a condo tower on that same piece of land. Ten stories, 100 housing units. The cost of a unit just went by down by a factor of ~100. The price of the land doubling is dwarfed by the increase in the number of permissible units per plot of land.

> Pretty much every argument you made can be easily refuted by looking at any other jurisdiction that has completely different zoning laws and completely different construction prices and yet prices for real estate are skyrocketing the same, regardless of use.

The places with less restrictive zoning objectively do have lower housing costs, and even most of the places with "less restrictive zoning" still have non-trivial zoning restrictions. For example, name the major US city that isn't accompanied by a significant land area zoned exclusively for single family homes.
by paulhebert | 2025-12-16 19:08:18+00:00
Hey, that’s awesome! That makes me happy to hear about your screen shares!

I’m experimenting with a way to make swapping tiles easier but I’ve gotten mixed feedback from players: https://sunny.garden/@paulhebert/115698266272946749

I’m curious what you think! My other idea is to add a “shuffle” button that rearranged the tiles to help get unstuck
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-12-16 19:08:32+00:00
Cameras could do it if:

* they were positioned for stereopsis like the human visual system

* had 6 degrees of motion freedom like the human visual system

* were hyper-adaptive to lighting conditions like the human visual system

* had a significantly higher density of pixels per degree of arc in the focus region like the human visual system

* and were backed by a system capable of intuiting object inertia like the human visual system.

Tesla does none of those.
by boplicity | 2025-12-16 19:08:38+00:00
You need to get more specific about your market. General language learning is too broad of a category in order to make informed choices.

Who are your ideal customers -- and how can you serve them best?

"Calm" is not a niche, its a style.

A niche is your position relative to the people you're serving.

Learning apps serve huge varieties of markets, with very different needs. For example, math apps designed to supplement math education in an elementary school environment, versus a language learning app designed for someone traveling to a X country in 3 months...

Your questions should be anchored to very specific audiences that you can actually reach.
by palmotea | 2025-12-16 19:08:39+00:00
> Then they can stand alone on a pile of ashes at The End of the World and then see how much happiness their "money" bought them.

Like the book "Don't Create the Torment Nexus," the wisdom of this cartoon is an inspiration to business leaders everywhere who know that shareholder value is paramount:

https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...
by lrvick | 2025-12-16 19:08:52+00:00
The same Apple whose CEO actively kisses the ass of the president buying tickets to be close to him and making him fancy gifts? The same Apple that voluntarily gave the CCP control of all the HSMs controlling the supply chains of all apple hardware in China?

Any claims of privacy or consumer advocacy at Apple are completely just marketing to gullible consumers.

If Apple actually cared about accountability, which is a prerequisite for privacy, they would open source everything so security researchers could reproduce all binaries and easily inspect their sources.
by llama052 | 2025-12-16 19:09:12+00:00
I guess this is on brand for Microsoft. Just lame to go through the trouble to self host runners and still get tacked on with fees after the fact.

Hard for me to feel like our industry is innovating and not just gouging with the rest in the battle for enshittification.

I will intentionally start exploring other options even if the cost isn't high, because I don't want to support this type of thing.
by K3UL | 2025-12-16 19:09:19+00:00
That's clearly the case, this is a three-pronged manoeuver :

- Introducing a cheap 1-core runner

- Lowering the price of GitHub-hosted runners

- Making it slightly more expensive to use self-hosted runners

- There is actually a fourth one: the vnet integration, which also allows you to run public runners in your own infra

As a bonus, for some people it means something that was free is now not free. Those who are willing to pay rather than go, might prefer to use GitHub-hosted if they are going to pay anyway.

This is clearly an incentive to use github-hosted, and their sales reps are also going this way.
by nickcw | 2025-12-16 19:09:30+00:00
Actually the fastest ones in my experience are the HTTP/1.x ones. HTTP/2 is generally slower in rclone though I think that is the fault of the stlib not opening more connections. I haven't really tried QUIC

I just think for streaming lots of data quickly HTTP/1.x plus TLS plus TCP has received many more engineering hours of optimization than any other combo.
Show HN: Display of Nested Comments and Spacing
by brettermeier | 2025-12-16 19:09:33+00:00
Use this CSS with eg. Stylus Firefox extension on Hackernews: Much better, ahh...

.spacer { height: 20px !important; } .ind { background: repeating-linear-gradient( 90deg, #f6f6ef 0px, #f6f6ef 37px, #465298 39px, #465298 39px ); } #hnmain { max-width: 1200px; }
by Zigurd | 2025-12-16 19:09:41+00:00
I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag.

I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it definitely would go off into the weeds fairly often. But not having to spend hours here and there getting up to speed on some mundane but unfamiliar aspect of the implementation really made everything about the experience better.

I even explored some aspects of LLM performance: I could tell that new and fast changing APIs easily flummox a coding agent, confirming the strong relationship of up-to-date and accurate training material to LLM performance. I've also seen this aspect of agent assisted coding improve and vary across AIs.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-16 19:10:06+00:00
It is really incredibly nice to be able to highlight a passage, right click on it, and select "Summarize" or "Explain this." That's all FireFox does at the moment. It's an option on the right-click menu. You can ignore it. If nobody told you the evil AI thingy was there, you would probably never notice it.
by impossiblefork | 2025-12-16 19:10:24+00:00
Ah. I don't see competition as being between generations to any major degree, but between people with generations, so I find the framing very strange, and I think, if you see competition as between people, you will see that allowing yourself to end up behind others will not end with you getting somehow repaid.

Instead, getting a high salary now is used as negotiation for getting a high salary tomorrow, so it is critical to ensure it. You do not gain by accepting a lower salary.

If consumption must be reduced, that may be so, but if it is done by reducing salaries, and your salary is part of it, then you will lose and you will never be repaid for it.