MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jansommer | 2025-12-03 23:14:15+00:00
AI is such a blessing. I use it almost every day at work, and I've spent this evening getting a Bluetooth to USB mapper for a ps4 controller working by having ChatGPT write it for me, for a bigger project I'm working on. Yes, it's going to take some time to fully understand the code and adjust it to my own standards, but i've been playing a game a few hours now and I feel zero latency and plenty of controller rumble that I'm having fun giving some extra power. It pretty much worked with the first 250 lines of C it spew out.

What's gonna be super interesting is that I'm going to have an rpi zero 2 power up my machine when I press the controller's ps-button. That means I might need to solder and do some electrical voodoo that I've never tried. Crossing my fingers that the plan ChatGPT has come up with won't electrocute me.
by anthonypasq | 2025-12-03 23:14:29+00:00
theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations. theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city. nothing about what you said is relevant.

rich people (of which boston has plenty even in the burbs where average house prices are 800k+) pay to avoid existing near poor people. they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.

if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-12-03 23:14:34+00:00
> The students have one big global Slack instance.

Are you back on Slack as the primary comms channel after their sudden attempt to upcharge you (followed by the U-turn after the PR backlash)? Do you have some mirroring and other kind of fallback strategy if something like that happens again?

(Context for those who missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887)
by dugidugout | 2025-12-03 23:14:42+00:00
If you were sincere in your attempt to "empathize with [them] there", your prose screams the opposite. I point this out, as anecdotally, it was quite distracting from the rest of your point and makes me think you are not doing much to meet the other perspective.

Now to directly push on your perspective, I'm not so sure why you make the conclusion that you don't have opportunity for feedback given you've moved to a remote office culture. I am giving you a form of feedback in this instance. Yes it is at my whim and not guaranteed if our interests don't align, however this is a cost of collaboration. It is a bit grim to see the ushering of "coding LLM" as proper replacement here, when you are doing no-more than bootstrapping introspection. This isn't to detract from the value you've found in the tool, I only question why you've written off the collaboration element of unique human experiences interlocking on common ground.
by ahepp | 2025-12-03 23:14:52+00:00
It makes sense that some of the criticisms wouldn't apply if you're not storing the files 1:1.

What about NFS or traditional filesystems on iSCSI block devices? I assume you're not using those because managing/scaling/HA for them is too painful? What about the openstack equivalents of EFS/EBS? Or Ceph's fs/blockdev solutions (although looking into it a bit, it seems like those are based on its object store)?
by snuxoll | 2025-12-03 23:15:14+00:00
The literal multi-million dollar question that executives have never bothered asking: When is it enough?

Do I, as a player, appreciate the extra visual detail in new games? Sure, most of the time.

But, if you asked me what I enjoy playing more 80% of the time? I'd pull out a list of 10+ year old titles that I keep coming back to, and more that I would rather play than what's on the market today if they only had an active playerbase (for multiplayer titles).

Honestly, I know I'm not alone in saying this: I'd rather we had more games focused on good mechanics and story, instead of visually impressive works that pile on MTX to recoup insane production costs. Maybe this is just the catalyst we need to get studios to redirect budgets to making games fun instead of spending a bunch of budget on visual quality.
Show HN: KeyboardNotifier: Debug intermittent keyboard/input issues
by jconley88 | 2025-12-03 23:15:19+00:00
Problem:

I was getting intermittent repeating characters on random keys after replacing my mechanical keyboard switches with Outemo switches (spoiler: they were not the issue). This was often outside of a text-input application, spamming Ubuntu, preventing input and causing freeze-like issues. In addition, I often didn't recognize it right away and could not reliably determine which recent modifier or other keys I had just been pressing. There was no physical indication on the keyboard to alert me either.

Solution:

I needed a way to clearly identify when a key was stuck so I could isolate other hardware components. I also needed to know which keys it was happening on to find out if it was a small set of bad switches or randomly any key.

I wasn't able to find an existing solution that 1. Monitored continuously 2. Checked for repeating keys rather than just single presses.

Implementation:

Built for Linux and tested on Ubuntu.

This runs as a simple bash script after the user configures their input device name. It can optionally be set up as a system daemon. (The README has comprehensive instructions)

The script: 1. Sets up an input stream from `evtest` 2. monitors for repeat events 3. Notifies and logs the key name when the configurable threshold is exceeded 4. ... and again if/when the same key gets unstuck

While the body of the script was designed specifically for my use case, ie repeat keys, the project is meant as a template that sets up monitoring and notifications/logging for physical inputs. You could change it to monitor other input streams, check for press down/release events, duplicate/bounce key strikes or limit the set of keys that's monitored.

Thanks!

I hope that somebody, somewhere finds this useful in some form, even if just as a reference!
by zdragnar | 2025-12-03 23:15:54+00:00
Where you see exponential growth in capability and value, I see the early stages of logarithmic growth.

A similar thing played out a bit with IoT and voice controlled systems like Alexa. They've got their places, but nobody needs or wants the Amazon Dash buttons, or for Alexa to do your shopping for you.

Setting an alarm or adding a note to a list is fine, remote monitoring is fine, but when it comes to things that really matter like spending money autonomously, it completely falls flat.

Long story short, I see a fad that will fall into the background of what people actually do, rather than becoming the medium that they do it by.
by tombert | 2025-12-03 23:16:13+00:00
GOG has managed to do pretty well in their own way. Nowhere near as popular as Steam, obviously, but they hold their own, and they've managed to do it without DRM. Humble Bundle has also managed to do something as well (though admittedly that's largely through selling Steam keys).

I feel like this is a Normalcy bias though [1]. Valve hasn't abused their status yet, and maybe they never will, but all it takes is a change in management for that to come to an end. Even if there's no competition to squelch, they still might just decide they want more money and engage in rent-seeking behavior.

For example (and to be clear I am just making this up and it's not based on anything), suppose Valve were to start charging a yearly "hosting fee", where you now have to pay $50 a year to cover the cost of hosting your games, and if you don't pay this hosting fee you lose access to all your games. I have like 800 games on Steam, I've spent thousands of dollars on them throughout the years, I don't want to lose them, so I'd probably complain about it and take out my credit card and just pay it.

Stuff like this has already happened with other companies (like the Unity licensing fee fiasco a couple years ago).

I'm not saying that it will happen, but at this point Steam has so much of the market and so many people have their entire game collections on there that I don't think we should discount the possibility that it could happen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
by micromacrofoot | 2025-12-03 23:17:01+00:00
What's "there" though is that despite being wrappers of chat gpt, the product itself is so compelling that it's essentially got a grip on the entire american economy. That's why everyone's crabs in a bucket about it, there's something real that everyone wants to hitch on to. People compare crypto or NFTs to this in terms of hype cycle, but it's not even close.
by sph | 2025-12-03 23:17:05+00:00
> I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself

> I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works.

Then what is the point? For some of us, programming is an art form. Creativity is an art form and an ideal to strive towards. Why have a machine to create something we wouldn’t care about?

The only result is a devaluation to zero of actual effort and passion, whose only beneficiary are those that only care about creating more “product”. Sure, you can pump out products with little effort now, all the while making a few ultrabilionaires richer. Good for you, I guess.
by amlib | 2025-12-03 23:17:25+00:00
I agree that you can have cheap and great DACs nowadays that far exceeds what a consumer needs but some manufacturers still insists in putting less than ideal ones, or fumbling their implementation, in all sorts of device. I've got a computer with a fairly recent motherboard that I'm using for an htpc and the audio output is much noisier and produced a less punchy bass than the now 20 year old (!) X-fi sound card I've been using for... 20 years. Too bad, I wanted to give it a respite but I guess It's gonna keep trucking for at least another decade.

I then proceeded to investigate that by using REW to produce measurements of each output and the findings confirmed my hearing, the motherboard audio was outputting 5db less, plus a noise floor 15 db higher than the x-fi, resulting in 20db of extra noise (When you compensate with 5db extra at the amp). The resulting frequency response also revealed a much more aggressive high pass filter, I was actually getting another -3db@30hz compared to the x-fi confirming where the lack of "punchiness" was coming from. And then the cherry on the top was that all the extra channeles (surrdound/sub/center) had an even more aggressive highpass filter, they cheapened out on the cheapening out, probably assuming you are not gonna use more than stereo.

Here is the graph, red is x-fi outs and green is motherboard outs: https://i.imgur.com/dxoLXJO.png

Obviously this is just my anecdote, but I suspect this is very widespread.

EDIT: Oh and I haven't even talked about the line-ins! It's pretty much unusable in ALL motherboard audio I've cared to try. There is some insane noise gating and AGC going on to try and mask the fact that they use some really low bit depth ADCs with terrible dynamic range. Meanwhile I can capture pristine audio from my n64 into the x-fi no problem.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-03 23:17:31+00:00
It's also bullshit. Half Life 2 didn't need uncompressed audio. MP3 decompression is damn near free.

Half life also did it with half the required minimum cores, and 1 ghz less clock speed on that CPU. It released a decade before Titanfall 1. Sure sure, it's got so much more going on, but uh, that much?

For a reference of how trivial it is for CPUs to decode MP3 files, software decoders take tens of MIPS. Remember that unit? Less than a percent of one of those minimum spec CPUs required.

You know what's funny? The source engine only supports MP3 compressed audio. Do you know what titanfall 1 downloads and decompresses to to create 30gb of audio data? Lossy compressed, 160kb/s OGG format audio.
by culanuchachamim | 2025-12-03 23:18:45+00:00
-The Filevine team was responsive, professional, and took the findings seriously throughout the disclosure process. They acknowledged the severity, worked to remediate the issues, allowed responsible disclosure, and maintained clear communication. This is another great example of how organizations should handle security disclosures.

In the same tenure I think that a professional etical hacker or a curious fellow that is poking around with no harm intent, shouldn't disclose the name of the company that had a security issue if they resolve it professionally.

You can write the same blog post without mentioning that it was Filevine.

If they didn't take care of the incident that's a different story...
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-03 23:19:20+00:00
I would contend that anger is the only thing that drives any kind of progress. An abundance of love means accepting, adjusting, and forgiving, which are antithetical to systemic change.

You need that middle-finger-to-everyone, "let me show you how it's really done" energy to build anything meaningful. Pretty much all the great builders I can think of in tech history are/were deeply angry people.
by kromem | 2025-12-03 23:19:36+00:00
Seems very strawmanned.

There's currently a bit of an 80/20 rule with AI where it does great automating 80% of an overlapping problem domain and chokes on it 20% of the time.

The idea of someone giving 100% of their work to Claude as in the examples is dumb. But so is someone doing 100% of the busywork themselves.

Don't waste your own time and your client's money for the sake of some nonsense purity ideal. Learn to thread the needle of changing times.

Cause they are gonna keep changing.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-03 23:19:42+00:00
TIL from goog (while looking up the origin of the "managerialist" vs "pastoral" technicalities of the word

Dispensation 2. a political, religious, or social system prevailing at a particular time. E.g. "scholarship is conveyed to a wider audience than under the old dispensation"

(Noted the Moloch iconography)

The market reflects a deep human need for "metrics you can grab/get you outta your head", no religious movement really addresses that (aside from freemasonry & Mormonism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_and_Compasses)
by tombert | 2025-12-03 23:20:28+00:00
Sure, none of that is untrue, but they could still engage in rent seeking behavior. They could start requiring subscription fees for stuff that previously didn't require it (like start capping download speeds unless you're part of "Steam+" or something), or blacklist any distro that isn't SteamOS, or make it difficult or impossible to install games from third-party stores (like GOG) on Steam Decks or their upcoming Steam Boxes.

I'm not saying that this still will happen, and it's fairly likely that it won't happen, but I just think we should be mindful for it. Twenty years ago, pretty much everyone in the tech world loved Google.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-12-03 23:20:42+00:00
"A new theoretical analysis ... provides evidence that large language models, such as ChatGPT, are mathematically constrained to a level of creativity comparable to an amateur human.... The study highlights that human creativity is not symmetrically distributed" - https://www.psypost.org/a-mathematical-ceiling-limits-genera...

URL of study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jocb.70077
by almostdeadguy | 2025-12-03 23:21:08+00:00
I think it’s a fair point that google has more stakeholders with a serious investment in some flubbed AI generated code not tanking their share value, but I’m not sure the rest of it is all that different from what engineer at $SOME_STARTUP does after the first ~8monthes the company is around. Maybe some folks throwing shit at a wall to find PMF are really getting a lot out of this, but most of us are maintaining and augmenting something we don’t want to break.
by bilkow | 2025-12-03 23:21:26+00:00
It's probable that licenses that explicitly allows revocation at will would not be approved by OSI or the FSF.

Copyright law is also a complex matter which differs by country and I am not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt, but there seem to be "edge cases" where the license can be revoked as seen in the stackexchange page below.

See:

https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists...

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-lice...
by Slow_Hand | 2025-12-03 23:21:29+00:00
I've actually tried all of the approaches that you've mentioned over the years, and - for my needs - they're not that compelling at the end of the day.

Sure it might be cool to use cellular automata to generate rhythms, or pick notes from a diatonic scale, or modulate signals, but without a rhyme or reason or _very_ tight constraints the music - more often than not - ends up feeling unfocused and meandering.

These methods may be able to generate a bar or two of compelling material, but it's hard to write long musical "sentences" or "paragraphs" that have an arc and intention to them. Or where the individual voices are complementing and supporting one another as they drive towards a common effect.

A great deal of compelling music comes from riding the tightrope between repetition and surprising deviations from that scheme. This quality is (for now) very hard to formalize with rules or algorithms. It's a largely intuitive process and is a big part of being a compelling writer.

I think the most effective music comes from the composer having a clear idea of where they are going musically and then using the tools to supplement that vision. Not allowing them to generate and steer for you.

-----

As an aside, I watch a lot of Youtube tutorials in which electronic music producers create elaborate modulation sources or Max patches that generate rhythms and melodies for them. A recurring theme in many of these videos is an approach of "let's throw everything at the wall, generate a lot of unfocused material, and then winnow it down and edit it into something cool!" This feels fundamentally backwards to me. I understand why it's exciting and cool when you're starting out, but I think the best music still comes from having a strong grasp of the musical fundamentals, a big imagination, and the technical ability to render it with your tools and instruments.

----

To your final point, I think the best example of this hybrid generative approach you're describing are Autechre. They're really out on the cutting edge and carving their own path. Their music is probably quite alienating because it largely forsakes melody and harmony. Instead it's all rhythm and timbre. I think they're a positive example of what generative music could be. They're controlling parameters on the macro level. They're not dictating every note. Instead they appear to be wrangling and modulating probabilities in a very active way. It's exciting stuff.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-03 23:21:40+00:00
> What I want to see is mathematicians employ the same rigor of journalists using abbreviations: define (numerically) your notation, or terminology, the first time you use it, then feel free to use it as notation or jargon for the remainder of the paper.

They do.

The purpose of papers is to teach working mathematicians who are already deeply into the subject something novel. So of course only novel or uncommon notation is introduced in papers.

Systematic textbooks, on the other hand, nearly always introduce a lot of notation and background knowledge that is necessary for the respective audience. As every reader of such textbooks knows, this can easily be dozens or often even hundreds of pages (the (in)famous Introduction chapter).
by rhetocj23 | 2025-12-03 23:22:19+00:00
Yes. The people who are amazed with AI were never that good at a particular subject area in the first place - I dont care who you are. You were not good enough - how do I know this? Well I know economics, corporate finance, accounting et al very deeply. Ive engaged with LLMS for years now and still they cannot get below the surface level and are not improving further than this.

Its easy to recall information, but something entirely different to do something with that information. Which is what those subject ares are all about - taking something (like a theory) and applying it in a disciplined manner given the context.

Thats not to diminish what LLMs can do. But lets get real.
by hmokiguess | 2025-12-03 23:22:39+00:00
I think this is the UX challenge of this era. How to design a piece of software that aids in promoting the human-level of attention to a distributed state without causing information loss or cognitive decline over many tasks. I agree that for any larger piece of work with significant scope the overhead of ingesting the context into your brain offsets the time saving costs you get from multitask promises.

My take on this is that the better these things get eventually we will be able to infer and quantify signals that provide high confidence scores for us to conduct a better review that requires a shorter decision path. This is akin to how compilers, parsers, linters, can give you some level of safety without strong guarantees but are often "good enough" to pass a smell test.
by seanw444 | 2025-12-03 23:22:44+00:00
Do people actually use GitHub to inspect code? I figure for anything that's not a 1-second lookup, I might as well just do at least a shallow clone of the repo, and look through it with my own personally-tailored editor instead.

Not to say their implementation doesn't suck. I just wouldn't know because even a non-buggy one would probably still be a subpar experience.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-03 23:22:46+00:00
To be fair, the huge JavaScript attack surface has ALWAYS been there. JavaScript runs in a really dynamic environment and everything from XSS-onwards has been fundamentally due to why you can do with the environment.

If you remember “mashups” these were basically just using the fact that you can load any code from any remote server and run it alongside your code and code from other servers while sharing credentials between all of them. But hey it is very useful to let Stripe run their stripe.js on your domain. And AdSense. And Mixpanel. And while we are at it let’s let npm install 1000 packages for a single dependency project. It’s bad.
by bastardoperator | 2025-12-03 23:22:48+00:00
It's all faux outrage, they didn't give a shit about ICE or MSFT until they could use it as a rage bait prop.

Imagine being a slave to any SCM UI when cli tools and desktop clients have existed for ages not to mention integration into nearly every IDE. Also, what they're describing "random" workflows is classic ci build machine went offline and came back later.

Regardless, best of luck to them, hopefully they don't run into any more "monkeys", that would be terrible for them.
by eggplantiny | 2025-12-03 23:23:02+00:00
I wrote an essay about why UI generation alone isn’t enough in the AI era.

The core argument: modern applications expose almost none of their internal semantics to AI agents. We give agents screenshots, DOM trees, or heuristics… but not the meaning behind the UI — dependencies, constraints, workflows, business rules, or state transitions.

Humans can infer these from components, hooks, and naming conventions. Agents can’t. As long as semantics remain implicit and scattered across UI/state/backend layers, agents will fail unpredictably.

The essay proposes a different direction: a “semantic layer” where entities, views, rules, and workflows are explicitly declared and machine-queryable. UI becomes just one projection of this underlying model; agents, tests, automation tools, and humans all consume the same structured meaning.

I’m curious whether others have explored similar approaches, seen real-world attempts, or disagree with the premise entirely. Is semantic exposure the missing layer for AI-native software, or are better vision/LLM models enough?
by dmytrokow | 2025-12-03 23:23:17+00:00
> Alacritty is “barebones” and doesn’t have modern features like... tabs.

It does. And the barebones complaint is literally funny (I'm mentally giggling) because Ghostty didn't have modern features like... search, literally 4 days ago https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9756

That's why I'm staying on Alacritty on my company mac.