MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cwbriscoe | 2025-12-12 04:58:17+00:00
No kids, rent is $1800 a month for a 1 bedroom. I could rent the same for cheaper but I like this place. I'm in Washington State, Software Devs make decent money where I am but not SF wages. I make good money but nowhere near the top. I have an easy job, WFH and rarely work over 40 a week.
by summa_tech | 2025-12-12 04:59:59+00:00
A few years ago, CZT detectors made by eV Products showed up in quantity on eBay. Pretty much everyone interested in radioactivity seemed to snap one up back then. It took a fairly long time for folks to figure out how to use them well! But they're really not bad, especially for the size.

Here's some spectra with 3% FWHM @ 662 keV:

https://maximus.energy/index.php/2020/05/01/gamma-spectrosco...
by NullPointerDD | 2025-12-12 05:01:19+00:00
I built this because I got tired of carrying a mouse to use CAD software on my MacBook.

The problem: Apps like FreeCAD, OnShape, and Fusion 360 expect middle-mouse navigation for orbit/pan. MacBooks don't have a middle button. Existing solutions either cost money (BetterTouchTool, Middle) or require disabling Mission Control.

MiddleDrag uses Apple's private MultitouchSupport framework to intercept touch data before system gesture processing. This lets three finger gestures generate middle-mouse events while leaving Mission Control intact.

- Three-finger tap = middle-click

- Three-finger drag = middle-drag

- Native Swift, menu bar app

- No telemetry by default

Install:

brew install --cask nullpointerdepressivedisorder/tap/middledrag

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or take feature requests.
by hamasho | 2025-12-12 05:03:01+00:00
One and half years ago, in Japanese Twitter this method gathered a bit of attention. It's called pawahara prompt (パワハラプロンプト, power harassment prompt) because it's like your asshole boss repeatedly saying "can you improve this more?" without any helpful suggestions until the employees breakdown. Many people found it could improve the code base at some point even then, I think now it works much better.
by smaughk | 2025-12-12 05:03:50+00:00
I've had a similar thoughts! I just put together a document with four sections (original, sanitized, output, unsantized) and built a little command-line tool to automatically filter and copy content between them. For now, my tool uses simple regex and specific keywords, but I really like the approach you're taking!! This is definitely an interesting problem that needs a good solution. I'm excited to see your WASM implementation!
by tolciho | 2025-12-12 05:06:02+00:00
$ tar --help tar: unknown option -- - usage: tar {crtux}[014578beFfHhjLmNOoPpqsvwXZz] [blocking-factor | format | archive | replstr] [-C directory] [-I file] [file ...] tar {-crtux} [-014578eHhjLmNOoPpqvwXZz] [-b blocking-factor] [-C directory] [-F format] [-f archive] [-I file] [-s replstr] [file ...] $ echo $? 1
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-12 05:06:26+00:00
Here is the link: https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90097654.html

The content spot on and very funny.

Also, a popup appeared at the bottom with this message:

> The future costs money. > You have reached your free article limit for this microsecond. > Subscribe for 0.0004 BTC/month

Suddenly, I have high hopes again for LLMs. Imagine you were a TV/film script writer and had writer's block. You could talk to an LLM for a while to see what funny ideas it can suggest. It is one more tool in the arsenal.
by lr0 | 2025-12-12 05:07:16+00:00
> but to claim we have "lost the plot" while holding up names like "awk" is contradictory at best

My argument is that even a name like awk is much more relevant to the people who used this software back then, of course it was not the best way to name it, but at least it held some meaning to it. Unlike modern software, awk and others were not written with the consideration of a wide user-base in mind. Regarding whether we "lost the plot" or not, I believe that we did, because as mentioned, in the 80s there was a current of people who named software conventionally, and up to the 2010s, the names still used to hold some rational even when word-played or combined with cutey names.

> It sounds more like this person just had a personal vendetta against cute sounding names, not against the names being uselessly non-descriptive.

Not at all, I find it quite fun, just unprofessional.

--

Sent by replying to an automated RSS email, via msmtp (light SMTP client, which is unlike firefox, not a consumer product and its name has to do with its function).
How I Streamlined My Development Workflow – A Game Changer for Productivity
by quchao | 2025-12-12 05:08:07+00:00
As developers, we’re always looking for ways to make our workflows faster, smoother, and more efficient. Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with methods to improve my development processes, and it’s honestly been a game changer. I’ve cut down hours of repetitive tasks and streamlined several parts of my workflow, and I wanted to share my experience with the community.

The Struggle We All Face

Anyone who’s worked on large projects knows how repetitive certain tasks can be. Things like:

Managing project dependencies.

Automating build processes.

Integrating testing environments.

These tasks were constantly eating into my productive hours. Despite using various tools, I often found myself stuck with solutions that didn’t meet my needs or weren’t reliable enough.

The Shift in My Approach

I needed a more efficient way to handle repetitive tasks. Instead of relying on complex setups, I began focusing on automation and simplicity. I broke tasks into manageable pieces and automated where possible, which allowed me to focus more on coding and less on troubleshooting.

Results: Significant Improvements

In just a few weeks of tweaking my workflow, the results have been incredible:

30% less time spent managing dependencies: No more manually checking versions or fixing outdated packages.

Automated build scripts: This has saved me tons of time. Once set up, the process is seamless.

Improved error handling: I now catch errors early, preventing wasted time fixing small issues later.

Why It Works

Efficiency doesn’t have to mean complexity. It’s not about one big tool solving everything, but combining simple tools that automate tedious tasks. Automation and simplification are key.

What I’m Sharing Here

I’m sharing this because I believe in the value of optimizing our workflows. It’s not about selling any specific tools, but about mindset. Automating repetitive tasks, no matter the tech stack, will drastically improve productivity.

Closing Thoughts

We often focus on the code, but optimizing the development environment is equally important. Small changes, like automating tasks, can transform your workflow, improve productivity, and free up more time for the creative aspects of development.

Anyone else here working on streamlining their workflow? I’d love to hear your experiences.
by quchao | 2025-12-12 05:10:17+00:00
I’m really glad to see the positive reactions to this post! As developers, we all know how easy it is to get stuck in a routine of repetitive tasks. I’ve found that automating even small aspects of your workflow can really add up in terms of time saved.

For those of you who have already streamlined parts of your workflow, I’d love to hear what tools or strategies have worked best for you. Do you prefer using out‑of‑the‑box tools or building custom solutions? What tasks have you successfully automated, and what impact did it have on your productivity?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and learning from your experiences!
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-12 05:11:07+00:00
But wait, there's more!

> Predictive SELECT Statements: > Added the PRECOGNITION keyword. > SELECT * FROM sales WHERE date = 'tomorrow' now returns data with 99.4% accuracy by leveraging the built-in 4kB inference engine. The library size has increased by 12 bytes to accommodate this feature.

12 bytes really sounds like something that the lead dev would write!
by MageOfTheEast | 2025-12-12 05:11:14+00:00
Nondescriptive names are not necessarily wrong or impeding. The author mentions science, yet STEM is filled with nondescriptive names: we have "Pythagorean theorem" instead of "right triangle sidelength theorem", "Newton's method" instead of "iterated tangent root-finding", "Lambda calculus" instead of "abstraction-application evaluation". Although they are not whimsical, these terms mean nothing to a first-time reader.
by eternityforest | 2025-12-12 05:11:31+00:00
I wonder if cloth simulation could be integrated as a CAD primitive that somehow outputs reasonable BRep geometry?

Could you take an AI 3D scan of someone's face, virtually lay a heavy cloth over it, then add whatever you wanted to make a mask?

Could you make the deformed cloth surface into one side of a cube, where the other side was flat for easily working with it, and use that to make custom pseudo-vacumformed cases for things?

Or just stack up boxes and simple shapes, and use the cloth simulation to build organic looking industrial design within a more traditional CAD workflow?
by cal_dent | 2025-12-12 05:11:48+00:00
There is a digression early in Knut Hamsun's novel Growth of the Soil, where for a paragraph or two he goes on about how great potatoes are and also mentions the same thing about man needing just potatoes and milk.

It's an incredible novel, and I have read it periodically since I was a teen, with so many great musings on the meaning of life but I always remember the passage on potatoes. Couldn't for the life of me tell you why that's stuck in my head so much.

EDIT

What was that about potatoes? Were they just a thing from foreign parts, like coffee; a luxury, an extra? Oh, the potato is a lordly fruit; drought or downpour, it grows and grows all the same. It laughs at the weather, and will stand anything; only deal kindly with it, and it yields fifteen-fold again. Not the blood of a grape, but the flesh of a chestnut, to be boiled or roasted, used in every way. A man may lack corn to make bread, but give him potatoes and he will not starve. Roast them in the embers, and there is supper; boil them in water, and there's a breakfast ready. As for meat, it's little is needed beside. Potatoes can be served with what you please; a dish of milk, a herring, is enough. The rich eat them with butter; poor folk manage with a tiny pinch of salt. Isak could make a feast of them on Sundays, with a mess of cream from Goldenhorns' milk. Poor despised potato — a blessed thing!

Wonderful
by hardwaresofton | 2025-12-12 05:12:05+00:00
You’d be surprised how hard it is to find an API driven bank account. They might be able to charge this just fine, maybe they could charge even more.

Automating my bank account is definitely worth that to me, and probably others as well

[EDIT] aaaand in ~17mins I’m signed up and have put in a wire to fund the new account already.

Easiest decision I have made today. <$24 a month for an API to my bank is a price I am certainly willing to pay — I expect I’m not alone.

Well done Mercury.
by avidiax | 2025-12-12 05:12:55+00:00
If I need 12V/1A, then that suggests I need 5V/2.4A even with 100% efficiency. Without negotiating anything, a device shouldn't draw more than 5V/0.5A.

That's not to say that a boost converter doesn't have value, but it still leaves a gap where there could be confusion.

The confusion or complexity even multiplies if the device has additional USB-C for data transfer. In that case, you either have to mark one port as being the "power in" port, or you have to support power in and data out on all the ports, which gets complicated and expensive.

It would be a great move by the USB IF to think through this sort of thing more carefully. Right now the USB-c connector is so overloaded in terms of power, display modes, thunderbolt, speeds, etc. that it's very hard to predict whether two USB-c devices will connect and at what power or speed and with what capabilities. For power, it would be helpful to require supplies to have a standardized status LED so that e.g. green means that the supply is providing the highest power allowed by the device (not the supply), yellow means there's been a compromise, and red suggests an error condition.
by mikeyouse | 2025-12-12 05:14:11+00:00
Unfortunately Binney has absolutely lost it and can’t be considered credible.. literally hanging out with Alex Jones and talking about Stolen elections using math a precocious middle schooler could rebut.

His pinned Tweet is still referencing a “directed energy weapon” assassination attempt of him by the US Air Force (which took place during the Trump administration, who he was supporting, so apparently some rogue DEW plane or deep state operative?)
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-12 05:14:41+00:00
> I think small scale entrepreneurship might be a solution to the current corp craziness.

That would mean breaking up big tech and prohibiting firms above a certain size from buying competitors.

Otherwise, there're huge swaths of the economy that used to be accessible to entrepreneurs that now aren't economically viable (without an attached unrelated business pumping in cash).
by btown | 2025-12-12 05:14:55+00:00
To add to that (extremely thought-provoking) video, I do think that the Marvel model of "pre-viz everything to death, the edit's already done before filming begins" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgvgi3ShcmY - can lose a lot of spontaneity. Perhaps the fading luster to Marvel films overall will bring us back from this place.

On a more tangential note around green screens and their limitations when used ubiquitously, Corridor Digital's quasi-rediscovery of the Sodium Vapor process used by Disney through the early '80s, but lost to history ever since, is a fantastic watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
by brendanmc6 | 2025-12-12 05:15:14+00:00
> Honestly it is kinda nice.

It's extremely nice! Coming from the React and Next.js world there is very little that I miss. I prefer to obsess over tests, business logic, scale and maintainability, but the price I pay is that I am no longer able to obsess over frontend micro-interactions.

Not the right platform for every product obviously, but I am starting to believe it is a very good choice for most.
by kcplate | 2025-12-12 05:15:16+00:00
Are you implying that perhaps 15-25 mins worth of porn video total throughout all of someone’s teenage years due to such rare access of the material would have a similar emotional and mental impact as having the ability to see that much daily for years as is possible now?

There could have been years between the opportunities we had. I don’t think you conceptualize just how infrequent the opportunity would present itself.
by marwamc | 2025-12-12 05:15:47+00:00
Nice. As a heavy claudecode user, I've ran into a certain form of this problem.

My problem was: for refactoring/renaming workflows Claude seems to run grep/ripgrep to enumerate occurrences of a symbol before renaming, but somehow misses some references, especially in test files or documentation. After renaming a symbol I would have failing tests, which Claude will dutifully fix, so not the worst problem. However the out-of-date documentation references slowly bite me in the neck because in future, Claude might read the outdated docs and make false assumptions or wrong decisions.

So I made an mcp tool that searches an indexed repo for all references/usages of a symbol and returns ranked results.

https://gitlab.com/rhobimd-oss/shebe/-/blob/main/docs/guides...

Also recently there a ShowHN about a tool called nia that does something similar. https://docs.trynia.ai/tools-features
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-12 05:16:35+00:00
> And the last time I was working on some CI for a front-end project -- a Shopify theme!! -- I found that it needed over 12GB of RAM for the container where the build happened, or it would just crash with an out-of-memory error.

This sounds epic. Did you blog about it? HN would probably love the write up!
by throwaway290 | 2025-12-12 05:16:35+00:00
> We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue

Would it be better if it was this:

> We’re using ConfigurationManager for configuration management, which feeds into CLI for the CLI, and then WebSocketHandler handles our WebSocket connections, PermissionManager manages permissions, all through JobQueue for our job queue

I think the author makes the opposite point of intended)
by viccis | 2025-12-12 05:17:50+00:00
This reads to me bit like Baudrillard's general points (he took a semiotic view on this phenomenon). The author might (or might not, 20th century French philosophy can be intimidating) benefit from reading Simulacra and Simulation. There's even a well known introduction to his thought that uses a similar food concept [1].

1: http://www.critical-theory.com/understanding-jean-baudrillar...
by tguvot | 2025-12-12 05:19:36+00:00
immune system is great analogy.

- immune system flagged this story because it thought that this story doesn't deserve to be on this site and it won't contribute/create any productive discussion (you can see this sentiment from many people who flagged it). Based on your comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218920) you turned off flags on this story and created gesturing around this. You essentially did what you just here criticized.

- immune system comes with interesting thing: autoimmune diseases
by whazor | 2025-12-12 05:20:50+00:00
I agree with you. To me, gemini has much worse search results. Then again, I use kagi for search and I cannot stand the search results from Google anymore. And its clear that gemini uses those.

In contrast, chatgpt has built their own search engine that performs better in my experience. Except for coding, then I opt for Claude opus 4.5.
by leke | 2025-12-12 05:21:45+00:00
I used to work as a software tester in Tampere, Finland with Nokia devices. We didn't test those devices in particular, but they were a big buzz in our office back in the day. I still have my n810, but haven't used it in years after the battery died. I remember adding a bunch of unofficial repos and having things like apache and python running on it and using it as a web server for a while. Eventually the battery was so discharged, even having it plugged in to the PSU would not be enough to keep it powered. It was such a shame it wouldn't run without the battery. I probably would still have use for it.
by viccis | 2025-12-12 05:23:40+00:00
Ok, so I see you're taking a denialist approach. At best you will have to settle on "well they sure did send them to a bunch of British politicians, and ya know, they did carry out the King David Hotel bombing that killed 91 people via terrorism, and they did plan on terrorist bombing a bunch of Westerners and Arabs to blame it on communists and Muslim Brotherhood (the Lavon Affair) before getting caught, but they definitely didn't send them to Truman we pinky promise".

This isn't even the most outrageous thing Lehi and Irgun did (trying to partner with Hitler against the British might take that) before the Israeli government disbanded them and merged most of them into the IDF when they no longer needed to terrorize the West.
by dartharva | 2025-12-12 05:24:42+00:00
I agree. I feel that the more we start looking into human enhancement and "fighting against death" we will explore hitherto unknown balances and equilibria in our bodies and nature that may prove to be destructive if disturbed.

When we age after reaching peak adulthood, for example, we see that our bodies lose their strength and our brains dull down. We aren't as ambitious and energetic anymore and get more lethargic. This understandably leads to everyone dreading it and getting up in arms against it (as with Bryan Johnson et al), but what if all this "decline" is actually an innate adaptive defense mechanism to handle and cope with the volume of experience we accumulate over the years? What if our bodies deteriorating as we get old actually has a neglected reason behind it that pertains to the individual too, not just nature? If we were to hypothetically make someone immortal, and if that immortal human were left in the real current world to live out without ageing, what if they actually miss something very crucial to help cope with environments that no longer grow in sync with themselves and eventually become something non-human?

Eastern notions of non-duality - especially Laozi and the Dao - could be useful in these thought experiments. They point out that life and death are not opposites but are states of the same being, and if you were to remove one (death), you'll automatically cease the other (life) from existing.
by razster | 2025-12-12 05:25:04+00:00
The latest of the big three... OpenAI, Claude, and Google, none of their models are good. I've spent too much time monitoring them than just enjoying them. I've found it easier to run my own local LLM. The latest Gemini release, I gave it another go but only for it to misspell words and drift off into a fantasy world after a few chats with help restructuring guides. ChatGPT has become lazy for some reason and changes things I told it to ignore, randomly too. Claude was doing great until the latest release, then it started getting lazy after 20+k tokens. I tried making sure to keep a guide to refresh it if it started forgetting, but that didn't help.

Locals are better; I can script and have them script for me to build a guide creation process. They don't forget because that is all they're trained on. I'm done paying for 'AI'.
by nuevita70 | 2025-12-12 05:25:07+00:00
This is a project I stumbled upon on another tech blog community and wanted to share it. It's very interesting to say the least...

Apparently a guy had a lot of high-end mystical, philosophical and theological conversations with GPT and created a wonderful book (better than 99% of human books).

Just sharing in case anyone wants to read something interesting over the weekend... GPT-made literature.

Enjoy
by oivey | 2025-12-12 05:27:28+00:00
That’s probably true. I do think part of the anger is that a lot of the changes didn’t clearly improve the code around it. The obvious example is the change to print from a statement to a function. It makes the language a little cleaner, but it also breaks existing code for little practical benefit. More insidious was the breaks with strings and byte strings. It was a good and necessary change that also could lead to weird quiet breakages.

At least for me, the real blocker was broad package support.

Maintainers should think carefully about whether their change induces lots of downstream work for users. Users will be mad if they perceive that maintainers didn’t take that into account.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-12 05:27:30+00:00
You cold find plenty of people complaining about CGI up to earlier this year.

Computers are bad, unless used by exactly the necessary measure to add to the story. Then they are great. But most movies don't do that, and you can see the actors not reacting to the scenes they are in because they have no idea what's actually happening.

The same will probably happen to AI, with also most people overdoing it and making bad stuff. Forever.
by anon291 | 2025-12-12 05:28:42+00:00
Yes all those things are great, but you'll notice that instead of explaining this to the non-technical crowd, technology focused privacy concerned individuals rarely attempt to educate about how these could work. Instead they simply seem to be against any sort of control on what children watch online.

Given that it's also coming from a bunch of tech males, it comes across as extraordinarily creepy. This is not hard to understand.