MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A daily logic puzzle game based on parity constraints
by greyisodd | 2025-12-11 17:24:38+00:00
Hi HN,

In my spare time I’ve been designing a browser-based logic puzzle game called Grey Is Odd. It’s inspired by ideas from parity, constraint grids, and nonograms — but the deduction flow is different.

Core rules: • The grid is divided into grey regions and white regions. • Each cell can contain 0 or 1 dot. • Grey regions must contain an odd number of dots. • White regions must contain an even number. • Each row and column shows the exact number of dots that must be placed in that line. • The rest is pure deduction — no guessing required.

Here is a 7×7 Level 3 puzzle so you can try it immediately: https://greyisodd.com/?size=7x7&level=liv3&id=4806&daily=tru...

If you prefer to start from the main page: https://greyisodd.com/

If you want a substantially harder example, try 7×7 Level 4 #45915 via the “Find puzzle” button. It has a deeper chain of parity/region interactions, but it still has a fully logical solution path — no need for trial-and-error.

I’d love feedback on: • how intuitive the rules feel • puzzle difficulty balance • UX (especially on mobile) • performance issues • ideas to make the deduction more interesting

If you try a puzzle and get stuck, I’m happy to walk through the reasoning.

Thanks for reading!
by Garlef | 2025-12-11 17:24:41+00:00
Their stack builds a lot of abstractions on top of each other and this works only well as long as you don't deviate from the beaten path.

One example:

You can't really build custom TS providers for AWS resources.

Why?

Because this feature is built using the compilation magic that makes inline lambdas work.

But the compilation step omits the AWS SDKs since these are present in a lambda anyways. So you can't use the AWS SDK in custom providers.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-12-11 17:24:50+00:00
> Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess.

This is wrong. Leopard wasn’t “such a mess”. No one was saying Leopard was more buggy than Tiger.

Further Snow Leopard wasn’t a bug fixing release. It had a lot of new features. The difference is the features were not user facing but geared towards the underlying tech.

From Wikipedia:

> The goals of Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint, unlike previous versions of Mac OS X which focused more on new features.

> Much of the software in Mac OS X was extensively rewritten for this release in order to take full advantage of modern Macintosh hardware and software technologies (64-bit, Cocoa, etc.). New programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, were created, allowing software developers to use graphics cards in their applications.
by jimbokun | 2025-12-11 17:25:04+00:00
All of those analogies were useful in some ways, and LLMs are too.

There's also a progression in your sequence. There were rudimentary mechanical calculating devices, then electrical devices begat electrical computers, and LLMs are a particular program running on a computer. So in a way the analogies are becoming more refined as we develop systems more and more capable of mimicking human capabilities.
by lunias | 2025-12-11 17:25:08+00:00
IMO the issue is that there's little to no enforcement outside of speeding. I see people get pulled over for speeding in a straight line even if it's relatively safe to do so, but never for talking on their phone, messing with the touch screen in their vehicle, left turns from the right lane and vice versa, failure to keep lane, failure to yield, failure to signal, cutting people off, driving a vehicle unfit for the road, etc.

It usually takes about 5 minutes of driving to observe someone doing something that I would pull them over for. I don't think cops need all this automated surveillance, they just need to drive around and be proactive.
by foxyv | 2025-12-11 17:25:11+00:00
Generally, you don't get hypoxic while using a clogged respirator. The problem in such cases is mild hypercapnia and increased work of breathing (Respiratory loading). Hypercapnia in general can cause short term cognitive issues but not long lasting issues. Respiratory loading can cause temporary pulmonary edema.

However, the respiratory loading and hypercapnia are extremely mild in the case of clogged respirators. Especially when compared to divers and snorkelers. The usual problem is that the respirator stops preventing contaminated air from reaching your lungs. As the filters become clogged, the air bypasses the seal around your face.

This is why I prefer a powered respirator. Zero work of breathing and positive pressure at the seals.
by quantummagic | 2025-12-11 17:25:33+00:00
The point is not to allow anything, the point is to be more tolerant that we currently are. If it's legal, we should default to being accepting of it. There are obvious extreme cases where the law gets involved, but the law should do so reluctantly, and only in cases where the vast majority of people agree. Cases where the population are split 50-50 should be hashed out in public, without those in positions of power artificially inhibiting a fair and open dialog.
by foldr | 2025-12-11 17:25:37+00:00
For that to be a problem you either have to have one function that allocates an enormous number of non-escaping objects below the size limit (if the Go compiler doesn't take the total size of all a function's non-escaping allocations into account – I don't know), or a very long series of nested function calls, which in practice is only likely to arise if there are recursive calls.
by imiric | 2025-12-11 17:25:40+00:00
> I don’t really feel I need to follow people’s cake recipe for success.

That's great, but then what's the point of this article?

The author is seemingly offering advice about why and how software should be built, but then claims to not follow anyone else's advice. Cool.

Just do whatever makes you happy. If you want to work on proprietary editors and programming languages, go ahead. I would argue that doing that in the open would both improve the projects and make the world a better place, far more than blogging about them does, but this doesn't matter if you're optimizing for personal happiness.
by neoromantique | 2025-12-11 17:25:44+00:00
Notetaking with ADHD is another sort of hell to be honest.

I absolutely can attest to what parent is saying, I have been developing software in Python for nearly a decade now and I still routinely look up the /basics/.

LLM's have been a complete gamechanger to me, being able to reduce the friction of "ok let me google what I need in a very roundabout way my memory spit it out" to a fast and often inline llm lookup.
by binaryturtle | 2025-12-11 17:25:46+00:00
I'm not even from the UK (EU here).

The following is what I'm seeing exactly, and because it still happens it seems deliberate, not a temporary issue where I was "snake-joking" about earlier. Well… no cute snakes for me.

--- Error 403 Forbidden

Forbidden Error 54113

Details: cache-fra-etou8220097-FRA 1765473610 1384447547

Varnish cache server
by tracker1 | 2025-12-11 17:26:05+00:00
Very cool... but I can't seem to get it to do so for other fonts I can think of off the top of my head... Inconsolata, Consolas, Fira Code, etc. "Times New Roman" does work as well.

Would be cool to see google support this for at least all the fonts in Google Fonts' library, since they're already well supported web fonts.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-11 17:26:12+00:00
This is a bit... low-effort, isn't it? I'd at least expect a video of an exasperated Github user walking up to the '# days since the last GitHub incident' board, sliding out the '1' or '2' card, and replacing it with a '0'.

I mean, that joke is as old as the universe (heck, in the brief period that I worked in an office, decades ago, I had a "# days since the last person asked a stupid question" sign to enact the exact same gag)...
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-11 17:26:18+00:00
> reads like slander

Slander is spoken, libel is written.

> What is work supposed to be?

THe union movement (and this is from the english point of view, I don't know much about it in the USA) people literally died for companies because the value of human life from the "lower classes" was so low. You only work week days because people literally fought and died for it.

We can, working together, create a better working world, where people are valued rather than exploited and used up for no real societal gain
by exasperaited | 2025-12-11 17:26:18+00:00
I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates.

I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".

There were four of us.
by AStrangeMorrow | 2025-12-11 17:26:25+00:00
I really enjoy writing some of the code. But some is a pain. Never have fun when the HQ team asks for API changes for the 5th time this month. Or for that matter writing the 2000 lines of input and output data validation in the first place. Or refactoring that ugly dictionary passed all over the place to be a proper class/dataclass. Handling config changes. Lots of that piping job.

Some tasks I do enjoy coding. Once in the flow it can be quite relaxing.

But mostly I enjoy the problem solving part: coming up with the right algorithm, a nice architecture , the proper set of metrics to analyze etc
by talljeff68 | 2025-12-11 17:26:32+00:00
ASCP is a draft specification suite for a protocol to support persistent, structured context shared between humans and AI agents. It defines an immutable articulation grammar, a secure distribution layer, and a local-first append-only log sync model.

The work is still in draft form, but substantial: multiple detailed specifications are included, and we’re actively iterating across the grammar, security model, and synchronization layer. It’s not “finished,” but it’s well beyond half-baked.

We welcome contributions and feedback from collaboration-tool builders, protocol designers, distributed-systems engineers, and security/cryptographic reviewers who are interested in advancing an open, vendor-neutral standard for durable shared context.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-11 17:26:42+00:00
Depending on the breadth (and value) of the sandbox: Sure? Why not?

To extend what may seem like a [prima facie] insane, stupid, or foolhardy idea: Why not send the output of /dev/urandom into /bin/bash? Or even /proc/mem? It probably won't do anything particularly interesting. It will probably just break things and burn power.

And so? It's just a computer; its scope is limited.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-11 17:27:11+00:00
My mother wouldn't be able to do what you did. She wouldn't even know where to start despite using LLMs all the time. Half of my CS students wouldn't know where to start either. None of my freshman would. My grad students can do this but not all of them.

Your 20 years is assisting you in ways you don't know; you're so experienced you don't know what it means to be inexperienced anymore. Now, it's true you probably don't need 20 years to do what you did, but you need some experience. Its not that the task you posed to the LLM is trivial for everyone due to the LLM, its that its trivial for you because you have 20 years experience. For people with experience, the LLM makes moderate tasks trivial, hard tasks moderate, and impossible tasks technically doable.

For example, my MS students can vibe code a UI, but they can't vibe code a complete bytecode compiler. They can use AI to assist them, but it's not a trivial task at all, they will have to spend a lot of time on it, and if they don't have the background knowledge they will end up mired.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-11 17:27:16+00:00
> There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs.

Software development is nowhere near advanced enough for this to be true. Even basic questions like "should this project be built in Go, Python, or Rust?" or "should this project be modeled using OOP and domain-driven design, event-sourcing, or purely functional programming?" are decided largely by the personal preferences of whoever the first developer is.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-11 17:27:26+00:00
> An example of a cycle looks like "now add an Options tab that let's me customize the global hotkey" where I'm only an end-user

Which is a prompt that someone with experience would write. Your average, non-technical person isn't going to prompt something like that, they are going to say "make it so I can change the settings" or something else super vague and struggle. We all know how difficult it is to define software requirements.

Just because an LLM wrote the actual code doesn't mean your prompts weren't more effective because of your experience and expertise in building software.

Sit someone down in front of an LLM with zero development or UI experience at all and they will get very different results. Chances are they won't even specify "macOS menu bar app" in the prompt and the LLM will end up trying to make them a webapp.

Your vibe coding experience just proves my initial point, that these tools are useful for those who already have experience and can lean on that to craft effective prompts. Someone non-technical isn't going to make effective use of an LLM to make software.
Show HN: I built a WebMIDI sequencer to control my hardware synths
by simplychris | 2025-12-11 17:27:37+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m an ex-Google engineer trying to get back into music production.

I needed a way to sequence my hardware synths using AI contexts without constantly switching windows, so I built this.

It runs entirely in the browser using WebMIDI. No login required. It connects to your local MIDI devices (if you're on Chrome/Edge) and lets you generate patterns.

Tech stack: [React / WebMIDI API / etc].

Link: www.simplychris.ai/droplets

Code is a bit messy, but it works. Feedback welcome.
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 17:27:40+00:00
It says "more like", not "like". Javascript now performs more like a statically-typed language, as one example. That wasn't always the case. It used to be painfully slow — and was so when Go was created. The chasm between them has shrunk dramatically. A fast dynamically-typed language was a novel curiosity when Go was conceived. Which is why Go ended up with a limited type system instead of being truly dynamically-typed.
by rmccue | 2025-12-11 17:27:47+00:00
There's a slightly different (I think) bug which I've been hitting since the update with URLs. The URL keyboard allows long-pressing on the . to open various TLDs, speeding how long it takes to write a URL.

In prior versions, you could long press to open the choices, then letting go would insert the default (eg .com)

With iOS 26, the touch target seems to be slightly different for triggering the options vs selecting them. I now frequently long-press, see the TLD choices with the default selected, and then releasing incorrectly inserts a single . instead of the TLD. This is infuriating when typing fast.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-11 17:27:53+00:00
> The initial claim was "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn", letting writers write the scripts, story-lines or dialogue for pornography does not mean OpenAI suddenly "does porn". In that case Google and Microsoft with their Docs and Office are also "getting into porn", which would be a ridiculous claim.

Actively announcing a change of policy whose marketable function is to facilitate porn production is only the case for the OpenAI action and you have presented nothing analogous for the entities you are trying to hold up as comparable.
Why Your RAG Costs $2,400/Month (and How We Cut It by 73%)
by helain | 2025-12-11 17:27:57+00:00
You're running RAG in production. Then the AWS bill lands. $2,400/month for 50 queries/day. $48 per query.

We built a RAG system for enterprise clients and realized most production RAGs are optimization disasters. The literature obsesses over accuracy while completely ignoring unit economics.

The Three Cost Buckets Vector Database (40-50% of bill) Standard RAG pipelines do 3-5 unnecessary DB queries per question. We were making 5 round-trips for what should've been 1.5.

LLM API (30-40%) Standard RAG pumps 8-15k tokens into the LLM. That's 5-10x more than necessary. We found: beyond 3,000 tokens of context, accuracy plateaus. Everything beyond that is noise and cost.

Infrastructure (15-25%) Vector databases sitting idle, monitoring overhead, unnecessary load balancing.

What Actually Moved the Needle Token-Aware Context (35% savings) Budget-based assembly that stops when you've used enough tokens. Before: 12k tokens/query. After: 3.2k tokens. Same accuracy.

python def _build_context(self, results, settings): max_tokens = settings.get("max_context_tokens", 2000) current_tokens = 0 for result in results: tokens = self.llm.count_tokens(result) if current_tokens + tokens <= max_tokens: current_tokens += tokens else: break Hybrid Reranking (25% savings) 70% semantic + 30% keyword scoring. Better ranking means fewer chunks needed. Top-20 → top-8 retrieval while maintaining quality.

Embedding Caching (20% savings) Workspace-isolated cache with 7-day TTL. We see 45-60% hit rate intra-day.

python async def set_embedding(self, text, embedding, workspace_id=None): key = f"embedding:ws_{workspace_id}:{hash(text)}" await redis.setex(key, 604800, json.dumps(embedding)) Batch Embedding (15% savings) Batch API pricing is 30-40% cheaper per token. Process 50 texts simultaneously instead of individu
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-11 17:28:14+00:00
I just don't understand why it would be a virtue to deliberately make things harder for people. If the font was neutral in terms of being easy to read, then they would never have touched it. To my mind, they're making a "virtue" out of cruelty.

The problem is that we've seen what this kind of "righteousness" leads to (gas chambers, The Final Solution, World War II) and yet we're heading down the same road. There is no reasoning with Nazis.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-11 17:28:42+00:00
Ugh, I am finding it hard to express how much I hate this.

Software developers have enough treadmills they need to stay on. Deliberately breaking backward compatibility in the name of "deprecating something old" doesn't have to be one of them. Please don't be that platform or library that deprecates and removes things and makes me have to dust off that old software I wrote in 2005 to move over to a different set of APIs just to keep it working.
by docjay | 2025-12-11 17:29:16+00:00
There are clearly plenty of people who feel the same way as you, and for those people what I’m about to ask might have such an obvious answer that it could feel like I’m being rhetorical or feigning ignorance to provoke an emotional response, but it’s truly honest:

Why should Disney care?

To which you might say “because people care”, so:

Why should people care?

Back when I was a spud I used futuristic text-to-speech synthesis to make my computer say “Eye am Bill Gaytes my farts go FERT FERT FERT” - Should Bill Gates be offended? What about the people who like him? What about the Intel processor I used to create it? Or the company behind the TTS software? Would anyone think they’re involved and endorsed it? I guess the real question is: are we catering the world to people who can’t make that distinction?
by thegrimmest | 2025-12-11 17:29:25+00:00
> So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared

Agree! let's get rid of these :)

> Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant

Agree! States have always pursued censorship to maintain power. That doesn't contradict the point that social media companies themselves are not state actors, and are not the problem.

> States ... pick winners and losers

I'm not sure I'm 100% on board here. States may thumb the scales, but the fact of the existence of FAANG/MANGO seems much more like a market phenomenon than an interventionist project.

> social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time

There is almost no clearer display of corporate self-preservation than social media vendors kowtowing to the president.

Much of what you're outlining is standard run of the mill corruption. The US Government (and others) is acting in contradiction to its stated principles. This is not a new phenomenon, and seems in the category of core human governance challenges.
by no_wizard | 2025-12-11 17:29:34+00:00
Deep professional understanding of a problem space that a business solves is way undervalued. Institutional knowledge, experience, and domain expertise have been devalued precisely because the managerial class (particularly executives and VPs) actively learn and live the idea that labor is always bad and to be minimized as much as possible.

This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.
by foxyv | 2025-12-11 17:29:35+00:00
Erotic asphyxiation is way different from intermittent hypoxia. Typically erotic asphyxiation is cutting off the flow of blood to the brain by constricting the veins and/or arteries in the neck. Intermittent hypoxia in the case of divers and Wim Hof enthusiasts is a breath hold. This doesn't cause a spike or decrease of blood pressure in the brain.

> Intermittent hypoxia (IH) entails alternating between intervals (typically 2–6 min in duration) of breathing normoxic (i.e., room air) and hypoxic (i.e., FiO2 of 10%–13%) gas mixtures and is a protocol that increases CBF and has been identified as a potential intervention to improve brain health (Panza et al. 2023). The onset of a hypoxia interval elicits an acute response wherein a rapid chemoreceptor-identified reduction in arterial (SaO2) and cerebral tissue (ScO2) O2 saturation stimulates increased ventilation and heart rate (HR) to maintain homeostatic O2 delivery
by jimbokun | 2025-12-11 17:29:49+00:00
This is meant for a lay audience so you should probably just read her research papers.

Also:

> it gives me the (probably flawed) impression that her research isn't the part of her life that's supposed to be important or impressive.

I don't see this at all in the article. There's just some human interest content to make her research more approachable.
by dclowd9901 | 2025-12-11 17:29:58+00:00
Just more evidence that eng managers (not product managers) and the myriad layers of executives are a waste of time and money. Engineers don't need babysitting. They don't need titles and they don't need someone running interference if people just leave them the fuck alone.

Give them a product goal and they will accomplish it. Tell them what you want to track and they'll figure out how to track it. Tell them what your long term vision is and they'll set you up for it.

Let us do our work and we'll do it well. Stop micromanaging engineers and stop telling us how, and instead, tell us what. This is software: it doesn't take a ton of people to make a product that's profitable. Stop burning capital on useless people.
by fcavallarin | 2025-12-11 17:30:09+00:00
Thanks! Tools like DomLoggerpp are super interesting for browser security work. I’ve worked in this area too (e.g., https://github.com/fcavallarin/domdig).

Wirebrowser comes at it from a different angle - no instrumentation, just inspecting the live heap and following how values propagate. Curious to see what people end up exploring with these approaches.