MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Minimal reasoning determinism stress test (no claims)
by seesea | 2025-12-18 15:07:27+00:00
Here is a minimal reasoning determinism stress test.

It runs the same task multiple times and observes whether reasoning invariants hold under repetition.

No performance claims. No capability or correctness claims.

v1.0 is frozen. If the protocol is flawed, I’m interested in where.
by AndroTux | 2025-12-18 15:07:35+00:00
You know what? Adding another example from a "non oppressive dictatorship" country: Germany.

Every few years, Germany tries to push for [Vorratsdatenspeicherung](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung), which forces ISPs to store all connection data for later analysis by law enforcement. This is against the German constitution, so it gets overturned after a few years and the cycle starts again.

Point is, if you want your data to not be analyzed by law enforcement, and you live in Germany, you may want to use a VPN and connect to, for example, the Netherlands, where no such law exists.

Now, as we established, the VPN providers lie about it and maybe they don't have an exit point in the Netherlands, so they just let you exit in Germany again.

Same situation as before, but less extreme. Germany now will be able to put together metadata and find out what you were actually doing.

Are you going to jail for that? Maybe, if you did something highly illegal. You probably deserve it in this case.

But this isn't the point of discussions like these. It's always fine until something like Hitler happens and you happen to be jewish. You just can't know how the future will play out, and if your data is stored somewhere, it can be abused. VPNs promise to be a solution to this issue, and they apparently aren't. Which is a problem, even in a healthy democracy.

People like you pretending this isn't a problem, are a problem. It's the same argument as "I don't have anything to hide." Yes, maybe you don't have anything to hide today. Tomorrow? That might no longer be true. Take abortions in the US as a recent example.
by dfxm12 | 2025-12-18 15:07:44+00:00
there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest.

Is anyone else seeing this in their orgs? I'm not...
by Thorrez | 2025-12-18 15:08:00+00:00
That's terrible.

What's the solution though? Stop letting kids play outside? I think the solution should be to reform CPS so it's not so traumatizing, and have more governmental awareness campaigns of the benefits of kids playing outside. I see government billboards all the time about anti-smoking, eating healthy, prediabetes screening. There can similarly be billboards promoting kids playing outside.
by jburgess777 | 2025-12-18 15:08:07+00:00
EXO lets you run your own AI cluster at home with everyday devices. We take advantage of Apple's M-series hardware and unified memory to run large language models, building a cluster to enable even more memory.

EXO underwent a full rewrite for v1. For legacy exo, see this repo's history or exo-explore/ex-exo for a snapshot.
by another_twist | 2025-12-18 15:08:09+00:00
Its weird how object detection models are "AI" now. These models and their weird errors have been around for quite a while. The issue is vendors claiming that there is no chance of errors. Ideally you would have a 2 eyes system such that if AI has a tolerable false positive rate and have a human review. But of course, you cant fire people with AI so why would we do the sane thing.

And of course there are policy wonks who would make gun ownership a human rights issue even though its fundamentally unsafe to have such free gun ownership.
by Apreche | 2025-12-18 15:08:13+00:00
The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action.

We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers.

1. If they block/ban/close/suspend a customer account they must provide habeas corpus. Explain to the customer the policies that were violated that resulted in their account being terminated. Additionally they should be required to show the customer the evidence that led the company to make the decision.

2. They company must provide an accessible live human appeals process. The human they appeal to must have the discretionary power to investigate and make a common sense decision even if it contradicts policy. This process currently only exists for people who are capable of making a lot of noise in public. How many people lose their accounts and suffer harm because they are incapable of getting attention in public? It needs to be available to all customers with a simple phone call or email. It must also be required to make a decision very quickly, 24 or 48 hours at most.

3. In the rare case that the company still makes an unjust decision, there must be a quick and accessible legal remedy. Establish some kind of small claims court where it is cheap and easy to file without a lawyer, and where cases can be heard and decided on short notice.
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-18 15:09:23+00:00
This sort of translation is probably well trodden the status of something like "Translate Jules Verne's 'Vingt Mille Lieues sous Les Mers' to English" has plenty of predicates.

In terms of images, this seems more like a translation. "Translate this photo into the style of George Seurat". Whether George Seurat would have a copyright claim is not as clear but it seems pretty intuitive that the result is a derivative of the photo.
by tikimcfee | 2025-12-18 15:09:48+00:00
In a genuine and everyday real sense, no, your likely thousand dollar device is not usable. The App Store requires an account to download from. Internal services and apps often complain about not being available. You are mostly stuck with whatever built in, non-cloud services the device comes with, which isn't much. Weather and mail fetching come to mind. Maybe some of the simple recording / note taking like apps. A working Apple ID is essentially a requirement to actually use the device you purchase. And yes there will be comments from folks about "ways" you can perhaps sideload or get things running, but to a regular person that simply uses a phone like a standard appliance in their life - they're stuck.
by rkomorn | 2025-12-18 15:10:06+00:00
I don't know where you live but even at my latitude it most definitely is not "at almost the same time every day."

If I woke up with the sunrise in winter I'd be waking up 2 hours later than in the summer (3, really, because of daylight saving time).

The time doesn't change by a lot every day, sure, but that's not relevant to things like transportation or work schedules.
by the_af | 2025-12-18 15:10:14+00:00
I'm not sure whether they look "bad" is enough justification. The author dismisses the possible explanation "maybe they didn't consider this bad style back then" without any real argument other than "there are other works of art with different styles".

I agree that I, personally, do not consider them painted in a way that is pleasing to me. But is that what the reconstruction project is meant to achieve, i.e. a painting style that is pleasing to current audiences? Or is it about reconstructing the bare minimum that can be asserted with some degree of reliability that is actually supported by the physical evidence?

Again I must ask: do we know decent artists weren't involved in the reconstruction project? Remember, the goal is to use their artistry to achieve scientific results, not just do whatever they find pleasing.

> You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing

I get this is the most compelling part of the argument TFA is making, but to be honest I don't find it all that compelling. Surely the people involved in the reconstruction considered this, and there's a reason why they still produced these reconstructions, and I don't believe that reason is "they are incompetent or trolling".
by philipwhiuk | 2025-12-18 15:10:16+00:00
The proselyting over frameworks is the worst bit of the web ecosystem.

If your solution is actually good, it will get adopted eventually...

Forget React, there's still stuff written in jQuery and JSP.

Why the rush to convert everything - you're not a missionary on a mission, just build your stuff in stuff you like?

The attack on npm is ridiculous, when (apart from introducing a permanent vulnerability in the form of a runtime dependency on a third party site), you still need npm for htmx.
by lsaferite | 2025-12-18 15:10:41+00:00
This highlights something that I wish was more prevalent, Path Coverage. I'm not sure of what testing suites handle path coverage, but I know XDebug for PHP could manage it back when I was doing PHP work. Simple line coverage doesn't tell you enough of the story while path coverage should let you be sure you've tested all code paths of a unit. Mix that with input fuzzing and you should be able to develop comprehensive unit tests for critical units in your codebase. Yes, I'm aware that's just one part of a large puzzle.
Show HN: Agentic PDF Viewer for Schematics
by edmgood | 2025-12-18 15:10:54+00:00
Hi HN,

We've been building out a PDF viewer to help support various tasks in the Architectural, Engineering, and Construction space.

We use it primarily for steel estimation right now, but are exploring how it might be useful across other engineering disciplines!

From a tech perspective, the AI PDF viewers we've ran into use mostly PDF metadata/text, so they dont work well on engineering schematics which are mostly visual. So we put an agent in there that has tool abilities to see both text and image modalities, and its been much better for our tasks.

Hope its interesting to play with and open to ideas where the tech could be useful!
by jsheard | 2025-12-18 15:11:01+00:00
Not really, the writing is sectioned away from the gameplay and easy to skip over unread without missing anything relevant to the main event, the puzzles. It's not good but its unobtrusiveness made it easy to forgive. Judging from this trailer the characters will be yapping to themselves and each other during gameplay though, so it had better be well executed, especially if they end up talking a lot.
by lvl155 | 2025-12-18 15:11:09+00:00
I experienced something similar recently. There’s something going on with gift cards at Apple. It’s a bit fishy. As in they don’t want you to use it so they can report higher holiday season sales. Or they’re experiencing a huge uptick in scams involving the cards. I started wondering if the system they use is actually secure from a cryptographical pov.

My lessons were:

1) if you’re going to accrue gift cards for hardware purchases, use a separate Apple ID. Do not use that ID for anything else and especially not as family organizer.

2) save paper trails for all your gift cards. That’s your only way out of this.

3) be prepared to be treated like a scammer by Apple Support. They will even question where you got the devices you traded in at the store. Some support staff will basically say you stole them without any evidence.
by sigseg1v | 2025-12-18 15:11:10+00:00
Agreed. A situation similar to this happened to me with Steam over a payment issue with their service. They banned me even though I had thousands of dollars of games and an account since Sept 2003. I had to go to my bank and escalate multiple times to get letters providing the info steam wanted about my account and credit card to prove it was legitimate. Eventually after contacting them enough times they said they would do a "one time good faith" gesture by unbanning me but warned if it ever happens again they cannot help and that my account will be flagged with this. In the end I didn't do anything wrong and the bank didn't do anything wrong, it was all on steam. It was over $10 by the way.
by LarryMade2 | 2025-12-18 15:11:12+00:00
I can see companies could get away with it from new coders who don't understand the repercussions of releasing )buggy code or know much of long-term maintenance.

You know, this sounds familiar - the big outsourcing boon to less expensive development in other countries, sure they can write the code, but it's either shipped buggy or takes a lot of management and hand-holding of the outsourced development teams to get everything right.
Show HN: Debug Console for Claude Code
by ramoz | 2025-12-18 15:11:37+00:00
Not intended to replace any OTEL solution.

Totally vibe coded desktop app meant to work alongside the CLI.

This is a simple way to peek into all that is happening including with sub agents. Search over previous session logs is nice.

I really built this as I needed a better way to debug an OPA policy engine that integrates with hooks https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake
by hermannj314 | 2025-12-18 15:11:43+00:00
Don't do anything until you are an expert is excellent gatekeeping, fortunately this is hacker news so we can ignore the gatekeepers!

I suggest people fuck around and find out, just limit your exposure. Spin up a VPS with nothing important, have fun, and delete it.

At some point we are all unqualified to use the internet and we used it anyway.

No one is going to die because your toy project got hacked and you are out $5 in credits, you probably learned a ton in the process.
by asim | 2025-12-18 15:11:51+00:00
Man I did try htmx, and I was hopeful, right until I saw how it polluted my codebase. I can't say I have the answers, but writing a pure Go app, I'm currently using one giant css file, custom styling and inline html.

And now I'm at the breaking point. So I'm planning to move to tailwind and Go templates, but honestly, i was hopeful for htmx, so I need to properly see the usecase. Which i don't know is this. It reminds me of Angular a lot...
by ijk | 2025-12-18 15:12:00+00:00
Eh, that's overstating the case. There's clearly some aesthetics that are more appealing to more people but for many architectural movements in particular the reason that they look that way is for the way that specific ideological reasons interacted with material constraints and the intended message. Brutalism in particular was intended to be cheap and honest; given the constraints many of these buildings were designed under, it makes sense. There are some quite appealing brutalist buildings; a core tenet of the style was integrating the buildings into the natural landscape, in contrast to the artificial styles that had previously been popular. The post-war shortages limited the available materials, shaping the constraints they were operating under. Raw concrete was honest, cheap, and was allowed to weather naturally.

There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-12-18 15:12:01+00:00
My non-tech brother has the latest Google Pixel phone and he enthusiastically uses Gemini for many interactions with his phone.

I almost switched out of the Apple ecosystem a few months ago, but I have an Apple Studio monitor and using it with non-Apple gear is problematic. Otherwise a Pixel phone and a Linux box with a commodity GPU would do it for me.
by the_af | 2025-12-18 15:12:05+00:00
How do you prevent introducing a bias that then becomes what we "know" about how statues were painted? By introducing modern aesthetic sensibilities and present them as plausible, we then reinforce that this is how statues were painted back then, and we don't know.

I think the article is mostly begging the question, and is not particularly rigorous. At most it's appealing to some sort of common sense, and we know how tempting but unreliable common sense can be in science and history.

To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."
by catapart | 2025-12-18 15:12:36+00:00
Sorry, but it's a no from me.

htmx is a great idea, but it's not necessary anymore. We're very close to invokers being baseline (and even that is just an extension of the "composedPath includes -> invoke" pattern), and that will take care of plenty of what htmx was designed to do. Between features like that, and web components, I'm very happy to stick with "plain HTML" (no frameworks; my web components do not draw from a core module or anything).

Also, just a suggestion because it's not technically wrong:

The example of sometimes needing an auto-completing search box is probably not the best one to use. I'm sure it's meant to say "you want the results to be queried from a server/database on every input", which you would certainly need javascript for. But the specific example of just having a search box autocomplete can actually be fulfilled with a datalist element. It won't dynamically re-query results, but it will filter based on input. So it's a muddy example, at best, and that's probably not great for the point trying to be made.
by zkmon | 2025-12-18 15:12:57+00:00
How about letting LLMs maintain a vast number of product versions all available at the same, which receive multiple versions of untested versions of the same patch, from LLMs, and then let the models elect a version of the software based on probabilistic or gradient methods? This elected version could change for different assessments. No human touches or looks at the code!

Just a wild thought, nothing serious.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-18 15:13:13+00:00
Recent customer service experiences:

- HN banned me for being a robot! (I'm not)

dang unblocked me 1 hour 4 minutes after an email (thanks dang!)

- A Marriott hotel clerk booked me a duplicate room instead of using my third party paid reservation

After 45 minutes on the phone on hold and arguing with robots, I got a person who hung up on me in the middle of investigating the issue, I issued a credit card chargeback because I wasn't going through that again

- Comcast billed me $200+ weeks after I closed my account

After 30 minutes going around and circles with their AI phone operator who kept directing me to the broken online portal which said nothing I gave up and issued a credit card chargeback, I'm presently ignoring the advances of a debt collector

- A Kraken withdrawl of $16k worth of BTC has been "On Hold" for 28 days now

Their email support stopped responding 15 days ago. I have filed complaints with the CFTC and my attorney general.

- My Corporate Amex was flagged for fraud (which is fine) I was on the phone for an hour and a half with customer service who could not figure out how to unblock the card, they wouldn't admit to me out loud but it was pretty obvious their fraud systems were down in the middle of the night and the phone people could do nothing

I hung up on them and paid for my corporate travel with my own card which of course caused stupid headaches later. I hate AmEx now.

---

The best customer service? A free online forum that I can't possibly ever give any money.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-18 15:13:36+00:00
100%! I dearly missed how simple it was to correlate security & issue event tracing (even for guest users!) without NAT/PAT at the following job, what a treat that was.

Right as I was on the way out they finally started using 10/8 after merging with another large org that had a lot of branches (and a "normal" amount of public IPs for their size :)).
by adrian_b | 2025-12-18 15:13:46+00:00
The main difference between functions and subroutines in Fortran and other ancient programming languages is not the fact that subroutines do not have a return value.

The functions of Fortran are what would be called pure functions in C (which can be marked as such with compilers that support C language extensions, like gcc).

The pure functions cannot modify any of their arguments or any global variable, and they must be idempotent, which is important in program optimization.
by glenstein | 2025-12-18 15:13:47+00:00
Ingenious to have Santa endorse your product. One thing I've thought about is how it costs money to use the likeness of a living celebrity or familiar brand, and so you can or can't "get" them and their value depending on the cost. And how by extension that implies values of familiar "big names" in the public domain. Presidents, cities, natural landmarks, figures from ancient mythology, etc. They are there for the taking.

Maybe you can't get a Kardashian or, for the 80s, maybe Madonna. But you can get Santa.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-12-18 15:14:02+00:00
There are a few people in charge, they just don’t advertise the fact. Similar how the ‘Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence’. These both appear correct to the vast majority of people because of the Pareto distribution of outcomes, the vast majority of people experience the incompetence / no-one in charge and don’t experience the relatively tiny number of events when the competent malevolent people in charge do make their decisions. Consider if you were hosting the Jekyll Island meeting, how many people of what caliber would you invite to be there? And that’s just one of the meetings we know about. Another good one is the involvement of Bohemian Grove in selecting Ronald Regan to run for president. Their motto, "Weaving spiders come not here", like many institutions, describes the opposite of what actually happens there.
by werdnapk | 2025-12-18 15:14:04+00:00
I've had good success with Turbo (previously Turbolinks). The newer versions (ie. Turbo) really fixed up the shortcomings of the older versions (ie. Turbolinks) and I enjoy using it.

Any big reason to use HTMX instead? Is Turbo not really discussed much because of it's association to RoR?
by quesera | 2025-12-18 15:14:06+00:00
You're making a different argument, throughout these threads.

The article is about the US. You say you are "not in [a developed nation like the US]", but instead somewhere that "violence rates are very significant".

That is just not the US. Headlines are scary, but the statistics don't support the fear. The worries you describe are absolutely irrational for 99+% of US parents.

I don't know where you are and I don't know the statistics for your area -- things might be worse there! But your comments sound like irrational US parent fears, without including that context.
by geoffeg | 2025-12-18 15:14:28+00:00
> After the user downloads 2MB of JavaScript, waits for it to parse, waits for it to execute, waits for it to hydrate, waits for it to fetch data, waits for it to render... yes, then subsequent navigations feel snappy. Congratulations.

In my experience, a lot of SPAs transfer more data than the front-end actually needs. One team I worked on was sending 4MB over the wire to render 14kb of actual HTML. (No, there wasn't some processing happening on the front-end that needed the extra data.) And that was using graphql, some dev just plunked all the fields in the graphql query instead of the ones actually needed. I've seen that pattern a lot, although in some cases it's been to my benefit, like finding more details on a tracking website than the UI presented.