Top 29 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:11 UTC.
288 points by ScottWRobinson · 241 comments
One of the best things about LLMs is that they'll write code for you, all day long. Who cares about DRY? You don't have to be the one updating the same long con...
What HN said:
cadamsdotcom: Write yourself a /review command. That is an empty markdown file at
.claude/commands/review.md. In it, put a checklist of things the agent should look for. When you’re ready to have your agent review the code, type/review.
jwpapi: Crazy how many engineers in here just say they are using another prompt on top. From my experience that makes things worse. It does abstractions, but the wrong ones. It overcomments, confusing future calls of the LLM.
agentultra: Wild idea: just write code. I know. It’s an unbelievable concept in this AI era. Write code? Isn’t that what dinosaurs did? If you expect that a human will need to read and maintain that code you might as well write it for them.
davnicwil: > The next time you ask the LLM for another endpoint with the same access rules, the model won't start from first principles. It'll start from the other four copies already sitting in your repo. To be honest I'm not sure how true this is.
287 points by speckx · 103 comments
The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight.
What HN said:
mrtnmcc: QuadRF creator here. Happy to answer questions! We have a quick demo video as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvniJk3uNyA&pp=0gcJCWQCo7VqN5t... Along with a deeper dive video: https://m.youtube.
piinbinary: One day I want to build something like this, except for sound. It would be great to get a heading and distance for where a sound is coming from. This could be both for small scale things (e.g. which part of this is squeaking?) or large scale (e.g.
fierycatnet: I just kinda skimmed through it, so it detects drones in sky? Am I understanding this correctly? That might have some defense application considering what's going on in Eastern Europe right now.
RobotToaster: Build this into smart glasses and it would be fascinating.
261 points by dmonay · 169 comments
What HN said:
evanjrowley: Seems to be a popular topic. Historian Eric H. Cline has multiple books citing this time period, specifically 1117 BCE as the inflection point for the bronze age "collapse", defined by a deterioration of international shipping routes that weakened the nation-states of the era.
Amorymeltzer: Patrick Wyman—of the Tides of History podcast—just put out a new book, Lost Worlds, which is worth a read if this is your bag. The basic premise is that the way ancient history is typically taught, "that we moved linearly from foraging to farming, and then from country farmers t...
timbits98: Given the era, it seems likely that the collapse was the work of multiple angry gods. The author doesn't cover this possibility.
marking-time: The study of the LBAC is compelling these days because of the similarities to our present day situation. Other commenters have noted the the possibility of AI driven collapse, but another possibility is our dependence on oil. Bronze is the combination copper+tin.
257 points by theanonymousone · 129 comments
What HN said:
agumonkey: "invisible" is something I used to describe emacs magit. It's a thin layer over git output, it pops up, it infers parameters from ui state, call the usual git command, and goes out. Lean and fast (unless large project it seems).
jrimbault: Having designed a good number of internal tools for teams of developers I couldn't agree more. Earlier I had the tendency to "leave the guts" open, thinking my users were developers and would want that. All it did was put obstacles in my teammates actually doing their work.
ventana: As a long time terminal user, it does not surprise me much when people just don't get it. The discussion often goes like this: — In a terminal, I can do so-and-so with a simple command — Well, in my FrobnicatorStudio, there's a shortcut Ctrl+Alt+So for that and this can go foreve...
bensyverson: The effect of the interface becoming "invisible" is actually a function of time spent in the interface. I think what the author is reacting to is discretionary friction; designers or product folks adding features or complexity.
149 points by kickingvegas · 89 comments
A common refrain is that Emacs is an operating system (OS). This isn’t true, but what invites comparison to an OS is its ability to orchestrate applications and utilities above the OS kernel...
What HN said:
kickingvegas: OP here. This post resonated far more than expected. Thanks all for the feedback!
pjmlp: > A common refrain is that Emacs is an operating system (OS). This isn’t true, but what invites comparison to an OS is its ability to orchestrate applications and utilities above the OS kernel level.
deng: This just proves that you can cram pretty much anything into the client/server dichotomy if you just define "client", "server" and "request" broad enough. Similarly, I remember how desperately people tried to argue that Emacs follows the "Unix philosophy" as long as your LISP fun...
kleiba2: I've been an Emacs user for over 25 years. But last year I switched employers and they won't let me use it even for tasks where it would absolutely shine. Their argument is that all team members should use the same tools, and I guess that is a valid point.
145 points by speckx · 53 comments
The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.
What HN said:
elictronic: Currently working at an older style defense company and this fits but I think momentum is a better reference. There are no financial incentives to risk on new process. Gatekeepers, siloing, bureaucracy, and risk aversion act to stop and slow.
overgard: I'm not sure I'd call this a competence issue; it's more of a context issue. If you put talented people in a thick bureaucracy they cease being able to display those talents.
jordand: I'm currently in a 'successful company goes blind' situation myself. The company has grown massively and the situation we're stuck in is mainly driven by two types of 'internal' people: a) People who've spent 10+ years with the company, and ended up in management/C-level position...
light_triad: A good example of "founder bias" where big companies are read as not innovating, when in fact their goal is to squeeze as much juice from their user base and strengthen their monopolistic position and pricing power.
129 points by scrlk · 118 comments
What HN said:
lubujackson: Reading the prompt is very interesting. I always wonder how they make these long-running prompts and I guess they literally just tell it to "keep going". After working with LLMs day-in, day-out an SWE for months, I feel like this could be greatly improved with something like a st...
zerobees: This is not a remark about AI, but there's something funny about mathematics in that every novel result is broadly perceived as a big deal. We attach basically zero value to writing a new program that hasn't existed before, or a piece of text that hasn't existed before.
ak_111: Unlike the unit distance problem, the impressive thing here is that it is a proof rather than a counter-example. However, it seems the proof is extremely concise so it seems that it is exploiting a clever trick that somehow all the experts missed.
Diogenesian: I am not very familiar with this problem but I am having trouble following the proof. Lemma 2.1 assumes the existence of a certain assignment of finite field elements to a cubic multigraph, but is this assignment always possible? Actually I am having trouble making sense of the c...
110 points by randycupertino · 48 comments
Rule from Mamdani administration bans companies from trapping customers into paying recurring charges and also targets ‘junk fees’
What HN said:
jzer0cool: Nintendo (subscription I have for my switch to access some older a classic games btw) is very good reminding me I have a subscription and whether I want to cancel (or renew).
nadermx: The irony with all this, is if a company makes it difficult to cancel their subscription, it's probably not a good product. Antidotically, I've found that making it easy for users to not only cancel, but refund, has given me eye opening things to fix in some products that made i...
sxp: It's unclear whether this junk fee law will have teeth. In theory, California has the same anti-drip pricing law, but restaurants have a specific carve out [1] which is bullshit because the drip pricing that most people complain about is the X% "service charges" and "lifestyle fe...
xp84: I wonder if the bit about 'junk fees' will include undisclosed hotel fees. I just stayed there last week in a no-frills "hotel" which doesn't include daily room cleaning, has no staff at night, and has no amenities whatsoever, and they charged me a surprise-at-check-in $35 a nigh...
110 points by Bender · 49 comments
A remarkably well preserved 1,600-year-old city complete with a church, watchtowers and bustling streets has been unearthed beneath Egypt
What HN said:
thisisauserid: A Byzantine lost city around the year 400 CE.
testoo: anyone else immediately reminded of this lovecraft tale? https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/nc.aspx
m0llusk: The Ancient Architects video on YouTube has a quite good summary of the history of this site.
honeycrispy: I wish I could go back in time and visit to see what it was like.
107 points by Gedxx · 27 comments
The beauty of Sagrada Familia becomes even more profound when we explore the numerical patterns that lie behind its striking forms.
What HN said:
jerkstate: I visited this and several other Gaudi buildings about 15 years ago in Barcelona, and many of them are truly breathtaking, or at least dramatically original and unique. I went to the Gaudi museum as well and found it fascinating that the architect himself was not a professional m...
psadri: Be sure to visit the basement museum to see the upside-down string + tiny sandbag weights model that was used to simulate the structure. Pure genius.
mightyham: "Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples are mathematics in stone. Doubtless Pythagoras was the first in the Classical Culture to conceive number scientifically as the principle of a world-order of comprehensible things—as standard and as magnitude—but even before him it had found ex...
RetroTechie: Wow that first photo almost looks like a sci-fi contraption! (insert suggestions here) And wonderful such a building that embodies in stone all kinds of mathematical relations, religious references etc. Let's hope it'll stand at least as long as it took to build. :)
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