Show HN: I Derived a Pancake
40 by bkazez | 7 comments on Hacker News.
After 25 years of making other people's pancake recipes - always yearning for more tang, more fluff, and more predictability - I decided to derive the pancake recipe from the chemistry. You mark checkboxes for what you have on hand (ricotta, sour cream, kefir, buttermilk, yogurt, cottage cheese, lemon, cream of tartar, etc.) and it computes the best recipe based on targets for acid, fat, salt, sugar, and CO2. My particular favorite are the yeast-raised lemon ricotta kefir pancakes - the best I've ever had. The math is done in a small pure-ESM library: ingredient composition to component masses and acid moles, a stoichiometry layer, and a bisection solver for the target deficits. I'm not a chemist, so if something is off, tell me and I will fix it!
Hack Nux
Watch the number of websites being hacked today, one by one on a page, increasing in real time.
New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Are we as society going to let LLM companies take all the values?
Ask HN: Are we as society going to let LLM companies take all the values?
3 by randomdev123 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I am not that young, but I'm not that old. I used to be a child, and thought that the adults already figured things out and I can be at peace. One of my realization of me getting older is the realization that there are no adults in the room anymore, or that I am now, an adult, who, also the same like other adults, we actually don't know shit about anything, none of us do. I think LLM is a useful technology. But since the dawn of LLMs, I've been trying to imagine what the world will look like if we take LLM to its logical conclusion. It seems to me, despite of all its benefits, LLM is a sword too sharp for all of us to handle. Its not gonna be sunshines and rainbows. A couple things I'm thinking about below, and these are all just societal impact, not even environmental ones: - Young people lost their career ladders. Capitalism doesn't work anymore. We have permanent underclass. And maybe worldwide scale societal unrest, in which violence will be the norm. - People stop creating music, stop writing blogs, stop doing experiments or any other cool stuffs and share it on the internet because LLM companies can just pirate the shit out of it without paying anything back. - Mediocrity in everything. We have this Suno shit claiming that people don't like the process of creating music because its so tedious so lets just prompt it away. Berklee has a class to make AI music. Yup. People claim that its okay to consume mediocre stuffs, because we don't need the highest grade of codebase, of design, of music for our day to day life. - People stop socializing and connecting to another human beings. For example, art is a way for people to connect to other's art. Software engineering is a lot of communication, discussing tradeoffs with other engineers. But now you can just prompt your way away, even things as simple as writing emails. - All the values (measured by money) created in this world is sucked by the LLM owners/producers. Oh you have a beautiful music you just created? Too bad, its mine now. Oh, you just created an art? Its my art now, and I will charge society money to recreate this art that I just acquired. Oh, you have a land somewhere? I can just buy it, money is cheap for me, after all I suck all the values that society created. There are no other values worthy of monetary compensation other than LLM training/research. These "researchers" don't need to practice music, don't need to practice art, don't need to practice law, don't need to practice coding, they can just be an LLM researchers/producers/owners and they get all the values that the other professions created. - All the above caused economic stagnation. People don't feel the need to pay other human beings, because everything is just a prompt away. - All the above caused stagnation of progress, or even winding down of progress. What else? If truly this is the logical conclusion of LLM, then it seems to me that the mission of this generation is to destroy AI as Ronnie Chieng said is not really off the mark. Maybe I am an LLM doomer, but help me out here HN, because I'm just a dumb adult.
3 by randomdev123 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I am not that young, but I'm not that old. I used to be a child, and thought that the adults already figured things out and I can be at peace. One of my realization of me getting older is the realization that there are no adults in the room anymore, or that I am now, an adult, who, also the same like other adults, we actually don't know shit about anything, none of us do. I think LLM is a useful technology. But since the dawn of LLMs, I've been trying to imagine what the world will look like if we take LLM to its logical conclusion. It seems to me, despite of all its benefits, LLM is a sword too sharp for all of us to handle. Its not gonna be sunshines and rainbows. A couple things I'm thinking about below, and these are all just societal impact, not even environmental ones: - Young people lost their career ladders. Capitalism doesn't work anymore. We have permanent underclass. And maybe worldwide scale societal unrest, in which violence will be the norm. - People stop creating music, stop writing blogs, stop doing experiments or any other cool stuffs and share it on the internet because LLM companies can just pirate the shit out of it without paying anything back. - Mediocrity in everything. We have this Suno shit claiming that people don't like the process of creating music because its so tedious so lets just prompt it away. Berklee has a class to make AI music. Yup. People claim that its okay to consume mediocre stuffs, because we don't need the highest grade of codebase, of design, of music for our day to day life. - People stop socializing and connecting to another human beings. For example, art is a way for people to connect to other's art. Software engineering is a lot of communication, discussing tradeoffs with other engineers. But now you can just prompt your way away, even things as simple as writing emails. - All the values (measured by money) created in this world is sucked by the LLM owners/producers. Oh you have a beautiful music you just created? Too bad, its mine now. Oh, you just created an art? Its my art now, and I will charge society money to recreate this art that I just acquired. Oh, you have a land somewhere? I can just buy it, money is cheap for me, after all I suck all the values that society created. There are no other values worthy of monetary compensation other than LLM training/research. These "researchers" don't need to practice music, don't need to practice art, don't need to practice law, don't need to practice coding, they can just be an LLM researchers/producers/owners and they get all the values that the other professions created. - All the above caused economic stagnation. People don't feel the need to pay other human beings, because everything is just a prompt away. - All the above caused stagnation of progress, or even winding down of progress. What else? If truly this is the logical conclusion of LLM, then it seems to me that the mission of this generation is to destroy AI as Ronnie Chieng said is not really off the mark. Maybe I am an LLM doomer, but help me out here HN, because I'm just a dumb adult.
New Show Hacker News story: Show HN: Nightwatch, The open-source, read-only AI SRE
Show HN: Nightwatch, The open-source, read-only AI SRE
2 by egorferber | 0 comments on Hacker News.
nightwatch is a local-first, read-only layer on top of your monitoring. it groups alert storm into incidents, flags noisy checks and has an agent that can investigate for you live systems. You can e.g. jump from the incident into the agent directly. the reason for this weekend project is that we had a kubernetes upgrade that went wrong, and at some point a rollback wasn't possible anymore, so it had to be fixed live during the night while several problems came together. We run a lot of different systems, on-prem and several Kubernetes clusters, and in a situation like that you spend most of the time just figuring out what is actually broken and where. So i thought that it would be pretty cool to have eyes in the dark in each system that can talk to your "brain". so the idea is to put a baby owl into each environment. Each owl runs where the systems live, keeps that environment's credentials local, and only dials outbound to a central brain, so there is no inbound hole into prod. It exposes a set of read-only skills, and the agent uses them to gather evidence and form a root-cause hypothesis, so the on-call engineer starts with a head start instead of from zero. read-only for now, i don't trust it near prod yet and honestly neither should you. llocal-first for easy self-hosting and to keep credentials on your side. the clustering and recommendations run fully offline with no llm at all. the agent needs a tool-calling llm, you can point it at a remote one, or self-host one (ollama etc.) if you want to stay fully offline. for non selfhosters: before every remote llm call, nightwatch strips real secrets (unrestorable) and swaps identifiers like ips, hostnames and paths for reversible placeholders, so the model only sees masked data while real values are restored only in the proposed commands and tool calls Would love if you try it in your Systems
2 by egorferber | 0 comments on Hacker News.
nightwatch is a local-first, read-only layer on top of your monitoring. it groups alert storm into incidents, flags noisy checks and has an agent that can investigate for you live systems. You can e.g. jump from the incident into the agent directly. the reason for this weekend project is that we had a kubernetes upgrade that went wrong, and at some point a rollback wasn't possible anymore, so it had to be fixed live during the night while several problems came together. We run a lot of different systems, on-prem and several Kubernetes clusters, and in a situation like that you spend most of the time just figuring out what is actually broken and where. So i thought that it would be pretty cool to have eyes in the dark in each system that can talk to your "brain". so the idea is to put a baby owl into each environment. Each owl runs where the systems live, keeps that environment's credentials local, and only dials outbound to a central brain, so there is no inbound hole into prod. It exposes a set of read-only skills, and the agent uses them to gather evidence and form a root-cause hypothesis, so the on-call engineer starts with a head start instead of from zero. read-only for now, i don't trust it near prod yet and honestly neither should you. llocal-first for easy self-hosting and to keep credentials on your side. the clustering and recommendations run fully offline with no llm at all. the agent needs a tool-calling llm, you can point it at a remote one, or self-host one (ollama etc.) if you want to stay fully offline. for non selfhosters: before every remote llm call, nightwatch strips real secrets (unrestorable) and swaps identifiers like ips, hostnames and paths for reversible placeholders, so the model only sees masked data while real values are restored only in the proposed commands and tool calls Would love if you try it in your Systems
New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Job market for SDMs/Engineering Managers. Any reliable data?
Ask HN: Job market for SDMs/Engineering Managers. Any reliable data?
4 by ed_balls | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I’m trying to find reliable data on the job market for Software Development Managers/Engineering Managers. It’s easy to find broad tech hiring reports, but hard to break the data down by role, company type, location, or tech stack. Anecdotally, it looks worse than the market for SDEs. Many companies are flattening management structures. Managers are taking on more teams and more direct reports. Coinbase is the extreme example. Does anyone know of good datasets, job-board analyses, or reports that track this? I wonder if I should go back to IC or maybe I should become Software Agent Manager ;)
4 by ed_balls | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I’m trying to find reliable data on the job market for Software Development Managers/Engineering Managers. It’s easy to find broad tech hiring reports, but hard to break the data down by role, company type, location, or tech stack. Anecdotally, it looks worse than the market for SDEs. Many companies are flattening management structures. Managers are taking on more teams and more direct reports. Coinbase is the extreme example. Does anyone know of good datasets, job-board analyses, or reports that track this? I wonder if I should go back to IC or maybe I should become Software Agent Manager ;)
New Show Hacker News story: Show HN: Dap-mux – Connect your editor and REPL to the same debug session
Show HN: Dap-mux – Connect your editor and REPL to the same debug session
3 by YesJustWolf | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I have been coding over four decades, in many languages, on many projects (including Firefox, Final Cut Pro, the Newton, and Fullwrite Professional if you can remember that far back; all these using my "dead-name"). I wrote something small and simple to scratch an itch. It's the UNIX philosophy: small "one-trick ponies", each *really* good at their one trick, then the user can hook them together to solve actual problems. I'm a CLI guy, and for almost everything, I already have this. But not for debugging. The itch I scratched was the connector that enables this philosophy for debugging. That thing is dap-mux. A DAP multiplexer turning a one-to-one protocol into a cooperating session of as many tools as you need to get it done! How it started: Helix and Python for me (and sometimes IPython), with the rest of my team using PyCharm (which I have long loved!). My team's problem is that they want the PyCharm debugger, and so must be satisfied with the JetBrains editor. *My* problem was I could use a full-blown debugger *or* I could have IPython *or* I could have Helix (or sometimes an unsatisfying combination of Helix and the debugger). That was my "itch". DAP (Debug Adapter Protocol) is the tantalizing answer, except it isn't. DAP is what editors (that don't want to write their own debuggers) are starting to adopt. The problem with DAP is it's one-to-one. One editor connects to one debugger. Done. Not a solution to my problem. And then suddenly, it *was* the solution. I realized that a DAP multiplexer would let you connect any DAP-aware editor to any debugger for any language, and simultaneously to a REPL, another session of your editor (or a different editor)! With the side benefit that now, like screen or tmux, since each process is its own thing: sessions are durable. Just restart whatever crashed and you're back where you were! There were hard parts: sequencing, late joiners, state management. Different end-points working on different actions in different sequences but with the same message ids. I solved these problems something like how NAT works. Instead of translating network addresses, though, I'm translating the sequence numbers of each client into something global and ordered, then correctly routing replies back to the end-point awaiting them, while mapping the sequence numbers for those replies back into the space of that end-point. Knowing the current state of the debugger, and replaying that as a message sequence to late joiners lets you start/connect the clients in any order. I chose Python: asyncio fits the I/O-router pattern perfectly, and it lets the IPython extension run in-process rather than over IPC. There are problems not yet solved: for instance, I think configuration in the clients and/or the startup sequence is too complicated. But it functions! I got what I wanted! The combination I use every day: Python + debugpy + Helix + IPython, all connected simultaneously. Step with `%n` or `%s`, evaluate expressions with `%eval`, watch Helix track the current line in real time. Rust with codelldb is the second confirmed combination — I debugged a Dijkstra implementation with Helix and a third-party DAP observer tool both connected to the same codelldb session. A community member, Sean Perry, has already built [dap-observer]( https://ift.tt/rKh6DPv ), which renders the current frame's variables as a navigable terminal tree. *This* was my exact dream! Small, focused, connectable tools all playing together! There's so much left to try: other editors, other debug adapters, Windows, other languages. None of this has been touched yet. The most helpful thing now is people testing it with their own setup and reporting what they find. It's time to play! `uv tool install 'dap-mux[ipython]'` for Python + IPython. `uv tool install dap-mux` for headless use with any language and adapter. No need for any part of the Python ecosystem. https://ift.tt/Dv421dh
3 by YesJustWolf | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I have been coding over four decades, in many languages, on many projects (including Firefox, Final Cut Pro, the Newton, and Fullwrite Professional if you can remember that far back; all these using my "dead-name"). I wrote something small and simple to scratch an itch. It's the UNIX philosophy: small "one-trick ponies", each *really* good at their one trick, then the user can hook them together to solve actual problems. I'm a CLI guy, and for almost everything, I already have this. But not for debugging. The itch I scratched was the connector that enables this philosophy for debugging. That thing is dap-mux. A DAP multiplexer turning a one-to-one protocol into a cooperating session of as many tools as you need to get it done! How it started: Helix and Python for me (and sometimes IPython), with the rest of my team using PyCharm (which I have long loved!). My team's problem is that they want the PyCharm debugger, and so must be satisfied with the JetBrains editor. *My* problem was I could use a full-blown debugger *or* I could have IPython *or* I could have Helix (or sometimes an unsatisfying combination of Helix and the debugger). That was my "itch". DAP (Debug Adapter Protocol) is the tantalizing answer, except it isn't. DAP is what editors (that don't want to write their own debuggers) are starting to adopt. The problem with DAP is it's one-to-one. One editor connects to one debugger. Done. Not a solution to my problem. And then suddenly, it *was* the solution. I realized that a DAP multiplexer would let you connect any DAP-aware editor to any debugger for any language, and simultaneously to a REPL, another session of your editor (or a different editor)! With the side benefit that now, like screen or tmux, since each process is its own thing: sessions are durable. Just restart whatever crashed and you're back where you were! There were hard parts: sequencing, late joiners, state management. Different end-points working on different actions in different sequences but with the same message ids. I solved these problems something like how NAT works. Instead of translating network addresses, though, I'm translating the sequence numbers of each client into something global and ordered, then correctly routing replies back to the end-point awaiting them, while mapping the sequence numbers for those replies back into the space of that end-point. Knowing the current state of the debugger, and replaying that as a message sequence to late joiners lets you start/connect the clients in any order. I chose Python: asyncio fits the I/O-router pattern perfectly, and it lets the IPython extension run in-process rather than over IPC. There are problems not yet solved: for instance, I think configuration in the clients and/or the startup sequence is too complicated. But it functions! I got what I wanted! The combination I use every day: Python + debugpy + Helix + IPython, all connected simultaneously. Step with `%n` or `%s`, evaluate expressions with `%eval`, watch Helix track the current line in real time. Rust with codelldb is the second confirmed combination — I debugged a Dijkstra implementation with Helix and a third-party DAP observer tool both connected to the same codelldb session. A community member, Sean Perry, has already built [dap-observer]( https://ift.tt/rKh6DPv ), which renders the current frame's variables as a navigable terminal tree. *This* was my exact dream! Small, focused, connectable tools all playing together! There's so much left to try: other editors, other debug adapters, Windows, other languages. None of this has been touched yet. The most helpful thing now is people testing it with their own setup and reporting what they find. It's time to play! `uv tool install 'dap-mux[ipython]'` for Python + IPython. `uv tool install dap-mux` for headless use with any language and adapter. No need for any part of the Python ecosystem. https://ift.tt/Dv421dh
New Show Hacker News story: Show HN: Documenting an Obscure Japanese Wii Game – and-Kensaku
Show HN: Documenting an Obscure Japanese Wii Game – and-Kensaku
2 by TylerJaacks | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I have been using Claude for the past couple of days this week to document and modify the TR2 game file format for an obscure Japanese-exclusive Wii game called And-Kensaku, or 安藤ケンサク. And-Kensaku is a game related to Googling. There are a few game modes, but the most famous one asks you a question and gives you two answer options, and you win if you choose the most popular Google search. I have been able to do the following: 1. disable signature checks on the files, and 2. allow edits to the Phrases.tr2 file, making it possible to modify the content of the aforementioned game mode. I wanted to go on this little adventure because reverse-engineering file formats is an extremely difficult (at least for me) and time-consuming task, and I wondered how well Claude would do at it. Right now, not everything about this game is documented, but I would like to fully document it and maybe release an English patch.
2 by TylerJaacks | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I have been using Claude for the past couple of days this week to document and modify the TR2 game file format for an obscure Japanese-exclusive Wii game called And-Kensaku, or 安藤ケンサク. And-Kensaku is a game related to Googling. There are a few game modes, but the most famous one asks you a question and gives you two answer options, and you win if you choose the most popular Google search. I have been able to do the following: 1. disable signature checks on the files, and 2. allow edits to the Phrases.tr2 file, making it possible to modify the content of the aforementioned game mode. I wanted to go on this little adventure because reverse-engineering file formats is an extremely difficult (at least for me) and time-consuming task, and I wondered how well Claude would do at it. Right now, not everything about this game is documented, but I would like to fully document it and maybe release an English patch.