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Do variable names matter for AI code completion? (2025)

Do Variable Names Matter for AI Code Completion? When GitHub Copilot suggests your next line of code, does it matter whether your variables are named current_temperature or just x ? I ran an experiment to find out, testing 8 different AI models on 500 Python code samples across 7 naming styles. The results suggest that descriptive variable names do help AI code completion. The Experiment Each code sample was transformed into different naming conventions: Descriptive ( process_user_input )

The 10-3-2-1-0 Sleep Hack May Kick Your Restless Nights to the Curb

After a long day of work, getting into bed and falling asleep may seem like the easiest thing in the world. However, for many, it's rarely that simple. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a third of American adults don't get enough sleep. Not getting enough rest doesn't just make it harder to wake up in the morning, but it can also lead to chronic conditions like high blood pressure and heart disease. If you've been struggling with getting to sleep, it might be

Microsoft adds Copilot Mode to Edge browser, brings AI chat and voice control

What just happened? Microsoft is taking a bigger swing at everyday AI integration with the launch of Copilot Mode in its Edge browser. Now available on Windows and Mac, the update marks a significant step in Microsoft's push to embed AI directly into the browsing experience, making tasks like research, comparison shopping, and online navigation faster (to be seen), and voice-enabled. Copilot Mode blends chat, search, and navigation in a single input field. Rather than relying on users to manage

I use Edge as my default browser - but its new AI mode is unreliable and annoying

Microsoft / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Microsoft's on a relentless quest to embed its Copilot AI into every software product it owns. That campaign takes another big step forward with the addition of some new generative AI features in the company's Edge browser. The latest release beefs up the capabilities of Copilot Mode, the chat-based search interface for Edge, on Windows PCs and Macs. You can use natural voice commands to navigate pages, and the chatbot can see all the open tabs in the c

Ask HN: How will the OSA affect small Mastodon instances?

I am not currently a user of Mastodon, but I have some interest in the project. I was looking at some stuff that seemed to indicate to me that the OSA could make it difficult to self host Mastodon without providing age verification. I was then reading the provisions and realsised that it didn't really affect you unless you have at least 3 million monthly users, so in theory would not affect self hosters with only a few users. But then I thought that if you are federated with a very large instanc

My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now, using GLM-4.5 Air and MLX I wrote about the new GLM-4.5 model family yesterday—new open weight (MIT licensed) models from Z.ai in China which their benchmarks claim score highly in coding even against models such as Claude Sonnet 4. The models are pretty big—the smaller GLM-4.5 Air model is still 106 billion total parameters, which is 205.78GB on Hugging Face. Ivan Fioravanti built this 44GB 3bit quantized version for MLX, spe

Meta's AI spending spree is Wall Street's focus in second-quarter earnings

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., arrives for the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024. Meanwhile, revenue growth in the second quarter likely slowed to 15%, down from 22% a year earlier, according to LSEG. It would be the slowest rate of expansion for the company since early 2023, and analysts are expecting lower levels of growth in the coming quarters. Although Meta's AI talent grab may not result in the company raising its projection for 2025 total expe

Exclusive: Galaxy S26 series could represent a major shake-up in Samsung’s flagship lineup

C. Scott Brown / Android Authority TL;DR The Galaxy S26 series could not only ditch the Plus model, but could also kill the standard model. Evidence found in an internal One UI 8 build suggests a lineup of the Galaxy S26 Pro, Galaxy S26 Edge, and Galaxy S26 Ultra. That means Samsung may rename the base model to “Pro” and replace the “Plus” model with Edge. Samsung’s next major release is the Galaxy S26 series, with the launch of its latest foldables now behind it. Earlier reports suggested S

Google Search's AI Mode is rolling out in the UK

Earlier this year, Google rolled out AI Mode to Search users in the US. Now, the notoriously inaccurate "tool" is coming to the UK. While Google's AI overviews have been available in the UK since last summer, AI Mode provides more conversational responses and fewer links to other pages. Google touts AI Mode as a more intuitive method for asking multi-part questions or follow-ups. It uses Google's Gemini 2.5 model to detail how-tos, compare products or plan a trip. Instead of searching for somet

Show HN: 433 – How to make a font that says nothing

433 is a font that masks visible text and replaces it with dots. I'm using it in the new version of Ensō along with Coffeeshop Mode. You can see it in action here: Beautiful. Why In short: because it's the simplest way to add Coffeeshop Mode to the app. (Also, because I was curious) (OK, mainly because I was curious, Dog mode) Longer version: The previous note on Ensō ended up on the front page of HN and gave us almost 400 TestFlight testers. This is way more than I had expected. In fact

LG Promo Codes: 20% Off | July 2025

LG makes some of the best TVs you can buy. Its OLED TVs in particular are perennial favorites at WIRED, with C-series models like the C4 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) providing among the best performance for your dollars on the market. LG is about way more than TVs of course. The Korean brand offers multiple products across the A/V landscape, from soundbars to Bluetooth speakers, along with a host of other products like home appliances, laptops, and more. Save 20% With Today’s LG Promo Codes If you

Show HN: 433 - How to Make a Font That Says Nothing

433 is a font that masks visible text and replaces it with dots. I'm using it in the new version of Ensō along with Coffeeshop Mode. You can see it in action here: Beautiful. Why In short: because it's the simplest way to add Coffeeshop Mode to the app. (Also, because I was curious) (OK, mainly because I was curious, Dog mode) Longer version: The previous note on Ensō ended up on the front page of HN and gave us almost 400 TestFlight testers. This is way more than I had expected. In fact

Chinese startup Z.ai launches powerful open source GLM-4.5 model family with PowerPoint creation

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Another week in the summer of 2025 has begun, and in a continuation of the trend from last week, with it arrives more powerful Chinese open source AI models. Little-known (at least to us here in the West) Chinese startup Z.ai has introduced two new open source LLMs — GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5-Air — casting them as go-to solutions for AI reasonin

Nuclear Winter Would Be Even Worse Than We Thought

Despite happening (thankfully) just once in real life, nuclear warfare has long been a staple element of science fiction. Popular depictions of nuclear conflict—from biographic thrillers like Oppenheimer to imagined disasters like The Day After—reflect the understanding that its consequences would be irreversible and catastrophic to modern society. Unsurprisingly, nuclear warfare and its potential repercussions concern scientists as much as fiction writers. In a recent paper published in Enviro

Anthropic is rate limiting Claude Code, blaming some users for never turning it off

Anthropic has introduced new weekly rate limits on its Claude Code tool for AI assistance with coding tasks. The move comes shortly after the AI company quietly began implementing rate limits on the Claude Code service, which is an agentic side of the AI chatbot that is capable of reading code, editing files, performing tests and pushing GitHub commits. According to a series of posts from Anthropic on X, these changes are in response to some users who have been running Claude Code "continuously

I designed my own fast game streaming video codec – PyroWave

Streaming gameplay from one machine to another over a network is a reasonably popular use case these days. These use cases demand very, very low latency. Every millisecond counts here. We need to: Send controller input from machine A to B over network B renders a frame on the GPU B encodes the frame into a bitstream B sends the result over a network to A A decodes the bitstream A displays image on screen Dopamine is released in target brain Every step in this chain adds latency and we wa

Topics: 32 bit codecs rate video

Forget the Pixel Buds 3, Google Should Make an AirPods Max Killer

Google has a lot in store for us starting next month. I know this, not because of some insider knowledge or gadget-centric ESP, but because last week all of its upcoming announcements were leaked in succession, leaving precious little up to the imagination. Among the upcoming Google drops is a whole family of Pixel 10s, a Pixel Fold, another Pixel smartwatch, and a minor update to Google’s Pixel Buds Pro 2, which are getting a new color. Some of those product drops may be exciting to someone, bu

Today's NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for July 29 #513

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles. Today's NYT Strands puzzle is a tough one. The words are stumpers, and one of them is both long and unusual -- though kind of funny. If you need hints and answers, read on. I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. If you're looking for today's Wordle, Conn

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for July 29, #779

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Card players, today's NYT Connections puzzle is for you. Need more help? Read on for clues and today's Connections answers. The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze you

Today's Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for July 29, #1501

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today's Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today's Wordle puzzle might be tricky, depending on how correctly you place all those vowels -- and perhaps your knowledge of another language. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for July 29, #309

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today's Connections: Sports Edition features two categories with references to specific places. One is a state and one is a city, so you should be able to sort them out without too much difficulty. Read on for hints and the answers if you get stuck. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta

Microsoft trials Copilot Mode in Edge

Microsoft has debuted a Copilot Mode for its Edge web browser. When enabled, this experimental feature can search across multiple open browser tabs and analyze the information on each page. An example posted on X by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shows Copilot Mode examining several papers published by the company's researchers and assessing if they make any similar points. Today we’re introducing Copilot Mode in Edge, our first step in reinventing the browser for the AI age. My favorite featur

I designed my own fast game streaming video codec

Streaming gameplay from one machine to another over a network is a reasonably popular use case these days. These use cases demand very, very low latency. Every millisecond counts here. We need to: Send controller input from machine A to B over network B renders a frame on the GPU B encodes the frame into a bitstream B sends the result over a network to A A decodes the bitstream A displays image on screen Dopamine is released in target brain Every step in this chain adds latency and we wa

Topics: 32 bit codecs rate video

Trump Organization says Amazon, Walmart, eBay sellers are hawking knockoff shirts, hats, mugs

The Trump Organization is seeking to prevent some online businesses from hawking counterfeit merchandise promoting President Donald Trump. In a lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Florida, the company accused unnamed merchants of selling "inferior imitations" of Trump-branded products on several online marketplaces, including Amazon , Walmart and eBay . The Trump Organization company, which is owned by Trump, sells a variety of branded merchandise through its website, including a go

AirPods are getting five new features — here’s how to try them now

Last week, Apple released its first-ever public beta for AirPods alongside the first public beta of iOS 26. If you want to try out Apple’s new AirPods features, here’s how to install the beta. How to install the AirPods public beta First, you’ll need to make sure your iPhone is running the iOS 26 beta. This takes just a few taps, and you can find those full instructions in our dedicated guide on installing the iOS 26 beta. The AirPods public beta is available for AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4.

Former Chaturbate Moderator Sues Site Over ‘Psychological Trauma’

A former content moderator for the porn site Chaturbate has sued the platform and its affiliates, claiming that he was psychologically harmed by his ongoing exposure to the sexual material on the site. Neal Barber, who was hired as a moderator for the porn site in 2020, claims in a class action lawsuit that his employers knowingly and intentionally failed to “provide their content moderators with industry-standard mental health protections, such as content filters, wellness breaks, trauma-infor

‘Rick and Morty’ Exec Producer Dan Harmon Is Already Thinking 2 Seasons Ahead

Last night brought the season eight finale of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty—a surprisingly poignant (by Rick and Morty standards) look at how Rick and the two Beths have coped with the loss of Diane, Rick’s wife and their mother. As you’d expect, sci-fi weirdness complicates their grief—but the episode, titled “Hot Rick,” brought a sense of closure as well as the suggestion that Rick’s emotional evolution will continue in future seasons. While fans of Rick and Morty have grown used to long wait t

How much pollution does AI create? Mistral breaks it down

What just happened? Mistral AI, a Paris-based venture focused on developing open-weight, open-source large language models, is now contributing to the AI discourse with a comprehensive lifecycle analysis of one of its models – guided by the same principles of openness that define its work. Mistral recently published an analysis of the environmental impact of one of its large language models. As chatbots and other AI-powered technologies become increasingly embedded in the global economy, Mistra

I changed 12 settings on my Android phone to instantly extend the battery life

Kerry Wan/ZDNET I've spent large portions of my life looking for ways to extend the battery life on my Android phones. Admittedly, that sounds rather dramatic, but growing up with only budget models meant I was constantly tweaking device settings to squeeze every bit of juice out of their batteries. Thanks to this micromanaging, I successfully pushed the batteries on all my past smartphones to their absolute limit. I don't want to hoard this knowledge to myself, so I've decided to share it wit