MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mabster | 2025-04-23 22:42:22+00:00
But it's this and many other features of C/C++ that make it faster than Java. C/C++ developers really don't want to "pay" for something for safety.

Though, I really like the _mm_undefined_ps() intrinsics for SSE that make it clear that you're purposefully not initialising a variable. Something like that for ints and floats would be pretty sweet.
by mandevil | 2025-04-23 22:42:23+00:00
On February 6th, Marko Elez announced his resignation from DOGE after the WSJ discovered many racist posts he made in 2024 (which they published on the 5th). That likely made someone really interested in what his actual coding skill levels were, and they took a look at a repo he had made.

Musk did a "poll" on X that voted for rehiring Elez to DOGE, by February 20th Elez had a US Government email address again, and on Febrary 21st he was reported as working for DOGE at the Social Security Administration.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-23 22:42:35+00:00
They're being harassed for lying about being a better actor. Apple gets to be a controlling asshole because there's no legal requirement for tech companies to not be. Google tried to have their cake and eat it too.

iOS is a package deal: you use our OS on our phones with our App Store and browser. Very straightforward and honest, even if we rightly hate the deal. This all relies on basic protections of IP law that the state is so far unwilling to roll back.

Android is a confusopoly[0]. For every point you mentioned, Google has a hidden deal or catch that subverts the intention of the words in question and makes it as bad as iOS.

Yes, Android is FOSS, but the app store everyone uses is proprietary; and Google's licensing terms for the proprietary store contravene the licenses on the FOSS portion. You specifically agree not to ship devices with "Android forks", even if you don't put the proprietary store on those specific devices. And what's actually released in AOSP shrinks every time a Google engineer puts a Google client in an app. Let us also not forget Android Honeycomb, which actually was not released to AOSP. There is no legal requirement for Google to ship source, and they've already tried out a fully-proprietary release of Android in the past.

Yes, you could install non-Google-Play apps on Android, but updating them required you to manually approve every update. Third-party app stores were a nightmare to use until Epic sued about it and Google provided APIs to actually deliver updates in the same way that Google Play can.

Yes, Google Play lets Mozilla ship Gecko. But Google is also paying phone manufacturers lots of money to make Chrome the default. Oh, and to not ship any third-party app stores. Combined with Google Play not letting you distribute other app stores through itself, it makes actually finding and using an app store a pain.

And Chrome is specifically designed to make you use Google Search with the same dark patterns Edge uses.

Please do not fool yourself into thinking that any actor in this industry is good. They all suck, and you should be happy when any of them get their noses bloodied.

[0] A term coined by the writer of Dilbert, Hatsune Miku, for deliberately confusing marketing intended to make you sigh in frustration, open your wallet, and let the sales guy decide what product you buy.
by Nevermark | 2025-04-23 22:42:38+00:00
Branding is very important.

Branding requires being distinctive, mixing novel visual and other aspects in a pleasing way.

As far as I have been able to tell no major platform ships with the universal font of fonts (full coverage of all possible fonts with 4.5Mb seed) “AnyStyleYouWant” font.

And none of the fonts they do ship have the “distinctive” feature.

Until that day comes…
by jaredcwhite | 2025-04-23 22:42:52+00:00
It is an ethical violation for me to receive a message addressed as "FROM" somebody when that person didn't actually write the message. And no, before someone comes along to say that execs in the past had their assistants write memos in their name, etc., guess what? That was a past era with its own conventions. This is the Internet era, where the validity and authenticity of a source is incredibly important to verify because there is so much slop and scams and fake garbage.

I got a text message recently from my kid, and I was immediately suspicious because it included a particular phrasing I'd never heard them use in the past. Turns out it was from them, but they'd had a Siri transcription goof and then decided it was funny and left it as-is. I felt pretty self-satisfied I'd picked up on such a subtle cue like that.

So while the article may be interesting in the sense of pointing out the problems with generic text generation systems which lack personalization, ultimately I must point out I would be outraged if anyone I knew sent me a generated message of any kind, full stop.
by paulpauper | 2025-04-23 22:43:16+00:00
There is no pleasing the NYTs or other tech critics like Wired, Axios, or Arts Technica. Either tech is too profit-focused, too focused on mundane or minutia, violates user privacy, or its proposals are too far-fetched or unworkable. What would be the perfect tech or the perfect tech company? One that makes minimal profits , works on products that are not too outlandish, does not make big promises yet is able to secure large investments with modest proposals.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-04-23 22:43:37+00:00
Somewhat related, but I suggest having both the record updated at, and some kind of "user editing updated at". As I've encountered issues where some data migration ends up touching records and bumping the updated at, which shocks users since they see the UI reshuffle and think they have been hacked when they see the records updated at a time they didn't update them.
by Dwedit | 2025-04-23 22:44:28+00:00
My "bad experience" with MSYS2 was when I misunderstood how the different environments were set up.

There are several different environments, each with their own different and incompatible set of packages. When you run "mingw64", you are running a different environment than "msys2". If you install a package named "gcc", you are getting the "gcc" intended for "msys2", and not the package intended for "mingw64".

The "Msys2" version ships with Windows headers that are not compatible with some Windows programs, while the "Mingw64" has compatible headers. Then this led to me filing an invalid bug report.

The role of the different environments (with their color-coded icons), and the necessary prefixes to install packages for those environments could be made a lot clearer. And that if you are in the "Msys" environment, all software you build will depend on "Msys".
by lolinder | 2025-04-23 22:44:31+00:00
Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn expensive.

If you can't afford the license for the font, your app is small-time enough that you can make do with one of the many, many high-quality fonts that are available for free, there's no need to pirate it. If your app is big enough that the difference matters, then you can likely afford the sticker price.
by seveibar | 2025-04-23 22:44:32+00:00
Agree, although the acronym in the article could be interpreted to mean “you are going to read it, so index it appropriately”, which is sort of bad advice and can lead to overindexing. There is probably something better for “add appropriate and conventional metadata” (the author suggests updated_at, created_at etc)

Not a huge fan of the example of soft delete, i think hard deletes with archive tables (no foreign key enforcement) is a much much better pattern. Takes away from the main point of the article a bit, but glad the author hinted at deleted_at only being used for soft deletes.
by quantadev | 2025-04-23 22:45:25+00:00
Hey Fraze! I'm a big fan of yours! I bet you know who I am, but don't dox me plz. :) I hope things are going well for you at Blue Sky actually, if you're still there. I think all your contributions to ATProto were probably all the good ones!

I remember Jeromy and his boss Cake who pretended to interview me for a job once, which cratered when I refused to do the "coding challenge" purely out of the principle of the thing. lol.
by mkhalil | 2025-04-23 22:45:30+00:00
Event-sourcing solves this. And with how cheap storage is, it should be more prevalent in the industry. IMO the biggest thing holding it back is that there isn't a framework that's plug-and-play (say like Next.js is to React) that provides people with that ability.

I've been working on one in Typescript (with eventual re-writes in other langs. like Rust and Go), but it's difficult even coming up with conventions.
by cousin_it | 2025-04-23 22:45:30+00:00
The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality. I agree a lot of "nice" futures with AI will look like that, but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice". I don't see a path from AIs built for profit and national defense to a Culture-like future or any "nice" future at all. Or rather, there could be such a path but it would require AIs to be built for public interest already now.
by antonvs | 2025-04-23 22:46:13+00:00
The Internet came from the military originally, the Web came from CERN, many advances in programming languages (like automatic garbage collection) came from academia, and so on. Your claim about where most progress came from isn't obviously true.

And to the extent that it might be true, to what extent is that just structural? In a society with a focus on free markets, more will come from free markets, naturally.
by alganet | 2025-04-23 22:46:18+00:00
All of these declared disputes in meaning, names and events is precisely what I am referring to.

One could argue that Jesus is the book itself anthropomorphized, edited so many times by so many sinners (crossed), that whatever salvation was contained within (a prophecy, a guide, a story) is not there anymore. It only serves to spare those who changed and betrayed it (to support churches and beliefs not originally present in it).

Thus, the book died. It is said that once it briefly was brought back to life. It is a reference from the New Testament to itself. Then it died again (once a living, thriving narrative of human history constantly being augmented, now unable to be that again, eternally locked in disputes and conflicted interpretations, thus, dead).
by romellem | 2025-04-23 22:46:44+00:00
To remove the presidential pardon power, you'd need to [amend the Constitution][1]. Getting [two thirds of both Houses of Congress][2] to pass any amendment in the foreseeable future seems highly unlikely if not downright inconceivable.

[1]: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...

[2]: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artV-1/ALDE_0...
by tpmoney | 2025-04-23 22:48:21+00:00
I think we’ve forgotten over the years just how expensive tech can be. The original iMac was 1299 at launch, inflation adjusted that’s $2500 today, for what even at the time was considered a cut down machine. The iBook would launch the next year for $1599, or about $3k today. Is the AVP at least as interesting of a product to buyers as the original iMac or iBook was in 1998? Bear in mind 1998 Apple was just barely holding on after years of mismanagement, still was running Mac OS 8 and neither the iPod juggernaut nor OSX were anywhere on the horizon for people to suspect that Apple would even still be in business or supporting their proprietary computers in a few years.

Perhaps more apt, the original Macintosh released at $2495, or a whopping $7,500 inflation adjusted. Now I’m not thinking that the AVP is necessarily going to change the computing world the way the Macintosh did, but surely its novelty and potential fits somewhere between an iMac and an original Macintosh right?
by noleary | 2025-04-23 22:48:22+00:00
> Index is the SOTA open-source browser agent for autonomously executing complex tasks on the web.

I've written a handful of pretty hacky Python scripts that just pull down all of the HTML content from a page and toss it over to OpenAI. As you can imagine, these were all extremely simple tasks, e.g., "find out if there's a login button"

What's a good example of a complex task that Index is well-suited for? What's the threshold of minimal complexity where you guys are a really good fit?
by seveibar | 2025-04-23 22:49:03+00:00
Most likely you won’t be asking for specific things like “3mm hole 3in from the side”, you’ll say things like “Create a plastic enclosure sized to go under a desk, ok add a usb receptacle opening, ok add flanges with standard screw holes”

In the text to CAD ecosystem we talk about matching our language/framework to “design intent” a lot. The ideal interface is usually higher level than people expect it to be.
by gkoberger | 2025-04-23 22:49:08+00:00
Arial v Helvetica is an interesting example, because Arial was designed basically as a cost-efficient alternative to Helvetica. So, the reason you'd choose between the two is exactly the thing the original comment was complaining about – licensing! They were designed to be metrically compatible... meaning, the character widths and spaces are exactly the same. This means that switching to Arial won't affect the layout of your document. This was more important when things were more analog, but it's still important with digital documents: for example, it could mess up the number of pages, which would affect meta content or create line breaks that seem meaningful but aren't. Additionally, having things like a widow (a word by itself on a new line) can disrupt the visual flow and draw focus to or away from content in ways you don't desire.

But just because those two typefaces are quite similar (and the reason to pick between them is largely financial/convenience) doesn't mean you'd never want to have more fine-grained control over the text you're working with.

You mentioned security. When I'm editing this comment, 0 and O are very different (the zero has a slash through it), however when I hit save they look quite similar. (But because we're all using system fonts on HN, it might be different for you). While it's often just a stylistic choice, in many situations the two characters would be indistinguishable and that would be an issue, which is why someone might choose a typeface where characters are significantly different. Think a password you have to transcribe.

If you know your font will be used in a quite small size, you may want one that is optimized for being read at tiny sizes. If you're displaying something technical, a monowidth font is better suited.

And all of this focused on utility for the most part; I'm leaving out all the reasons you'd want it for stylistic reasons. If you're trying to make people feel at ease, you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are rounded, for example. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.
by phire | 2025-04-23 22:49:43+00:00
Good point. When reading, I kind of just assumed the "use of initialised memory" warning would pick this up.

But because the whole line is parsed in a single sscanf call, the compiler's static analysis is forced to assume they have now initialised. There doesn't seem to be any generic static analysis approach that can catch this bug.

Though... you could make a specialised warning just for scanf that forced you to either pass in pre-initilized values or check the return result.
by fallinditch | 2025-04-23 22:49:47+00:00
Another benefit of using an IDE like VSCode for writing and publishing your blog is you can use the copilot AI to fill in the front matter details for you, easily add a table of contents, or add a cohesive structure of subsections. Don't forget the shift + CMD + v command to see see a preview within VSCode.

Hugo is a great choice for an SSG, I find it logical and intuitive. As for extending it with a CMS front end, I looked at Decapcms.org - formerly Netlify CMS - it gives you the WYSIWYG editor and you can hook it up to an asset management platform like Cloudinary for images.

BTW just checked Cloudinary pricing - generous free tier looks like plenty for most blogs.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-23 22:49:58+00:00
AI agent idea: Detect notifications and dialog boxes that (a) lack a "Don't bother me again" button and (b) which you have responded "Maybe later" to, and forever afterwards automatically "click" "Maybe later" on your behalf the moment they appear.

Yes, this is using an H100 to crack a walnut, we shouldn't have to, etc. But still.
by lostmsu | 2025-04-23 22:50:13+00:00
I am not sure what is your point here. In Windows these components can be replaced. You even mentioned alternatives.

UPD. ah. I see. But Perplexity is an assistant. On Android AFAIK you can't just install another assistant.

UPD2. Actually, turns out on Android you can install a 3rd party assistant. AFAIK Alexa can just be installed from Play Store.
by simonw | 2025-04-23 22:50:22+00:00
"There are a thousand other ways of solving problems for real people, so that doesn't explain why some choose software development as their preferred method."

Software development is almost unique in the scale that it operates at. I can write code once and have it solve problems for dozens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of people.

If you want your work to solve problems for large numbers of people I have trouble thinking of any other form of work that's this accessible but allows you to help this many others.

Fields like civil engineering are a lot harder to break into!
by evanmoran | 2025-04-23 22:50:35+00:00
Just curious, how do people feel about this general style of soft deletes currently? Do people still use these in production or prefer to just delete fully or alternatively move deleted rows to a separate tables / schema?

I find the complexity to still feel awkward enough that makes me wonder if deleted_at is worth it. Maybe there are better patterns out there to make this cleaner like triggers to prevent deletion, something else?

As for the article, I couldn't agree more on having timestamps / user ids on all actions. I'd even suggest updated_by to add to the list.
by econ | 2025-04-23 22:51:40+00:00
The most capitalist thing to do here is to have the parties gathered in an app on the device and have the companies bid on the user and have the user pick their prefernce. That way the user can enjoy many dialogs and be paid for their time. You pick, ebay 10$ temu 12$ Amazon 2$ aliexpress 15$ etc or all 20 shopping apps for 80$

Should be fun to install 500 games for 60 cent each. It might even push storage forwards.

Who knows, maybe there are enough parties out there to fund the entire device.
by jppope | 2025-04-23 22:51:44+00:00
I agree with the script kiddies comment- which is basically what the reporting has shown... but in a way isn't that part of the point? That they can save billions of dollars just by having a couple of relatively normal comp sci kids (who can't even rent a car) review the most basic financial information of our government departments. These guys aren't supposed to be "delta force" they are supposed to be the interns.

Not trying to defend the means to the end, but I would really like my tax money used more efficiently. I will also say am extremely worried about the levels of access that they are being given, especially since it comes with basically no accountability
by tcdent | 2025-04-23 22:51:45+00:00
I usually read these opinion pieces and roll my eyes because the OP is just being pedantic.

But, this really cuts to the core of everything wrong with modern software.

Open your bank app. Immediately get blocked by a popup asking you to complete a survey or try some new feature.

Sign up for a new account with some SaaS. Immediately get blocked with a tutorial flow to sell you on how great it is, regardless if you even came there for those features in the first place.

Even the way OS updates are installed has turned into a pushy salesman that tricks you into agreeing to something you didn't originally want.
by gusgus01 | 2025-04-23 22:53:17+00:00
At least at places I've worked, terminating the logger would cause a security incident, and the central logging service have some general heuristics that should trigger a review if a log is filled with junk. Of course with enough time and root, there's ways to avoid that. But that's also usually why those with root are limited to a small subset of users, and assuming root usually requires a reason and is time gated.
by ctm92 | 2025-04-23 22:55:11+00:00
It has gotten a bit better lately, but it's still a pain.

Just recently the docker-compose stack from the current main branch would not start properly, because someone committed a faulty health check. Why does this make it to the main branch, does nobody there review PR?

Starting a new stack is nothing compared to maintaining it. Upgrading to newer images requires carefully checking which environment variables suddenly appeared in new versions or maybe were renamed. Upgrades never really went absolutely smooth for me in the past.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-23 22:55:15+00:00
>"Tenant-admin" isn't such a radical thing

Admin accounts without logs is extremely radical. I have literally never seen it, or had anyone request it, in my decade+ of consulting in security.

Unless you think the whistleblower, Krebs, and everyone else reporting are lying. Which, in that case, nothing anyone says is going to change your opinion (and you should just say that, if it's what you think, to save us all time).
by skull8888888 | 2025-04-23 22:55:27+00:00
- research task, agent is smart enough to understand which links to click next without the need to hardcode the parsing and navigation logic

- any task that requires UI interaction, button clicking, filter selection, form filling and so on. Just prompt it, it's surprisingly very robust and self-healing.

- complex long-running task that require extensive context - e.g. researching one topic and then creating spreadsheet, creating a presentation for a topic and so on.

Essentially, any task that can be done within a browser environment that previously required flacky hardcoded predefined scripts. Also, website testing is a great example.
by anonymousiam | 2025-04-23 22:55:30+00:00
The lightning "strike" mentioned in the article was probably not a direct hit. Nothing can really survive >30kA of current. I recall concerns from Boeing engineers when they switched to carbon fiber fuselages, that a strike would be far more serious than before, with Aluminum fuselages.

https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-power

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/35493/are-carbo...
by nyanpasu64 | 2025-04-23 22:55:36+00:00
That doesn't sound like ring modulation in a musical sense (IIRC it has a modulator above 30 Hz, or inverts the signal instead of attenuating?), so much as crackling, cutting in and out, or an overdone tremolo effect. I checked in Audacity and the signal only gets cut out, not inverted.
by randunel | 2025-04-23 22:55:44+00:00
> Do you fail to comprehend that Cloudflare does not show any captchas and does not block anybody by default? And that blocking entirely depends on the site's settings?

Nope, it would appear that you fail to comprehend that users which are banned from ever reaching your website would never contact you. You can't know what you don't know, it's a natural limitation, you just can't yet wrap your head around this concept. I suggest re-reading the thread.
by pedalpete | 2025-04-23 22:55:49+00:00
With Apple, they are the manufacturer of the phone and the software, so they get to decide what goes on the hardware.

Google makes the OS, but not the hardware. Why should they be able to decide what another company puts on the hardware.

This is exactly the same playbook Microsoft tried in the 90s, and it is going to court for the exact same reason. It's using your market power to prevent competition.

We've decided that just because you are the maker of a piece of software does not mean you get to decide what runs on someone else's hardware.