MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by armchairhacker | 2025-04-21 19:01:44+00:00
Then the company just re-implements your project; they have the resources to.

Most software isn't hard to reverse-engineer, and most people aren't exceptional; if a group is big enough to create a GPL-licensed product that competes with Microsoft's, they're big enough to create an MIT-licensed product that competes with Microsoft's.

I like GP’s comment “don’t discuss anything in private and/or offer priority support without being paid”. Also:

- Ensure you get attribution, and support others who deserve attribution

- Develop open-source alternatives to paid programs

- Donate to others who write open-source

I disagree that open-source contributed much to companies becoming so rich. I believe it was more that people gave them (money and) private data, e.g. made posts and interactions that only exist on their locked-down platform. I doubt a lack of open-source and accessible development tools would’ve prevented Google and Facebook; if anything, they would've been founded by richer or more networked people. And it certainly won't prevent them now.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-21 19:01:46+00:00
>if you're sincere about catching criminals you would want even more intrusion into online spaces

Why?

For 40 years, Police in the US have been given basically carte-blanche to do whatever dragnet surveillance they want, as long as it "technically" is done by a third party they just buy services from. Police have had constant and perfect visibility into the digital world, with almost no moderating force, and yet they're so bad at finding culprits that violent crime clearance rates are still a coinflip.

Oh actually that's just in my State. ME claims the national violent crime clearance rate is ~20%. Jesus.

It seems obvious to me that police departments are either utterly incapable of, or utterly unwilling of, doing their damn job. We have given them near infinite power and zero responsibility and they've spent those immense resources being trained that everyone is trying to kill them, being taught how to shoot people first and ask questions later, and harassing people, often including journalists literally exposing their mob activity.

Please don't give them more power until they demonstrate an ability to productively use the power we have already given them.
by godelski | 2025-04-21 19:02:28+00:00
Your profile says you're a security engineer, so I'm hoping you can help me understand.

What was the problem with the current DNS system? I definitely think there could be improvements like displaying domain instead of TLD but still.

And why not move into a system like multiparty keys? Keys assigned by domain holder, need to be signed, and verified accounts must login with a private key that validates. That way you don't just get that the account is validated but the post is too. Yeah, this would require more technical expertise to do but the organizations we're usually most concerned about would have no problem with that. Besides, tooling gets easier when there's meaningful pushes to make it available to general audiences
by aerhardt | 2025-04-21 19:03:06+00:00
I've also settled on a copy-paste LLM workflow.

I can see the usefulness of agents however for (a) some tedious refactorings where the IDE features might not reach and (b) occasionally writing a first pass of a low-value module when I am low on energy.

For the rest of stuff I feel very happy with copy-paste.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-21 19:03:07+00:00
Sirus wasn't bad, but it was still a call which is annoying.

The worst I've experienced was equifax. I signed up for a free trial to see where my credit sat and what was up, then cancelled. It was a phone call, 30 minute wait, and SUPER weaselly behavior in the call center script. Something to the effect of Them: "Hey we want to give you this free gift", Me: "Will that gift keep my subscription active?" Them: "yes". Repeated several times as they tried just a bunch of avenues to not cancel my account. I literally had to say "No, I just want you to cancel my account" or "Are you going to cancel my account" like 20 times. It took over an hour.
by tptacek | 2025-04-21 19:03:47+00:00
People who aren't familiar with mainstream Catholicism might not understand that TLM is a pretty powerful cultural signifier; it's something close to a separatist movement within the church (in fact, it's the launch pad for an actual separatist movement, SSPX) and it's quite conservative. When you hear the pejorative "tradcath", these are the people they're talking about.

Naturally, the tiny but vocal minority of people who attended the TLM found Francis very activating. But it's important to know that those people are not broadly representative of the church as a whole. Most Catholics I know would barely offer a shrug if you told them (they certainly wouldn't already know) that Francis had restricted the TLM.
by gopalv | 2025-04-21 19:03:52+00:00
> they also outperform human expertise directly

When measured statistically.

This is not a takedown of that statement, but the reason we've trouble with this idea is that it works in the lab and not always in real life.

To set up a clean experiment, you have define what success looks like before you conduct the experiment - that the output variable is defined.

Once you know what to measure ahead of time to determine success, then statistical models tend to not be as random as a group of humans in achieving that target.

The variance is bad in an experiment, but variance jitter is needed in an ever changing world even if most variants are worse off.

For example, if you can predict someone's earning potential from their birth zipcode, it is not wrong and often more right than otherwise.

And then if you base student loans and business loan interest rates on the basis of birth zipcodes, the original prediction does become more right.

The experimental version that's a win, but in real life that's a terrible loss to society.
by matklad | 2025-04-21 19:04:27+00:00
>for Zig enthusiasts, the set of features that Zig has appeals to them. Just like enthusiasts of every programming language.

I find it rather amusing that it's a Java and a Rust enthusiast who are extolling Zig approach here! I am not particularly well read with respect to programming languages, but I don't recall many languages which define generic pair as

fn Pair(A: type, B: type) type { return struct { fst: A, snd: B }; }

The only one that comes to mind is 1ML, and I'd argue that it is also revolutionary.
by alexdanilowicz | 2025-04-21 19:04:35+00:00
> Do you not think that’ll get solved by a future generation of cleverer LLMs though?

I don't. But obviously I'm biased + have spent perhaps too much time at application layer. I think there will still be a large amount of tooling + feeding of context to get the best result and I don't see a world in which we let LLMs run hog wild on our computers any time soon, especially for prototyping workflows at the enterprise level.

And for the sake of discussion: let's say these cleverer, future generation LLMs do exist... then I think the entire workflow will be very different. Hard to say how. Perhaps knowledge work as we know it will be unrecognizable.

Re: the Gemini 2.5 comment, I would love to compare it prompt for prompt. Looks like the prompt they are comparing it to didn't include the requirements for the Rubik's cubes scrambler/timer/solver. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if one LLM — Gemini 2.5 in this case — is better at creating a Rubik's cube compared to Sonnet 3.7/3.5 with our system prompt. (Not a lot of product teams are prompting our platform to build Rubik's cube in three.js lol). But if it is better, what's great is we can easily swap it out and start using Gemini.
by JohnMakin | 2025-04-21 19:04:37+00:00
I’m disabled and rely heavily on food delivery apps and stopped using uber/postmates about a year ago. I somehow got tricked into paying $40 on a $6 order. I went back through the flow to see where I messed up, the screen did show my order amount that I expected, but after many many emails and messages with support, this discount didnt apply because I didn’t hit some “minimum” on the order, so they went ahead and charged the full amount (not what was displayed, or if it was, was done in an extremely dishonest/obfuscated way).

I am far from a novice computer/device user. you’re already making a decent amount of money off me and the slave labor wages you pay your workers, why try to aggressively milk every penny I have? I stopped using it after their joke of an outsourced customer support would not do anything but run me in circles. How much did losing my business cost them in revenue vs. the blatant petty theft in dark patterns would have gained? There has to be a day where all these user hostile apps triggers some response from people like “no, enough of this.”
by palmotea | 2025-04-21 19:04:44+00:00
Enterprise development has particular problems you won't find in other environments, for instance having hundreds of different developers with widely varying levels of skill and talent, all collaborating together, often under immense time and budget pressure.

The result ain't going to be what you get if you've got a focused group of 10x geniuses working on everything, but I think a lot of the aspects of "enterprise development" that people complain about is simply the result of making the best of a bad situation.

I like Java, because I've worked with people who will fuck up repeatedly without static type checking.
by PeterZaitsev | 2025-04-21 19:05:03+00:00
Not including original license may well be oversight, It is very unlikely Microsoft would intentionally to do something like this, which costs them really nothing, but not doing it can post a lot in the future in the legal costs.

For the rest - if you chose MIT license for your work you should expect it can be used by someone to create software based on it, including commercially licenses

I would treat anything you're releasing as MIT as the gift to the world. This is how Open Source suppose to work - people building on each other work, often without properly thanking authors and maintainers.

If you want to reserve some rights - chose who can use your software and for what purpose, ie ensure "Microsofts" of this world can't use your code in a way you do not approve, you should not release it as Open Source.
by usaar333 | 2025-04-21 19:05:27+00:00
> Neither of us will ever pay for power again.

Seems optimistic? With 2 EVs and almost all electric utilities, I'm well past the ~26 KWH a day electricity your system might generate.

I'm also impressed how cheap your costs are. The install cost alone in the Bay Area is going to be past that. Panels getting cheaper just don't matter much.
by karaterobot | 2025-04-21 19:05:27+00:00
The code will function, in the sense of executing, whether the underlying concepts are sufficiently well-understood or not. Considering the ramifications of that statement might lead you to seeing why people want to understand what they're building before they build it.

I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were asking questions in good faith, but I'm not sure that's true anymore, so good luck.
by lgiordano_notte | 2025-04-21 19:05:58+00:00
keybase had promise early on but kinda lost the plot. the vouching system was neat in theory but never really caught on outside a small circle. the crypto stuff definitely didn’t help, and once zoom bought them it was basically a ghost town, no roadmap, no real dev activity, just inertia.

feels like identity + trust systems keep coming back around but never quite stick. maybe too hard to balance usability, decentralization, and adoption all at once.
by blacksqr | 2025-04-21 19:06:15+00:00
The OpenACS web server toolkit has a lot of useful Tcl utilities, including the ad_proc procedure, which wraps proc and allows adding of switches, inline docs, and more.

I think it would be very useful to turn ad_proc into a built-in command and incorporate it into TCL.

https://nstcl.sourceforge.net/docs/nstcl-core/ad_proc.html
by icarito | 2025-04-21 19:06:28+00:00
Yeah I agree, I've been thinking about using Rust. But ultimately it's a problem with GTK3 vs GTK4 too because if we could reuse the Python interpreter from the applet that would speed things up but GTK4 doesn't have support for AppIndicator icons(!).

I've been pondering whether to backport to GTK3 for this sole purpose. I find that after the initial delay to startup the app, its speed is okay...

Porting to Rust is not really planned because I'd loose the llm-python base - but still something that triggers my curiosity.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-21 19:06:36+00:00
The example of a comptime parameter to a function is a template, whether you call it that or not :-/ A function template is a function with compile time parameters.

The irony here is back in the 2000's, many programmers were put off by C++ templates, and found them to be confusing. Myself included. But when I (belatedly) realized that function templates were functions with compile time parameters, I had an epiphany:

Don't call them templates! Call them functions with compile time parameters. The people who were confused by templates understood that immediately. Then later, after realizing that they had been using templates all along, became comfortable with templates.

BTW, I wholeheartedly agree that it is better to have a small set of features that can do the same thing as a larger set of features. But I'm not seeing how comptime is accomplishing that.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-21 19:07:21+00:00
Google has two advantages:

1) Their AI models aren't half bad. Gemini 2.5 seems to be doing quite well relative to some competitors.

2) They know how to scale this stuff. They have their own hardware, lots of data, etc.

Scaling is of course the hard part. Doing things at Google scale means doing it well while still making a profit. Most AI companies are just converting VC cash into GPUs and energy. VC subsidized AI is nice at a small scale but cripplingly expensive at a larger scale. Google can't do this; they are too large for that. But they are vertically integrated, build their own data centers, with their own TPUs, etc. So, once this starts happening at their scale, they might just have an advantage.

A lot of what we are seeing is them learning to walk before they start running faster. Most of the world has no clue what perlexity is or any notion of the pros and cons of claude 3.7 sonnet vs. o4 mini high. None of that stuff matters long term. What matters is who can do this stuff well enough for billions of people.

So, I wouldn't count them out. But none of this stuff guarantees success either, of course.
by fortran77 | 2025-04-21 19:07:27+00:00
The problem I had with twitter was the check was supposed to mean one thing and one thing only: that the person was who he or she claimed to be.

What twitter starting doing was removing blue checks from people who were causing problems for the platform (but not behaving bad enough to kick off). This made no sense because people still needed to know if a person was who he claimed to be (e.g., Milo Yiannopoulos) even if the person was controversial or problematic or just plain nasty.

Blue Checks weren't "gutted". Now they just mean something else -- you're a premium subscriber.
Show HN: Chessophone – Generate music from chess games
by csmeyer | 2025-04-21 19:07:30+00:00
Chessophone takes a PGN string representation of a chess game and generates music - Notes from the C major scale are added for each piece in each row of the board for each move in the game. Games played with the same opening will sound the same until they deviate from book moves. The perceived tempo of the music speeds up as pieces are captured. Enjoy!

Created with python-chess and tone.js.

Source code here: https://github.com/charliemeyer/chessophone
by scoofy | 2025-04-21 19:07:31+00:00
I’ve literally experienced (not with Uber, probably around 2010):

1: Account

2: Cancel

3: Call this number.

4: Call number.

5: Welcome to Customer Service press… … …press 9 to cancel.

6: We need to confirm who you are. Give birth date, etc.

7: Are you sure?

8: Agent gets on the line.

9: Why do you want to cancel?

10: We are offering you a discount to continue and not cancel, how about that?

11: Cancel

12: Are you sure again? (This time for real)

13: Cancelled, but we are offering you a BIGGER discou… this is when I hang up.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-04-21 19:07:32+00:00
> if you think it's okay to be rude to a Jewish person at a bar because of literally anything to do with Israel

Look I don't have full context here, but more generally there's recently been a lot of conflating Judaism with "support of Israel". If a person is at a bar and you know they support Israel and you're "rude to them" (a subjective statement which can include telling them to re-calibrate their moral compass), then many people, myself included, think that's perfectly OK, regardless of whether that person is Jewish or not. To suggest it's somehow suddenly not OK if that person happens to be Jewish (but presumably it's fine if they're not Jewish?) is kind of ridiculous.

I say this as a Jewish person with family in Israel also, who is completely over people (many in my family included) reducing criticism of Israel or intense disapproval of Israel to "antisemitism"
by anonymars | 2025-04-21 19:08:00+00:00
What is liberty? Is it freedom from vaccinations, or freedom from getting vaccine-preventable diseases?

Is it freedom to carry a gun, or freedom from getting shot?

Is it freedom to pollute, or freedom from pollution?

Is it the freedom to pay as little as possible, or the freedom from others pushing their tragedy-of-the-commons cost onto me?

Is it freedom to choose the ideal healthcare plan for me, or freedom from spending hours deciphering healthcare mumbo-jumbo and ending up in medical debt if you get it wrong?

Liberty is subjective and opinions differ. The social contract is society's collective détente.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-04-21 19:08:39+00:00
Thank you for making my point:

We have created a tool called "full self driving" cars already. This is a tool that humans can use, just like we have MCPs a tool for AI to use.

All I'm trying to say, is AGIs should be allowed to use tools that fit their intelligence the same way that we do. I'm not saying AIs are AGIs, I'm just saying that the requirement that they use a mouse and keyboard is a very weird requirement like saying People who can't use a mouse and keyboard (amputees, etc.) aren't "Generally" intelligent. Or people who can't see the computer screen.
by Zak | 2025-04-21 19:08:45+00:00
That hasn't been my experience with it, and I'm curious as to what usage pattern gets that result other than intentionally following accounts that post pornography. My account that follows and posts tech and general interest stuff gets tech stuff and politics in its discover feed. My account that posts bird photography and follows photographers gets photographs of animals and landscapes, and politics in its discover feed.

It's politics I can't avoid there, not pornography.
by johnea | 2025-04-21 19:08:52+00:00
Just one article as a reference:

https://newrepublic.com/article/176117/prosperity-gospel-chr...

and one citing the "optimal economic output" theory of the real lib-tards:

https://thereformedconservative.org/christians-engaging-in-s...

For any large heterogeneous groups, one can only speak statistically. Many "christians" do still seek to help the poor, but there is a significant emerging trend, especially in the "prosperity gospel" that says god blesses the rich.

or, to quote another fictional character: "Greed is good"

Cooperation is a more productive strategy than competition. The primary reason to practice it, is because we'll all be better off.

However with competition, a few players are able to reap even greater rewards individually, in spite of overall productivity being less.

Therefore, competition favors the victors. As for the "losers", see the hyperbolic quote in my original post...
by janandonly | 2025-04-21 19:09:13+00:00
I am surprised that the comments on that blog don’t menstion Nostr as a solution to the given pain points.

Unlike traditional federated systems, Nostr is built around a protocol where users have a single cryptographic identity not tied to any particular server. This means that when a user shares a post, anyone with a Nostr client can interact with it—like, comment, or repost—regardless of which relay (server) they are connected to, solving the “can’t interact across instances” problem.

Moreover, Nostr posts are identified by content hashes and public keys, not by server-dependent URLs. This makes posts portable and resilient: if a relay goes offline or a user migrates, their content and identity remain intact and accessible via other relays, addressing the “post portability pain” and “migration pain” described in the article.

And because Nostr clients can register themselves as handlers for Nostr-specific links (e.g., nostr: URIs), clicking a Nostr link can automatically open the post in the user’s preferred client, improving the user experience across different devices and apps.
by dang | 2025-04-21 19:09:18+00:00
Users (correctly) flagged your GP comment because it broke the site guidelines, including these:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
by 1718627440 | 2025-04-21 19:09:26+00:00
I think getting killed for your belief is exactly what Jesus was arguing for. It was also what all apostles did and the only cause for the next 300 years to be declared a saint.

Jesus' death was special, because he was without sins, he was the son of God (YMMV) and, because was walking around afterwards physically (i.e. capable of touching and eating, etc.) on earth. I am not sure, why you name it suicide, because he didn't killed himself, he got himself killed.

I do not think, that Jesus would defend "the agressor". But fighting in return is also not good, which is where "turning the other cheek" comes into play.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-21 19:09:26+00:00
>Can't imagine why this person got jail time for that given that it was just idiocy, but still

Lots of "idiocy" is explicitly illegal. Being dumb isn't an excuse to commit a crime. Literal children in the US get in trouble (legally, as in, sent to juvie) for bomb threats all the time.

Making a bad judgement call, like "surely everyone will understand I'm just joking about my threat to literally murder people" often has legal ramifications.
by Edmond | 2025-04-21 19:10:33+00:00
For folks interested in a PKI certificate based approach to solving verification problems:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40298552#40298804

Delegation similar to bluesky's "NYT org issues certs to journalist" is also possible and done in a far more versatile manner.

If you have a domain and want the ability to issue certs to others, email me...this will just be for experimenting of course :)
by mrweasel | 2025-04-21 19:10:47+00:00
Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, that's probably how I'd do it. Not hosting the Wii in a datacenter, but set up a VM as a proxy, as to not expose my home internet connection to the world.

You're not going to win an points with the family when they can't stream Disney+ because you had to expose a webserver running on that old Wii to the internet, using your home internet connection.