MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LordDragonfang | 2025-05-01 18:07:30+00:00
The title made me think this was an official feature of git or maybe GitHub, but it's entirely unrelated - in fact, the readme doesn't even mention git.

I'd suggest changing the title to actually use the project tagline: "Changesets - versioning and changelogs with a focus on monorepos" (possibly s/with a focus on/for/)

(@dang @tomhow)
by K0balt | 2025-05-01 18:07:33+00:00
You could run a 3B model on 200 dollars worth of hardware and it would do just fine, 100 percent of the time, most of the time. I could definitely see someone talking it out of a free coke now and then though.

With vending machines costing 2-5k, it’s not out of the question, but it’s hard to imagine the business case for it. Maybe the tantalizing possibility of getting a free soda would attract traffic and result in additional sales from frustrated grifters? Idk.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-01 18:07:54+00:00
> I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.

You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult or special. They were written by people reading text books for the most part.

They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades because the DMCA made interoperability and selling cheaper tools like that basically illegal.

Because of the DMCA, the work that was done to make IBM PC clones would have been close enough to illegal to kill all the businesses that tried it. They still tried with the liberal IP laws at the time.
by otterley | 2025-05-01 18:07:59+00:00
If there's a lesson to be learned from this drama, it's that changing a software license from a liberal open-source one to a anti-competitive one (even if the source is still available and open to contribution) is a one-way door and loses trust. Once done, even if you recognize your error and revert the license, you're not getting that trust back.
by codecraze | 2025-05-01 18:08:20+00:00
In 2024 i’ve conducted a lot of interviews to recruit some frontend and backend engineers in full remote roles.

And at one point i was getting a lot of candidates with european names, no picture, good resume.

And when I met them over a call it was very strange: they were all asian(with really typical nordic names), they were like clones in the way they talked and answered questions exactly the same. They also claimed to be from Sweeden/Finland/Norway for most of them but yet they had a strong asian accent. Not nordic at all.

This was really fishy and since the fit wasn’t there I stopped the interview without thinking about it too much. but the more I think about it, the more i tend to lean on North Corean candidates.
by cloudtrucks | 2025-05-01 18:08:41+00:00
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by munificent | 2025-05-01 18:09:07+00:00
I believe there is an implicit answer here, but I agree that the author didn't tie the threads together as clearly as they could have.

What they are saying is that tech moguls have a period in their life where they felt they were at their best, living their glory days. They are latching on to and trying to recreate that environment, including superficial properties that environment had that don't actually have anything to do with why it was such a formative period for them.

One attribute of programming back in the 90s is... it was mostly non-poor white guys.

Now, obviously anyone with a certain level of maturity and wisdom would realize that the demographic monoculture of the 90s was an effect of the fact that computers were still relatively rare and expensive in the 80s, and those most people who had access to them back them came from a certain level of privilege. Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.

Being wealthy, white, and male didn't cause people to be better hackers. Having economic stability is what gave people the freedom to become better hackers. It's just that that level of economic stability has historically not at all been uniformly distributed across people in the US. Thus anti-DEI measures are counterproductive. Going forward, society has a moral and rational incentive to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible, regardless of their anatomy or skin color because that's how society gets the most out of all of its members.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-01 18:09:15+00:00
> youth should be questioning the rules

that sounds like a rule to me

maybe the rules they're questioning simply aren't the ones you want them to question

for example: the usa has long had a social "rule" to tolerate intolerance, but now that youth see where that has led, many are questioning that rule

they were long warned that it leads to bad censorship, and they look around now, and see that the intolerant who warned are themselves perpetrating a wave of censorship anyways, and the argument is dissolved

a good person might want whichever rules do less harm in the end (and perhaps ones that do more good), it naturally follows that those primary goals should inform decisions regarding rules and policy and economy and government

we're good with questioning the rules, right?
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-01 18:09:19+00:00
> I find some people's attitude to NK hackers slightly schizophrenic: either they are a credible threat or they are amateurs. Which one is it?

I have no clue whether the proposed approach works, but there's a pretty coherent model that explains how it could, no schizophrenia needed: They are competent people in a cult.

Being unable/unwilling to diss Dear Leader even when it's advantageous to do so is very typical cult stuff. In fact, it's sort of why cults are dangerous. They compel people to do maladaptive things in service of the "ideals" of the group/leader.

This applies both to the spy directly (perhaps they would personally be unwilling to say such a thing), but also to their entire chain of command. Cults by their nature are not good at passing nuanced instruction like "you can say bad things about Dear Leader under these circumstances." Just because you're willing to diss KJU to get in the door doesn't mean you know your entire chain of superiors are cool with it.
by duskwuff | 2025-05-01 18:09:32+00:00
Absolutely. It's a published article by a reputable source - the fact that it had to be obtained by FOIA doesn't make it any less so.

As an aside, I'm amused that the FOIA officer felt the need to redact the names of the fictitious agents in the image captions on pages 11, 12, and 13.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-01 18:09:45+00:00
Eh, after COVID it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There actually were grand conspiracies to smother the truth in which the output of scientific research was rendered untrustworthy. The people who tried to sound the alarm were slammed as paranoid lunatics, and then turned out to be correct.

And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.

As for his other beliefs, like HIV not being the cause of AIDS, well that belief comes from renegade scientists in the 90s who alleged that a young Dr Fauci was at the center of a HIV-related conspiracy organized by virologists to give their field new relevance and grant funding, after attempts to connect viruses with the 60s era 'war on cancer' fell through. One of those scientists was himself a virologist, and another was Kary Mullis. Mullis is famous primarily for being the inventor of the PCR test, he even received a Nobel prize for it.

So where RFK Jr gets this stuff is no mystery.

Anyway the article is wrong. It quotes Paul Offit who makes the same claims in his Substack. I haven't read the book but people who have say Offit is selectively quoting Jr, who does believe germs exist; that he uses the terms miasma/terrain theory interchangeably, and that his book argues for a better balance between the notion of strengthening immune systems and targeted pathogen treatments - not that the latter shouldn't exist at all.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-01 18:09:50+00:00
> This might be too deep for this thread, but... does it ever get better?

If I had to point to a single thing that is most indicative to the change-over from 'child' to 'adult' it would be the thought behind this question.

The answer is "it always gets different." Which is dissatisfying to the child who yearns for a parent to make things better, and engaging for an adult that realizes that nothing is forever and things change but they can be an agent for change.

That last bit, owning ones own agency, is where "it gets better" comes from. When you are a child it got better because your parents worked to make it better, their vision of what better was meant they were willing to invest their time, effort, and resources into changing things for the better. When you are the parent, then its on you.

They key difference between nostalgia and maturity is that the former works to recreate what had been before, where the latter works to change what is into something better. One of the services you can do for your child is to show them how "adults" make things better.

So it's interesting to look at "What gets better these days?"

Modern video games are way better than the video games of the 90's.

Putting together a complete computer you can learn to program on can be done for < $100 if you're willing to use used keyboards/monitors/mice.

Making things out of plastic is accessible to everyone either by owning a 3D printer or borrowing one at the library or social club.

On line resources for learning any topic including taking college courses are free and easy to find.

Keeping in touch with your friends in "real time" is both trivial and multi-media.

Shopping is different with much of it online rather than in person. Is that better? Is that worse? Kind of a bit of both, but definitely different. The Internet is full of crap ads, which is different, but its a lot faster than it used to be, is that better? Is that worse? A bit of both and definitely different.

I was joking at a conference I attended last week that I remember when grown-ass men could make a living wage developing database software written in BASIC on what was essentially a giant Arduino with an 8 bit processor. Definitely different, and it was fun for them, but it wasn't necessarily different then grown people getting paid to write code in Javascript to make web pages look nice.

Here is the bottom line: Things get better because you, as the adult, work to make them better. The more effective your efforts, the more people will join you in helping you make things better. Conversely, if you do nothing, then things getting worse is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Change is endemic, without effort and maintenance, change tends toward decay.
by moandcompany | 2025-05-01 18:10:01+00:00
Concur. This is part of why Suite A ciphers (algorithms) exist, and the second component includes robust key management practices are so important (this includes hardening of devices to prevent leakage of signals that could compromise those keys or the cryptographic processes themselves).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_A_Cryptography
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-01 18:10:07+00:00
There are, however, such things as breakthrough eras and consolidation / comprehension eras.

Physics hasn't been the same since Einstein's era. While breakthroughs have happened, the fundamental reframing of the way we comprehend the world that happened with the one-two punch of the theories of relativity and the experimental evidence for the quantum model have patterned the world in which we now live, but understanding that pattern is the new work.

Similarly, I think a good case can be made that the one-two punch of the implementation of the Internet as a fabric and the web as a killer app is now finished work. While the remaining work is real, valid, and valuable, it is of different kind to the creation of the new pattern; consolidation and comprehension of the pattern is the work of the day, and that's not nearly as glamorous, sexy, or profitable (to reputation or pocketbook).

It's fine for there to be eras of great opportunity and eras of not, so long as we respect which we're in.

(Google is great as a case-study for this concept. The circumstances that birthed Google are now actively suppressed in the ecosystem... Mostly by Google. The positive feedback loop of great-search-breeds-great-search-data that birthed Google doesn't leave room for multiple Googles because human attention and time is finite; this is evidenced by Bing being unable to draw users despite huge monetary investment and just as much technical competence. But they can't draw the users because they aren't already better than Google.

As consequence, two guys in their garage can make something but it won't be a Google-scale search engine. Meanwhile, the small, scrappy search engine is now a huge behemoth with 8.5 billion daily searches, and that amount of real human contact implies real human responsibility... if Google goes offline, people will literally die from lack of access to information, so they can't take the kind of risks they used to be able to.

Young systems have different features than old systems. Young ten-person companies have different behavior than old 100,000-person Fortune 500s. Young people have different wants and capabilities than older people. Making the transition is key. Failure to make the transition causes pain not only to the one failing but to the ones interacting with them).
by childintime | 2025-05-01 18:10:49+00:00
Makes sense, as Parkinson patients, freeze or tremble, which are both fear responses. I have seen my mother die of Parkinsons. I see a static (permanent) fear response as the straightforward cause for Parkinsons (combined with a helpful personality, which makes it difficult to just snap out of it).

On the other end there were people close by that having seen war, took a life lesson from their fear response: you survive by being alert and by distrusting. They radiated a permanent state of alarm, as the enemy may come when you least expect it.
by duxup | 2025-05-01 18:11:00+00:00
Very good story, good read.

I read these stories and I can't help but think "Isn't there some justifiable action another free country can take to help / establish a free system of some sort in places where folks are desperate like this?"

I recognize that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and the challenge of nation building, but man I always wonder.
by timschumi | 2025-05-01 18:11:02+00:00
> Screwing up EFI vars doesn't make most systems unbootable. I have corrupted my EFI vars quite a few times trying to do funny things. UEFI implementations do tend to be buggy, but not all of them are that catastrophically bad.

For what it's worth, I have a laptop here that can be irrevocably (short of having a flash memory dump on-hand that can be flashed back) bricked just by messing around with EFI variables through fully intentional operations (i.e. operations that would be available to any program with Administrator privileges on Windows, or the root user on Linux).
by somenameforme | 2025-05-01 18:11:31+00:00
This is not really how it works, at least not internally. For instance the record for blindfold simultaneous games is 48. Playing that by anything even remotely like conscious memory would probably be impossible. If it were simply a game of conscious memory then a highly competent memory competitor should be able to play (even if to a poor standard) multiple blindfold games, yet in reality he'd probably be unable to play a single one - even if he is entirely capable of memorizing a deck of cards, which is vastly more 'state' than a chess position. And vice versa, test a highly competent blindfold player in a general memory game and he'd be unlikely to do much better than above average.

Chess, for a stronger player, is very much like a language - in fact it uses the exact same area of the brain. It's like when you read these words, you're not consciously thinking at all - the meaning just comes to you immediately. And in fact you could trivially recall everything I said (even if not necessarily verbatim) if you just thought for a second or so. But simultaneously it's not like you actually made any effort whatsoever to memorize it.

So how long of a conversation could you hold with yourself in your mind? Practically endless, and you could probably reconstruct the overwhelming majority of it on demand. It's the same with chess. Meandering around in your mind to positions of an arbitrary depth is not difficult for a strong player. And the person I was responding to felt that a player writing down some analysis to move 20 would be some meaningful form of cheating. In reality, I'd absolutely love for my opponent to be able to write down their analyses. It'd waste just a monumental amount of time and afford no advantage whatsoever. It'd be akin to you writing down the conversation from your mind.
by iggldiggl | 2025-05-01 18:11:46+00:00
> It's disabled by default. You have to dig around in your phone's settings to enable APK installations

At least since the time that the "install apps from unknown sources" permission was migrated from a global toggle to an app-specific permission (maybe even before that?), the dialogue that pops up to tell you that installation has been blocked has a button for directly taking you to the correct settings screen for toggling the permission, so it's just two extra taps.

Sure, at scale even that will confuse/scare off some users, but it's not insurmountable and nowhere near as obscure as having "to dig around in your phone's settings" – just two extra taps and you're good to go (unless your phone manufacturer has made things more complicated there, which does remain a possibility).
by _msw_ | 2025-05-01 18:12:16+00:00
RMS was not convinced that the Affero clause was a good idea as a general rule, though he approved the Affero-sponsored fork of the GPL that created AGPLv1. Hence, he did not support the addition of network copyleft obligations in GPLv3 during its drafting.

RMS has long expressed concerns about "Service as a Software Substitute" [1], and I think he hesitated to endorse the AGPL because it would conflict with his philosophy on the dangers of "Service as a Software Substitute".

Henry Poole should be given credit for raising the concern; Bradley M. Kuhn and Eben Moglen should be given the credit for advancing the license to address the concern.

It took a long time for the Free Software Foundation to accept Affero versions of the GPL under their stewardship with the release of AGPLv3.

So, perhaps he did understand before many people that services posed some challenges for his social movement. But it's my belief that he favored self-reliance and maximum "freedom" by running computer programs on hardware you own yourself as the remedy, rather than extending copyleft obligations to reach over the network.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
by HumanOstrich | 2025-05-01 18:12:27+00:00
Taking an LVM snapshot and then copying the sqlite database from that is sufficient to keep it from being corrupted, but you can have incomplete transactions that will be rolled back during crash recovery.

The problem is that LVM snapshots operate at the block device level and only ensure there are no torn or half-written blocks. It doesn't know about the filesystem's journal or metadata.

To get a consistent point-in-time snapshot without triggering crash-recovery and losing transactions, you also need to lock the sqlite database or filesystem from writes during the snapshot.

PRAGMA wal_checkpoint(FULL); BEGIN IMMEDIATE; -- locks out writers . /* trigger your LVM snapshot here */ COMMIT;

You can also use fsfreeze to get the same level of safety:

sudo fsfreeze -f /mnt/data # (A) flush dirty pages & block writes lvcreate -L1G -s -n snap0 /dev/vg0/data sudo fsfreeze -u /mnt/data # (B) thaw, resume writes

Bonus - validate the snapshotted db file with:

sqlite3 mydb-snapshot.sqlite "PRAGMA integrity_check;"
by DannyBee | 2025-05-01 18:12:47+00:00
+1 to this.

In addition, one of the ironic things is that I ran engineering teams that did the equivalent of project michigan, at Google.

More than once.

The upsides (downsides?) of being an engineer/manager/lawyer.

So i even have plenty of firsthand experience dealing with exactly this situation, both on the legal side, and the engineering side.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-05-01 18:12:50+00:00
Point is that competition is fueled by insecurity. If you are happy, truly content, with yourself you will find competing extraordinarily tiresome and unnecessary. Not saying it’s good for society by the way. I think our civilization needs the pathologically insecure to be disruptive and create room for innovation. Related traits are narcissism and psychopathy. Painful, but useful, in small doses.

Musk, Altman, Bezos they are basically caricatures.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-01 18:12:58+00:00
> AFAICT the technologies been around for a while (esp assistance)

Yeah, agree. There is even mention of a collision alarm at the tower going off

> Nobody gets fired for doing nothing and continuing to play whack-a-mole with human frailties.

That seems like it. It kind of feels something should have been worked out by now, but nobody wants to put a system in place, that would could due to a glitch direct a bunch of flight to crash into a mountain or into each other.
by atonse | 2025-05-01 18:13:31+00:00
I disagree. They can walk and chew gum, do both things at once. And this practical stuff is very important.

I've been using the Atlassian MCP for nearly a month now, and it's completely changed (and eliminated) the feeling of having an overwhelming backlog.

I can have it do things like "find all the tickets related to profile editing and combine them into one epic" where it works perfectly. Or "help me prioritize the 15 tickets assigned to me this sprint" and it'll actually go through and suggest "maybe you can do these two tickets first since they seem smaller, then do this big one" – i haven't hooked it up to my calendar yet.

But I'd love for it to suggest things like "do this one ticket that requires a lot of heads down time on wednesday since you don't have any meetings. I can create a block on your calendar so that nobody will schedule a meeting then"

Those are all superhuman things that can be done with MCP and a smart model.

I've defined rules in cursor that say "when I ask you to mark something ready for test, change the status and assign it to <x person>, and leave a comment summarizing the changes"

If you look at my JIRA comments now, you'd wonder how I had so much time to write such thorough comments. I don't, Cursor and whatever model is doing it for me.

It's been an absolute game changer. MCP is going to be what the App store was to mobile. Yes you can get by without it, but actually hooking into all your daily tool is when this stuff gets insanely valuable in a practical sense.