MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9dev | 2025-05-13 10:05:56+00:00
I am not a C programmer, but I have been wondering this for a long time: People have been complaining about the standard library for literal decades now. Seemingly, most people/companies write their own abstractions on top of it to ease the pain and limit exposure to the horrors lurking below.

Why has nobody come along and created an alternative standard library yet? I know this would break lots of things, but it’s not like you couldn’t transition a big ecosystem over a few decades. In the same time, entire new languages have appeared, so why is it that the C world seems to stay in a world of pain willingly?

Again, mind you, I’m watching from the outside, really just curious.
by asar | 2025-05-13 10:06:19+00:00
Personally, I've been using Cursor since day 1. Lately with Gemini 2.5 Pro. I've also started experimenting with Zed and local models served via ollama in the last couple of days. Unfortunately, without good results so far.

I've created a list of self-hostable alternatives to cursor that I try to keep updated. https://selfhostedworld.com/alternative/cursor/
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-13 10:08:49+00:00
macOS already has the first UI. It's not just for accessibility, the Privacy & Security pane lists permissions in depth.

macOS doesn't show explanations because apps can come from outside the App Store meaning nobody is checking that the explanation is actually true, but users would reasonably assume someone has checked it.

Ditto for the explanation of what happens if you say no.

Fake entries would just be a very weird user experience if the user accidentally denied access, would freak people out, and be very un-Apple like.

macOS already has very fine grained capabilities. That's what the Privacy & Security pane shows you. In fact, on macOS every app is sandboxed out of the gate regardless of whether they opt in or not, and root is disempowered. This is better than other operating systems.
by gingerBill | 2025-05-13 10:09:09+00:00
> You're making it sound like uninitialized variables _have_ a value but you can't be sure which one.

Because that's a valid conceptualization you could have for a specific language. Your approach and the other person's approach are both valid but different, and as I said in another comment, they come with different compromises.

If you are thinking like some C programmers, then `int x;` can either have a value which is just not known at compile time, or you can think of it having a specialized value of "undefined". The compiler could work with either definition, it just happens that most compilers nowadays do for C and Rust at least use the definition you speak of, for better or for worse.
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-05-13 10:09:16+00:00
yeah, this is much slower growth... danger must be it is so slow it must be non-existent. but I am with you on same boat, there are too many AI ads for crappy apps

but I guess it speaks to flood of crap-ware, and flood bad content in social networks

^not meaning about you, of course (those folks must not be even on HN)
by stevekemp | 2025-05-13 10:09:24+00:00
The number of emails I get "Your website is vulnerable to clickjacking attacks, PS. how much bounty have I earned?" suggests that there are many for whom a desire for literal rewards is their sole driver.

Not to mention the AI-generated security "issues" that are reported against curl, for example, suggests there can indeed be negative value for reports, and contributions.
by IshKebab | 2025-05-13 10:10:46+00:00
Count yourself lucky you haven't had to use Jira! Or bugzilla for that matter.

I agree it is rather basic but I don't see how it's hard to navigate.

> accepting GitHub PRs is going to be a recipe for thousands of low-value drive-by commits, which will require a lot of triage.

I don't think that really happens based on what I've seen of other huge projects on GitHub.
by gingerBill | 2025-05-13 10:11:29+00:00
Because to be _standard_, it would have to come with the compiler toolchain. And if it's scattered around on the internet, people will not use it.

I tried to create my own alternative about a decade ago which eventually influenced my other endeavours.

But another big reason is that people use C and its stdlib because that's what it is. Even if it is bad, its the "standard" and trivially available. Most code relies on it, even code that has its own standard library alternative.
by sokoloff | 2025-05-13 10:14:29+00:00
Juan Browne (blancolirio on YouTube) is good: https://youtube.com/@blancolirio?si=kadw8hC35YGWbRZe

(Dan Gryder is, IMO, on the opposite end of the spectrum from Juan.)

VASAviation has a bunch of radar recreations, but if you’re new to aviation safety and never flown under ATC, you might not get as much from it as you would from a more commentary-based treatment: https://youtube.com/@vasaviation?si=__ZSdYSR1YgTOpge
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-13 10:14:43+00:00
Nope, that was fixed several releases back. macOS doesn't use the concept of a root user for years. It's there in the APIs for backwards compatibility but the actual enforced permission model is nothing like UNIX.

1. Apps can't tamper with each others files. Try writing an app that writes to another app's bundle, even if it's in $HOME, and you'll find you can't. One way to test this quickly is to ensure that your terminal app doesn't have "Manage applications" privilege in the settings app, restart it, then use vim to open a file in a bundle that appears to have user write permissions. You'll find it is read only.

2. root can't make arbitrary changes to the system unless you disable SIP (requires messing around in recovery mode terminals).
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-13 10:15:39+00:00
> I often harp on how much I wish someone would build a simple GUI for the modern desktop or web environment, instead of spending ages fighting css and javascript for even the most basic layouts.

I read comments like this nearly every day, and they make me so excited to announce my project soon! But I don't want to botch the release, so I'm trying to finish it properly and not rush or announce it too soon.
by metalman | 2025-05-13 10:16:21+00:00
metal back, and fancy talk about heat management to prevent burn in, then brings up the unanswered questions of exactly how much power does this thing consume, how hot is it running, and how does that look from the point of long term reliability, and general comfort? add in a hot gpu, and other gadgets and what is the total heat output for a gaming set up likely to be?
by CrulesAll | 2025-05-13 10:16:49+00:00
Education marketing is the trench warfare of marketing. Unless you are a big conglomerate, this is a terrible strategy. "Finding people who are searching for a solution" is maneuver warfare. It's the best strategy, and the only one that should be employed by SMEs. OP is looking for 100 people when in reality they should be looking for 5 people who already know they want the solution you are offering. If the product/service works, these five people will become sales reps for you. NB. The trick is not selling the product to these five people. It is finding these five people.
by lpln3452 | 2025-05-13 10:16:57+00:00
Did you ever use the alternatives before GitHub took off?

GitLab? It was awful. Slow, and paying for that kind of experience felt like a bad joke. It's much better now but it was borderline unusable back in the day.

Or SourceForge, before Git was mainstream? Also terrible.

GitHub succeeded because it quickly established itself as a decent way to host Git - not because it was exceptional, but because the competition had abysmal UX.

Unlike other lock-in-prone services, moving a Git project is trivial. If GitHub loses its advantages due to enshittification, you just move. Case in point: Mozilla hopping on and off GitHub, as this article shows.
by cookiengineer | 2025-05-13 10:17:43+00:00
To be fair: Linus didn't predict how painful email is in 2025. Self hosting email is a useless attempt if 99% of your emails land in spam anyways, and only spammer emails land in your inbox because they pay for azure or google business accounts.

The general issue that git has is making them interact with each other, I would love for git to get distributed issues, and a nice client UI that is actually graphical and usable by non-terminal users.

There were some attempts to make this distributed and discoverable via similar seed architectures like a DHT. For example, radicle comes to mind.

But staying in sync with hundreds of remotes and hundreds of branches is generally not what git is good at. All UIs aren't made for this.

I'm pointing this out because I am still trying to build a UI for this [1] which turned out to be much more painful than expected initially.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/git-evac
by piker | 2025-05-13 10:18:18+00:00
Managed to scale my legal tech B2B product Tritium (https://tritium.legal) through an existing professional network. It's technically B2B but B2C in the sense that it's marketed directly to the end-user, not the enterprise. Probably not yet at a hundred users, but it's heading there. I'm using these initial users to flesh out the frequently asked questions and produce the introduction artifacts to hopefully transition to something more product-led.
by sethammons | 2025-05-13 10:19:11+00:00
Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution says that congress, in addition to having the power to raise taxes and borrow and regulating commerce, is charged "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." This is listed before their ability to declare war and fund the military. And listed before their ability to make law.

Art and science funding is listed before funding the military and law making as a responsibility of congress. That was written in that order intentionally.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-13 10:19:22+00:00
"This is a program downloaded from the internet" isn't a push to the app store. It predates the Mac App Store, iirc.

It's another quick security hack (as they often are in any OS). Many years ago someone noticed that apps can pick any icon they want. And, therefore, if you could convince a browser to download a file to ~/Downloads (not hard), the user might look inside and find what appears to be a harmless JPEG or Word document, double click it and are immediately pwnd because back then there was no app sandboxing of any kind, no SIP etc. macOS in that era was a conventional desktop UNIX.

So the quick hack - make apps that download things mark files with extended attributes, and if the Finder sees that, it pops up the warning and then removes them. Now the user realizes (maybe) that the document-looking-thing was actually an app.
by azonenberg | 2025-05-13 10:20:02+00:00
The code is at https://github.com/azonenberg/staticnet but I've intentionally avoided over-publicizing it since it hasn't had any kind of third party security review. As of now it's functional enough I'm willing to deploy it on a lab network but wouldn't trust it open to an untrusted network.

I work in embedded security and have tried to avoid any of the most gross footguns, deliberately simplifying the implementation as much as possible both to optimize for deeply embedded applications with double-digit kB flash/RAM footprint, and to minimize attack surface. The only supported cipher suite is ssh-ed25519 + aes128-gcm, and I didn't implement either of those (I use the DJB reference implementation or my line-by-line FPGA port of it for the 25519, and the hardware AES + RNG on the STM32).

But I've never done a formal code review myself (not that I'd trust one done by me as the author of the offending code, but it'd be a good starting point to find low-hanging fruit before I waste somebody else's time), fuzzed it, etc.

I have a bunch of additional features I want to add (notably, IPv6 support in the TCP/IP stack is very incomplete and not yet usable) and then am going to try to get at least some friends/coworkers to bang on it more.
by WJW | 2025-05-13 10:21:05+00:00
...what? There's a whole bunch of manufacturers, so many that there's an entire Wikipedia page disccusinge them at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_hub_gears. There's at least 8 different manufacturers on there, some with many different models. Some were introduced as recently as 2023, so it's hardly some abandoned legacy technology.
by JimDabell | 2025-05-13 10:21:15+00:00
> LLMs are completely unpredictably 'bad' - sometimes a task that a high schooler can solve sends an LLM into a spin, sometimes an LLM solves a task that would require a PhD in the field.

That doesn’t mean they are unpredictably bad, it means assuming that they behave like humans is a bad way of predicting their behaviour. “Unlike humans” and “unpredictable” are not the same thing. If you spend time working with them, you get a better sense of what they are good and bad at and get better at predicting their behaviour.
by Timwi | 2025-05-13 10:21:55+00:00
I completely agree with you — we should definitely decouple our conception of worth from what we “do”. And if the only issue with AI is that it gets good at doing what we want it to do, then I also agree with you.

But if AIs become superintelligent and plot an overthrow of humanity, it won't matter what our conception of identity or dignity is, the AI will still kill us. The AI doesn't ascribe dignity or worth to humans. It only pursues goals.
by yusina | 2025-05-13 10:24:57+00:00
As long as programmers view a program as a mechanism that manipulates bytes in flat memory, we will be stuck in a world where this kind of topic seems like a success. In that world, an object puts some structure above those memory bytes and obviously an allocator sounds like a great feature. But you'll always have those bytes in the back of your mind and will never be able to abstract things without the bytes in memory leaking through your abstractions. The author even gives an example for a pretty simple scenario in which this is painful, and that's SOA. As long as your data abstraction is fundamentally still a glorified blob of raw bytes in memory, you'll be stuck there.

Instead, data needs to be viewed more abstractly. Yes, it will eventually manifest in memory as bytes in some memory cell, but how that's layouted and moved around is not the concern of you as the programmer that's a user of data types. Looking at some object attributes foo.a or foo.b is just that - the abstract access of some data. Whether a and b are adjacent in memory should be insubstantial or are even on the same machine or are even backed by data cells in some physical memory bank. Yes, in some very specific (!) cases, optimizing for speed makes it necessary to care about locality, but for those cases, the language or library need to provide mechanisms to specify those requirements and then they will layout things accordingly. But it's not helpful if we all keep writing in some kind of glorified assembly language. It's 2025 and "data type" needs to mean something more abstract than "those bytes in this order layed out in memory like this", unless we are writing hand-optimized assembly code which most of us never do.
by saghm | 2025-05-13 10:25:06+00:00
If the CI/CD is the most intensive part, it seems reasonable to move all of the other parts to a free provider to focus on the part that would be harder and more expensive to move. Even if they don't ever move any of the CI/CD over, I feel like I can understand the rationale for reducing the scope to just that rather than the source hosting. I've worked on plenty of projects with way less traffic than Firefox over the years that used GitHub for source hosting but alternate CI/CD; GitHub didn't even have built in CI for a while, so that was the only way to use it.

Given the frequency I see comments on this site about Mozilla trying to do far too much rather than just focusing their efforts on core stuff like Firefox, I'm honestly a bit surprised that there aren't more people agreeing with this decision. Even with the other issues I have with Mozilla lately (like the whole debacle over the privacy policy changes and the extremely bizarre follow-up about what the definition of "selling user data" is), I don't see it as hypocritical to use GitHub while maintaining a stance that open solutions are better than closed ones because I think trying to make an open browser in the current era is a large and complicated goal for it to be worth it to set a high bar for taking on additional fights. Insisting on spending effort on maintaining their own version control servers feels like a effort that they don't need to be taking on right now, and I'd much rather than Mozilla pick their battles carefully like this more often than less. Trying to fight for more open source hosting at this point is a large enough battle that maybe it would make more sense for a separate organization focused on that to be leading the front in that regard; providing an alternative to Chrome is a big enough struggle that it's not crazy for them to decide that GitHub's dominance has to be someone else's problem.
by krapp | 2025-05-13 10:26:01+00:00
>We didn't really care when it was factory workers, or payroll clerks, or switchboard operators. But now that it's going after programmers, now we care.

Watching tech people slowly realize they aren't an elite class of philosopher kings but just labor has been amusing. Wish they could have come around to class consciousness before they ruined the world but I suppose better late than never.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-13 10:26:04+00:00
Which model do you use? I use large usually, on a GPU. It's fast and works really well. Be aware though that it can only recognise one language at a time. It will autodetect if you don't specify one.

Of course the smaller models don't work nearly as well and they are often restricted to English. Large works great for me though it does require GPU hardware to be responsive enough, even with faster-whisper or insanely-fast-whisper.
by walrus01 | 2025-05-13 10:26:19+00:00
To give an example of how little thought the non technical user pays to scary pop ups and warnings, people running MacOS and Chrome will regularly fall for full blue screen "your computer has been locked by windows, call Microsoft support at this phone number to unlock". It doesn't even enter into their minds that they're not running a windows computer before they even contemplate that it's just scam content presented in a full screen browser window.
by 6P58r3MXJSLi | 2025-05-13 10:26:33+00:00
> unhinged

while wanting to monitor what the delivery guy does while doing his job and pretending to "help" him because you truly believe that having tipped a couple dollars makes him your butler, that's completely normal...

alright...

There’s a reason why everyone hates the USA right now — one major reason is that, unlike in much of the world, you truly believe that workers don’t have rights.
by Spivak | 2025-05-13 10:26:44+00:00
The finger on the monkey's paw curls.

Now every service will be spamming you notifications and emails even more desperately to bait you into "using" the service so they can bill you. More clickbait and scare tactics on news subscriptions. Also goodbye monthly subscriptions.

It only works for Kagi because they're pretty decent folk.
by abdullin | 2025-05-13 10:27:10+00:00
When I was starting my community, I joined other similar communities and tried to be helpful there. No ads or links, just answering questions and supporting. People that were genuinely interested to learn more about the topic - opened my profile and followed the links there.

This and interesting content was enough to grow community organically to 14k subscribers over 2 years.

Another approach to speed up the growth - organise some fun event that benefits the entire community, highlights and showcases the participants.

E.g. when I organised last Enterprise RAG challenge, we got 350 submissions from the teams around the world. Plus IBM joined as a sponsor. People were mostly participating not for the prises, but because of the approachable challenge and ability to push state of the art. Plus some were hired away because of the good leaderboard scores.

Article of the winner (just google "Ilya Rice: How I Won the Enterprise RAG Challenge") is considered by some companies as one of the best resources on building document-based AI systems. And the entire community sees it as the result of their work together - further reinforcing the spirit of the collaboration.

People tend to share and spread fruits of their labor and love.
Show HN: Structured LLM Output in iOS Shortcuts
by TweedBeetle | 2025-05-13 10:27:25+00:00
Hello all,

I recently built an app that allows you to ask Perplexity and OpenAI models for structured data in the form of Booleans, lists and dictionaries in iOS Shortcuts.

This was previously not easy to do despite structured outputs having been around for a while via API.

-

Here's an example of a shortcut that uses an "Ask GPT for a Dictionary" action to create a calendar event from a screenshot of a conversation discussing the event:

Vid (43 sec): https://youtube.com/shorts/3hinFj0J30M

Shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1e21117f68ba4afebf2d785ae2a...

-

Some use-cases of app-provided actions include:

* extracting structured output from text to populate calendar events (as shown above)

* smarter filtering in automations triggered by receiving emails or messages

* generating lists for Reminders

* invoking ChatGPT in iOS shortcuts without clogging up your conversation history

-

Personally, I like having the option of using my own API keys for things and so, the free tier of the app offers unlimited use of OpenAI-text-based actions indefinitely if you bring your own key. Without an API key, daily usage is limited.

The paid tier currently costs $3.99 a month and increases usage limits and unlocks Perplexity-based actions.

-

All functionality can also be replicated without an extra app by building and parsing requests from scratch. If anyone would like to share such a solution, please feel free.

-

The app is available on the app store: https://apps.apple.com/app/native-ai-actions/id6447460842

-

Interested in hearing your thoughts.

-Christo
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-13 10:27:32+00:00
There's open solutions for that like openwakeword and microwakeword (the latter can even run on an esp32!)

The training is a lot of work though and requires a lot of material. For Home Assistant's voice preview model they had tens of thousands of volunteers record the "okay nabu" wakeword and even still it doesn't work quite as well as hey siri on Apple devices.
by cosbgn | 2025-05-13 10:28:52+00:00
I run a small but fairly successful "embed chatGPT on your site" widget https://rispose.com

I'm acquiring customers by:

- Offer a 100% free unlimited solution (with branding) I get a lot of daily clicks from people coming from my customer's website

- Offer a really good price. My competitors are about 5X more expensive. I'll eventually maybe raise my price, but for now I have a lot of people switching to my tool

- Affiliates. This is something new I'm still testing.

In summary a good free product which links back to you get's you millions of requests per month!
by azonenberg | 2025-05-13 10:29:09+00:00
For context of how lightweight this is, an -O3 release build of my entire firmware on the management processor right now (including the sshd, hardware drivers, TCP/IP stack, the CLI itself, all of the code to query the supported set of sensors, etc) uses 109 kB of flash and 84 kB of SRAM. The -Og debug build is smaller at 86 kB flash usage.

It compiles in five seconds from a clean build tree on my workstation.

Sure, this isn't as feature-rich as OpenSSH or even Dropbear and is missing a lot of the fancy features you get on Linux, but it's tiny and fast. Good luck getting buildroot or something to give you a 100 kB kernel+userspace image that builds in five seconds.

And it's fast: "time -p ssh testbed show ver" returns in 70 ms on a debug build. That's faster than some x86 Debian + OpenSSH machines I've benchmarked against. And I'm on a 500 MHz single-core Cortex-M7.