MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GTP | 2025-05-13 12:15:47+00:00
It's not just mirroring of your remote storage, you can also upload local files manually, turn on auto-upload for some directories (the main use case is uploading pictures) ant there was recently work being done to enable two-way-synchronization for directories that the user would like to sync. IMO it makes sense to let the users give it access to all the files on the phone, if they whish to do so.
by DaSHacka | 2025-05-13 12:16:02+00:00
> The internet should be safe for everyone — at least on the surface.

Who defines "safe"?

I'm sure there are numerous people on this site that would feel unsafe from your not-so-subtle dig at the LGBTQ; should you no longer have the ability to communicate on the internet?

What method do you propose to allow acceptable users (IE adults) who want to access such content the means to do so, without compromising their privacy and operational security?

Otherwise, you're merely trading people's actual security and freedom for control.

Im frankly tired of negligent parents expecting the government to regulate away anything and everything that's not explicitly created for children on the internet.
by cbeach | 2025-05-13 12:16:18+00:00
Even though it serves as expensive housing for private purchase, it still manages to exude Soviet central-planned estate vibes.

Walking around this imposing concrete structure, you feel its soullessness and brutalism. They made attempts to introduce greenery (like the temperate greenhouse area), but in the 21st century those areas are tired, poorly maintained and generally devoid of any visitors. The glass is misty or greening. The water features are stagnant. The concrete has aged poorly, with cracking and visible degradation.

London is full of beautiful Victorian and Georgian architecture, so brutalist concrete buildings look cringeworthy by comparison.. but they do seem to tickle the fancy of the socialist intelligentia, who love to proclaim how clever it all is - clever in a way that the common non-socialist folk simply wouldn't understand.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-13 12:16:29+00:00
Apple, in macOS, has something called "Full Disk Access". You can grant it if you want, deny if you don't.

If you allow that, the app works like the way the person you're replying to wants. If you deny that, the application works the way you want.

If one company have it, the other can implement it, too. There's no shame in copying a good feature, is it?
by llm_nerd | 2025-05-13 12:16:44+00:00
It is a long-standing policy, not a "bug"[1]. Further it isn't the users complaining, it's a company of a fringe "cloud" product. I'm going to be gentle here and say their app looks incredibly shitty, and I suspect they saw an opportunity to get some free press on the "Google the monopolist" angle.

>I suspect people want their entire photo folders mirrored into Nextcloud from the device

That isn't remotely the contention, nor do photos even qualify for this as they use a different API. Further, the reason this company gives for refusing to use the obviously more suitable structured storage API is that they don't want their files -- presumably mirrored from the cloud storage -- visible to other apps. Their complaint is technical nonsense and doesn't pass an ounce of scrutiny.

The argument by this company is nonsensical, and their argument seems to be "we did it this way before and we don't want to change". Firstly they can have their own app storage without granting access to any other app, and they can go through a system UI process to get access to additional folders (for instance "I want to back up my WhatsApp folder to this cloud provider"). They argue against the latter because they seem to think it somehow reveals the former, but that isn't the case whatsoever.

[1] - Well it's a bug in the Nextcloud product where they seem to just ignore that the instance lacks a permission
by gingerBill | 2025-05-13 12:16:55+00:00
I won't get into it too much but virtually no one needs ECS, and if you have to ask how to do it, it's not for you. There are much better ways to organize a game for most people than the highly generic relational-database-like structure that is ECS. ECS does make sense in certain contexts but most people do not need it.

But I agree that DOD in practice is not a compromise between performance and ergonomics, and Odin kind of shows how that is possible.
by pron | 2025-05-13 12:16:59+00:00
But it's not free for the taking. The point is that we'd get more than that 5%'s worth in exchange. So sure, we'll get significant value "if software optimization was truly a priority", but we get even more value by making other things a priority.

Saying "if we did X we'd get a lot in return" is similar to the fallacy of inverting logical implication. The question isn't, will doing something have significant value, but rather, to get the most value, what is the thing we should do? The answer may well be not to make optimisation a priority even if optimisation has a lot of value.
by deng | 2025-05-13 12:18:23+00:00
> I suspect people want their entire photo folders mirrored into Nextcloud from the device, which would fit under the "backup utility" category.

Exactly. Many people use Nextcloud's auto-upload to backup important data from their phone. In addition to photos, I use it to backup FreeOTP and WhatsApp, for instance. This does not work with the version from Google Play, see

https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14334

EDIT: After some research, I think even that use case should be possible with SAF, you just need to move your backups to external storage that you can access via SAF.
by DaSHacka | 2025-05-13 12:19:11+00:00
Believe it or not, people can oppose both kinds of censorship.

Some of us haven't forgotten the days of overzealous Christian mothers getting products banned off store shelves, before it swung to far-left activists doing similar for digital creators/services, to now where the pendulum appears to be swinging back to the right-wing as the proponents of censorship.
by elric | 2025-05-13 12:19:22+00:00
> I think you're in the tiny minority with that opinion.

I'm not. The whole "I hate Jira thing" is a meme among a very vocal minority of tech enthusiasts. They don't have tens of millions of users because Jira is awful. The reason why so many people cry about it (apart from the meme-factor) is that people conflate Jira with their team's failed approach at scrum.

Sure, it has rough edges, and sure, Atlassian as a company sucks. I have a bug report open on their Jira for some 20 years and I don't think it will ever get fixed. And yes, Jira Cloud is very slow, it's ridiculous. And in spite of that, GH Issues is still objectively worse. It's so far behind in terms of features that it isn't even a fair comparison.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-05-13 12:19:29+00:00
There's servers and there's all of the rest of consumer hardware.

I need to buy a new phone every few years simply because the manufacturer refuses to update it. Or they add progressively more computationally expensive effects that makes my old hardware crawl. Or the software I use only supports 2 old version of macOS. Or Microsoft decides that your brand new cpu is no good for win 11 because it's lacking a TPM. Or god help you if you try to open our poorly optimized electron app on your 5 year old computer.
by folicle | 2025-05-13 12:19:31+00:00
I worked in a company where the author was brought in as fractional CTO and later advisor for a few months. The company was small size (about ~40 developers, total being around 200).

There was hardly any "politics" in the workplace before, but there many instances my manager had to do so, to get the work done. Worst part was he was being appreciated for gaming systems. (I find it worse, I don't know how my manager felt it)

to add, as a fractional CTO, the author was just terrible. Lacked vision, foresight or could offer anything on technology. Just a glorified manager who could smooth talk with management and the investors

thankfully, we got a CTO later, but soon after I left the company for different reasons.

so yeah, I wouldn't take anything seriously about the author. Pretty much a grifter
by WhitneyLand | 2025-05-13 12:19:41+00:00
Reading this article tbh causes second hand embarrassment. Ostensibly it’s targeting professional scientists using the brand of a prestigious journal, yet it has a vibe of explaining ethics and common sense to school kids. We’ve come to the point of having to explain to PhDs why cherry picking data is bad.

I’m not criticizing the article, rather bemoaning the fact that it’s needed. Of course the problem is not just with the much maligned social sciences, it’s physics and computer science too. The controversy around Microsoft’s topological qubits, a super complex topic, in part involved the most basic kind of this nonsense, something like including 4 samples of 20 measured in the paper iirc.

The community needs to get its shit together. The world we’re living in now, the post truth era, is the result of many factors but this is one of them. The loss of faith in science is partially a self-inflicted wound.
by metalman | 2025-05-13 12:19:48+00:00
this whole episode is a proof that anything that is too good to be true, remains so though as has also been true forever, driving cab can be a great way to hustle any number of other side hustles, as all passengers are a self selecting group of people open to suggestions of other services.....which the drivers cousin just so happens to provide, which is essentialy a network, within the network.,......which then folds over into turf wars, and towtruck gangs operating in toronto that are proving to be ferociously tenatious even in the face of widespread outrage and police action...,so what will work and is implimentable?
by llm_nerd | 2025-05-13 12:19:49+00:00
For those scenarios, structured storage fits the bill. The app requests folder permission and the user, using system UIs, grants permissions on the folders they want to enable.

>it makes sense to let the users give it access to all the files on the phone

It doesn't even pretend to be a backup app, and further the permission we're talking about is limited to external storage (though that is a nebulous term on many Android devices where internal storage is split-brained on being internal and partly external).

Further saying "let the user decide" works great in theory and with a considered, rational userbase. In reality it means that everyone just says sure to everything, and soon all of the user's data is exfiltrated and everyone is whining that Google/Apple/et al should have forseen this.
by gingerBill | 2025-05-13 12:19:55+00:00
The compiler cannot know the _purpose_ of your program, and thus cannot "figure out the optimal data layout". It's metaphysically not possible, let alone technically.

Not everybody needs to worry about L2 or L3 most of the time, but if you are using a systems-level programming language where it might be of a concern to you at some point, it's extremely useful to be able to have that control.

> expecting every programmer to call malloc and free in the right order

The point of custom allocators is to not need to do the `malloc`/`free` style of memory allocation, and thus reduce the problems which that causes. And even if you do still need that style, Odin and many other languages offer features such as `defer` or even the memory tracking allocator to help you find the problems. Just like what was said in the article.
by rwieruch | 2025-05-13 12:20:51+00:00
If anyone wants to check out these things:

- CloudCamping (still only German market for now) https://www.cloud-camping.com/

- The Road to Next (fully launched last month) https://www.road-to-next.com/

- Music https://soundcloud.com/schlenkermitturnbeutel

Feel free to AMA.
by red_trumpet | 2025-05-13 12:21:35+00:00
> Anti-personnel mines do exactly what they are intended to do. These devices/software do something against the interests of the user in the process of doing something the user actually wants

Actually, I think you got it backwards: Anti-personnel mines are highly problematic especially when they are not needed anymore. They often linger in the ground for extended times after a conflict and are a cause of death and injuries in civilians, who just want to live their lives. Contrary to this, anti-personnel computing is problematic in the times when civilians are incentivized to use it.
by margorczynski | 2025-05-13 12:22:26+00:00
The priority should be safety, not speed. I prefer an e.g. slower browser or OS that isn't ridden with exploits and attack vectors.

Of course that doesn't mean everything should be done in JS and Electron as there's a lot of drawbacks to that. There exists a reasonable middle ground where you get e.g. memory safety but don't operate on layers upon layers of heavy abstraction and overhead.
by xoa | 2025-05-13 12:22:28+00:00
>I'm always astounded by the self-centeredness humans are capable of.

In this instance I'm sorry but this is the wrong take. The fantastic article directly addresses that in fact, and it jives with what I was taught as part of first responder and mountain rescue training in the US, as well as have heard from EMTs and volunteer firefighters I know:

>"However, research has shown that when untrained civilians are unexpectedly placed into an emergency aboard an aircraft, many people’s brains revert to what they already know, which is to stand up, grab their bags, and walk to the exit, as though nothing is wrong. This behavioral tendency can be short-circuited if the flight attendants loudly and assertively order passengers to leave their bags behind and exit immediately. But on flight 1492, the order to leave bags behind was not heard by the majority of the passengers because the senior flight attendant forgot to press the PA button before making the announcement."

Again, this jives with everything from military to emergency response of all sorts: in high stress maximal flight/fight rapid response sorts of situations, humans tend to (a) revert to whatever "muscle memory" or drilled in training they've got, if any, or else whatever basic instinct/patterns they've developed, (b) follow authoritative instructions, if available and simply/rapidly understandable, (c) panic, or (d) freeze up. Just as with everything else with safety, humans must be recognized as humans and be part of an overall systemic approach if we wish to improve outcomes as much as possible.

So if you're dealing with untrained random civilians who have no particular "muscle memory" to draw on beyond the typical, then crew procedures, aircraft design etc have to account for that. That's just part of the responsibility of running a civilian facing service involving life/safety. Better training for the cabin crew might have helped here just as better training could have prevented the situation happening at all, and identically better mechanical designs might also have helped and be worth considering in principle if this was frequent enough. This could range from how PA systems work (perhaps when an emergency landing is triggered, PA should automatically go to open mode and stay that way, or perhaps the evac warning including "LEAVE ALL BAGS BEHIND, EVACUATE NOW OR DIE" should be fully automated and just start broadcasting once emergency slides are deployed) to having overhead bins automatically seal and be impossible to open so somebody could at most spend a few seconds trying before realizing they can't (this would require actual study and cost/benefit tradeoff investigation of course). But the take away in disasters should not be any sort of moral one liner. These are massive systems with large numbers of people being forced to deal with a (literally here) by-the-second lethal scenario. Safety is a systemic issue.
by pydry | 2025-05-13 12:22:58+00:00
Most of it was exchanged for abstractions which traded runtime speed for the ability to create apps quickly and cheaply.

The market mostly didn't want 50% faster code as much as it wanted an app that didn't exist before.

If I look at the apps I use on a day to day basis that are dog slow and should have been optimized (e.g. slack, jira), it's not really a lack of the industry's engineering capability to speed things up that was the core problem, it is just an instance the principal-agent problem - i.e. I'm not the one buying, I don't get to choose not to use it and dog-slow is just one of many the dimensions in which they're terrible.
by cbeach | 2025-05-13 12:23:51+00:00
Brutalism was a reactionary movement against ornate Victorian and Georgian architecture, which was seen as elitist and emblematic of the "property owning class"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture

> In the United Kingdom, brutalism was featured in the design of utilitarian, low-cost social housing influenced by socialist principles and soon spread to other regions around the world, while being echoed by similar styles like in Eastern Europe

So beware the vocal minority of English socialists that have a politically-tainted take on this architecture.

The rest of us agree with you. It's offensively ugly!
by noobermin | 2025-05-13 12:24:20+00:00
I guess the dream is dead. Even in open source, we have consolidation with no real hard monetary markets involved.

EDIT: skimming these comments, I like how none of the top comments are talking about the bigger story here which is the move away from mercurial to git and instead everyone is focusing on github itself. This has essentially sealed hg away to obscurity forever. Do people not realise git is a program that runs on your computer and github is just a service that uses git? May be this is an old man gripe at this point but I'm surprised at the lack of technical discussion around this.
by xg15 | 2025-05-13 12:24:37+00:00
Eh, there is a middle ground between permitting LGBT, Trans and reproductive health education and throwing extreme porn into people's faces?

This middle ground is definitely not what this law is seeking, but I just want to note that the opposite extreme position is just as dishonest. (Both are essentially the same motte/bailey argument, just with the motte and bailey swapped - and both implicitly assume that LGBT = porn)
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-13 12:24:50+00:00
What cost? The hardware is dirt cheap. Programmers aren't cheap. The value of being able to use cheap software on cheap hardware is basically not having to spend a lot of time optimizing things. Time is the one thing that isn't cheap here. So there's a value in shipping something slightly sub optimal sooner rather than something better later.

> Except your browser taking 180% of available ram maybe.

For most business users, running the browser is pretty much the only job of the laptop. And using virtual memory for open tabs that aren't currently open is actually not that bad. There's no need to fit all your gazillion tabs into memory; only the ones you are looking at. Browsers are pretty good at that these days. The problem isn't that browsers aren't efficient but that we simply push them to the breaking content with content. Content creators simply expand their resource usage whenever browsers get optimized. The point of optimization is not saving cost on hardware but getting more out of the hardware.

The optimization topic triggers the OCD of a lot of people and sometimes those people do nice things. John Carmack built his career when Moore's law was still on display. Everything he did to get the most out of CPUs was super relevant and cool but it also dated in a matter of a few years. One moment we were running doom on simple 386 computers and the next we were running Quake and Unreal with shiny new Voodoo GPUs on a Pentium II pro. I actually had the Riva 128 as my first GPU, which was one of the first products that Nvidia shipped running Unreal and other cool stuff. And while CPUs have increased enormously in performance, GPUs have increased even more by some ridiculous factor. Nvidia has come a long way since then.

I'm not saying optimization is not important but I'm just saying that compute is a cheap commodity. I actually spend quite a bit of time optimizing stuff so I can appreciate what that feels like and how nice it is when you make something faster. And sometimes that can really make a big difference. But sometimes my time is better spent elsewhere as well.
by mc32 | 2025-05-13 12:25:08+00:00
This has the inherent danger of becoming a programing tool to push forward the desired agenda of a given government. So, while it may be a cure, it's also a poison -a greater poison than having a relatively few conspiracy theorists.

I'd add, to some extent conspiracy theorists keep government and industry honest. Or at least is skeptical about their honesty --with good reason. Quite a few so called conspiracy theories turned out to be actual conspiracies. And some conspiracy theories turned out to not be conspiracies (like moving away from trolleys when cars became the main mode of transportation)

Turned out to be true:

MKUltra

Biden mental decline

Reagan mental decline

Epstein blackmail

Iraq WMDs

Carnivore (syphoning internet comms)

Lots of the programs Snowden revealed

Steele document

Lab theory for Covid

etc.
by busterarm | 2025-05-13 12:25:17+00:00
I/O _can_ be optimized. I know someone who had this as their fulltime job at Meta. Outside of that nobody is investing in it though.

I'm a platform engineer for a company with thousands of microservices. I'm not thinking on your desktop scale. Our jobs are all memory hogs and I/O bound messes. Across all of the hardware we're buying we're using maybe 10% CPU. Peers I talk to at other companies are almost universally in the same situation.

I'm not saying don't care about CPU efficiency, but I encounter dumb shit all the time like engineers asking us to run exotic new databases with bad licensing and no enterprise features just because it's 10% faster when we're nowhere near experiencing those kinds of efficiency problems. I almost never encounter engineers who truly understand or care about things like resource contention/utilization. Everything is still treated like an infinite pool with perfect 100% uptime, despite (at least) 20 years of the industry knowing better.
by grumpymuppet | 2025-05-13 12:25:48+00:00
This is something I've wished to eliminate too. Maybe we just cast the past 20 years as the "prototyping phase" of modern infrastructure.

It would be interesting to collect a roadmap for optimizing software at scale -- where is there low hanging fruit? What are the prime "offenders"?

Call it a power saving initiative and get environmentally-minded folks involved.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-13 12:26:05+00:00
We've been able to run order matching engines for entire exchanges on a single thread for over a decade by this point.

I think this specific class of computational power - strictly serialized transaction processing - has not grown at the same rate as other metrics would suggest. Adding 31 additional cores doesn't make the order matching engine go any faster (it could only go slower).

If your product is handling fewer than several million transactions per second and you are finding yourself reaching for a cluster of machines, you need to back up like 15 steps and start over.
by _ncyj | 2025-05-13 12:26:40+00:00
> They aligned with 1 side of politics

I don't think that was the issue. Even in Southeast Asia there was a lot of resistance to the vaccine. Some of it is definitely due to American interference [0], but there already a lot of existing fear. The disinformation campaign only strengthened the argument against all vaccines. If it wasn't forced, I think even less people would've taken it.

I personally place blame on how capitalist healthcare has become such that science is distrusted and believed to only push corporate narratives. It's not entirely unjustified - A lot of family has had experiences where pharmacies would push unnecessary medicine to charge more.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...