MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tecleandor | 2025-05-13 16:09:37+00:00
Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm not saying that it's good or bad, I just say that some people like to sync/backup/copy their apps data (that sometimes it's located on private directories, or in the Downloads folder...), and they were able to do it before. And that the new API has less permissions than the one that Google wants them to use.

Google Play, or at least that's what they say in their docs, might allow the use of the MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE "all files" API call "...if your app includes a use case similar to any of the following: File managers, Backup and restore apps, [...] Document management apps ..." [0][1]. And the Nextcloud app sounds very similar to that.

Of course, it's all "Subject to Google Play review and approval.", but why they used to grant that permission to Nextcloud with no problem and revoked it suddenly... I have no idea.

---

0: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/manage-all-files#all-files-access-google-play 1: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/10467955#zippy=%2Cpermitted-uses-of-the-all-files-access-permission
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-13 16:09:46+00:00
In the kinds of applications that require a systems language you need to know the object layouts, it isn’t avoidable. Algorithm selection over those objects is dependent on the physical object layout and hardware architecture based on the use case. The compiler doesn’t do any of this and largely can’t because it doesn’t understand what you are trying to do. It has nothing to do with “hand-optimized assembly code”.

You are making a classic “sufficiently smart compiler” argument. These types of problems can’t be automagically solved without strong general AI inside the compiler. See also: SIMD, auto-parallelization, etc. We don’t have strong general AI, never mind inside the compiler.

Until we have such a compiler, you will be dependent on people caring a lot about physical data layout to make your software scalable and efficient.
by lynndotpy | 2025-05-13 16:10:00+00:00
You are entirely correct. The massive investment in science (and the culture of valuing scientific knowledge) that started with the cold war is coming to an end. It turns out that destruction is far easier to do than creation.

I was a PhD student in machine learning during the first Trump administration, and even then things were on very shaky grounds. The Muslim ban alone hit really hard, and was a boon for research institutions outside the US. (Look at Canada's Google Brain branch, for instance.)

But, until recently, there was still the plausibility that the whole Trump thing was a flash in the pan. When Trump lost in 2020, there was a sigh of relief that science would continue in the US.

This is on top of plummeting educational attainment in the US and the as-of-yet uncertain ramifications of students widespread reliance on LLMs.

It is very difficult to imagine a path of returning to the good reputation we had in science.
by vessenes | 2025-05-13 16:10:27+00:00
Audience. This will only reach people who agree. It's a lesson Dems just haven't learned yet about where America is in discourse:

Hillary: "This great economy, based on the new globalization means that we will with the help of economists transform Pennsylvania's economic infrastructure away from dirty fuels."

Donald: "I'm going to save coal."

Kamala: "My macroeconomists say this is the best economy the US has ever seen, and they say my plan to help will put money back in American pockets"

Donald: "No taxes on tips."
by nolist_policy | 2025-05-13 16:10:31+00:00
Hmm, I just checked: I have developer options enabled and untrusted sources (F-Droid). I checked my play integrity status[0] and it reports:

Labels: [MEETS_BASIC_INTEGRITY, MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY, MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY]

So I don't think remote attestation is the issue here, but it could be the app detects it by some other way

[0] https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity/addition...
by Multicomp | 2025-05-13 16:10:38+00:00
Here in Atlanta Georgia, we have a ToyoTechs business. They perform maintenance on only Toyota-family automobiles. They have 2 locations, one for large trucks, one for cars, hybrids, and SUV-looking cars. Both are always filled up with customers. Some of whom drive hundreds of miles out of state to bring their vehicles exclusively there, whether the beater is a customized off-roader or a simple econobox with sentimental value.

Why? Because they are on a different incentive structure: non-comissioned payments for employees. They buy OEM parts, give a good warranty, charge fair prices, and they are always busy.

If this computer fad goes away, I'm going to open my own Toyota-only auto shop, trying to emulate them. They have 30 years of lead time on my hypothetical business, but the point stands: when people discover that high quality in this market, they stick to it closely.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-13 16:10:40+00:00
You're assuming all of that from just a word. To support your position you would need to cite the proposal, which you haven't read, but are assuming its contents. All you can do is cite the title and conclude it's defacto bad. Most people don't agree that we should base funding decisions on titles of proposals, that's why we have them write a full proposal.
by robinsoncrusue | 2025-05-13 16:10:55+00:00
If my memory serves me correctly, the ones you mentioned were DARPA projects. Which is defense arm - and AFAIK defense budget is not being cut.

I am not against government spending for dominance but I am just simply asking a question when the deficit spending is high and soon the line item for interest expense is greater than the defense budget, is dominance still more of a concern than say, I don't know, Govt unable to pay its debt or inflating away the currency?
by orwin | 2025-05-13 16:10:57+00:00
Wow, wow, i wasn't clear, i'm not accusing any western army of doing that (israel, US might be close however), i was responding to a specific comment about rotten leadership and lack of discipline. A well disciplined army do not bring the violence back, because they're taught how to handle the violence, and often are debriefed after each mission, then after each deployment. The issue is when demilitarization never happen, or when it start to treat enemies as non-humans.

I know far to much army men (mostly airforce, some Marsouins) to say "veterans are broken people", i know it isn't the case.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-05-13 16:11:22+00:00
The used car market is market for lemons because it is difficult to distinguish between a car that has been well maintained and a car close to breaking down. However, the new car market is decidedly not a market for lemons because every car sold is tested by the state, and reviewed by magazines and such. You know exactly what you are buying.

Software is always sold new. Software can increase in quality the same way cars have generally increased in quality over the decades. Creating standards that software must meet before it can be sold. Recalling software that has serious bugs in it. Punishing companies that knowingly sell shoddy software. This is not some deep insight. This is how every other industry operates.
Show HN: SmartBuckets – With one line of code, never build a RAG pipeline again
by genovalente | 2025-05-13 16:11:43+00:00
Hey HN,

We’re Basia, Fokke, and Geno from Liquidmetal AI, and we built something we wish we had a long time ago: SmartBuckets.

We’ve spent a lot of time building RAG and AI systems, and honestly, the infrastructure side has always been a pain. Every project turned into a mess of vector databases, graph databases, and endless custom pipelines before you could even get to the AI part.

SmartBuckets is our take on fixing that.

It works like an object store, but under the hood it handles the messy stuff — vector search, graph relationships, metadata indexing — the kind of infrastructure you'd usually cobble together from multiple tools. You can drop in PDFs, images, audio, or text, and it’s instantly ready for search, retrieval, chat, and whatever your app needs.

Would love to hear your feedback, or tell us where it still sucks.

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by deepsun | 2025-05-13 16:11:50+00:00
I was also thinking the same and advocated with pretty much the same words. Until became a manager, and noticed that yes, most of the employees are like that, but there are some that will screw you over. And just that minority is why we cannot have nice things. Hell, we wouldn't even need written contracts if everyone behaved responsibly.

It's like leaving your bicycle on a street, in Japan you don't need a lock, in San Francisco a lock wouldn't help. Even when 99% people are honest and responsible.
by TuxSH | 2025-05-13 16:12:48+00:00
> And I am one of the people saddened by the convergence on a single platform.

Hardly surprising, though, social networks are prone to centralization (due to network effect), and GitHub & its competitors (anything that offers git repos + issue tracking + fork-ability, really) are social networks.

Also, GitHub offering private repos for free right after they got acquired by Microsoft helped a lot. A lot of people, myself included, were using gitlab.com for private repos at that time
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-05-13 16:12:49+00:00
Does no.js still limit you to a single core/CPU use?

Or as a node successfully been able to start utilizing more cores underneath its JavaScript single thread model. It presents the programmer?

I just remember early node.js from like 15 years ago and the single background task limitation of JavaScript running in a web page.

Cuz you got async code is nice, but what you really wanted to be able to harness in modern CPUs is multi-core

That said, I've been looking for an article like this for a while, although I think there are other associated libraries that also had steps in here. I do think the jvm adopted a lot of those, but I'm not sure if they actually are better than the original extension libraries.
by sillystuff | 2025-05-13 16:12:59+00:00
The repo appears to be working for installing/updating packages. Mozilla should allow file listing which should fix the 404s, and make this repo behave as expected when manually browsed (Apparently hosted on a Google webserver; maybe Google forbids this?).

apt-get changelog firefox Get:1 store: firefox 138.0.3~build1 Changelog Fetched 129 B in 0s (0 B/s) firefox (138.0.3~build1) UNRELEASED; urgency=medium * N/A -- Mozilla <release@mozilla.com> Mon, 12 May 2025 12:40:33 -0000 date Tue May 13 08:56:09 AM PDT 2025

Or, to really prove it to yourself, you can re-download the package:

apt-get install --download-only --reinstall firefox
by neilv | 2025-05-13 16:13:18+00:00
> The IP address information came from an unidentified "data partner" that uses first- and third-party cookies to create user profiles and ultimately infer their place of employment. The LinkedIn data – user profiles and resumes – came from Revelio Labs, and was supplemented with US census data and corporate data from Aberdeen CiTDB and People Data Labs.

If this research prompts more businesses to RTO or non-WFH -- for the reason of reducing employees leaving to do a startup, or doing a potentially competing startup after termination -- is this effectively leveraging surveillance capitalism to suppress labor (and innovation, as we say)?
by Zak | 2025-05-13 16:13:34+00:00
Shady apps use file access to do tracking of various sorts and simply ingest private data that has nothing to do with their nominal purpose. Sophisticated users probably wouldn't install those apps, and certainly wouldn't agree to their request for filesystem access, but that's not who Google is trying to protect here.

It's obviously not a security problem or a harm when used by an open source file synchronization app, and Google is being unsophisticated with its policy here.
by alistairSH | 2025-05-13 16:14:11+00:00
I was thinking the same thing. Plus, treat people well enough (salary, benefits, work you assign, etc) that they want to stay. IE, as a manager, part of my job is to ensure my employees feel challenged/stimulated, satisfied with their comp plan, etc. If they aren't they'll go elsewhere (start their own, or jump to CapOne/Amazon/some other big tech company in DC).
by fzeroracer | 2025-05-13 16:14:13+00:00
Why does research have to be profitable? There are many, many smaller diseases and cancers which affect a small subset of the population which will never be 'profitable', but it's important to research for the sake of scientific progress. I fundamentally do not understand how one can be so enthralled by capitalism that they believe we should not research anything unless a shareholder can generate a profit somewhere along the way.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-13 16:14:48+00:00
That's why there are an increasing number of "microframeworks" for Web Components such as Lit and FAST. (My own Butterfloat I think works very nicely in Web Components, too, though some would quibble that it isn't a "microframework" because its one and only dependency is RxJS, which isn't as bloated as people remember it being, but has that reputation.)

> (without updating the DOM each turn, hence shadow DOM).

Uh, Shadow DOM doesn't help with DOM performance and can make some things worse. If your Web Component has terrible DOM performance in the Shadow DOM that can still noticeably degrade DOM performance of the entire DOM.

I'm of the growing opinion that the Shadow DOM is over-complicated for what it tries to do and most Web Components don't actually need the Shadow DOM and would be better without it and would have a better idea of their own performance (issues) without it.

Hot take: The Shadow DOM is built for advertisers that want beefier iframes, not for building good performance.
by genewitch | 2025-05-13 16:15:26+00:00
It is a port that has two data lines, RX and TX, and data is sent in a serial fashion across those data lines. It is used today for embedded systems, routers and switches et al, and getting a console on any machine that doesn't have a gpu with a monitor attached.

USB is a serial BUS, which allows multiple devices; serial ports are single device (if my memory serves).
by mppm | 2025-05-13 16:15:37+00:00
What you say is true, but I would still disagree with the overall assessment. To put it bluntly, it is the pilot's job to be thrown into unexpected situations. Modern airliners mostly fly themselves, and the pilots are there to a) coordinate with ATC b) step in when the shit hits the fan, which does happen with some regularity. Ultimately this accident was caused by a confluence of many factors, as is often the case, but my read on the situation is that a competent pilot should have been able to handle this emergency without any losses.
by devnull3 | 2025-05-13 16:15:38+00:00
If I have to guess the tuning and optimizations:

SQLITE:

1. Smaller page size (to be specific: max(disk_sector_size, 512))

2. Integer primary keys

3. WAL mode

4. Increase page cache size. This is assuming that most people will click in the top-left 100x100 checkboxes.

Other optimzation:

1. In mem cache of bitmap of 1B bits, which is about 120MB, which is a shared state for all incoming connections.
by Retric | 2025-05-13 16:15:48+00:00
Not being free upfront isn’t the same thing as expensive.

Zoom’s got 7,412 employees a small team of say 7 employees could make a noticeable difference here and the investment wouldn’t disappear, it would help drive further profits.

> Don't care about efficiency at all

Doesn’t care beyond basic functionality. Obviously they care if something takes an hour to load, but rarely do you see considerations for people running on lower hardware than the kind of machines you see at a major software company etc.
by lwo32k | 2025-05-13 16:16:17+00:00
> what does that mean though.

The earnings call transcript is more useful than these stupid news articles - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q2...

Basically Azure earnings were at the low end of their own projections. And their explanation was Azure non-AI services earnings have dropped as customers who have ongoing non-AI projects are working out how to incorporate AI services.
by homebrewer | 2025-05-13 16:16:25+00:00
If you're being honest, compare Slack and Teams not with weechat, but with Telegram. Its desktop client (along with other clients) is written by an actually competent team that cares about performance, and it shows. They have enough money to produce a native client written in C++ that has fantastic performance and is high quality overall, but these software behemoths with budgets higher than most countries' GDP somehow never do.
by alistairSH | 2025-05-13 16:16:59+00:00
A manager should have at least a vague notion of how long a given set of tasks should take an employee.

If I assign 20 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, I should not be surprised the employee does something else with the 20 remaining hours.

If I assign 40 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, and is of the expected quality, I really don't care if the employee take a part-time job elsewhere (assuming that doesn't conflict with expected online hours, etc).
by fdr | 2025-05-13 16:17:12+00:00
One of the things I think about sometimes, a specific example rather than a rebuttal to Carmack.

The Electron Application is somewhere between tolerated and reviled by consumers, often on grounds of performance, but it's probably the single innovation that made using my Linux laptop in the workplace tractable. And it is genuinely useful to, for example, drop into a MS Teams meeting without installing.

So, everyone laments that nothing is as tightly coded as Winamp anymore, without remembering the first three characters.
by pmontra | 2025-05-13 16:17:28+00:00
Did he draft people and sent them to fight, like in WW2 or the Vietnam war? I believe he didn't but I never lived in the USA so I might be wrong.

At one extreme a government can draft all the population into the military and send most of them to factories and farms. When the war is over, restart the civilian economy. A big mess for sure.

At the other extreme, the war is fought with contractors and volunteers and military factories have to compete with the civilian economy for workers, by raising salaries. This is what is happening in Russia AFAIK. They seem to be badly understaffed but even there the government must be careful if people become too unsatisfied.

So ultimately it's not economic reasons, is about winning the next election or staying alive.
by searine | 2025-05-13 16:17:45+00:00
Standing on the shoulders of giants, the growth LLMs is built on a foundation of government funded academic training and research without which it would not have been possible. Also, I didn't say there is no corporate basic research. Things like Bell Labs and googleX have existed but they are the exception and not the rule and are dependent on a company being highly lucrative and culturally open to basic research. Certainly not reliable as a primary source of funding and almost completely lacking in training.

Even something like the latest explosion in LLMs is applied science and profit motivated.
by vessenes | 2025-05-13 16:18:00+00:00
This feels revisionist to me. It was not accidental. The US had the booming wartime economy, AND it had a State department that went at solidifying global influence. Essentially the "greatest generation" locked in America's situation, and doubled down on cultural and economic dominance.

The combination of state, industry and WMF-type loans extended American power globally. It was a very very good time to be American. This is the core of the "Great Again" part of the slogan. Boomers remember this America and want the growth, wealth and dominance back.
by nodja | 2025-05-13 16:18:08+00:00
The store is also an app on windows and is sometimes an hard dependency to install apps that only exist on the windows store without having to jump through many hoops. It's usually part of windows itself in the regular retail builds of windows, but LTSC which is meant for enterprise and embedded system does not include it. Installing it is not straightforward which is what this repo provides.

There's no source code, it's a just a bunch of binaries and an install/uninstall script.

Edit: I should clarify that the link provided in the repo is not the microsoft store that the apps refer to. This would be a better link https://apps.microsoft.com
Ask HN: How do you like the Framework matte screen?
by christophilus | 2025-05-13 16:18:28+00:00
It's about time for me to upgrade my laptop, and I'm leaning towards Framework, but I hate matte screens. I love my Dell XPS 4k glossy Oled: crisp, clear, accurate colors, and most importantly, no huge blob of diffused light across half of the screen when I'm outside.

For those of you who switched to Framework from a glossy screen, how is your experience with it?
by asoneth | 2025-05-13 16:18:45+00:00
> Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science?

This is a fair question.

For one thing, the US dominance in science has allowed us to dominate many profitable products and new industries that were derived from that science. I'm not sure I believe the commonly-given estimate that every $1 spent on basic research yields $8-20 in economic return, but I do believe that the return has been positive.

If other countries become the preferred target for the best and the brightest scientists then the US is unlikely to continue to dominate new research-dependent industries as we did for the last ~4 generations.

I don't necessarily think this is bad for the world -- concentrating too much wealth, talent, and power in one country has had corrosive effects. But this decline may ultimately be bad for the average US resident, even if their taxes go down.

> other than funneling billions to arms industry?

As someone who has worked on several military research projects, for better or worse my sense so far is that US military research budgets will be the only ones to come out of this administration largely unscathed.
by LadyCailin | 2025-05-13 16:19:35+00:00
A phone number given to a generally reputable company is hardly equivalent to giving a rando your social security number.

I mean, obviously you disagree with them being generally reputable, but you must realize that’s not a broad opinion, and they are certainly better at preventing data breaches than the average company that stores phone numbers.

Sincerely though, I hope you get your GDPR request sorted.
by adverbly | 2025-05-13 16:20:05+00:00
Isn't it to be expected that anyone with more free time is more likely to have time to start a business?

Working from home means you don't have to commute which saves you hours a week. Of course it will increase the chance that you can start up a business.

I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen more employers offer to pay people a bit more so that they can work during the hours they would normally commute... That seems like it would be a win-win, and would probably drop the number of people doing startups if they so desired.
by vessenes | 2025-05-13 16:20:12+00:00
You talk about this like it's an accident almost. It was a considered Federal policy to brain drain as hard as possible.

Anecdotally, I too worry about the influx of the dirty Irish into our borders, stealing good jobs and spreading their Irish culture. Oh, sorry, I forgot it's not 1940. In my opinion, America has a strong, strong culture -- brain drained scientist's kids in general look pretty integrated to me, at least the ones I know.