MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dijit | 2025-06-21 12:06:37+00:00
When the money really starts drying up it will be on the table again, for now it's "someone elses money" at worst and "less profits for the shareholders" at best (which is not an incentive for an engineer on the ground).

There's also a lot of FUD regarding hiring more staff, my observed experience is that hyperscalers need an equivalent number of people on rotation- it's just different skills (learning the intricacies/quirks of different product offerings on the hyperscaler vs CS/Operational fundamentals) - so everyone is scared to overload their teams with work and potentially need to hire people -- you can couple this with the fact that all migrations are up-front expensive and change is bad by default.

There will come a day where there simply isn't enough money to spend 10x the cost on these systems. It will be a sad day for everyone because salaries will be depressed too, and we will opine the days of shiny tools where we could make lots of work disappear by saying that our time is too expensive to work with such peasant issues.
by xnorswap | 2025-06-21 12:06:46+00:00
As a .net programmer, the "stringly typed" nature of the metadata horrifies me, but the choices of Go have long confused me.

So in .NET, like Java as you mention, we have attributes, .

e.g.

[JsonPropertyName("username")] [JsonIgnore]

etc.

This is simple, and obvious. The JsonPropertyName attribute is an override, you can set naming policies for the whole class. camelCase by default, with kebab-case, snake_case etc as alternative defaults.

C#/.NET of course has the benefit of having public properties, which are serialised by default, and private properties, which aren't, so you're unlikely to be exposing things you don't want to expose.

This contrasts to Go's approach, much like python, of using casing convention to determine private vs public fields. ( Please correct me if I'm wrong on this? )

The first example still confuses me though, because either you want IsAdmin to come from the user, in which case you still want to deserialise it, or you don't, in which case it shouldn't even be in your DTO at all.

Deserialisation there is a bit of a red-herring, as there should be a validation step which includes, "Does this user have the rights to create an admin?".

The idea of having a user class, which gets directly updated using properties straight from deserialized user input, feels weird to me, but I'd probably be dismissed as an "enterprise programmer" who wants to put layers between everything.
by Y-bar | 2025-06-21 12:07:56+00:00
We tried that for more than thirty years.

We tried public awareness campaigns, major environmental and educational groups were part of it, celebrities and television personalities held galas on prime time which some estimated 40% of the population tuned into, frequent ad campaigns, via sports clubs and scouting, lobbying, partnering with ski resorts.

It barely worked. Plastic pollution still increased.
by HelloUsername | 2025-06-21 12:08:33+00:00
Previous discussions:

05-mar-2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43262510 100 comments

24-jan-2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25893626 148 comments

07-jan-2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25674894 4 commments

27-feb-2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19263357 11 comments

21-feb-2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216827 56 comments

03-feb-2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13560279 1 comment
by jijijijij | 2025-06-21 12:08:39+00:00
The MacBook Air is undoubtedly good hardware, even good value, but from experience I personally just hate the Apple software ecosystem/wardship so much, it’s a dealbreaker. The pretentious presentation while neglecting practical details, the inflexibility you will sooner or later fight… it’s a special kind of hell. You strictly don’t have options on their devices. Asahi is a nice effort, but still too limited. The happy Apple users I know, have adapted their expectations, bought fully in. I am honestly never sure, if they are merely fantasizing about productivity, or actually (just) work. For me, after the honeymoon phase, it always ends in deep frustration. IMO with Apple you have to embrace the "yes, daddy“ mentality, be gaslit into overstating the good, while disowning the bad, or you will end up angry.
by sgt | 2025-06-21 12:08:47+00:00
For those wondering about ISO 27001 - it's a standard for international security management, and popular in Europe.

However in the US it's not very relevant or even interesting to companies, and some European companies fail to understand that.

SOC 2 is the default and the preferred standard in the US - it's more domestic and less rigid than ISO 27001.
by morsch | 2025-06-21 12:08:54+00:00
From the study: Conventional cotton bags: Reuse for grocery shopping at least 52 times for climate change, and up to 7100 times considering all indicators; reuse as waste bin bag if possible, otherwise incinerate.

50 times seems real easy, all of mine have been used more often than that. 7000 seems hard to accomplish in a lifetime, though, to me anyway. If I forgot to bring one at a store, I buy a paper bag (which get good grades in the study) and reuse it for paper recycling. Or I reuse discarded cardboard containers available in the store.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-06-21 12:09:23+00:00
Yes -- bootsplash showing "DANGER! YOUR SECURITY AT RISK! HACKERS CAN NOW STEAL YOUR GIRLFRIEND AND SHUFFLE YOUR PAIRS OF SOCKS!" in big bold red letters only because you enabled root to remove manufacturer malware (which if anything likely _increases_ your security) is a deal breaker, because it will frighten most users from doing it .
by hbnjgf | 2025-06-21 12:10:09+00:00
I guess it depends on the distance. If you are currently typing and need to get to the beginning of the word, obviously it's way faster to navigate using the keyboard than the mouse.

If instead you need to navigate somewhere you don't exactly know the location of, scanning and clicking is faster.

Then again, if you happen to know the exact location, going there by command is much faster
by sureglymop | 2025-06-21 12:10:14+00:00
Actually, on macOS you have the same shortcuts as gnu readline in any text editing field.

You have these same shortcuts in bash, zsh, the python repl, html form fields, etc. And anything that doesn't use gnu readline can be wrapped in rlwrap.

Note that copying and pasting is an exception. Otherwise, navigating words with shortcuts seems to fairly universally use these shortcuts.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-06-21 12:10:26+00:00
> and their servers are centralized, owned by one organization

For what it's worth, everything about signal is open source and you can see how little data they can actually collect from you even if they wanted to. I believe they wouldn't be able to start collecting more data by modifying the server code, because the features which prevent them from receiving your info are built into the protocol and the client apps as well.

But since it is open source I suppose it would be possible to run your own server too... I suspect you just wouldn't be able to talk to the same people if you did (you'd effectively be running your own version of signal and that server would do the necessary coordination tasks for you and the other people using it)
by simion314 | 2025-06-21 12:10:27+00:00
So if Samsung makes a TV that will use 10x more energy if you decide not to buy the Premium Subscription you will comment that is actually a Good thing, free markets and so on, fuck that environment and fuck the "Don't be evil promise" .

Today Big Tech moto should be "Be as evil as you are able if it makes money".

Hopefully some civilized countries can add laws about wasting energy and killing devices for no good reason.

EDIT: The Google/Samsung exampel is affecting the entire planet not only the individual that "choose" that he really wants his device to be screwed and his energy bill to increase. So the individual "freedom" is screwing the entire planet for no fucking good reason , at least if you waste the battery to show ads I can understand it.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-21 12:10:27+00:00
What's cmd? I've only got ctrl, alt, super, and hyper over here. /s

I guess I've also that useless "right click menu" keyboard button that's not even worth repurposing for anything due to the placement making it incredibly awkward to use. I'd be curious to know if anyone here actually uses the ctrl or alt keys that are located on the right.
by Jave_Defender | 2025-06-21 12:10:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently finished building a deterministic AI-based firewall called Jave Ethical Defender. It’s designed to analyze incoming traffic at Layer 7 using entropy, trust scoring, and packet intent—not traditional rulesets. During real-world testing, it successfully neutralized a 5,000+ node botnet with 100/100-rated IPs from AbuseIPDB using under 10% CPU on a 7950X3D. Fail2Ban was enabled at the time but caught none of the attackers—Jave caught them all.

This isn’t just theory. I’ve published documentation, architecture, screenshots, and the actual performance report here: https://github.com/JAVE-Ethical-Software/Jave-Defender-Publi... (Core engine is gated for responsible access requests to avoid misuse.)

It’s built to be lightweight, non-subscription, and eventually open to self-hosters and SMBs who want real AI-first perimeter defense.

Would love your thoughts on:

Risk scoring logic at the packet/header level

Ethical honeypots + deterministic behavior isolation

The approach of avoiding set rules entirely

Happy to answer anything. AMA.
by krts- | 2025-06-21 12:11:03+00:00
Is there a transparent way to see credit used/remaining/topped up, and do you have any tips for how you can prompt the agent that might offer more effective use of credits?

The LLM chat taps out but I can't find a remaining balance on the fly.io dashboard to gauge how I'm using it. I _can_ see a total value of purchased top ups, but I'm not clear how much credit was included in the subscription.

It's very addictive (because it is awesome!) but I've topped up a couple of times now on a small project. The amount of work I can get out the agent per top-up does seem to be diminishing quite quickly, presumably as the context size increases.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-21 12:12:16+00:00
The sane way to privatize a transit system isn't to give the private company ownership over the system, it's to have the government own all of the plant and equipment and pay various private companies to supply or operate pieces of it. Then they're not deciding what fares are (the thing with no competition), they're deciding how much they bid to provide rolling stock or train conductors and then the government chooses the company with the most attractive bid for each thing it needs to buy in any given year.

The government in turn sets the fares by amortizing the total cost of the system over the number of riders modulo any taxpayer subsidies it intends to provide.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-21 12:13:57+00:00
I did that the last time (again, only with 3.5, things have hopefully improved in this area).

And I could potentially see LLMs being useful to generate the “bones” of a query for me but I’d never expose it to end-users (which was what I was playing with). So instead of letting my users do something like “What were my sales for last month?” I could use LLMs to help build queries that were hardcoded for various reports.

The problem is that I know SQL, I’m pretty good at, and I have a perfect understanding of my company’s schema. I might ask an LLM a generic SQL question but trying to feed it my schema just leads to (or rather “led to” in my trials before) prompt hell. I spent hours tweaking the prompts, feeding it more context, begging with it to ignore the “cash” column that has been depreciated for 4+ years, etc. After all of that it still would make simple mistakes that I hard specially warned against.
by ACCount36 | 2025-06-21 12:14:09+00:00
No need. We know today's AIs are simply not capable enough to be too dangerous.

But capabilities of AI systems improve generation to generation. And agentic AI? Systems that are capable of carrying out complex long term tasks? It's something that many AI companies are explicitly trying to build.

Research like this is trying to get ahead of that, and gauge what kind of weird edge case shenanigans agentic AIs might get to before they actually do it for real.
by vultour | 2025-06-21 12:14:12+00:00
I was trying to show someone a scene from a 45-minute YouTube video the other day. I didn't know where it was so I was randomly choosing points to watch. _Every single time_ I clicked on the scrubber I was hit with a 30-second advertisement. Mind you, I always watched maybe 3 seconds of the actual content before moving on. After the 8th time I gave up and vowed to never open YouTube on a device without adblock again. This was so beyond the pale I'm never going to give Google another cent.
by zabzonk | 2025-06-21 12:14:20+00:00
> The purpose of a language is to encode the programmers’ contributions

Where did this "contribution" stuff come from? Does anyone know here it originated (is this the origin)? It even seems that now what we used to be known as programmers are simply "contributors", which I hate.

And for me, the purpose of a computer language is to tell the machine what I want it to do, possibly somewhat indirectly.
by sureglymop | 2025-06-21 12:14:22+00:00
I would personally say that you should ignore it.

Programming isn't bottlenecked by how fast you can enter or type text, it is about focusing and thinking and then solving a problem. In other words, being able to enter text faster does not imply also being able to solve a problem faster.

I would even say that on the contrary, taking longer and reflecting on what you are typing more may perhaps result in a better quality solution of the problem being solved.
by rustc | 2025-06-21 12:14:32+00:00
> Having a tool to provide a name instead of an hex code is useful to discuss colors with other stakeholders (customers, colleagues, etc...)

But how useful are names that this website shows, e.g. the first few random names I got were "Singapore Orchid", "Scented Spring", "Lamiaceae", and "Lunatic Sky Dancer"?
by cataflam | 2025-06-21 12:14:36+00:00
Happy for you, don't get me wrong, but your post is not particularly news, I'm guessing everyone on HN knows bare metal/VPS providers are cheaper than AWS/Azure/GCP.

And also lacking a bit in details:

- both technical (e.g. how are you dealing with upgrades or multi-data center fallback for your postgresql), and

- especially business, e.g. what's the total cost analysis including the supplemental labor cost to set this up but mostly to maintain it.

Maybe if you shared your scripts and your full cost analysis, that would be quite interesting.
by spauldo | 2025-06-21 12:15:01+00:00
The Plank length thing is just going to add confusion here. Quantum stuff is weird. That's where analogies go to die.

But generally speaking, the answer is 2. That's assuming there's no forces between the two objects.

Space doesn't expand like the outside of a balloon or a rubber sheet - I hate those analogies because they give you the wrong idea.

I'm not aware of any major current theories that say space is quantized, or any theories that have a way of pinpointing a "piece" of space, so the following analogy is flawed. But it should at least point you in the right direction.

Draw a line and put eight dots on it. Draw arrows pointing to the fourth, fifth, and eighth dot. We'll call those dots A, B, and C respectively.

We're going to measure distance by dots. Dots A and B have a distance of 1. Dots A and C have a distance of 4.

Now for each dot, add a new dot before and after it. Measure the distances. Dots A and B now have a distance of 3. Dots A and C now have a distance of 12.

Repeat. Measure the distances. Repeat again. Measure the distances. You'll notice that the distances between the dots you've marked is increasing faster with each repetition, and that the distance between A and C is increasing faster than A and B. An object at any of those points would not be experiencing any force - nothing is pushing or pulling on them - but an observer at any of those points would observe the objects at the other points to be accelerating away from them.

That's sort like how space expands. Of course, space doesn't have "points" as far as we can tell, so there's all kinds of problems with the above analogy, but hopefully it helps.
by sokoloff | 2025-06-21 12:15:29+00:00
That’s “just” a matter of the choice of discount rate, which needs to account for both inflation and uncertainty effects. (I’m pro-nuclear energy, but think the costs are indeed high and uncertainty is medium or high.)

If you’re arguing the chosen discount rate is too high in some models, we can have a productive discussion about that.

If you’re arguing the methodology is wrong, you’ll need to explain more before I understand your point of view, or perhaps you’ll be interested in lending me $1M today and I’ll pay you $100/day for the next 55 years, by which time you’ll have more than doubled your money.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-06-21 12:17:02+00:00
These kinds of deep dives into superficially trivial aspects of modern life can be interesting and, in some ways, healthy. But they are also just exhausting if you consume (or produce) too many of them.

Most of the things being dissected and critically analysed here are popular precisely because they don't demand too much thought to engage with in the first place. Being forced to consider the political or philosophical root causes of your enjoyment of cat memes just turns them from cheap laughs into hard work and saps the enjoyment out of them. You might end up more enlightened but you will probably also end up less happy.

IMO it's good that there is a blog out there putting out these kinds of analyses, so that people can visit it when that's the kind of thing they're after, and not visit it when it's not. The problem is people either over-consuming this content themselves in a manner similar to doom-scrolling, or having the content forced on them by people who want to shoe-horn these topics into every conversation.
by layer8 | 2025-06-21 12:18:16+00:00
The server can't completely ignore the player, as it would have to adjust the embedded timestamps to be consistent with the skip operations, or otherwise the player won't show the video. In other words, the server would have to act as if the ad is embedded wherever you skip to in the video. Not only would it mean that users lose their position in the video when they try to skip, since after the ad it would continue in a different place, but it would also mean that timestamps don't uniquely identify positions in the non-ad parts of the video anymore, which is a nonstarter in many ways.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-21 12:18:24+00:00
> Everybody needs to use VSCode as their editor"

I despise mandates like this. My rule for the engineers under me is:

We will pay for your IDE (if it costs money) and you are free to use whatever you want but if you get stuck I’m only going to help you on IntelliJ (IDEA). Others might be able to help you with VSCode and that’s fine but “I can’t get it working in VSCode” is not a valid excuse. I know it works in IDEA so you can use that or figure it out yourself (assuming it’s not delaying your work significantly).

Essentially use whatever you want, but I’m not going to be supporting it. You can use emacs for all I care (and some do), as long as it doesn’t get in the way of doing your job.
by the_af | 2025-06-21 12:20:53+00:00
> But youtube is just junk food for the mind, packaged as stuff that interests you

This is demonstrably false.

There's no such thing as "YouTube stuff", there's thousands of people uploading videos, some interesting to you, some not, some junk, some very in-depth, some garbage, some very thoughtful -- Sturgeon's Law applies. There are music videos, science videos, history videos, hobby videos, videos analyzing everything under the sun (e.g. the amazing Every Frame A Painting), etc.

I don't know which videos you watch, but mine aren't "junk food".
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-21 12:21:23+00:00
> The outsourcing push was a Republican party propaganda anti-tax shibboleth

For that to be true it would have to be actually saving money in order to allow lower taxes at a given level of deficit spending.

> Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias(tm)

Quoting a satirist isn't a real argument.

> If you want real competition, you have to keep at least some amount of capability in house in the government or the contractors will simply wring you out knowing full well that you have no recourse.

If you want real competition then you need real competition, i.e. multiple companies that can each supply the thing. And then they lose the contract to the other bidders if they mess up.

But when the corruption is the outcome desired by the politicians, preventing competing bidders is the name of the game.
by yusina | 2025-06-21 12:21:49+00:00
Um, Whatsapp does that too?! Maybe there is a way to use it without a phone number, but the most common use is to have a phone number on some sign / store front with a Whatsapp symbol next to it. In many countries that's the default way to do business. Scolding Signal to use phone numbers is just weird in comparison.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-21 12:21:58+00:00
Manufactured consent requires media complicity to achieve acceptance of Hobson's choice Accept or Don't Use EULAs and corporate, technofeudal non-ownership and the "shame" of specialized knowledge, tinkering, and modifying things. Nerds were frowned upon until electronics and software people became billionaires in the 80's, and technical vocations are still frowned upon in socially most of America.

PS: While he maybe in effectively hospice now, at least he outlived Kissinger.
by grey-area | 2025-06-21 12:22:07+00:00
Yes they are a horrible idea for many reasons, not just security. It’s like a hidden ill-defined poorly understood dsl in strings.

You can just not use them though - you can unmarshal to a map instead and select the keys you want, perform validation etc and then set the values.

Same when publishing - I prefer to have an explicit view which defines the keys exposed rather than than publishing all by default based on these poorly understood string keys attached to types.
by notahacker | 2025-06-21 12:22:55+00:00
The existence of common slang which isn't used in the sort of formal writing that grammar linting tools are typically designed to promote is more of a weakness of learning grammar by a weighted model of the internet vs formal grammatical rules than a strength.

Not an insurmountable problem, ChatGPT will use "aight fam" only in context-sensitive ways and will remove it if you ask to rephrase to sound more like a professor, but RHLFing slang into predictable use is likely a bigger potential challenge than simply ensuring the word list of an open source program is sufficiently up to date to include slang whose etymology dates back to the noughties or nineties, if phrasing things in that particular vernacular is even a target for your grammar linting tool...
by pcthrowaway | 2025-06-21 12:23:13+00:00
I think the issue with a traditional web app, is if they deliver one, they can be probably compelled by three-letter agencies to modify the app served to users or a specific user, to collect that user's information.

Distributing it as a signed desktop/mobile application makes it so they can't tamper with what users are running to be made complicit in attacking their users