MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ashishb | 2025-06-08 09:24:28+00:00
> Why would you do that? This is a self-inflicted wound that exactly matches the title. This isn't like another example of some important system library you need that gets removed, forcing changes

As I mentioned elsewhere in the article, each library supports a certain version of Android; your old library will not support newer versions. E.g. API 33 onwards there is an edge-to-edge display, and older UI libraries won't be able to handle it.
by Nasrudith | 2025-06-08 09:24:47+00:00
That isn't a loophole. It is working exactly as was intended. Reinvesting is good.

The deal is that you can delay taxes by reinvesting (and either make the government more money at the end or lose it all if you were a fool, but you gain nothing by losing it all) but you cannot skip them when it comes to taking the profit out. The entire point of it was to promote investment into businesses which has kind of been a crucial factor in international competitiveness since the Industrial Revolution. Remember the fall of US Steel? That happened because they didn't reinvest.
by DoctorOW | 2025-06-08 09:25:23+00:00
For many reasons (including the ones above) it's difficult for any institution within reach of the US government to analyze how the alt-right took power but from what I can tell the US economy is in a slow burn. It's been receiving patches roughly once a presidency but it turns out you can't combine a lot of short term solutions to make a long term one. Fixing the economy would require bold decisions and the parties took two different directions. The Republican party realized that any bold policy would get votes regardless of any other factor including coherency. This is why Trump supporters, when asked about their logic usually give some form of "things are bad, and they didn't used to be".

To summarize, there are competing ideas for what got us here, but I think it was less of a real inciting event like WW1 and more of a breaking point that was eventually reached.
by rawling | 2025-06-08 09:25:45+00:00
> If LLM generation was like a Makefile step, part of your build process, this concern would make a lot of sense. But nobody, anywhere, does that.

Top level comment of this thread, quoting the article:

> Reading through these commits sparked an idea: what if we treated prompts as the actual source code? Imagine version control systems where you commit the prompts used to generate features rather than the resulting implementation.
by rgoulter | 2025-06-08 09:25:47+00:00
> > The biggest problem with Nix is its commit-based package versioning. > ...isn't that like...the whole selling point of Nix?

Not quite.

That sentence is definitely the most ... discussion-worthy comment in the blog.

To my understanding, OP wants to write a tool to make it easy for use cases like "use ruby 3.1 and gcc 12 and ...".

The main Nix repository is nixpkgs. Nix packages are source-based, so the build steps are declared for each version. To save maintenance effort, nixpkgs typically only maintains one version of each program.

I read OP's "commit-based package version" phrase to mean "if you want ruby 3.1, you need to find the latest commit in nixpkgs which used ruby 3.1, and use that nixpkgs revision". -- Although, worth noting, this isn't the only way to do it with Nix.

Though, regarding 'commit-based versioning' as Nix's USP? I'd say that's also a reasonable description, yes. (By pinning a particular revision of Nix, the versions you use will be consistent).
by latexr | 2025-06-08 09:26:03+00:00
> We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Because if it lasts thousands of years it will do a good job of storing your food products.

We don’t need it to last thousands of years to store food. That durability is in fact quite a disadvantage when we consider microplastics in our own bodies. Its time frame to natural degradation could be orders of magnitude smaller and it would still do a great job for food and many other applications, with significantly less harmful drawbacks.
by 5mv2 | 2025-06-08 09:27:01+00:00
For the grades, it's true you could always spend more time in the library out of sheer willpower. It was nice just to be nudged into it by this lifestyle, and definitely helped as willpower is limited.

People's places: have you heard of people doing this? I'm genuinely curious because I could never bring myself to be a nuisance if I didn't absolutely need it, meaning the blocker is definitely real yet fully in my head here.

Material freedom: I guess I haven't seen enough to agree with this one yet. The only intellectual pursuit I know that would genuinely get you closer to not caring about life so much as to reduce your fear in homelessness is the study of physics!
by lukan | 2025-06-08 09:27:09+00:00
China is also investing in Fusion

https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-nuclear-fusion-reactor

In general, I was leaning towards your side, but after learning a bit more about Wendelstein via a german podcast who went there twice

https://alternativlos.org/36/

I believe the time for fusion is indeed near.

For the current energy needs, I still would rather invest heavily in solar, wind and battery, though.

But recent breakthroughs in superconductors and advancement of computers (confinement of the plasma needs lots of fast calculations) make it seem like a realistic goal to pursure for mid and long term.
by James_K | 2025-06-08 09:27:10+00:00
I'd assumed the point of them was that you can take the several cars of a tram and split them up to have more frequent services. Though I suppose this would compound with the cost of having a driver on each car, potentially cancelling some of the gains from cheap installation. As for the point of automation, I think the tram can probably be a lot easier than the bus because of the human factor. It seems safer, so legislators will be more willing to legalise it and residents less likely to complain. Also, you've got rails in the road that clearly mark the route of the tram which make it more visible than an automated bus. Most of these automated taxi companies still have a human supervising the process, and I imagine that could be employed here to good effect and with fewer or faster manual interventions than would otherwise be needed.

Even if all that falls through, I'm not gonna complain about it. We sorely need more public infrastructure in the UK. Even if an experiment like this fails, at least you actually get a tram line and experience out of it. Much better than a project which sucks up million then gets cancelled. (Cough cough HS2.)
by agnishom | 2025-06-08 09:28:05+00:00
> Obsidian: An Org-Mode replacement?

I doubt it. Obsidian is not open source, and the core is maintained by a small group of people, rather than a community. What happens when the company dies?

That said, I am willing to have more faith in Obsidian, than many other things since they are not [VC funded](https://stephango.com/vcware)
by mafro | 2025-06-08 09:28:30+00:00
Great post. I'm fairly new to the AI pair programming thing (I've been using Aider), but with 20 years of coding behind me I can see where things are going. You're dead right in the conclusion about now being the time to adopt this stuff as part of your flow -- if you haven't already.

And regarding the HN post getting buried for a while there...[1] Somewhat ironic that an article about using AI to help write code would get canned for using an AI to help write it :D

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44214437
by skerit | 2025-06-08 09:29:18+00:00
> I remember meticulously using the photoshop slice tool

I made so many newsletters using that tool back in 2009. I remember a new designer was appalled I used it, and did not write the HTML code manually... 70% of our receivers were using Outlook and the horrible Word-based HTML renderer. I'm not writing anything manual for that piece of crap.
by Gareth321 | 2025-06-08 09:29:25+00:00
The problem is not saving my data, it's losing access to the email account. I have hundreds of accounts like trading, social media, forums, GitHub, media, etc, which require access to my email account for 2FA. If I lose access to my email accounts, I lose access to those accounts. Some might be recoverable with a lot of effort, but many would be gone forever.
by pja | 2025-06-08 09:30:53+00:00
Bus stops are often set too close by municipalities, but that’s driven by the lack of density in US housing. Density drives efficiency.

> Manhattan needs a serious demolishing to become sane

Ah yes, lets demolish one of the most economically productive regions of the USA, both in GDP / capita and GDP / km^2 in order to make it easier for people to drive through it.

Listen to yourself, this is deranged.
by kashunstva | 2025-06-08 09:32:04+00:00
If Taihuttu is this concerned about the security of his family and assets, then why would he want to bait would-be attackers by disseminating his family’s whereabouts so flagrantly? He turns his plans, whatever their technical and safety merits into some kind of theatre. It would seem that their needs for publicity outweigh that of safety.
by yogoism | 2025-06-08 09:32:39+00:00
That's a great insight, Paul. As someone who has been researching the data annotation space, your perspective really resonates.

I completely agree that the first-hand, contextual information you get from actual users is something an external firm can never replicate. It seems like the most effective and efficient way to spin the data flywheel at high velocity.

This leads me to a question I've been struggling to understand: If this approach is so powerful, why do you think even companies with the vast resources of Big Tech still rely on what seems to be a riskier path—using external human evaluators—instead of fully building this feedback loop in-house?

I feel like I'm missing a key piece of the puzzle. I would be very interested to hear if you have any thoughts on this.
by smcin | 2025-06-08 09:33:03+00:00
hoseyor wrote multiple interesting comments on this thread that seem to have gotten shadowbanned. (I didn't flag or ban them, this was hours ago).

(@hoseyor if you could repost more toned-down soberly-worded versions of those comments, without directly accusing multiple prominent tech companies of fraud, I think you'd get more traction.)
by easyThrowaway | 2025-06-08 09:34:59+00:00
I wonder why they were never able to replicate the same level of "virtualization" they managed with Windows 3.11 / Dos while running win9x-based OSes - like mounting a folder as the root drive or a cd rom drive. I guess at that point it would become simply a clone of the wine environment while using the original os binaries instead?
by yreg | 2025-06-08 09:35:53+00:00
"How many man-years did it take to write QuickDraw?", the Byte magazine reporter asked Steve.

Steve turned to look at Bill. "Bill, how long did you spend writing Quickdraw?"

"Well, I worked on it on and off for four years", Bill replied.

Steve paused for a beat and then turned back to the Byte reporter. "Twenty-four man-years. We invested twenty-four man-years in QuickDraw."

Obviously, Steve figured that one Atkinson year equaled six man years, which may have been a modest estimate.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Mythical_Man_Year.txt
by gregjor | 2025-06-08 09:36:06+00:00
I agree that I prefer less surveillance. But I have little sympathy for people who break the law and put others at risk. We all lose some freedom because of a relative few who put their “rights” above the public good.

Rather than rampant surveillance I would support confiscating the car and cancelling the license of reckless drivers on the second offense, and DUIs on the first offense.
by fzeroracer | 2025-06-08 09:37:45+00:00
I wouldn't particularly say 'extensive coverage'. It's mostly the publications sitting on the far left side of things (by American standards). Publications closer to the center tend to downplay the stories immensely (focusing on finding a way to highlight that they're illegal, theorizing about crimes they did, ignoring the fundamental rights of the country etc) and anything on the right is either outright ignoring it or calling it a good thing.

Most of the coverage I've seen come out of these stories has been on social media which bubble up some of the local news stations and papers.
by ashishb | 2025-06-08 09:38:21+00:00
> Well, at least I've learned not to bet against the cheaper way of doing something. If the Play Store is too expensive to list in, F-droid will thrive.

F-droid has nowhere near the reach of the Play Store. You can't tell your non-geeky friends to install F-droid to install apps from F-droid.
by gf000 | 2025-06-08 09:40:47+00:00
> If Nixpkgs is the default and alternatives require additional research and effort then for most users it _is_ Nix.

This is not what parent commenter is getting at. Nix itself is a deterministic build tool. There is also a package manager built on top which uses a large collection of nix files to describe each package - this is nixpkgs.

They use the same primitives, but the same way you don't just yolo your node/rust etc build versions to whatever your OS comes with and use a lock file, you also want to have more control over the exact versions and thus may use something other than what nixpkgs packages. Especially that it makes it easy to override any property of your dependencies, unlike any other tool out there.
by kreyenborgi | 2025-06-08 09:40:50+00:00
I use gptel in emacs, and keep around some of the chats and such as notes, along with my regular notes, it's all org-mode. I already used to keep around snippets copy-pasted from the web. This is knowledge management in the age of AI (except it works, it's useful and mundane and so I guess it's no longer AI, maybe I have to start using MCP agents or whatever the next partially-there thing is to be AI)
by gregjor | 2025-06-08 09:42:09+00:00
Been to multiple Don Quijote stores many times, never seen such a sign or had anyone ask for my passport unless I applied for the VAT refund. Possibly a bad translation. Photo or I won’t believe it.

Edit: Japan (like many other countries) requires everyone to carry official ID at all times. Japanese have government ID cards. For foreigners that means your passport. Americans find that requirement off-putting because we don’t (yet) have to “show our papers” to police on demand.

I travel a lot. Only had immigration or customs ask anything in the USA (my native country), Canada (had my young son with me so understandable), UK multiple times. Never anywhere in Asia, and I live in SE Asia. It mainly comes down to appearance and attitude and the mood of the officer at the moment, hard to extrapolate to a national or ethnic tendency from a few anecdotes.

I’ve never had Thai immigration hassle me but I’ve seen them take young people who look rough aside, maybe to check for drugs, probably to make sure they had sufficient funds and an onward/return ticket. Asian cultures tend to more formality and higher expectations of appearance in public, so foreigners may call negative attention to themselves with their clothes or tattoos, and their entitled attitude.

Japan may feel closed off and xenophobic. On the other hand they don’t have foreigners marginalized into ghettos or rounded up by ICE. The USA and Canada have no ethnic identity, whereas Japan and other Asian countries do. Unfamiliar perhaps but I don’t interpret that as racist or hostile.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-08 09:42:16+00:00
I was a Master Navigator of the Meat Mysterious[0].

My magnum opus was a Flash site, that looked like a blank black page, and revealed the page structure, in a fuzzed circle, as you moused around. It was, literally, a flashlight in a dark room interface.

You could probably do the same, these days, with CSS. Back then, you needed Flash.

The space must flow…

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
by ThinkBeat | 2025-06-08 09:42:41+00:00
A first step to mitigate some of the risk would be to move the system to a virtualised system. This could be in each location or more centralised which would make the maintenance of the fleet of old computers easier.

Floppy can be copied to hard disks and will not have to worry about failures of mechanical parts involved in reading floppy drives.

Developing a brand new system would take quit a lot of time. As all systems du if they need extreme uptime. Starting that effort now is ok but I would guess it would be take at leas a couple of years. Significant work would have to understand in detail what the current system does and does not do, and then map out what a system should do.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-06-08 09:45:36+00:00
Yeah I get almost no login attempts on ports other than 22. Should I even care about attempts on 22 though? They bounce off, and fail2ban blocks the IP after a while.

I sometimes think of putting my private servers on completely random IP addresses drawn from /64 IPv6 ranges. It should be near-impossible to find those by address scanning, unless I'm overlooking something dumb. Am I? It wouldn't surprise me.
by wry_durian | 2025-06-08 09:46:49+00:00
Cycle time is imprtant, but three problems with it. First, it (like many other factors) is just a proxy variable in the total cost equation. Second, cycle time is a lagging indicator so it gives you limited foresight into the systemic control levers at your disposal. And third, queue size plays a larger causal role in downstream economic problems with products. This is why you should always consider your queue size before your cycle time.

I didn't see these talked about much in the paper at a glance. Highly recommend Reinertsen's The Principles of Product Development Flow here instead.
by gorgoiler | 2025-06-08 09:47:02+00:00
Buses are just… bouncier!

You’re absolutely right about potholes, technically, but my point was more about how people work not the immediate technical difference between road and rail.

If you have a system that requires 100% upkeep in order to function at all — the rails of a tram system — then it receives nothing less than the complete maintenance it demands.

The social and technical economics of roads, on the other hand, practically ensures that they’re only ever barely maintained to the lowest possible standard people (and air suspension) will tolerate.

Trams, the divas that they are, will tolerate nothing less than perfection!
by 5mv2 | 2025-06-08 09:48:31+00:00
Thank you!

1. That would have been a great option had there been one close to the university! Proximity was a top criteria because commute is expensive money-wise and time-wise. Also, weirdly enough I think I was much safer in this illegal spot than in a regular camping where traffic makes robberies more likely.

2. I like how you think because I happen to have befriended a research student who did just that! I didn't envy him one bit thought because he had no windows while my tent view was magnificent. And then summer came and I would have given anything to have his AC!
by movedx | 2025-06-08 09:50:24+00:00
Absolutely everything they said makes sense.

Everything you're saying is complete overkill, even in most Enterprise environments. We're talking about a home server here for hosting eBooks and paperless documents, and you're implying Kubernetes clusters are easy enough to run and so are a good solution here. Madness.

> I have news for you.

I have news for _you_: using Docker to run anything that doesn't need it (i.e. it's the only officially supported deployment mechanism) is like putting your groceries into the boot of your car, then driving your car onto the tray of a truck, then driving the truck home because "it abstracts the manual transmission of the car with the automatic transmission of the truck". Good job, you're really showing us who's boss there.

Operating systems are easy. You've just fallen for the Kool Aid.
by yusina | 2025-06-08 09:51:11+00:00
I'm not sure where all your mentions of the Bay Area come from. I'm writing from a European perspective, and in all major European cities you find homelessness prevalent. And it's not pretty.

A millionaire in the Swiss forest is not homeless. Choosing to live in a tent is not homelessness. To me, the term "homeless" implies a lack of alternatives. As soon as it's a choice, to see romantic sunrises or fall asleep to ocean waves or whatever, that is, if calles "homeless", to me, a misuse of the term. It's a nice life, I've done it too and loved it, but I'd not start to call it "homelessness" and place myself into the same category as the poor souls sleeping under a bridge.

Of course it's a spectrum. Some folks have been forced out of their home and are living out of a car while finding a new place. That's homelessness. For some of those, it's temporary. For others, it's a spiral into misery, next is to lose the job, having a mental health issue, soon the car breaks down, and eventually they are sleeping under a bridge. Insubstantial of whether it's in SF, Berlin, Sao Paulo or Tokyo. Similarities to a concious choice are only superficial. Once it's a choice, it's outside the spectrum and is doing the fight against homelessness a disservice.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-08 09:51:32+00:00
Algorithms made to imitate humans exhibit human weaknesses. What a terrible unexpected outcome! I love how the article is written but it is literally proving the opposite of it's premise.

Playbook:

1) you want to "disprove" some version of AI. Doesn't really matter what.

Take a problem humans face. For example, an almost total inability to follow simple rules for a long time to make a calculation. It's almost impossible to get a human to do this.

Check if AI algorithms, which are algorithms made to imitate humans have this same problem. Now of course, in practice if they indeed have that problem, that is actually a success: algorithm made to imitate humans ... imitates humans succesfully, strengths and weaknesses! But of course, if you find it, you describe it as total proof this algorithm is worthless.

An easy source for these problems is of course computers. Anything humans use computers for ... it's because humans suck at doing it themselves. Keeping track of history or facts. Exact calculation. Symbolic computation. Logic (ie. exactly correct answers). More generally math and even positive sciences as a whole are an endless supply of such problems.

2) you want to "prove" some version of AI.

Find something humans are good at. Point out AIs do this. Humans are social animals so how about influencing other humans? From convincing your boss, or on a larger scale using a social network to win an election, right up to actual seduction. Use what humans use to do it, of course (ie. be inaccurate, lie, ...)

Point out what a great success this is. How magical it is that machines can now do this.

3) you want to make a boatload of money

Take something humans are good at but hate, have an AI do it for money.
Show HN: CrisisNote – Secure Notes and Digital Wills with Smart Access
by roguedev | 2025-06-08 09:52:53+00:00
Hi HN,

Happy to launch CrisisNote – a secure way to store sensitive information (like passwords, final wishes, or critical instructions) and share it only when it matters.

Secure Notes & Digital Wills with Smart Access Your secrets, safely stored. Share only when it counts.

Key Features: Easy, encrypted storage

MultiShare: Split access across trusted people (like a secret-sharing puzzle)

One-time or crisis-triggered sharing

Peace of mind for you and your loved ones

It’s designed for scenarios where you want to ensure important info gets to the right people only if something happens to you, without relying on lawyers or big institutions.

Would love feedback from the HN community:

Are there edge cases or threat models we should be thinking about?

How would you want to use something like this?

Does the “crisis sharing” concept make sense to you?

Thanks for checking it out!

https://crisisnote.com