MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ashishb | 2025-06-08 07:09:07+00:00
> It's really copied from Apple's anti-consumer measures, which seem to be targeting free software

AFAIK, Apple also charges $99 per year to maintain a developer account on the Apple App Store, effectively shutting out any hobbyists who would like to provide their app with no monetization.

> the only options for a simple tool are either ad-laden or have recurring expenses.

Unfortunately, that indeed seems to be happening.
by bowsamic | 2025-06-08 07:10:54+00:00
Yes that was my thought exactly. The original article did not address by far my biggest concern which is skill degradation. It happens rapidly and drastically: I know developers with 10+ years experience who now feel useless without the LLM to write their emails and code for them.

My wife is pregnant and the education stuff terrifies me. I may have to make huge sacrifices to avoid schools that use LLMs. Hopefully by the time he’s school age people will have realised that relying entirely on LLMs will degrade your thinking, reading, and writing, but I’m not confident
by delusional | 2025-06-08 07:11:04+00:00
Not American.

> ~40% of the country doesn't see that as corruption in any way, shape, or form.

I'm definitely in agreement with the 60 percent. This should be unthinkable and political suicide. Openly speculating on if you can use the government as personal retaliation is absolutely undemocratic.

So why is it so hard for me to care in this case? Because Elon Musk has used the government in the exact same way. He just got done cancelling random contracts he didn't like. He just circumvented democracy to play his little doge game.

It is really hard to care about cheating when it happens to a cheater. Disgust at this move against SpaceX or Tesla has to start with consequences for Elon. If this is wrong, then Elon must be jailed.
by ofalkaed | 2025-06-08 07:11:38+00:00
I have already asked for that post to be downvoted into oblivion, see my reply to myself. I despise most side-tracks in internet discussion, they have a tendency to become the main track and uninteresting. I don't expect or want HN to be purely tech but I would love it if people would not use upvoting as a like/agreement and use it to make sure anyone who opens a thread does not have to wade through irrelevant nonsense, pedantry, virtue signalling, etc before getting to the discussion of the thread's topic.

People complain about the lack of humor here but it served a purpose.
by flomo | 2025-06-08 07:11:54+00:00
Well the truth is Microsoft branding is totally incoherent, and MSN has been anything and everything MS thought they could put their name on. Like there is a cable network called MSNBC which now has nothing to do with either MS or NBC.

Originally, like Bill Gates wrote about it in a book completely ignoring web browsers, MSN was a proprietary Windows client like AOL. Later on it became a 'web portal' like Yahoo. Then a 'content' site. At one point, it was even a social media site. Somehow, when my parents got cable internet, they were funneled into a @MSN.com account. It had this fake "dialer" which pretended it was "connecting", even though the internet was always on.

For many years since, MSN has just been the tabloid news to remind you that Microsoft shit is low class.
by stavros | 2025-06-08 07:12:38+00:00
I feel like this article makes the same tired point I see every time a new technology comes alone: "but if we don't know how to shoe our own horses any more because we got cars, soon nobody will know how to shoe horses!"

Yeah. And that's OK. Because nobody will need to shoe horses any more!

If I forget how to write tests, what's the problem? It means that I never need to write tests any more. If I do need to write tests, for some reason (maybe because the LLM is bad at it) then I won't forget how to!

That's how atrophy works: the skills that atrophy are, by definition, the ones you no longer need at all, and this argument does this sleight of hand where it goes "don't let the skills you don't need atrophy, because you need them!".

Well, do I need them, or not?
by tw04 | 2025-06-08 07:12:40+00:00
> instead of "let's see if they can drive from point A to point B first". We are now at the point where they can do that, somewhat reliably,

No, we really aren’t. Let me know when any of those systems can get me from Souix falls South Dakota to Thunder Bay Ontario without multiple disengagements and we can talk.

Based on what I’ve seen we’re still about 10 years away best case scenario and more likely 20+ assuming society doesn’t collapse first.

I think people in the Bay Area commenting on how well self driving works need to visit middle America and find out just how bad and dangerous it still is…
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-08 07:13:07+00:00
Ah yes, the <BLINK><MARQUEE><H1> to tell everyone the website made in notepad in 1997 was still under construction in bold, Comic Sans, and fuchsia on a yellow background. Don't forget the lots of NBSPs so that the message scrolls off for even a longer period of time and the reader has to wait for their computer to shift the message back into the viewport.

What's missing about the retro experience is browsers and computers were slower back that then, so large marquees would blink and scroll with visible tearing.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing
by 3036e4 | 2025-06-08 07:14:12+00:00
I use rsync.net for borg backups. They create daily ZFS snapshots that are read-only to the user, specifically for ransomware protection.

But this was a good reminder I should probably figure out some good way to monitor my borg repo for unintended changes. Having snapshots to roll back to is only useful if a problem is detected in time.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-06-08 07:14:48+00:00
> Steel wheel on steel rail is low friction, and you get most of the energy used to go uphill back when you go downhill.

If you were going up and down hills, would you still use steel wheel in steel rail unless you had some sort of cable to work with? I always thought the Muni did relatively level routes for that reason? The Lausanne m2 for example uses rubber (well, ideally you’d be able to just balance the train going up with the train going down, but that only works for simple inclines with limited stops). Actually, a battery powered rubber wheeled tram service on some sort of steep incline like SF’s cable car routes could get some wicked regen going down.

Even if level, they could still get some regen from making stops.
by seadan83 | 2025-06-08 07:14:49+00:00
IDK, my impression of the self driving car discussion 5 years ago were more akin to: "let us start designing AI only roads, get ready for no human drivers - they won't exist in 5 years! AI only cars will be so great, it will solve traffic congestion, pollution, noise, traffic deaths, and think of all the free time while you are lounging around in your commute!" Seemed like a conversation dominated by people gearing up for that VC money. Meanwhile, actual solutions for any of those problems seem to be languishing.. My perspective; was a lot of distraction away from real solutions, lead by a tech-maximalist group that had a LOT to gain by hype.

> I feel (hah!) that we've reached a point where instead of focusing on objective things that the LLM-based systems can do, we are wasting energy and "ink" on how they make us feel.

> best to focus on objective things that the systems can do today, with maybe a look forward so we can prepare for things they'll be able to do "tomorrow".

These two together.. Reminds me of this type of sentiment that seems somewhat common here: 'I feel that AI is growing exponentially, therefore we should stop learning to code - because AI will start writing all code soon!'

I think this points to where a lot of skepticism comes from. From the perspective of: the AI barely does a fraction of what is claimed, has grown even less a fraction of what is claimed, yet these 'feelings' that AI will change everything is driving tons of false predictions. IMO, those feelings are driving VC money to damn MBAs that are plastering AI on everything because they are chasing money.

There is an irony here though too, skepticism simply is a lack of belief without evidence. Belief without evidence is irrational. The skeptics are the ones simply asking for evidence, not feelings.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-08 07:14:52+00:00
I think it's more than essential NPCs though. Already in Oblivion those couldn't die anyway (Morrowind was the last TES game where you could get locked out of finishing the main story if you killed the wrong NPC).

But fully emergent behavior would likely destroy some player's experience in other ways - towns without shopkeeps, most quests ruined, little staged moments going away, etc.
by renewiltord | 2025-06-08 07:15:36+00:00
It's hard for me to take all of this seriously because I sat and listened to how Google Search was going to ruin everyone's mind and without the skill of manual research we'd all be turned into imbeciles.

Back then we didn't have this particular modern meme of "extremely dangerous" for something like a syntactically inaccurate file so I suppose no one said it was "extremely dangerous" for people to copy-paste code from searches. SQL injection was fairly novel at the time but as that came up people would mock copy-paste scripters rather than act as if man's extinction was at hand from a vibe-coded single-page app that tells you which Pokemon you are.

Yes, yes, it's different now. But it was different then too. Search engines changed the stuff you could find from carefully curated Usenet channels to any rando with a blog. I suppose if we had modern sensibilities we'd say that was "extremely dangerous" too.

I've been writing code for decades, and it's true that I've seen nothing like this technology. It's true that it's a game changer and that with slightly different rates of change could have already lead to human extinction. But that doesn't mean that I have to lay any more credence to the guys who have, since time immemorial, said "this new thing makes something easier; it will make us worse because we do not slog as much".
by sunshine-o | 2025-06-08 07:16:20+00:00
I would agree with that.

Docker has a lot of use cases but self hosting is not one of them.

When self-hosting you wanna think long term and the fact you will loose interest in the fiddling after a while. So sticking with software packaged in a good distribution is probably the way to go. This is the forgotten added value of a Linux or BSD distribution, a coherent system with maintenance and an easy upgrade path.

The exception are things like Umbrel which I would say use docker as their package manager and maintain everything, so it is ok.
by M4v3R | 2025-06-08 07:17:15+00:00
> My dopamine comes not from tweaking someone (something) else’s code to make something barely work. My dopamine comes from the fact that I solved some intricate, non-trivial problem.

If that’s your thing that’s perfectly fine and I can understand how LLMs take away this fun challenge from you.

But for many - myself included - it’s not necessarily the process itself that’s rewarding - it’s the outcome. I love creating things that work and are useful. The particular process that was used to create the thing is secondary to me, and if I discover a tool that will enable me to skip some steps to achieve the outcome I will pick it any time of the day over doing things manually.
by philosophty | 2025-06-08 07:17:18+00:00
The elephant in the room here is that, like so many issues, AI has become political for some people. In this case your "AI skeptic friends" are your "defund the police" and "abolish ICE" friends. For 95% of people AI is just a new technology to be loved and feared.

There are some real technical debates to be had about the capabilities of LLMs and agents but that's not what's driving this "AI skepticism" at all. The "AI skeptics" decided AI is bad in advance and then came up with reasons, the weakest of which is the claim that it's all or mostly hype.
by whstl | 2025-06-08 07:17:27+00:00
Meta or not, people don't like being fired or being threatened to. Period. They like the comfy job.

But don't ask me why. I'm a troublemaker. I bring up this stuff, I talk to CEOs, I refuse to do stuff that breaks the GDPR or other laws, I got people to scream at me for being stubborn. Other people aren't like that.
by jbk | 2025-06-08 07:18:23+00:00
And all this article is "just" about the building of the Java/Kotlin application :)

Native NDK is another can of worms, with updates linked to SDK or sometimes not, unclear documentation about device and API compatibilities, compiler behavior changes and other requirements (like the 16K one) that impact so many 3rd party native libraries.

But, of course, the rules on the uploading and the changes of the Console, that changes so often is what makes it painful.

The absolute nightmare is about giving Google the root signing key of your application, the unfinished business about app bundles (which should reduce the size of the downloaded app, and more often than not, make it bigger), the changes in compliance, letters to sign for different countries, the compatibility for Google form factors (XR, TV, Auto, Automotive), Inline installs and other Teacher Progams, Play for family and so on.

All of this changes non-stop and is very poorly documented :)

At least, the Play Store is still GPLv2 compatible, so for now, we're saved (VLC)
by gblargg | 2025-06-08 07:18:46+00:00
The key seems to have been recognizing the utility of the region concept and making it fundamental to the QuickDraw API (and the clever representation that made finding the main rectangular portions easy). This insulated QuickDraw from the complexity of windowing system operations. Once you go implementing region operations you probably find that it's fairly efficient to work out the major rectangular regions so you can use normal graphics operations on them, leaving small areas that can just be done inefficiently as a bunch of tiny rectangles. All this work for clipped graphics was applicable to far more than just redrawing obscured window content, so it could justify more engineering time to polishing it. Given how easy they were to use, more things could leverage the optimization (e.g. using them to redraw only the dirty region when a window was uncovered).
by yusina | 2025-06-08 07:18:47+00:00
That was surely a great experiment. But it's very different from actual homelessness. I would have appreciated if the author had acknowledged that more. It's closer to a backpacker-in-a-tent-in-the-mountains experience than homelessness. In the latter, the living-in-a-tent is just a comparatively minor aspect of the experience.

This was a choice (essentially to save money) and the author had multiple fallback plans. Real homelessness is born out of desperation and lack of alternatives. Tragedies of mental health issues, abuse, severe financial distress, no savings, debt, warrants. No nice shower at the gym, no locker to keep a laptop and two suits. The constant fear of not just the police but also of getting robbed by another homeless, likely after something to sell for drugs. That's very different from anytime being able to crash on somebody's sofa to save on rent so you can earlier "afford to build companies".

We can even see it in one of the later paragraphs where potential spots in the bay area are evaluated. The local homeless should not be close. Oh, they shouldn't? That gives you an idea of the conditions actual homeless folks need to live under.
by tzs | 2025-06-08 07:18:54+00:00
It looks like Trump has decided to approach deficit reduction like he approaches climate change: claim that it is a hoax that his policies will increase the deficit [1].

According to that document he actually is cutting the deficit by $1.407 trillion with the One Big Beautiful Bill, and with the tariffs and deregulation the deficit will be cut by least $6.6 trillion over the next 10 years.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/mythbuster-the-o...
Show HN: upagent – monitoring SaaS for endpoints and scheduled tasks
by aviadhaham | 2025-06-08 07:18:55+00:00
Hey HN!

We're super excited to share upagent (https://upagent.io) with you all finally!

After years of dealing with the stress of not knowing when something broke in our apps (usually at the worst possible time!), we realized there had to be a better way to keep an eye on endpoints and scheduled tasks. We wanted a simple, reliable tool that didn't drown us in false alarms or complicated dashboards.

upagent is designed to be user-friendly from the ground up - easy to set up, with instant, actionable alerts. We also monitor scheduled tasks, which are often overlooked but critical to keeping things running smoothly.

This is only the beginning - we're continuously building new capabilities to make upagent even more indispensable for your monitoring needs. The journey has just begun, and we're excited to roll out more features that'll help you keep your systems running smoothly.

ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/upagent
by JustinCS | 2025-06-08 07:18:56+00:00
I agree with this, it reminds me of how most people don't need to write assembly anymore, but it still helps with certain projects to have that understanding of what's going on.

So some people do develop that deeper understanding, when it's helpful, and they go on to build great things. I don't see why this will be different with AI. Some will rely too much on AI and possibly create slop, and others will learn more deeply and get better results. This is not a new phenomenon.
by emptysongglass | 2025-06-08 07:19:06+00:00
Your government recently mandated technical capabilities for breaking encryption. Australians let that fly. There is nothing special about Australians, just as there is also nothing special about the British people who also did nothing when the UK mandated technical capabilities to break encryption.

One could even make the argument that the people of these two countries are even more pliant than Americans when they enable a key capability for totalitarian surveillance states without a blink.
by grues-dinner | 2025-06-08 07:19:43+00:00
> The Sun delivers ~170,000 TWh per year.

It delivers 170,000 TWh per hour (i.e. 170,000 TW)!

3.14 * (6378km)^2 * 1300W/m^2 = 166PW

It's a ludicrous amount of energy - roughly the entire human annual energy usage is delivered every 70 minutes. The whole problem of AGW is that even a tiny modulation in absolute terms of things that affect the steady state (i.e. greenhouse gases) can have substantial effects. But it's also, presumably, going to be key to fixing the problem, if we do fix it.
by godelski | 2025-06-08 07:22:10+00:00
To all the people that are confused by "skeptics":

Yes, LLMs are powerful tools Yes, LLMs can be useful

I think "skeptic" is the wrong word for most of us. There's certainly people that will just deny that LLMs and ML can do anything useful. But I don't think that's the majority of the "skeptic" crowd.

I'm an ML[0] researcher. Of course I love these machines! And you know what? I really fucking want to build some god damn AGI.

Maybe all you hype people are all right and LLMs will get us there. If you're right, you got all the money you could ask for and then several times more. You got some of the biggest companies in the world dumping billions in, competing, with huge infrastructures, and dumping money into a few dozen startups who are trying to do the same. If scale is all you need, then you're going to get there even without another 7 trillion dollars. I'm not saying "Don't fund LLM research" nor am I saying "Don't fund scaling research". Please do fund those things.

But be honest, money isn't your bottleneck.

Hell, what if you're right but other ways are faster?! We miss those opportunities and lose the race? For what?! If more efficient opportunities are out there (and I really do believe there are), who do you think is going to find it? It's literally betting on ITER[1] and giving essentially nothing to other fusion attempts. Except ITER is a international effort and we're a hell of a lot more confident it'll work.

But what if you're wrong? Why stop people like me from looking at other avenues? Why put all your eggs in one basket? Why dismiss us when we point out issues? We're engineers here, we fucking love to point out issues! IT IS OUR JOB! Because you must find issues if you're going to fix them. We could have hedged our bets a little and pivot fast, hopefully seamlessly enough that it doesn't even look like a hiccup. Nobody in this side of this is asking for half as much as what the next hip new LLM startup is. I don't know if it is even a penny on the dollar!

Are you really gonna bet that the golden goose is always going to be laying golden eggs? Are you really going to make a situation where if it stops you just go broke?

IDK, it just all seems needlessly risky to me. Maybe I just don't get it because I'm not a high stakes gambler.

[0] Funny... only a few years ago the litmus test was "If someone says 'AI' they're selling you something. If they say 'ML' they're probably not"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
by renewiltord | 2025-06-08 07:22:35+00:00
In my experience, both breadth and depth. Not only do the STEM guys know more humanities material, they comprehend it better. I can only conclude that this is because of The Sort because '90s philosophy majors and so on are still quite smart and capable people. The ability to turn skill into money contingent on credentials has turned the Humanities into a population of people too bumbling to do anything else.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-06-08 07:24:44+00:00
The most effective way Google uses to keep free software out of the Play store is the search function and description rules.

You can put free, user-friendly software into the Play store. The Play store shows whether software contains ads or in-app purchases. But the Play store doesn't let you search by those criteria, and IIRC developers used to be prohibited from clearly advertising the main distinguishing quality of their software in the title (couldn't find the rule in the policies anymore so this may have changed).

Likewise, users can't search or filter for app size, which not only affects how much space the app eats on your phone but is also a great proxy for how much crap is bundled inside it.

So in effect, the good apps will be impossible to find amid the sea of SEO-optimized and/or paid placements of ads that can afford to do that because they are full of ads.
by gblargg | 2025-06-08 07:24:58+00:00
And even ignoring memory requirements, an uncompressed bitmap mask would have taken a lot of time to process (especially considering when combining regions where one was not a multiple of 8 pixels shifted with respect to the other. With just the horizontal coordinates of inversions, it takes the same amount of time for a region 8 pixels wide and 800 pixels wide, given the same shape complexity.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-08 07:26:24+00:00
Plastics can be made from pretty much any plant-derived oil. Heat some vegetable oil, and voila, you have essentially plastic gunk and toxic side-products. The root problem is we have corrupt governments around the world in the pockets of big oil who don't care about the survival of the species or the planet long term so long as they advance short-term profits and expanding demand for oil.
by ashishb | 2025-06-08 07:27:42+00:00
> Native NDK is another can of worms

Thanks for sharing this. I agree with your sentiment as one of my Android apps use vox SDK. However, my experience is very limited compared to you to write about it.

> The absolute nightmare is about giving Google the root signing key of your application,

I haven't and I don't think it is required.

> the unfinished business about app bundles

Can you elaborate what's unfinished here?

> the compatibility for Google form factors (XR, TV, Auto, Automotive),

My app is disabled for Android Auto in production. If I re-enable, then it gets rejected during the review. I have never been able to precise fix the issue they are raising to let me re-enable Android Auto.

For Chromecast (TV), I have to run a web server inside the app to serve the media.