MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PicassoCTs | 2025-06-26 09:25:29+00:00
They tried that - especially companies like BMW - and they got no permits, because the state run power company wants money for providing nothing.

The problem is also that thieves steal the copper cables, even for micro-grids. You can not tech your way out of social/cultural problems.

Socialist cultural rot is real and the only way out is to eradicate cultures that encourage that mindset. All the ingredients are there- but the people are still set on telling themselves that robin hood story that destroys everything.
by anovikov | 2025-06-26 09:25:39+00:00
Perhaps it was indeed my personal thing. Maybe it's just that i'm introverted? But i'd hate to be bugged when in a cafe and if it ever happened (it never did), i'd probably stop visiting that particular place seeing it as a magnet for obnoxious types.

And yes, i don't do any networking at all, literally never met any person i did business with, in 25 years of career.

Or maybe, that is my European perspective? Because i probably never seen people doing that. There is an old observation that "networking" is American only cultural phenomenon and it doesn't exist in Europe - maybe it's one of the ways it manifests itself?
by noirscape | 2025-06-26 09:27:17+00:00
Another thing worth noting is that out of GAFAM, Microsoft is the only one that really has vertical business integration that's worth anything, which is why they're the default for so many companies.

AWS is just a hyperscaler, they don't do the full business stack outside that. Google has a full business stack (read: office tools, email, hyperscaling) as an option, but the experience is miserable because Google constantly deprecates and changes things on a dime, which is why most people avoid them. Killedbygoogle stuff doesn't just apply to their non-paying customers, it applies to their paying customers as well. The moment you try to build anything outside of Gmail or Google Docs, you're subject to their whims and depreciation policies. (Case in point; Google has been sending me scare mails that they're going to kill an OAuth service I set up ages ago because it had no logins for 6 months. They just randomly decided it and gave me a month to deal with it. Their solution isn't just "hey, are you still active" - I am, that's easy to see - it's "just do a login and make sure you do a login every 6 months". If it was just a checkbox in their admin panel, I'd probably have done it without a second thought, but I really cba to figure out what the OAuth service was for, so I guess that OAuth service is gonna bite it now. Probably a selfhosted git forge or something that offered easy Google logins?)

Apple has everything except for hyperscaling, but it's all aimed at normal users, not corporations; I'm pretty sure they don't even have a business version of iCloud? The closest is that they offer MDM and bulk buying individual plans afaik. (Facebook isn't in this industry at all.)

Microsoft is the only one who offers a full kit and the promise that they won't pull the rug out under you. They're also the only one that really tries to take legal compliance and depreciation timelines/upgrade paths seriously. (AWS and Google just pass it off onto the customer with a "figure it out", while MS has loads of infrastructure for both of these.)

It's a hard business to replace if Microsoft goes bad with O365/Azure.
by chrisldgk | 2025-06-26 09:27:20+00:00
As an indie hacker using better auth, I’m somewhat skeptical of there now being VC money in the mix (enshittifcation is a process that starts with VC money). But from my time working for enterprise, they often prefer OSS products that are well-funded for their stacks so they can rely on them for a longer amount of time. So I’d suppose this would help in that regard. Also having a cloak-like SaaS solution might be nice for those who don’t want to host their own infra, though I‘d advise against relying on third parties for auth.
by trinix912 | 2025-06-26 09:28:10+00:00
Very valid points regarding handing your phone to someone. I too don't think the whole lockbox thing is a good solution.

There are places/"events" in Europe where people keep their phones off seemingly without problem (ex. going to the church). But they still have their phones so if there's an emergency, one can just go out the building and pick up that call.

The problem with events is lots of times, people don't go to them to knit together, they go there for networking, so then getting someone's LinkedIn/Instagram/Etsy/... is (unfortunately) the end goal. If we could change that, I think most people wouldn't even need to take their phones out. Perhaps an after-meetup list of all attendees with their LinkedIn/socials? But then again we're at the privacy concerns.
by stavros | 2025-06-26 09:29:30+00:00
I don't understand the premise. If I trust someone to write good code, I learned to trust them because their code works well, not because I have a theory of mind for them that "produces good code" a priori.

If someone uses an LLM and produces bug-free code, I'll trust them. If someone uses an LLM and produces buggy code, I won't trust them. How is this different from when they were only using their brain to produce the code?
by petercooper | 2025-06-26 09:30:09+00:00
The argument is totally sound for comparing lump sum versus regular donations, but if the option comes down to $200 lump sum vs nothing, the lump sum wins.

95% of my donations to various things are lump sums as I've proven prone to losing track of subscriptions, so it's good to retain the option (as GNOME has). It can also be a lot simpler to make one-off donations as a company for accounting reasons.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-26 09:32:23+00:00
>Lots of budget PCs sold as new today use chips [...] from 5+ years ago.

Source? Links?

Plus, what does this have to do with Microsoft and Intel, what do HW and SW vendors have to do with a retailer selling you dated products? ?

If you buy a new iPhone 6 today and realize you don't get any more SW updates do you blame Apple?
by amelius | 2025-06-26 09:33:57+00:00
> I have worked on innumerable problems that you would call humble, but which I enjoyed and felt very good about because I sometimes could partially succeed. For example, ... [list of many problems] ... Plus all the “grander” problems of quantum theory.

I'm having difficulty understanding what is meant here. Does he intend to say that his student thinks quantum theory is a humble problem?
by ChrisNorstrom | 2025-06-26 09:34:16+00:00
I was part of the first generation Mozilla FireFox fan. Yep, I had the "Get FireFox" T-Shirt and everything. I came over from Netscape Navigator. After all these years honestly, good riddance. The glitches, the bugs, the crashes, the instability, and it took years or was it decades for them to make it so that extentions don't break on every update. Too little too late. There's no reason for me to go back. We already have the bad memories, and firefox comes with a lot of bad emotions for it to feel new and fresh again. Imagine Mozilla saying "Okay guys we redid FireFox again this time, do you want to try it?" NO.
by gwd | 2025-06-26 09:34:44+00:00
On the contrary. IANAL, but this is my understanding of the law (setting aside the "work for hire" thing for simplicity)

1. If you come up with something completely new, you are the sole copyright holder.

2. If you take someone else's copyrighted work and transform it, then both of you have a copyright on the derivative work.

So if you write a brand new comic book that includes Darth Vader, you can't sell that without Disney's permission [1]: they have a copyright on Darth Vader, and so your comic book is partly copyrighted by them. But at the same time, they can't sell it without your permission, because you have a copyright on the comic book too.

In the case of Midjourney outputs, my understanding of the current state of the law is this:

1. Only humans can create copyrights

2. So if Midjourney creates an entirely new image that's not derivative of anyone else's work (as defined by long-established copyright law on derivative works), then nobody owns the copyright, and it's in the public domain

3. If Midjourney creates an image that is derived from someone else's work (as defined by long established copyright law on derivative works), then only Disney has a copyright on that derivative work.

And so, in theory, Disney could distribute Darth Vader images you made with Midjourney, unless you can convince the court that you had enough creative influence over them to warrant a copyright.

[1] Yes of course fair use, trying to make a point here
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-06-26 09:35:06+00:00
While LLMs are really good at generating content, one of their key weaknesses is their (relative) inability to detect _missing_ content.

I'd argue that the most impactful software security bugs in the last couple of decades (Heartbleed etc) have been errors of omission, rather than errors of inclusion.

This means LLMs are:

1) producing lots more code to be audited

2) poor at auditing that code for the most impactful class of bugs

That feels like a dangerous combination.
by neilv | 2025-06-26 09:35:50+00:00
You could've figured out this one with basic familiarity with how graphs are represented, constructed, and navigated, and just working through it.

One way to often arrive at it is to just draw some graphs, on paper/whiteboard, and manually step through examples, pointing with your finger/pen, drawing changes, and sometimes drawing a table. You'll get a better idea of what has to happen, and what the opportunities are.

This sounds "Then draw the rest of the owl," but it can work, once you get immersed.

Then code it up. And when you spot a clever opportunity, and find the right language to document your solution, it can sound like a brilliant insight that you could just pull out of the air, because you are so knowledgeable and smart in general. When you actually had to work through that specific problem, to the point you understood it, like Feynman would want you to.

I think Feynman would tell us to work through problems. And that Feynman would really f-ing hate Leetcode performance art interviews (like he was dismayed when he found students who'd rote-memorize the things to say). Don't let Leetcode asshattery make you think you're "not good at" algorithms.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-26 09:37:37+00:00
It's not just redistribution, land is an already heavily overcommitted resource on Earth. China, for example, holds basically same amount of land as US, for its 4x population, and they house the people in things like dozens per each clusters of 50-story condominiums.

In places like that - that but not necessarily specifically China or Asia, local proprietors would head to forested mountains unfit for residences, and actively desertify it to put on PVs to collect incentives, if incentivized. The cost is externalized and paid collectively in such forms as raised atmospheric CO2 levels and micro disasters like mountain landslides.

Resilient solar-battery off/micro-grid is great if you live "by yourself" in relative sense and doing so would allow removal of electrical transmission lines with own costs and externalities, but it's far from panacea, if not opposite - it's a specific and somewhat radical solution to specific problems.

Now, as to whether such dystopian Bladerunner cities on Earth that has to rely on fission/fusion should exist in real life, it's probably deeply wrong that they do. But we're not cutting down Earth's population by 90% to fix that, and wealth redistribution is a minor part of the reason it would be wrong.
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-26 09:37:47+00:00
Also note that the article is about a guesthouse. It is a business and you pay for the service. It is not about getting inside random people homes because whoever is living there is too polite to kick you out.

The old lady in the article is so kind and polite because she respects you as a customer, takes pride in her job, and wants you to feel at ease. Service tradition really is something there. But don't get things wrong, it is still a business relationship.
by heisenbit | 2025-06-26 09:37:50+00:00
Bigger companies have either policies or have policies derived from regulatory demands on the software they are using for their products and services. Defects must be fixed within a certain timeframe. Software suppliers and external code must be vetted. Have such a widely used library explicitly not maintained in theory should make it a no-go area forcing either removal or ongoing explicit security audits - it may well be cheaper for any of them to take over the full maintenance load. Will be interesting to watch.

Also the not so relevant security bugs are not just costs to the developers but the library churn is also costing more and more users if the user is forced by policy to follow in a timely manner the latest versions in the name of "security".
by Aninay | 2025-06-26 09:39:09+00:00
Quality assurance (QA) is a strategic investment that protects brand reputation, accelerates delivery, and keeps compliance risk in check. For most software organizations, QA absorbs 15–25% of the total project budget – enough to demand the same rigor applied to funding for engineering, marketing, or sales. Why those funds are required, where they go, and how to manage them for maximum return.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-06-26 09:39:09+00:00
I used this a fair amount today. My first impressions are that it feels a bit worse to use than Claude Code (understandable given a day 1 product), and the lying progress indicator is extremely annoying.

It generates a bunch of fake activity indicators based on your prompt, then cycles through them on a timer. It has no bearing on the actual activity going on underneath.

It appears to be much slower than Claude Code, possibly due to being overloaded, but it feels like it thinks a lot more before beginning to suggest file edits. The permissions aren't as nice either. Where Claude Code suggests "allow uv run pytest without approval", Gemini suggests "allow uv run without approval", which is broader than I would like.
by skunkworker | 2025-06-26 09:39:53+00:00
You can get generic finasteride 1mg/180 (6 month) for as low as ~$17 if you go to a Kroger pharmacy and use their preferred savings program (I forget the name off hand) and no insurance coverage. Kroger discontinued their Kroger savings and now have a preferred card, which ended up being half the cost of the best deal on GoodRX.

Source: I picked up a 6 month supply last week.
by mishoo | 2025-06-26 09:40:01+00:00
In SLip: https://lisperator.net/s/slip/

SL-USER> (time (loop for i below (expt 10 8) count t)) Evaluation time: 19376ms 100000000 SL-USER> (time (loop for i below 1000000 count t)) Evaluation time: 272ms 1000000 SL-USER> (defun fib (n) (if (< n 2) n (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2))))) #'FIB SL-USER> (time (fib 32)) Evaluation time: 1601ms 2178309

These timings are in Firefox; Chromium is almost 2x faster. Also, it doesn't completely freeze the browser in the mean time (we have green threads).

I used to think it's quite slow, but somehow it's much faster than any other posted here. The only Lisp in browser I know to beat SLip (by a large margin) is JSCL, which compiles to JS.
by mjw1007 | 2025-06-26 09:41:45+00:00
It would be better if there was a layer of maintainers between the free software authors and the end users that could act as a buffer in cases like this, in particular to take care of security vulnerabilities that genuinely need dealing with quickly.

Of course that's exactly what traditional Linux distributions signed up to do.

Clearly many people have decided that they're better off without the distributions' packaging work. But maybe they should be thinking about how to get the "buffering" part back, and ideally make it work better than the distributions managed to.
by chithanh | 2025-06-26 09:42:11+00:00
> Anti-cheat today is a stop-gap measure at best. For various reasons such as improved OS security and security concerns with this software, ring zero anti-cheat won't be around forever.

I think that traditional kernel-level anticheat is going away. But the reason is more that when CrowdStrike caused mass outage, Microsoft stated that they want to provide standard interfaces for security sensors, and forbid kernel-level access otherwise (and anticheat can be considered a kind of security sensor too).

If these interfaces become standardized then Valve/Linux could in principle implement them too.
by DonHopkins | 2025-06-26 09:43:09+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779399

DonHopkins on Dec 13, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bill Atkinson: Reflections on the 40th anniversary...

I recently posted these thoughts about Bill Atkinson, and links to articles and a recent interview he gave to Brad Myers' user interface class at CMU:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726302

Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different drugs. The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.

"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...

https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...

Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:

https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...

Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:

https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...

Including polaroids of early Lisa development.

About PhotoCard:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160511170432/http://www.billat...

PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.

With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!
by nosianu | 2025-06-26 09:44:44+00:00
> Send a computer

Those age too. Especially out there without the earth's shields. If you make one that lives longer than a human it's already quite the feat, add only a bit more radiation, it only gets worse. Computers are much worse with failures than brains too.

The nice thing about biological systems is the self-assembly from tiny molecule parts. Worst case, you can create a closed system with birth/death renewal. For tech the machines that build the machines, and the machines that build or repair those in turn, will all have to be brought along too, or you need to have some impossibly tough requirements for the product to last.

We may need some similar automatic self-assembly for tech for such use cases. The whole spaceship and all its components will deteriorate too.

Even when we sent out ships to venture around the world they had to be able to do replacements for broken parts, like masts. We probably need that capability for space ships too, to stop at some asteroid and rebuild. But then you get the equivalent of the rocket equation: On the one hand, you need a lot of stuff to support that manufacturing, on the other hand, every item you add itself needs maintenance and rebuilding at some point. The way out is this molecular-level self-assembly. You throw a few tiny nano-machinery dust spores on an asteroid, and ten years later you grew some useful machinery...
by imiric | 2025-06-26 09:44:50+00:00
> I'm contemplating what exactly it means to "understand" the code though.

You can't seriously be questioning the meaning of "understand"... That's straight from Jordan B. Peterson's debate playbook which does nothing but devolve the conversation into absurdism, while making the person sound smart.

> I've set up a test cluster and am running a variety of testing scenarios on the new storage backend. So I understand it from a high level design, and from the testing of it.

You understand the system as well as any user could. Your tests only prove that the system works in specific scenarios, which may very well satisfy your requirements, but they absolutely do not prove that you understand how the system works internally, nor that the system is implemented with a reliable degree of accuracy, let alone that it's not misbehaving in subtle ways or that it doesn't have security issues that will only become apparent when exposed to the public. All of this might be acceptable for a tool that you built quickly which is only used by yourself or a few others, but it's far from acceptable for any type of production system.

> As someone who spent months tracking down subtle bugs in early Linux ZFS ports, I deeply understand that significant testing can trump human authorship and review of every line of code.

This doesn't match my (~20y) experience at all. Testing is important, particularly more advanced forms like fuzzing, but it's not a failproof method of surfacing bugs. Tests, like any code, can itself have bugs, it can test the wrong things, setup or mock the environment in ways not representative of real world usage, and most importantly, can only cover a limited amount of real world scenarios. Even in teams that take testing seriously, achieving 100% coverage, even for just statements, is seen as counterproductive and as a fool's errand. Deeply thorough testing as seen in projects like SQLite is practically unheard of. Most programmers I've worked with will often only write happy path tests, if they bother writing any at all.

Which isn't to say that code review is the solution. But a human reviewing the code, building a mental model of how it works and how it's not supposed to work, can often catch issues before the code is even deployed. It is at this point that writing a test is valuable, so that that specific scenario is cemented in the checks for the software, and regressions can be avoided.

So I wouldn't say that testing "trumps" reviews, but that it's not a reliable way of detecting bugs, and that both methods should ideally be used together.
by fodkodrasz | 2025-06-26 09:45:23+00:00
AUTOSAR xml-s are compile-time/integration time toolchain metadata mostly in my memory.

Yet this is off topic for the libxml funding/bug debate.

For embedded mission critical C libxml is surely unsuitable, just like 99.99% of the open source third party code. Also unneeded. If crashes the app on the developer machine or in the build pipeline if it runs out of memory? Who cares (from a safety point of view)? That has nothing to do with availability of safety critical systems in the car.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-06-26 09:45:34+00:00
>deployment

This is what Bell Labs mastered,the D in R&D was not the vague term "development"

I'm guessing the venture builders (what Eric Schmidt might deride as glue people) bit might stand in for the missing parts of Bell Labs that they cannot recreate (the essential "culture"* needed to offset otherwise inevitable academic/technical/ops silos)

*Tacit skills & outlooks passed down between, uh, generations of "program managers" (I can't recall the BL term for those guys who are themselves technical people, but that would be the closest real world equivalent today)?