MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oblio | 2025-06-25 21:21:32+00:00
> But also, giving admin rights to these Python tools all the time is annoying, and bad security practice (since they don't actually need to modify any system files).

You only need to do it once, when the symlink is created...

My point is that venvs are a code smell. Again, there's a reason basically no other programming language ecosystem needs them. They're there because in Python's history, that was the best idea they had 20 years ago (or whenever they were created), where they didn't even bother to do their homework and see what other ecosystems did to solve that specific problem.

> You say this like you think there's something difficult or onerous about using virtual environments. There really isn't.

They're a bad, leaky, abstraction. They provide value through a mechanism that is cumbersome and doesn't even work well compared to basically all competing solution used outside of Python.

* * *

Anyway, I've used Python for long enough and I've seem many variations of your argument often enough that I'm just... bored. Python packaging is a cluster** and it has sooo many braindead ideas (like setup.py having arbitrary code in it :-| ) that yes, with a ton of work invested in it, if you squint enough, it basically works.

But that doesn't excuse the ton of bad design around it.
by w-m | 2025-06-25 21:21:41+00:00
The documentation reads like it was written by a programmer who documented the different parameters to their implementation of a specific algorithm. Now when you as the user come along and want to use silenceremove, you'll have to carefully read through this, and build your own mental model of that algorithm, and then you'll be able to set these parameters accordingly. That takes a lot of time and energy, in this case multiple read-throughs and I'd say > 5 minutes.

Good documentation should do this work for you. It should explain somewhat atomic concepts to you, that you can immediately adapt, and compose. Where it already works is for the "detection" and "window" parameters, which are straightforward. But the actions of trimming in the start/middle/end, and how to configure how long the silence lasts before trimming, whether to ignore short bursts of noise, whether to skip every nth silence period, these are all ideas and concepts that get mushed together in 10 parameters which are called start/stop-duration/threshold/silence/mode/periods.

If you want to apply this filter, it takes a long time to build mental models for these 10 parameters. You do have some example calls, which is great, but which doesn't help if you need to adjust any of these - then you probably need to understand them all.

Some stuff I stumbled over when reading it:

"To remove silence from the middle of a file, specify a stop_periods that is negative. This value is then treated as a positive value [...]" - what? Why is this parameter so heavily overloaded?

"start_duration: Specify the amount of time that non-silence must be detected before it stops trimming audio" - parameter is named start_something, but it's about stopping? Why?

"start_periods: [...] Normally, [...] start_periods will be 1 [...]. Default value is 0."

"start_mode: Specify mode of detection of silence end at start": start_mode end at start?

It's very clunky. Every parameter has multiple modes of operation. Why is it start and stop for beginning and end, and why is "do stuff in the middle" part of the end? Why is there no global mode?

You could nitpick this stuff to death. In the end, naming things is famously one of the two hard problems in computer science (the others being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors). And writing good documentation is also very, very hard work. Just exposing the internals of the algorithm is often not great UX, because then every user has to learn how the thing works internally before they can start using it (hey, looking at you, git).

So while it's easy to point out where these docs fail, it would be a lot of work to rewrite this documentation from the top down, explaining the concepts first. Or even rewriting the interface to make this more approachable, and the parameters less overloaded. But since it's hard work, and not sexy to programmers, it won't get done, and many people will come after, having to spend time on reading and re-reading this current mess.
by ramoz | 2025-06-25 21:21:54+00:00
Gemini web UI is extremely apologetic and self deprecating at times. Therefore I was not surprised to experience Gemini spiraling into an infinite loop of self-deprecation - literally it abandoned the first command and spiraled into 5-10line blocks of "i suck"

---

Right now there is one CLI that influences and stands far and beyond all others. Smooth UX, and more critical some "natural" or inherent ability to use its tools well.

Gemini can also achieve this - but i think it's clear the leader is ahead because they have a highly integrated training process with the base model and agentic tool use.
by lugu | 2025-06-25 21:21:57+00:00
It is late and I am thinking out load. How about a reputation system where users bring proof that other websites haven't found them abusive.

Visit a website that require identification. Generate a random unique identifier in your user agent. Live your life on that site. Download from that site a certificate that prove that your didn't abuse their site. Repeat that a few times.

Visit the site that wants to know if you are an abusive user. Share your certificates. They get to choose if they accept you.

If you abuse that site, it reports the abuse to the other sites that delivered you a certificate. Those sites gets to decide if they revoke their certificate or not.

It is a self policying system that require some level of cooperation. Users make themselves vulnerable to the risk of having sites they like loose trust in them.
by freejazz | 2025-06-25 21:22:16+00:00
The point is that the conversation was perfectly parsable and your repeated misunderstanding brings nothing to it. I made that point several posts ago but for some reason you keep responding to me and I do not understand why.

> but my argument zooms out a level and treats them as both part of the larger government

Okay? I'm not going to argue against your obtuse misunderstanding or recharacterization of the problem. No one was referring to the government that way, so pretending like they were "for the sake of argument" furthers nothing.
by monkeywork | 2025-06-25 21:22:54+00:00
Those items exist yes, however they aren't required nor are they tied to the service nor universal so the again the DEFAULT expectation is that anything put onto the platform was ephemeral.

Being able to get a text file log dump easily is also light years ahead of what most people are able to do on discord.

In order to get log bots or bouncers up and running it required some technical know how (meaning most people didn't do it, thus staying ephemeral as default) but those that did do it were well aware how to get and export those log files for archiving etc (thus why we have things like bash.org).

On Discord it's default and while yes someone could setup bots or something to export some of the content - that requires some technical know how (meaning most people won't do it). Thus everything in there goes away when the service closes.... even though the DEFAULT EXPECTATION is that information there is forever.
by kmod | 2025-06-25 21:22:56+00:00
I've found a method that gives me a lot more clarity about a company's privacy policy:

1. Go to their enterprise site 2. See what privacy guarantees they advertise above the consumer product 3. Conclusion: those are things that you do not get in the consumer product

These companies do understand what privacy people want and how to write that in plain language, and they do that when they actually offer it (to their enterprise clients). You can diff this against what they say to their consumers to see where they are trying to find wiggle room ("finetuning" is not "training", "ever got free credits" means not-"is a paid account", etc)

For Code Assist, here's their enterprise-oriented page vs their consumer-oriented page:

https://cloud.google.com/gemini/docs/codeassist/security-pri...

https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/p...

It seems like these are both incomplete and one would need to read their overall pages, which would be something more like

https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919?hl=en

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#revi...
by justincormack | 2025-06-25 21:24:27+00:00
Most of the stuff that configure scripts check is obsolete, and breaks in situations like this as the checks are often not workable without running code. It is likely the check does not apply to any system that has existed for decades. Lots of systems have disabled eg Nix in 2017 [1]

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/dff0ba38a243603534c9...
by LordDragonfang | 2025-06-25 21:24:50+00:00
Lots of budget PCs sold as new today use chips from 3+ years ago, and several use ones from 5+ years ago. (This is especially common with old i7s, because your average consumer has been fooled by marketing to think that an i7 is automatically better than an i5). Anecdotally, this practice was even more common 5 years ago (the last time I shopped for prebuilts for my parents).

(That said, I agree that complaining about the TPM requirement specifically is ridiculous - MS has offered ways around the TPM requirement for upgraders. And more relevantly, any CPU that old is going have bigger problems when the UI is basically all React Native)
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-25 21:25:07+00:00
Integrated local stores are better for pretty much everything except for actually having what you want in stock.

There is a reason why rural communities welcome Wal-Mart with open arms. Not such a big deal now that you can mail-order anything more-or-less instantly, but back in the 80s when I was growing up in BFE, Wal-Mart was a godsend.
by yesfitz | 2025-06-25 21:26:20+00:00
I think there is a target market for this, and it might seem silly to anyone outside of that market, but it shouldn't.

If you're a screen addict living in these cities, paying an entry fee could be reassuring because you know that you're supposed to be there. The same goes for having a non-skills based activity, because you can't screw it up.

Compare that to a free and/or skills-based gathering[1], where you end up paying with social capital (which you don't currently have), and staying home with the screen becomes all that more enticing.

1: I help run a monthly pinball tournament locally, and we've taken deliberate steps to favor socialization over competition, which has been wildly successful, but there are still those for whom the skills-based activity is too much. I feel the same about dancing.
by smaudet | 2025-06-25 21:27:28+00:00
Maybe.

Some things go deep, true. However most businesses don't use most of Microsoft products - even the ones that do, the usage of the more complicated products is far more minuscule than imagined by e.g. CFOs, etc.

The real thing keeping many "in the fold" as it were would be authentication services.

Which are overcomplicated and probably easier to manage without...
by derefr | 2025-06-25 21:28:52+00:00
> So all the addressing bodies (e.g., ISPs and cloud providers) are on board then right?

My guess is that it's going to be approached the other way around. After all, it's not the ISPs' job to issue IP addresses in conformance with TLS; it's a TLS provider's job to "validate identity" — i.e. to issue TLS certificates in conformance with how the rest of the ecosystem attaches identity to varyingly-ephemeral resources (IPs, FQDNs, etc.)

The post doesn't say how they're going to approach this one way or the other, but my intuition is that LetsEncrypt is going to have/maintain some gradually-growing whitelist for long-lived IP-issuer ASNs — and then will only issue certs for IPs that exist under those ASNs; and invalidate IP certs if their IP is ever sold to another ASN not on the list. This list would likely be a public database akin to Mozilla's Public Suffix List, that LetsEncrypt would expect to share (and possibly co-maintain) with other ACME issuers that want to do IP issuance.
by nevertoolate | 2025-06-25 21:30:11+00:00
I was surprised that after “closer to god” comes the “build the next kubernetes”. How do you connect these two things?

E.g. I’ve found the “closer to god” in my yoga practice. And how I now realize that through words I can’t connect that much as through practice (e.g. just eating my lunch being fully present). I still think I can help through my software product building skills, but also know that if I can help people find a more joyful life / build a less painful body is closer to my purpose than “only” building software.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-25 21:31:04+00:00
> Proof-of-work is even more obviously a temporary solution, security by obscurity: it relies upon symmetry in computation power, which is just wildly incorrect. And all of the implementations I know of have made the bone-headed decision to start with SHA-256 hashing, which amplifies this asymmetry to ludicrous degree (factors of tens of thousands with common hardware, to tens of millions with Bitcoin mining hardware). At that point, forget choosing different iteration counts based on bot detection, it doesn’t even matter.

It takes a long time and enormous amounts of money to make new chips for a specific proof of work. And sites can change their algorithm on a dime. I don't think this is a big issue.
by haswell | 2025-06-25 21:31:14+00:00
In my purely anecdotal experience over the last few years, performance ranking is as follows:

1. Steam on Linux via Proton + Wayland (Niri)

2. Steam on Linux via Proton + X11 (Xfce)

3. Steam on Windows

4. Games on Linux launched via other means (it's possible I was missing out on certain flags/optimizations, but this is just about the average experience)

The biggest thing I noticed when switching to Linux was an improvement in framerate consistency, i.e. I'd have fewer situations where the framerate would drop momentarily. Games felt more solid and predictable.

The biggest thing I noticed when switching from X11/Xfce to Wayland/Niri was just an overall increase in framerate. I'd failed this jump many times over the years, so it was notable when I jumped and stayed there earlier this year.

It does feel like games take longer to launch on average, but this makes sense given the fact that it's launching via Proton/Wine.
by evo_9 | 2025-06-25 21:32:34+00:00
I was using Claude 3.7 exclusively for coding, but it sure seems like it got worse suddenly about 2–3 weeks back. It went from writing pretty solid code I had to make only minor changes to, to being completely off its rails, altering files unrelated to my prompt, undoing fixes from the same conversation, reinventing db access and ignoring existing coding 'standards' established in the existing codebase. Became so untrustworthy I finally gave OpenAi O3 a try and honestly, I was pretty surprised how solid it has been. I've been using o3 since, and I find it generally does exactly what I ask, esp if you have a well established project with plenty of code for it to reference.

Just wondering if Claude 3.7 has seemed differently lately for anyone else? Was my go to for several months, and I'm no fan of OpenAI, but o3 has been rock solid.
by strbean | 2025-06-25 21:32:52+00:00
> (b) This section does not apply to any of the following:

> (1) A public utility, or telephone company, engaged in the business of providing communications services and facilities, or to the officers, employees or agents thereof, where the acts otherwise prohibited herein are for the purpose of construction, maintenance, conduct, or operation of the services and facilities of the public utility or telephone company.

> (2) The use of any instrument, equipment, facility, or service furnished and used pursuant to the tariffs of a public utility.

> (3) A telephonic communication system used for communication exclusively within a state, county, city and county, or city correctional facility.

> *(4) A commercial business purpose.*

Emphasis mine.

That seems wildly less limited than you imply.
by tehlike | 2025-06-25 21:33:36+00:00
A lot of logic just becomes easier with javascript. If you have complex-ish trigger logic, or a procedure etc - doing these in pl/pgsql is just hard if not intracatable. Also allows up reuse of a lot of code that people have built with npm - even if not directly with require(), it becomes possible to bundle compiled binary.

I used this for storing patches of data (to save space, compression is a pain in Postgres) and applying runtime to show full version etc. It's fun.
by tusslewake | 2025-06-25 21:34:08+00:00
From the article:

"Arenas, whose father Gilbert played in the NBA, was involved in the single-car crash last April when he said the Cybertruck's keypad and steering wheel wouldn't respond. Arenas said he awoke to find the passenger side of the dashboard engulfed in flames and tried to use his digital key to escape, only to find the Tesla app had locked him out. I tried to open the door and the door wasn't opening," he said."
by motoxpro | 2025-06-25 21:34:10+00:00
This is why the price goes up.

If the LTV of a "good" user (e.g. user who buys things from ads) is X, you price the non-ad tier at X + Y. Y is the premium you pay for not wanting to see ads.

So you're right, but also wrong, in that you can extract EVEN MORE money from the user you were talking about through a non-ad tier.

Companies (Meta, Google, etc) get better at advertising -> LTV goes up -> non-ad tier goes up
by animatethrow | 2025-06-25 21:34:26+00:00
Sure, but that's a fair bit of extra time and friction to watch an HDR video versus just clicking the play button on Windows or Mac and being done with it. It's also nice on Windows how every Steam game launches and runs without a "missing libfoo.so" error like you get for a number of games on Linux, though I'm glad Linux support continues to improve and look forward to switching back to Linux from Windows when there are sufficiently few issues I have to research how to work around and fix.
by snowwrestler | 2025-06-25 21:34:56+00:00
Every startup goes through a phase where there are very few technical people spanning a huge range of responsibilities. Not all founders or early employees are Steve Jobs. Many are like Bill Atkinson: a broadly talented person who shapes many aspects of a product in development.

While Apple was not a startup at the time Bill did his work there, the Mac project very much was a startup inside Apple.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-06-25 21:35:10+00:00
A more technically correct way to express this feeling is:

"The computational power of the cores on the GPU was never the issue-- however the code that I wrote resulted in a memory bandwidth bottleneck that starved the GPU cores of data to work on, which is firmly within my responsibilities as a programmer -- to fully understand the bandwidth and latency characteristics of the device(s) i'm running on"
by hooverd | 2025-06-25 21:35:17+00:00
> There was a recent incident where Microsoft somehow allegedly blocked a mailbox of a sanctioned individual. Any organization highly depending on MS products that might come into the crosshair should ask - can this happen to me? What would be the cost? How much I invest into prevention of this scenario? In this article I try to get the facts straight and use a return on security investment calculation to try and judge this situation in a rational way. Let’s grab our tinfoil hats and find out if it’ll be fine.

for people who didn't RTA
by judahmeek | 2025-06-25 21:35:46+00:00
> If you witness police misconduct, you do not have the right to impede the police.

Wrong. There is a moral right to impede unjust authority.

> The agents have no duty to provide a warrant to a bystander, even if he is a government official.

So you're ignoring the fact that the officers didn't show a warrant to anyone, including the individuals they seized?
by thenaturalist | 2025-06-25 21:36:48+00:00
Let's be real, that's already far less approachable to 90% of consumers I know.

The simples hurdle just being knowledge.

The existence of NAS is probably an unknown unkown to a large part of the population.

Compare that to "there's an app for that" & plug USB.

Drastically simpler.

No skin in the game either way, but I can very much understand OPs reasoning and would reach the same conclusion.
by malkia | 2025-06-25 21:37:21+00:00
Autoconf is the prime example of easy vs simple.

It looks easy on the surface to roll down support for any kind of operating system there is, based on auto-detection and then #if HAVE_THIS or #if HAVE_THAT, but it breaks in ways that maybe really hard to untangle later.

I'd rather have a limited set set of configurations targeting specific platforms/flavors, and knowing that no matter how I compile it, I would know what is `#define`-d and what is not, instead of guessing on what the "host" might have.
by tonymet | 2025-06-25 21:37:42+00:00
There was a dream that was having a social life. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile. -- Marcus Aurelius

Relationships and things that matter are spontaneous. When you try to optimize them into calendars, checklists & databases -- they become lame and fall apart.

It's half the reason people aren't social. They try so hard to "schedule a meetup" and the meetup becomes work so people stop hanging out.

You're just supposed to show up at someone's house and do shit.

You don't make friends by agenda. You have cool experiences , build trust and develop a bond.
by nailer | 2025-06-25 21:37:49+00:00
> You aren't responding to the fact that you're committing the composition fallacy

Yes, I am. To make it simpler, I’ll use your analogy: you asked me for a car with a red door and I provided one. Even though you say you are a scholar of cars and are aware that there are many instances of cars have red doors. Furthermore, you did not thank me.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-06-25 21:39:46+00:00
> However, neither of these are capable of HDR.

How so? As far as I can tell, the ICCv2 spec is very agnostic as to the gamut and dynamic range of the output medium. It doesn't say anything to the extent of "thou shalt not produce any colors outside the sRGB gamut, nor make the white point too bright".

Unless HDR support is supposed to be something other than just the primaries, white point, and transfer function. All the breathless blogspam about HDR doesn't make it very clear what it means in terms of colorspaces.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-25 21:40:40+00:00
First sentence:

>Western Berks Fire Commissioner Jared Renshaw said a Tesla was in self-driving mode when it made a left at a railroad crossing.

Last sentence:

>We've had accidents involving Tesla's that have been in vehicle accidents, but nobody has expressed to us that the vehicle was in self-drive mode when it happened," said Commissioner Renshaw.

So which is it?!

>He said the car was lifted by a crane, since rolling it back to a flatbed could have caused damage to the battery, located on the bottom of the car and it was very close to the train.

Gotta bring out the heavy wrecker so you can get that $10k heavy wrecker fee (that the insurance will reimburse them for and then charge us all higher rates).
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-06-25 21:41:23+00:00
>Anthropic spent "many millions of dollars" buying used print books, then stripped off the bindings, cut the pages, and scanned them into digital files.

The judge, Alsup J, ruled that this was lawful.

So they cared at least a bit, enough to spend a lot of money buying books. But they didn't care enough not to acquire online libraries held apparently without proper licensing.

>Alsup wrote that Anthropic preferred to "steal" books to "avoid 'legal/practice/business slog,' as cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei put it."

Aside: using the term steal for copyright infringement is a particularly egregious misuse for a judge who should know that stealing requires denying others of the use of the stolen articles; something which copyright infringement via an online text repository simple could not do.