MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dcow | 2025-06-11 13:55:43+00:00
They still offer(ed) you a new phone after two years. The “payments” are(were) hidden costs. I thought that was what we agreed on. 15 years ago there were no other options unless you did pay-as-you-go. Recently, yes, there are plans that let you skip the subsidized upgrade. They don’t cost any less than the plans that have upgrades did in the past though, they just cost less than other plans from the same carrier.
by almostdeadguy | 2025-06-11 13:56:15+00:00
> Whether this understanding of engineering, which is correct for some projects, is correct for engineering as a whole is questionable. Very few programs ever reach the point that they are heavily used and long-lived. Almost everything has few users, or is short-lived, or both. Let’s not extrapolate from the experiences of engineers who only take jobs maintaining large existing products to the entire industry.

I see this kind of retort more and more and I'm increasingly puzzled by it. What is the sector of software engineering where we don't care if the thing you create works or that it may do something harmful? This feels like an incoherent generalization of startup logic about creating quick/throwaway code to release early. Building something that doesn't work or building it without caring about the extent to which it might harm our users is not something engineers (or users) want. I don't see any scenario in which we'd not want to carefully scrutinize software created by an agent.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-11 13:56:38+00:00
The issue as I have observed it is that software is written to cover as many use cases for as many users as possible. Obviously executives want to sell their product to as many hands as possible.

But end users often only need a tiny fraction of what the software is fully capable of, leaving a situation where you need you need to purchase 100% to use 5%.

LLMs can break down this wall by offering the user the ability to just make a bespoke 5% utility. I personally have had enormous success doing this.
by siver_john | 2025-06-11 13:56:46+00:00
Depends on how deep you want to go. The pioneering work in this field is the "The multiscale coarse-graining method." series of papers kicked off by Noid. Who is still a person to pay attention to in this field.

I also believe the work of Frank Noe is someone to watch for in the ML potential space for proteins.

I'm also always happy to talk about CG.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-11 13:57:29+00:00
> If you didn't have the apps users wanted they wouldn't buy into your platform, it really was as simple as that.

And conversely, to have apps you need developer buy-in, and to get that you need to demonstrate potential for wide adoption or be so intriguing that devs want to build for your platform regardless.

This is where starting low-end hurt. As noted by others, this made it difficult for Firefox OS to perform well in users’ hands, but additionally the users willing to take a risk on a new platform generally aren’t usually the ones who are interested in low-end hardware. People buying cheap phones primarily want a high value proven workhorses, and anything running an experimental OS is the opposite of that.

As a result, buzz around the project was minimal and quickly dissipated. Devs weren’t excited about it and didn’t talk about it and thus didn’t develop for it.
by chubot | 2025-06-11 13:57:30+00:00
I think you missed the original point, which is that joining argv is equivalent to

sh -c "$1 $2 $3 $4 ..."

This is a form of shell injection, just like

sh -c "ls $dir"

because there's interpolation WITHOUT escaping.

That should be:

dir=$(escape "$dir") sh -c "ls $dir"

Or simply

ls "$dir"

It's not my preconception -- it's a security problem.

It's similar to ShellShock -- you can argue it was documented behavior, but it's still a security problem.
by vmg12 | 2025-06-11 13:57:46+00:00
There is a lot of formulaic code that llms get right 90% of the time that are impossible to build macros for. One example that I've had to deal with is language bridge code for an embedded scripting language. Every function I want available in the scripting environment requires what is essentially a boiler plate function to be written and I had to write a lot of them.
by scrollaway | 2025-06-11 13:57:48+00:00
Maybe.

But to be honest, optimizing monstrously slow processes that cost weeks of human labour by automating them, that saves a ton of energy as well. It’s not zero sum, as the humans spend that energy elsewhere, but ideally they spend it on more productive things.

This calculus can very quickly offset whatever energy is wasted generating cartoon images of vuvuzelas.
by Compzilla | 2025-06-11 13:57:59+00:00
I appreciate that you and your peer group are doing well, but saying, “if you don’t like it, leave” kind of proves my point. It illustrates a bit of tech wealth blindness. My mother always told me... "just because you can doesn't mean you should." Maybe those with such means shouldn't be so quick to just contribute to the affordability crisis and force out families who have lived there for generations.

The city has become a luxury good, a playground for the wealthy, not a place for the other classes to live. That’s the problem I’m trying to document, not just complain about. By the way, my daughter was born in this city. She just graduated from a very good school, but she will still never be able to afford this place as long as people like you maintain such a callous attitude about those who came before them.
by nathan_compton | 2025-06-11 13:58:35+00:00
Genuinely, I think if you push on PMC types you will first, indeed, get some vaguely utilitarian thinking, but then if you push further, you will arrive again at teleological justifications. As far as I can tell, this kind of thinking is basically endemic in the human race and I frankly despair at the possibility of human beings crawling out from beneath it.

Its not a deep observation that you can't be a utilitarian without an enfolding moral framework and most people have one and in western civilization that framework is basically the one inherited from the cultural aether. From my point of view that kind of sloppy thinking is basically the same as believing in God.
by blargey | 2025-06-11 13:58:48+00:00
"If an artificial label/watermark is the only criteria by which you can differentiate <unwanted version of product> from <wanted version>, by definition there's nothing wrong with the unwanted product itself"

Of course, "art" isn't one fixed standard of quality/features, and you can get "watermark-requiring parity" with average/bad/unmemorable creations but not the top percentile that's actually valued, for example.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-11 13:58:51+00:00
>That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough.

That's exactly why she asks an LLM to do it for her. A program like this would be <1k LOC, well within even the current LLM one-shot-working-app domain.
by cAtte_ | 2025-06-11 13:58:57+00:00
> With Android 16, you can now activate Advanced Protection, Google’s strongest mobile device protection. It enables an array of robust device security features that protect you from online attacks, harmful apps, unsafe websites, scam calls and more. blah blah

let me guess: Advanced Protection will continue to gain features that restrict the freedom of users in the name of security and some time from now it will be mandatorily enabled for everyone. classic google!
by stego-tech | 2025-06-11 13:59:09+00:00
Not for small environments they’re not. If you say “observability” to a big Fortune company, they peg it to a narrow, specifically defined team and goal; that same word to a SMB/E is “oh, you mean monitoring and change control”.

I used the word correctly for the environments I was describing. They’re just not accurate for larger, more siloed orgs.
by qsort | 2025-06-11 13:59:10+00:00
We are talking past each other here.

Once I solved an Advent of Code problem, I felt like the problem wasn't general enough, so I solved the more general version as well. I like programming to the point of doing imaginary homework, then writing myself some extra credit and doing that as well. Way too much for my own good.

The point is that solving a new problem is interesting. Solving a problem you already know exactly how to solve isn't interesting and isn't even intellectual exercise. I would gain approximately zero from writing a new hash table from scratch whenever I needed one instead of just using std::map.

Problem solving absolutely is a muscle and it's use it or lose it, but you don't train problem solving by solving the same problem over and over.
by n4r9 | 2025-06-11 13:59:11+00:00
I see. That looks a lot like it's applying a Widmark-style model [0], which assumes that absorption is instantaneous, and that drinking starts in a fasted state unaccompanied by food or water. I guess that makes sense if we're literally talking about replacing a whole meal with alcohol. But normally I imagine cutting back on portion sizes so that I can have some drinks later. I don't know about other users but the idea that an 80kg man will have body control or speech impairments after 3 pints (60oz) of beer over 3 hours just feels wrong. Especially if they start after dinner and have a glass of water in the middle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content#By_intak...
by the_af | 2025-06-11 13:59:19+00:00
> A related, but tricker topic is one of the quieter arguments passed around for harder-to-use programming tools (for example, programming languages like C with few amenities and convoluted build systems) is that these tools act as gatekeepers on a project, stopping low-quality mediocre development. You cannot have sprawling dependencies on a project if no-one can figure out how to add a dependency. If you believe in an argument like this, then anything that makes it easier to write code: type safety, garbage collection, package management, and LLM-driven agents make things worse. If your goal is to decelerate and avoid change then an agent is not useful.

This is the first time I heard of this argument. It seems vaguely related to the argument that "a developer who understands some hard system/proglang X can be trusted to also understand this other complex thing Y", but I never heard "we don't want to make something easy to understand because then it would stop acting as gatekeeping".

Seems like a strawman to me...
by bandoti | 2025-06-11 14:00:42+00:00
Nice I would like to explore KaiOS more. I have been thinking these days: what is the bare minimum people need today in a mobile digital experience.

Browser, phone, email/contacts, maps, payment, authentication, file manager, networking (NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular).

Seems like with the progression of web APIs and WASM, most of this functionality can live in the browser.
by ralfd | 2025-06-11 14:00:49+00:00
Even with you trying to be factual, how you present this still shows your bias. Plus you rationalize the opposite arguments away (“overestimate”) and boost the ones you agree with.

From the first Claude link:

> Damage remains far below 2020 George Floyd protest levels

Ugh. Is this the bar now?

Aside from quantifications, I see the disagreement largely on the qualitative/philosophical/ideological (tribal) side. An inverse of the Jan 6th insurrection (which also caused much less damage than the George Floyd riots, and much less than now in LA, so was it ok in retrospect?). But the damage was not in property, but that the state and its laws itself was attacked. The sides are just now switched again between left/right: the former shout rule of law, the latter want resistance/insurrection.
by lipowitz | 2025-06-11 14:01:03+00:00
The next billion users for each billion after the first were not enterprise workers who wanted to connect to some email server so windows and BlackBerry missed the volume market entirely. Users wanted a phone that lasted 3 years, could browse and could bank. A small number of power developers that dont despise the platform are simply needed to keep the user base at all and a browser OS that wasn't Android had that by default.

Mozilla ignored the autonomy of the parties that should be in an ecosystem and tried to make them wait for Mozilla's choices and implementations on things. I bet they had more than enough people on every one of their waiting lists for being involved but they discouraged actual involvement.
by eigenspace | 2025-06-11 14:01:03+00:00
I wonder if they adjusted it since reading this thread, or if you forgot to turn on reasoning or if you just got unlucky. For me, when I ask this it thinks for about 1.5 minutes and responds with

"The Brazilian citizen needs to clear immigration in Lisbon."

When I asked it to explain why, it said

"The Brazilian citizen needs to clear immigration in Lisbon because Lisbon is the first Schengen entry point when traveling from a non-Schengen country (Brazil) to a Schengen country (France via Portugal). According to Schengen rules, travelers must clear immigration at the first Schengen port of entry. Since Paris is also within the Schengen Area, no additional immigration checks are required upon arrival in Paris."
by runxel | 2025-06-11 14:01:26+00:00
Pückler is a fascinating person and most of the stories about him sound so unreal, Hollywood would outright reject scripts containing them.

If you ever find yourself to be in Berlin with an extra day to spare you should take the 1.5 hour drive to Cottbus, where his second park – Branitz – is located. Has a lovely museum in the manor house and in the stable a world class restaurant, cooking his meals with a modern twist (he had an extra meal diary, that's how we know exactly what he has eaten with whom throughout his entire life).

Basically the complete field of modern landscaping design has grown – no pun intended – on his work and vision. The probably best known example is the Central Park in New York. Without Pückler it would not have come to be.

Oh and did I mention he is buried in a pyramid?
by folknor | 2025-06-11 14:01:32+00:00
Could you please consider using something other than recaptcha?

There's been several alternatives mentioned on HN over the past year. A quick search through my browser history revealed https://altcha.org/open-source-captcha/ as the most recent link I'd been to.

Just to say I have no experience of any of the "alternative" captchas, I just hate the one you're using.

Also please get your app up and running fast so we can use it for our vacation in early September, haha :-) Thank you.
by exceptione | 2025-06-11 14:01:42+00:00
The pointe is that that you the moment you want to prevent the action, you have found the public siding with the action. The war is on the mind, you need to get regular people to hand their keys to the autocrats. Infowars, indeed.

Try stopping Hitler from rounding up Jews. Or try to stop Trump's unlawfulness. You are invariably too late by then.
by numlocked | 2025-06-11 14:02:10+00:00
Hi - I'm the COO of OpenRouter. In practice we don't expire the credits, but have to reserve the right to, or else we have a uncapped liability literally forever. Can't operate that way :) Everyone who issues credits on a platform has to have some way of expiring them. It's not a profit center for us, or part of our P&L; just a protection we have to have.
by account42 | 2025-06-11 14:02:44+00:00
> Having run engineering teams for some reasonably popular open source products, my experience is that community reported issues can easily out-pace engineering capacity.

The solution to that is to have an additional triaging capacity. That can come from the community if you empower them with e.g. a public bug tracker.

If you truly do not have enough capacity to even fix the valid bugs then you have much bigger problems and no change to the bug reporting mechanisms will help you.

> As an aside, I find your opinion that "if I give you my time in the form of a bug report, the least you can do is give me your time" to be common. We rarely have the right to demand another person's attention, though. Especially with respect to non-commercial open source hobbyist maintainers.

This discussion is in the context of a post about a getting users to report bugs. Users might not be entitled to a response to their bug reports just because they spent their time but you sure as hell are not entitled to users telling you about issues encountered with your software before they inevitably get fed up and move to an alternative. The point is that if users feel they are wasting their time they won't bother - and the first to go will be the high-effort bug reports with useful information.

And this isn't really different for open source hobby projects - as long as you care about improving your software you'd do well to not make users who are willing to make good bug reports feel unwelcome.
by pembrook | 2025-06-11 14:02:50+00:00
Source: have dealt with fraud at scale before.

Phone number is the only way to reliably stop MOST abuse on a freemium product that doesn't require payment/identity verification upfront. You can easily block VOIP numbers and ensure the person connected to this number is paying for an actual phone plan, which cuts down dramatically on bogus accounts.

Hence why even Facebook requires a unique, non-VOIP phone number to create an account these days.

I'm sure this comment will get downvoted in favor of some other conspiratorial "because they're going to secretly sell my data!" tinfoil post (this is HN of course). But my explanation is the actual reason.

I would love if I could just use email to signup for free accounts everywhere still, but it's just too easily gamed at scale.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-11 14:03:06+00:00
Unfortunately, the right to abortion is under fire worldwide. I'm not just talking about the usual suspects like Russia or Islamist theocracies, but also here in Europe... Hungary and Poland being the first suspects, but Italy is also planning to restrict it [1]. And in Germany, the last government at least banned "pro-life" haunting events, but there are wide swaths especially in Bavaria where there is no doctor or clinic providing abortion at all, even in medical emergency scenarios, because church-run hospitals can and do ban it.

[1] https://www.rnd.de/politik/abtreibungsgesetz-in-italien-rech...
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-06-11 14:03:36+00:00
My experience is that most won’t. I was someone who wouldn’t say no, once. For me it was because I was naive and didn’t believe people would work so hard to exploit others.

In fact, one time there were users on an ad network I built who were breaking rules. I’d track them and try to figure out where they came from and who they actually are, only for them to drop out and open a new account. I’d report to my CEO about this, ask for advice, generally discuss strategies to prevent this kind of usage of the network. He seemed very concerned. But sure enough, eventually I figured out it was actually him all along. He was making tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per month doing literally the most shady stuff on the network. He was using my naivety to keep himself in the loop on internal compliance and stay a step ahead of me.

I’ve worked with several people like this. They love the tech industry. I had to finally admit to myself that I worked with bad people and did bad things to develop the awareness and courage to start saying no and do something else.

Once I was gone, he did the same thing with a younger developer who was eager to break into the industry. I actually work with him now, nearly 15 years later.
by mort96 | 2025-06-11 14:05:58+00:00
Sorry but nobody is going to use a phone where they can't chat with their friends via whatever chat app they're already using or transfer money via whatever money transfer apps their social group is already using or transfer money between their existing bank accounts with their bank's apps or check in with their flights or use their city's public transport infrastructure apps or parking payment apps or car charging apps or taxi hauling apps or food delivery apps.

I think the average non-technical user uses a whole lot more apps than what you give them "credit" for. The technology industry has pushed for more and more everyday services to be app-based. And most of these apps work only on iOS and Android.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-11 14:06:09+00:00
Pregnancy (even without elective abortion!) has a variety of risks of criminal prosecution in the post-Dobbs world, and prosecutors in some states where this is the case have expressed desire to use menstrual data to identify targets for investigation.

There's also sometimes significant risks of nongovernmental (particularly family and intimate partner) violence associated with situations that can be inferred from that data, which is one reason people often conceal things which might be inferred from it from selected other people.
by nilkn | 2025-06-11 14:06:28+00:00
It's not the end of observability as we know it. However, the article also isn't totally off-base.

We're almost certain to see a new agentic layer emerge and become increasingly capable for various aspects of SRE, including observability tasks like RCA. However, for this to function, most or even all of the existing observability stack will still be needed. And as long as the hallucination / reliability / trust issues with LLMs remain, human deep dives will remain part of the overall SRE work structure.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-11 14:06:33+00:00
> You learned Java. AI is now writing entire operating systems. You studied marketing fundamentals. AI is predicting consumer behavior before consumers know what they want. You memorized case law. AI is finding legal precedents your professors never heard of.

> ... Enough doom and gloom. Here's your action plan:

Putting my deconstructionist hat on, this is entirely self-contradicting. For all we know, in a decade, the most important skill might be the ability to clearly mentally imagine "the change you wish to see in the world", and your neural implant will do the rest. If anything, their premises could lead to a strong argument that the best course of action is a well-rounded Liberal Arts degree.
by kenrick95 | 2025-06-11 14:06:52+00:00
Thanks for the feedback!

Unfortunately I've been challenged with the Recaptcha quite often too. That part is apparently injected by my shared hosting service (Hostinger) with no ability to turn off even when I check with their support. I hosted this at my main site (kenrick95.org)'s shared hosting service as a subdomain since I don't need to pay extra to do so.

I might consider moving it out somewhere else if I decide to maintain it separately from my main site.
by dtagames | 2025-06-11 14:06:52+00:00
Nothing says that has to happen in the terminal. All UI used to be console, and switches and lights before that.

I would suggest the opposite of this article: that a new kind of RAG IDE made for orchestrating agents is the next step. I also think that's what Cursor is trying to become.

The article itself says the reason Anthropic didn't make an IDE is not that it wouldn't be better, but it was too hard, and not in their wheelhouse as a model vendor. This is also why OpenAI just bought Windsurf.
by cometapi | 2025-06-11 14:07:29+00:00
You’ve probably come across two names making waves recently When you’re diving into AI video generation: Kling 2.1 and Veo 3, Google DeepMind’s most advanced text-to-video model. In this article, we’ll walk through their key features, performance, ease of use, and real-world applications—so you can decide which one fits your creative toolbox best.
by tartoran | 2025-06-11 14:07:31+00:00
Oh wow, didn't know about this. If the kid isn't rich they probably won't be able to get that money from him. Yeah, social media is pushing people to do crazy things and it's quite destructive for the society. We took this genie out of the bottle, is there a way to tame it? And there's the AI genie, we'll see some very bad consequences down the line, im sure of it.