MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcranmer | 2025-06-09 21:18:59+00:00
It is possible that he had a brain fart. But Musk makes a lot of statements, and he's repeatedly demonstrated that he is the kind of person who wants to project an image of himself that is smarter than he is. There's a trend of people discovering, when he starts speaking in the areas that he's knowledgeable, that he's just a complete idiot making n00b mistakes in their field, and if he's that bad in their area, why not others? Recent entries in this category include programming and playing Diablo, but the conversion factor for me was hearing him talk about tunneling and transit technology. And once you hear him as a fast-talking technobullshitter, it's hard not to treat any future misstatement of him as anything but fast-talking technobullshittery.

But for this claim in particular, there's another element that makes me think the claim was intended to be truthy instead of true. "Bitcoin style encryption" feels like it's meant to be a riff on "military-grade encryption"--a signifier that it's "really good" encryption while being extremely vague on what it is, but using "Bitcoin" instead of "military" to make him seem cooler to the people for whom cryptocurrency references gives you extra credibility.

Even if we assume it's a brain fart for "cryptosystem" or something similar... people with a basic understanding of cryptography recognize that bitcoin isn't using encryption, so a reference to Bitcoin's cryptosystem isn't directly relevant in the first place. To the extent Bitcoin itself uses a cryptosystem, it's the same cryptosystem everybody is using, so the reference itself degenerates "hey, we're using the same algorithms everybody does" which isn't something to tout.

So, no, I don't think it's a brainfart. I think it's a smarter-than-thou bullshitter trying to bullshit his audience, although I'm willing to accept that he may "just" be an idiot repeating what somebody told him without properly understanding what was told to him, leading him to give a confused response.
by quantified | 2025-06-09 21:19:24+00:00
One problem with this is that the car is going to kill or hurt more people outside the car with the car than kill or hurt people inside the car. One of the reasons that large vehicles like the Cybertruck are popular (not necessarily the Cybertruck itself, it isn't popular) is that in an accident, they crush the other things, not get crushed.

So the market that purchases them might enjoy enough safety, but you or I outside the vehicle find it super dangerous. We are not "the market", unless we pay protection money to keep it from being sold.
by cmogni1 | 2025-06-09 21:19:25+00:00
Does anyone know how AI coding fits in with S174? If a person’s “coding” part of the job is primarily running prompts and checking code outputs (quality control and minor reprompting) with the remainder of the time used for other activities, does this count as software engineering?

It seems like an inevitable outcome of this is elaborate system-gaming to mitigate how much employees fall under S174…
by bigyabai | 2025-06-09 21:19:25+00:00
> Having one and only one app be both viewer and toolkit feels like a convenience trap

It's a decade too late for that. Websites and mobile applications are the de-facto metaphor for using computers, trying to fight that trend ostracizes your most promising markets. Hell, it even ostracizes a lot of Mac users that like the new approach.

Maybe it's time to face the music - people like convenience. MacOS does not have potent enough windowing controls to make most users comfortable throwing around several windows to use one app. iOS and iPadOS both neglect their multitasking abilities to the point that people practically forget you can use more than one app at once.

I don't hate the idea of trying to enforce a more informative windowing model, but I also don't think most people can intuit how to use it. If Stage Manager is any indication, most people just want a fullscreen view of a single-page app.
by lukan | 2025-06-09 21:19:31+00:00
"If you shine a laser into a box with one-way mirrors on the inside, will it reflect forever?"

No, because each reflection comes at a cost (some light transformed to heat)

"Why do people mainly marry and make friends with people who look extraordinarily similar to themselves?"

To not get so much surprises and have a more stable life. (I didn't choose that path.)

(But I feel it would be too much OT answering the other questions and don't want to distract from this great submission or the interesting Wasmi concept)
Show HN: Custom OAuth Connector Example for ChatGPT Deep Research
by seanobannon | 2025-06-09 21:19:32+00:00
I subscribe to a ton of newsletters and always wanted to include them as sources with ChatGPT Deep Research. With the launch of Custom Connectors last week, this is finally possible. This repo is a minimal working example of a Deep Research connector with OAuth, built to hook up your custom data sources.

The official docs for custom MCP connectors are sparse, and there wasn't a complete example at launch. I figured sharing this Next.js demo (built using Auth.js and node-oauth2-server) could help others get started quicker.

Security hasn't been thoroughly vetted, so definitely proceed with caution.

Hope it helps folks hacking on MCP integrations!
by nonameiguess | 2025-06-09 21:19:33+00:00
I'd just like to say, with unfortunately little to add, that your comments on this article are terrific to read. You've captured perfectly how I have felt about LLMs roughly from the first time they came out to how I still feel now. They're utterly amazingly technology that truly do feel like magic, except that I have enough of a background in math modeling and ML to de-mystify them.

But the key difference between a model and a human is exactly what you just said. It's what animals can do on the margin. Nobody taught humans language. Each of us individually who are alive today, sure. But go back far enough and humanity invented language. We directly interact with the physical world, develop mental models of it, observe that we are able to make sounds and symbols and somehow come to a mutual agreement that they should mean something in rough analogy to these independent but sufficiently similar mental models. That is magic. Nobody, no programmer, no mathematician, no investor, has any idea how humanity did that, and has no idea how to get a machine to do it, either. Replicating the accomplishments of something else is a tremendous feat and it will get our software very, very far, maybe as far as we ever need to really get it. But it is not doing what animals did. It didn't just figure this shit out on its own.

Maybe somewhat ironically, I don't even know that this is a real limitation that current techniques for developing statistical models can't overcome. Put some "AIs" loose in robot bodies, let them freely move about the world trying to accomplish the simple goal of continuing to exist, with cooperation allowed, and they may very well develop ways to encode knowledge, share it with each other, and write it down somehow to pass on to the future so they don't need to continually re-learn everything, especially if they get millions of years to do it.

It's obvious, though, that we don't even want this. It might be interesting purely as an experiment, but it probably isn't going to lead to any useful tools. What we do now actually does lead to useful tools. To me, that should tell us something in these discussions. Trying to figure if X piece of software is or isn't cognitively equal to or better than a human in some respect is a tiring, pointless exercise. Who cares? Is it useful to us or not? What are its uses? What are its limitations? We're just trying to automate some toil here, aren't we? We're not trying to play God and create a separate form of life with its own purposes.
by jandrese | 2025-06-09 21:19:38+00:00
> In multiple Democratic-leaning areas, Kamala Harris’s name was reportedly missing from the top of the ballot entirely. Voters said they couldn’t even find her name to select. These same areas had high support for Democrats like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, yet Harris received zero votes—a statistical anomaly that defies traditional voting patterns.

I have trouble believing something this blatant would not draw the attention of MSNBC or the like. I am also suspicious that the "areas" were not named.
by bjackman | 2025-06-09 21:20:09+00:00
For the older ones with Broadcom WiFi I was able to get stock Ubuntu working great by following this:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/55868/installing-broadcom-wi...

Not sure about the newer ones.

Gathering this information and putting together a distro to rescue old Macbooks from the e-waste bin would be a worthwhile project. As far as I can tell they're great hardware.

I imagine things get harder once you get into the USB-C era.
by crq-yml | 2025-06-09 21:20:16+00:00
The majority of what we make is temporary, and a majority of software amounts to wheel reinvention. But this is true throughout history. Crafted objects had always have their design iterated upon and adjusted to meet the available dependencies.

Liberation isn't found in "fighting", as if there were some kind of ideological showdown that resolved everything. That's a way to drain your energy for living while waiting for a final resolution that never comes. Indeed, by directing it towards "enemies" you can accumulate guilt in yourself, and become increasingly unstable.

Rather, it has to be part of living and personal character, to take opportunities to "do hard things" because they are interesting, not because you are coerced. When you do this, succeed, and pass down the knowledge, the potential opens up to others. You don't have to believe right things to stumble into new ideas.
by RollingRo11 | 2025-06-09 21:20:40+00:00
Currently replying from my iPhone 16 pro (granted, not old by any means) on the iOS 26 dev beta. MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18. Safari is a joy to use from a performance perspective.

It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating, etc. but my summarized initial thoughts are “it’ll take some getting used to, but it feels pretty fast”
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-09 21:21:12+00:00
> Theoretically it’s the same with any asset you pay someone to make.

No, it's not.

Sec. 174 explicitly and specifically refers only to software development.

Also, this:

> If you pay someone to make a chair, you don’t deduct the salary. Instead you create an asset valued at what you paid to build it, then depreciate it over time.

is also incorrect. For most tax filers, and for most things, under current law, you have a choice whether to deduct the expense in the year in which it incurred or to amortize it.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-09 21:21:18+00:00
Literally everything I've ever read about Forstall and his behavior post-Jobs makes me think he would have been an awful CEO. It just sounded like he was "Game of Thrones-ing" from the second Cook became CEO. E.g. it was widely reported that Ive and Forstall could barely stand to be in the same meeting with each other. I may have some criticisms in my mind about some of Ive's design post-Jobs, but I don't think I have ever heard other folks be critical of Ive's leadership style or personality - everything I've read about him uses words like "inspirational", "remarkable", "calm", etc. I've read tons of criticism about Forstall.
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-09 21:21:42+00:00
I hired a house cleaner. I didn't tell them what to do because figuring that out is their job. They didn't do the things I wanted and they even missed some spots on what they did do. I didn't tell them about that either. It's they're job. So I fired them and switched to another. Repeat. Maybe eventually one of them will figure it out.
by zahlman | 2025-06-09 21:22:05+00:00
> the reduction of "intellgence" to "language" is a catagory error made by people falling vicim to the ELIZA effect[1], not the result of a sum of these particular statistical methods being equal real intelligence of any kind.

I sometimes wonder how many of the people most easily impressed with LLM outputs have actually seen or used ELIZA or similar systems.
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-09 21:22:07+00:00
> AFAIU the consensus opinion is that carting wheels never took hold in pre-Columbian America because of a lack of draft animals.

On hilly terrain, wheels simply aren't the best thing to use—you can't fully sustain the weight easily pulling up the hill as opposed to standing on the incline. Meanwhile we have tons of evidence of people used as couriers for relatively heavy items with a specific sort of framed backpack.

The lack of pack animals is a real thing, but domesticated horses would have seriously struggled even if they magically appeared in the pre-colonial incan empire. Even today, transportation by donkey sans-cart is often the easiest way to move a bunch of stuff around the andes without prepared roads.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-09 21:22:44+00:00
IMO the difference is mostly theoretical anyway. Despite the fancy HSMs and end-to-end encryption, if Signal or Whatsapp wanted to read your messages they trivially could - just push an app update to you that sends all of your messages to them.

It's more risky in terms of getting caught, but probably not hugely so if you do it in a way that has plausible deniability.

I think you pretty much have to trust the app supplier. Which in this case, I do not.
by sQL_inject | 2025-06-09 21:22:53+00:00
We're being downvoted but no one has offered answers to my question.

In an advanced society where citizens are tracked, and receive the benefits of that tracking, why is it somehow okay for others to not be yet to reap the benefits? Why should others immigrate the 'proper way' if one can simply walk across? I can wait until anyone here who defends the lawlessness of the past ways answers.
by ivraatiems | 2025-06-09 21:22:55+00:00
What does your ideal world look like? Dogs and humans have no relationship? Humans stop interacting with the animals we have domesticated and return them all to the wild?

I don't think there's a large constituency in this thread who's in support of "manufacture" of dogs in the sense of things like puppy mills. But that isn't what we're talking about with shelter dogs. Nor are dogs simply going to cease existing if we decide as a society that we don't want to continue our relationship with them.
by AndyKelley | 2025-06-09 21:22:56+00:00
Can confirm, Zig's generated C is extremely ugly. We literally treat it as an object format [1].

The MSVC limitations are maddening, from how short string literals must be, to the complete lack of inline assembly when targeting x86_64.

[1]: https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.14.1/std/#std.Target.Obj...
by schroeding | 2025-06-09 21:23:20+00:00
IMO, if you lobby for a thing which does not do harm to other people, you are not the bad guy. If you do, you are. Lobbying itself is not immoral.

The oil and gas industry, and the tobacco industry et al., lobbied (and lobby) for things which they know were (and are) doing harm. This isn't the case here, IMO.

Code is not an asset in all (I would even argue most) cases - proven by companies which open source the vast majority of their code and live from service contracts or certain addons to it, and basically pay developers to commit to open source software.

Often they buy market- or mindshare. There is no way in hell e.g. Akamai wouldn't have been able to bootstrap "Linode 2". I'm unable to see the secret sauce why OpenAI couldn't have created their own VS Code fork instead of buying Windsurf. But why do that if you can acquire their existent customers / market share? Additionally, the term "acquihire" didn't plop into existence with no precedent.

Being able to immediately get a full deductible for salary, which in many (western) countries is the norm for virtually all businesses, does not strike me as particularly immoral. It's a normal office job, developers do not create gold out of thin air.

Big tech isn't even the most affected by this change, they (often) have obscene margins - small software companies do not.
by spencerflem | 2025-06-09 21:23:28+00:00
I feel like its less antivaxx, and more the anti nuclear style movement. The antivaxxers are Just Wrong.

But for nuclear - there's certainly good uses for nuclear power but its scary! and powers evil world ending bombs! and if it goes wrong people end up secretly mutated and irradiated and its all so awful and we should shut it down now !!

And to be honest I don't know my own feelings on nuclear power or "good" AI either, but I do get it when people want to Shut it All Down Right Now !! Even if there is a legitimate case for being genuinely useful to real people.
by pc86 | 2025-06-09 21:23:35+00:00
Most of the time you can decide what you want to do. There are exceptions but for most capital expenses (which salary is not despite what proponents of this change would argue), you can choose to either deduct all of it or amortize it. It also depends how you categorize expenses.

A $100 chair is unlikely to get amortized, but a $100 chair as part of $450k office remodel might.
by gdubs | 2025-06-09 21:24:20+00:00
There's a different thread if you want to wax about Fluid Glass etc [1], but there's some really interesting new improvements here for Apple Developers in Xcode 26.

The new foundation frameworks around generative language model stuff looks very swift-y and nice for Apple developers. And it's local and on device. In the Platforms State of the Union they showed some really interesting sample apps using it to generate different itineraries in a travel app.

The other big thing is vibe-coding coming natively to Xcode through ChatGPT (and other) model integration. Some things that make this look like a nice quality-of-life improvement for Apple developers is the way that it tracks iterative changes with the model so you can rollback easily, and the way it gives context to your codebase. Seems to be a big improvement from the previous, very limited GPT integration with Xcode and the first time Apple Developers have a native version of some of the more popular vibe-coding tools.

Their 'drag a napkin sketch into Xcode and get a functional prototype' is pretty wild for someone who grew up writing [myObject retain] in Objective-C.

Are these completely ground-breaking features? I think it's more what Apple has historically done which is to not be first into a space, but to really nail the UX. At least, that's the promise – we'll have to see how these tools perform!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226612
by stevenhubertron | 2025-06-09 21:24:21+00:00
I don't post here often, but I hope someone at Apple is reading this as this is one of the worst designs I have seen from this company. Even in their own presentation they shows text hard to read, text on top of text. It's an accessibility and usability nightmare. I really don't want to give up iMessage but if what ships looks as bad as this I may jump ship.
by cxr | 2025-06-09 21:24:49+00:00
Useful applications of polyglot files that would unironically be good to see people adopt:

- JS-based build scripts being replaced with HTML/plaintext polyglot files that serve as both the README and the build script and that run in the universal runtime (the browser) rather than requiring e.g. NodeJS; alternatively

- JS/JS polyglot files that you can run with NodeJS if you so choose but that have first-class support for the browser instead

- JSON/HTML+JS polyglot files that parse as valid JSON but that you save with a .htm(l) extension and provide an advanced browser-based viewer for the data encoded in the JSON (especially typed data, e.g. JSON-LD)
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-09 21:24:54+00:00
> authoritarian societies also seem to have a lot of problems inventing new things

I'm not sure evidence can easily sustain this. Even putting aside the kind-of-tautological "rigid societies don't invent disruption" sentiment.... not only is "authoritarian" a pretty vague phrase in terms of economics, but we have a good deal of evidence of societies we mostly consider authoritarian inventing plenty of "disruptive" things. Just not a generally beneficial sort of disruption.
by sitkack | 2025-06-09 21:24:55+00:00
I think you are spot on. I got into software because of the ideas I wanted to implement, but implementing other peoples ideas are what pay the bills.

I read on other forums that now with these tools, lots of folks are having a blast implementing all the ideas in their back catalog. I also really appreciate that it is opening up the realization of these ideas to people that don't code so good.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-09 21:25:16+00:00
> I'm genuinely struggling to understand why the labor of software engineers would be treated differently from other kinds of work

Trump wanted a large tax cut. To make the numbers look better (notably the CBO reporting), Congress looked for ways to increase revenues. For whatever reason, they settled on software development, and devised Sec 174 to generate tax on 80% of s/w developer salaries in the first year it went into effect.

Why s/w development? I have seen no indication of the reasons for this; I suspect it was perceived as a "rich field" and thus suitable for this sort of treatment. Also, somewhat more fairly, s/w developers do tend to produce semi-durable assets that in some ways are like capital goods.
by tengbretson | 2025-06-09 21:25:19+00:00
> and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.

This is my #1 take-away from this. At this point it seems pretty safe to assume that interfaces made by Apple will probably still be decent, in spite of this design philosophy.

The clones, however, are going going to take accessiblity to new lows.
by nine_k | 2025-06-09 21:25:30+00:00
I find this all moot. Not useless (because it's another layer of defence in depth), but still recoverable.

A real end-to-end encryption is such that the transport intermediary only passes opaque blobs, and won't be able to decrypt them to save the CEO's life. Everything else is sparkling obfuscation.

But even with that level of unbreakable content encryption, the metadata, which has to be accessible to the intermediary in cleartext, could blow enough covers.
by focusedone | 2025-06-09 21:25:45+00:00
I used to think that, not having used an iPad. Now I carry a work-issued iPad with 5G and it's actually pretty convenient for remote access to servers. I wouldn't want to spend a day working on it, but it's way faster than pulling out a laptop to make one tiny change on a server. It's also great for taking notes at meetings/conferences.

It's irritatingly bad at consuming media and browsing the web. No ad blocking, so every webpage is an ad-infested wasteland. There are so many ads in YouTube and streaming music. I had no idea.

It's also kindof a pain to connect to my media library. Need to figure out a better solution for that.

So, as a relatively new iPad user it's pleasantly useful for select work tasks. Not so great at doomscrolling or streaming media. Who knew?
by pjmlp | 2025-06-09 21:26:06+00:00
What matters is what is available for developers on userspace, regardless if they like it or not.

Great technology sadly wins on merit.

Technology wins on either being cheaply available, in a worse is better fashion, as devs rather drink free lemon juice instead of nice costly orange one, or by having companies with willingness and deep pockets to push it no matter what.