MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonzzzies | 2025-07-09 10:03:46+00:00
The focus should not be on the location, provided it is in the EU, but really the focus should be on carefully siloing the user data and make it only accessible to who needs them which is definitely no-one managing any servers and networks; it shouldn't matter (just dataloss, but not leaks which are not worthless). The info should be encrypted with different service dependent (healthcare, different levels, taxes etc) key pairs. As long as this data is accessible by anyone else but me, it's going to fall in the wrong hands anyway.
by mrflop | 2025-07-09 10:04:10+00:00
Yes Plakar works much like Restic and Kopia: it takes content-addressed, encrypted and deduplicated snapshots and offers efficient incremental backups via a simple CLI. Under the hood, its Kloset engine splits data into encrypted, compressed chunks. Plakar main strengths:

UI: In addition to a simple Unix-style CLI, Plakar provides an web interface and API for monitoring, browsing snapshots

Data-agnostic snapshots: Plakar’s Kloset engine captures any structured data—filesystems, databases, applications—not just files, by organizing them into self-describing snapshots

Source/target decoupling: You can back up from one system (e.g. a local filesystem) and restore to another (e.g. an S3 bucket) using pluggable source and target connectors

Universal storage backends: Storage connectors let you persist encrypted, compressed chunks to local filesystems, SFTP servers or S3-compatible object stores (and more)—all via a unified interface

Extreme scale with low RAM: A virtual filesystem with lazy loading and backpressure-aware parallelism keeps memory use minimal, even on very large datasets

Network- and egress-optimized: Advanced client-side deduplication and compression dramatically cut storage and network transfer costs—ideal for inter-cloud or cross-provider migrations

Online maintenance: you don't need to stop you backup to free some space

ptar...
by chrisldgk | 2025-07-09 10:04:21+00:00
I agree with that it’s not a new concept by itself, but the way it’s being done is much more elegant in my opinion.

I originally started as a web developer during the time where PHP+jQuery was the state of the art for interactive webpages, shortly before React with SPAs became a thing.

Looking back at it now, architecturally, the original approach was nicer, however DX used to be horrible at the time. Remember trying to debug with PHP on the frontend? I wouldn’t want to go back to that. SPAs have their place, most so in customer dashboards or heavily interactive applications, but Astro find a very nice balance of having your server and client code in one codebase, being able to define which is which and not having to parse your data from whatever PHP is doing into your JavaScript code is a huge DX improvement.
by dattiimo | 2025-07-09 10:04:27+00:00
Interesting idea, but for me an app switcher needs to be super fast and switch between the apps I want without interrupting my thought process.

I've used an auto hotkey script for years that has served me perfectly. I press my shortcut modifier (the right Alt key) and then the letter of the app I want to switch to. For example, Right Alt + C will switch to my code editor VS Code. Right Alt + T will switch to MS Teams.

Repeating key presses will switch through all instances of that app so Right Alt + C, C, C will switch to the third open VS Code window.

The top row can be temporarily assigned to any open window for using on windows I have open that I'm switching to frequently but only while I have work in progress.

The scripts are at https://github.com/dattiimo/ahk-scripts for anyone interested.
by fmjrey | 2025-07-09 10:04:36+00:00
The article reads like a story of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, discussing pros and cons of cutting the square corners vs using a bigger hole. At some point one needs to realize we're using the wrong kind of primitives to build the distributed systems of today. In other words, we've reached the limit of the traditional approach based on OO and RDBMS that used to work with 2 and 3-tier systems. Clearly OO and RDBMS will not get us out of the tar pit. FP and NoSQL came to the rescue, but even these are not enough to reduce the accidental complexity of building distributed systems with the kind of volume, data flows, and variability of data and use cases.

I see two major sources of inspiration that can help us get out of the tar pit.

The first is the EAV approach as embodied in databases such as Datomic, XTDB, and the like. This is about recognizing that tables or documents are too coarse-grained and that entity attribute is a better primitive for modeling data and defining schemas. While such flexibility really simplifies a lot of use cases, especially the polymorphic data from the article, the EAV model assumes data is always about an entity with a specific identity. Once again the storage technology imposes a model that may not fit all use cases.

The second source of inspiration, which I believe is more generic and promising, is the one embodied in Rama from Red Planet Labs, which allows for any data shape to be stored following a schema defined by composing vectors, maps, sets, and lists, and possibly more if custom serde are provided. This removes the whole impedance mismatch issue between code and data store, and embraces the fact that normalized data isn't enough by providing physical materialized views. To build these, Rama defines processing topologies using a dataflow language compiled and run by a clustered streaming engine. With partitioning being a first-class primitive, Rama handles the distribution of both compute and data together, effectively reducing accidental complexity and allowing for horizontal scaling.

The difficulty we face today with distributed systems is primarily due to the too many moving parts of having multiple kinds of stores with different models (relational, KV, document, graph, etc.) and having too many separate compute nodes (think microservices). Getting out of this mess requires platforms that can handle the distribution and partitioning of both data and compute together, based on powerful primitives for both data and compute that can be combined to handle any kind of data and volumes.
by eadmund | 2025-07-09 10:05:05+00:00
Why would anyone want to install another browser to use as a developer?

What the computing world needs is less separation of users and developers. Developers use programs all day, every day. And users should be able to write programs any time they wish. One of the most commonly used pieces of software in the world is a programming system: Excel.

One of my problems with iOS is the implicit assumption that users will not and should not extend the systems they use.
by shakna | 2025-07-09 10:05:08+00:00
... Except you have already admitted that it has bupkus to do with C.

You said it was a lack of "modern tooling". Modern C toolchains vastly outstrip most, for modernity. C23 is three years old.

But no. I wont be breaking compatibility for everyone, just to chase a shiny nickel. That is burning the barnyard for fear of geese.
by teekoiv | 2025-07-09 10:05:08+00:00
It's baffling to me why more SSR frameworks, Astro and NextJS namely, can't adopt static pages with dynamic paths like SvelteKit. So for example, if you have a page /todos/[todoId] you can't serve those in your static bundle and NextJS straight-out refuse building your app statically.

Whereas with SvelteKit, it builds happily and does this beautiful catch-all mechanism where a default response page, say 404.html in Cloudflare, fetches the correct page and from user-perspective works flawlessly. Even though behind the scenes the response was 404 (since that dynamic page was never really compiled). Really nice especially when bundling your app as a webview for mobile.
by enricozb | 2025-07-09 10:05:32+00:00
I'm not sure how these two things are related. When writing an `impl` for a struct, there's no assumption on the bounds of the generics (if any) unless they are specified _at the impl site_.

For example, the bounds of T in

impl<T> Weird<T> { .. }

are independent of the bounds of `T` in any other impl or the struct definition.

Unless I'm missing something...
by ddritzenhoff | 2025-07-09 10:05:34+00:00
- Manufacturing mass timber [1] 5-over-1s and starting a limited-profit housing association [2] wave in the US.

- Completely circular material lifespans. I'm out of my depth here, but there _must_ be a way to gasify/liquify any type of object and filter its contents through a membrane, the same way desalination plants separate salt (NaCL) and water (H20).

- Replacing first-past-the-post voting with proportional representation.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/15/2105805... [2]: https://www.iut.nu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Limited-Profit...
by wahern | 2025-07-09 10:05:51+00:00
> But there’s evidence that “do the needful” might be an old English legal term as well. I’ve updated the parent comment. Further research is definitely required.

Huh. Using Google Books I found "do the needful" as far back as the 17th century. The 17th century hit and 19th century hits were almost all in the context of Mercantile Law, but the several 18th century hits weren't in a legal context, though perhaps the authors were importing legal terminology.

The Mercantile Law usage makes me wonder if the phrase nonetheless found its origin in India, given the centuries-long commercial and legal ties between Britain and India. OTOH, it's a rather natural turn of phrase in English. I'm surprised it isn't more common, though our (American) modern, over-sexed, adolescent culture gives rise to distracting connotations.
by LoganDark | 2025-07-09 10:06:03+00:00
> You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial

Maybe but idk. I have calendar events for every single monthly expense & BNPL. Anything that isn't on-demand is in the calendar. That makes it easy to calculate future expenses and also serves as a reminder of what I'm paying for so I can cancel anything I don't think I'll need for a while. At least one subscription I've canceled and restarted a lot because I use it a bunch and then don't use it at all and then use it a bunch again and so on.

I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into, because it gives me an easy way to see how my finances are doing and also gives me a way to keep track of charges that aren't properly descriptive on their own (for example, "wl *steam purchase" doesn't say which product was purchased; on the spreadsheet, I can see exactly, as well as for every other transaction, what I purchased, without having to look at each individual order). It's also faster to check than having to log into my bank, which ever since I switched to Mac has been forcing me through SMS verification every single time I log in no matter what.
by orbital-decay | 2025-07-09 10:06:10+00:00
They are made by and for photographers. This software is designed for many use cases, not just creative photography - hence multiple demosaicing algorithms. AI masking is missing exactly because it's made by photographers - they don't have the required expertise. UI is not intuitive because a) it's designed by photographers' committee, not UI designers, and b) you are familiar with a completely different workflow.
by slinkydeveloper | 2025-07-09 10:07:17+00:00
At Restate.dev (workflow as a code engine) we use Rust/WASM to code-share the implementation of the durable execution protocol between the restate-server and the SDKs to develop workflows. This code is essentially a "pure" state machine: events in, events out, no side effects.

We use WASM in some cases:

* Our Typescript SDK uses wasm-bindgen to compile and release the Rust part of the code. We have chosen WASM over Node native extensions because we wanted to support deno, cloudflare workers, bun, and potentially other runtimes. We've stumbled on few issues related to packaging, but except that it was a smooth process.

* Our Golang SDK uses WaZero + manual bindings using protobuf's. It was a bit of a manual process to set it up, especially surrounding concurrency issues wrt accessing the WaZero runtime plus you need some wasm runtime pooling to get decent performance, but at the end it works well and reliably.

My lesson learned from our experience is that Rust is the real player here, because it delivers on the promise that you can develop libraries that can be easily embedded in high level languages. It's really "write once, bind everywhere".

WASM is just a "packaging"/"distribution" detail in our case, and we picked it just for lack of alternatives. For example in our Python SDK, we could have used WASM but we didn't, instead we went with PyO3 which is an amazingly well done Python -> native code bindgen, and it works without hassle for users as opposed to, for example, CGO in Golang. If Golang had a PyO3-like solution without CGO/any hassle for users, I would have taken it as opposed to doing the WASM bindings myself.

Plus, from what I've tried myself, the whole WASM experience is great only when used in combination with TS/wasm-bindgen, in the other scenarios it's a lot of manual tedious memory moving code involved. Maybe when WIT gets more broadly adopted, and there will be bindgens available in most languages/engines, this will be different.

If you wanna check out the projects and see how it works: https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-shared-core/, https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-go/ and https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-typescript/
by Lio | 2025-07-09 10:07:51+00:00
I loved David's book Sustainable Rails[1], it's one of the books on Rails I always recommend.

This is a really interesting take. I'd love see one of these small alternative frameworks full embrace Sorbet and use it for things like form validation. I guess that might defeat the gradual typing approach but it would definitely be interesting.

1. https://sustainable-rails.com/
by diggan | 2025-07-09 10:08:20+00:00
> Remember trying to debug with PHP on the frontend? I wouldn’t want to go back to that.

I do remember that, all too well. Countless hours spent with templates in Symfony, or dealing with Zend Framework and all that jazz...

But as far as I remember, the issue was debuggability and testing of the templates themselves, which was easily managed by moving functionality out of the templates (lots of people put lots of logic into templates...) and then putting that behavior under unit tests. Basically being better at enforcing proper MVC split was the way to solve that.

The DX wasn't horrible outside of that, even early 2010s which was when I was dealing with that for the first time.
by dspillett | 2025-07-09 10:08:35+00:00
Hit something similar a fair time ago, and installed havenged¹ to stop it repeating. Less necessary now as the kernel has its own similar (jitter based) internal entropy source, and /dev/random has been made non-blocking anyway by adding a little extra compute to “stir the pot” (like /dev/urandom did anyway, but less cryptographically safely so).

----

[1] https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/haveged/haveged.8.en.ht...
by HelloNurse | 2025-07-09 10:09:52+00:00
> However, the article lacks even the simplest example of an api done the “wrong” vs the “right” way.

Unless the design and requirements are unusually complex or extreme, all styles of API and front end work well enough. Any example would have to be lengthy, to provide context for the advantages of "true" ReST architecture, and contrived.
by Delphiza | 2025-07-09 10:10:00+00:00
In Excel formulas everything is a function. IF, AND, OR, NOT are all functions. It is awkward and goes against what software devs are familiar with, but there are probably more people familiar with the Excel IF function than any other forms. Here is an example taken from the docs... =IF(AND(A3>B2,A3<C2),TRUE,FALSE)
by keiferski | 2025-07-09 10:10:00+00:00
Also, not for nothing but the Polish economy is mostly doing as well as it does because of the metric ton of EU subsidies injected into it the past decades.

That's one part of it. The other part is that the country had just as much human capital and economic potential as Western European states, but was held back artificially by the Partitions, WW2, the Soviet Union, and the lack of Marshall Plan investment that Western Europe received.

Sorry, but the narrative of "Poland is only doing well because the EU is helping" (of which German companies are benefitting from tremendously) is a historically narrow way to analyze the situation.
by hamilyon2 | 2025-07-09 10:10:11+00:00
I am not getting it. The rule makes competition in markets higher. Because dollars flow to best offers faster. And thus improve economic situation, not only in markets affected by rule, but also on all other markets, in case customer wants to take his money elsewhere.

And on international scale, because more competitive companies presumably out-compete foreign competitors.

So, FTC needs some permission and review to make national economy money?
by jamesemmott | 2025-07-09 10:10:14+00:00
This original sense of 'call' (deriving from the 'call number' used to organize books and other materials in physical libraries) was also responsible for the coinage of 'compiler', according to Grace Hopper: 'The reason it got called a compiler [around 1952] was that each subroutine was given a "call word", because the subroutines were in a library, and when you pull stuff out of a library you compile things. It's as simple as that.'
by tudorg | 2025-07-09 10:10:31+00:00
Another way to mitigate this is to make the agents always work only with a copy of the data that is anonymized. Assuming the anonymisation step removes / replaces all sensitive data, then whatever the AI agent does, it won't be disastrous.

The anonymization can be done by pgstream or pg_anonymizer. In combination with copy-on-write branching, you can create a safe environments on the fly for AI agents that get access to data relevant for production, but not quite production data.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-07-09 10:13:17+00:00
> The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more. The FTC estimated in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the rule would not have a $100 million effect.

> But an administrative law judge later found that the rule's impact surpassed the threshold, observing that compliance costs would exceed $100 million "unless each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates," the 8th Circuit ruling said. Despite the administrative law judge's finding, the FTC did not conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis and instead "proceeded to issue only the final regulatory analysis alongside the final Rule," the judges' panel said.

It says it in the article
by lproven | 2025-07-09 10:13:23+00:00
For most purposes, much better.

Pop OS has a whole new desktop metaphor. That doesn't bother a techie; it can totally throw non-technical folks.

Zorin coerces GNOME into a Windows-like design, but unlike too many distros, it looks good while doing it, and the paid version comes with a tonne of apps pre-installed and paid support.
by 3cats-in-a-coat | 2025-07-09 10:13:29+00:00
Each glass layer is something like 5 shader layers, all of them running something different than a basic alpha blend, looking up content from close to far away. Those "couple of texture lookups" (more like a dozen, if you add the filtering) add up pretty fast, also to be able to look up textures, you need to render each of the textures in a distinct buffer, and so on.

Saying this won't tax the battery is ridiculous. And if it was for something "impressive" I might see the ROI.

But it's a basic UI control. A button, a slider. And it's not impressive, it's distracting. The whole idea of glass in UI is to make a control less apparent. To make it fit with the content, blend in, be less distracting. But when light rapidly bends and twists behind in the refraction, the effect (in motion) is more like "STOP LOOKING AT YOUR CONTENT, LOOK AT ME".

This is... I don't know what the exact opposite of good design is. It's not "bad". Bad is not knowing what you're doing. This looks intentionally done to be as terrible as it can be, with laser-sharp malice.

I remember when Microsoft was ensuring us all Vista won't tax the performance of the computer, it's all hyper-optimized, don't worry about it. And theirs was a much simpler glass effect. What happened then? Windows 7 simplified the effect for performance reasons, and Windows 8 and 10 completely removed it, because it was too heavy...

Use common sense. Liquid Glass is more difficult to compute due to the refraction and "global illumination" effects, and it's running on tiny power starved devices. Even a DAMN WATCH. How is that supposed to magically not matter?
Show HN: Client-side ePub generation tool
by soapdog | 2025-07-09 10:13:57+00:00
This is a little tool I made that can generate a website and an epub from a set of markdown/textile/asciidoctor files plus some control toml for configuration. It all happens client-side which is neat and private. It is a no-build application, so all the source code on the repo is exactly what is executed.
by ttoinou | 2025-07-09 10:14:20+00:00
I spent a small amount of time looking into Astro and I didn’t get the difference with the Fresh framework created by the Deno team.. ? Fresh does this Island architecture already, and benchmarks on Astro website dont include Deno+Fresh to compare. So I’m still wondering what’s the benefit of using Deno+Astro vs. Deno+Fresh
by vidarh | 2025-07-09 10:14:48+00:00
They can certainly build ad-hoc tool chains very easily. But where MCP is valuable is as a means to provide them tested and secure ways of executing more complex workflows, especially if it means you can more easily whitelist actions you otherwise would want to manually approve and where simple pattern matching is insufficient to sanitise the command line.

Just having the MCP tool to do something also often seems to encourage at least Claude to aggressively use it. E.g. I added a linter tool to my own experimentaling coding assistant, and I didn't even have to tell Claude to use it - it just started using it after most changes.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-07-09 10:14:53+00:00
Interesting how he was kind of, but not quite, on the right track in terms of predicting where technology would go. Small "wearable" (in the sense that you carry them on your person) computers obviously became huge, but not in the way that he was thinking. I was a kid back then, so wasn't thinking too deeply about the future of technology, but mobile phones were already a thing and some were becoming internet-compatible, so in hindsight smartphones seem a more obvious next step than "a special glove that can recognize a digital sign language". Maybe not at the time though.
by replete | 2025-07-09 10:15:10+00:00
I have my eye on COSMIC Desktop, but ultimately decided Fedora was a better fit for me from a perspective of 'latest stuff with less hassle, mostly stable' as a technical person.

The real comparison is 'stable distribution for developer/techie type people' vs 'stable distribution that is easy to use for newbies'. Zorin is the latter, comparing the two doesn't quite make sense. If you are the former, you wouldn't pick ZorinOS.

Not to say you can't do anything on Zorin you couldn't on PopOS, but the point of Zorin is a well integrated operating system for non-technical people, which means packages won't always be latest because they want to ship a stable operating system for non-technical people.

If you had an older system and wanted to use it for basic web type activities, Zorin would probably be a better fit for that scenario