MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ho_schi | 2025-07-22 09:09:53+00:00
First:

Valid point about the image size. A possible sign for bloat? Bloat is danger.

Second:

C, C++ or Rust are our tools. Everyone prefers another for technical and personal reasons. A religious believe in salvation by the next programming language is not helpful and causing harm. I hope sanitizers for C/C++ improve further - which improved safety a lot. For C++28 or C++3x we can hope for further safety improvements. Which we need.

Most bugs are logic errors. SharePoint is - according to my knowledge - implemented in C#. The CVEs mention deserialization of untrusted data, improper limitation of a pathname to a restricted directory ('path traversal'), improper control of generation of code ('code injection') and so on.

I'm rather careful about people requiring another language and claiming it will fix everything. Reliability needs hard work (design, code, review, testing...more review) even with well selected tools. I guess Microsoft does that. And I guess Microsoft works like the rest of the industry, focus on time-to-market and building a monopoly in every area. That's why we see rapid updates in a lot areas and - worse - enforced updates. And why software is known for it's low quality in comparsion to other industries?

Examples:

GNOME opted to use JavaScript in the hype back in 2010:

* JavaScript reduced compatibility compared to C/C++. * They suffered a lot from memory-leaks. Due to JavaScript. * The run-time modification seems not to be a big benefit. * Extra dependencies for JavaScript. More memory usage.

The code matured and it works now rather well. I didn't liked the decision back then. I don't like it now. But I also don't request a rewrite in C, C++, Rust or Python. Without good reasons (plural) it doesn't benefit the project.

Java also suffered. This rewrite of C++ to Java with JRE is a example, why rewrites for the sake of rewrites aren't a solution:

https://neilmadden.blog/2022/04/19/psychic-signatures-in-jav...

There is no magic. Only thorough work.

We will always suffer from security issues and we shall be always careful.
by Gravyt1 | 2025-07-22 09:10:23+00:00
For now, the website works with Flask. I would like to create an easy-to-use solution, perhaps directly integrated into the front-end. And keep the back-end part for the premium side. I am a student and this project is mainly to learn not to code but more to manage a project. So I am not even sure to finish it, especially if I see that it does not reimburse the hosting costs, even if the learning side is already great. But I will try to advance as much as possible when I return from my vacation, and maybe do it on my own and relaunch the complete website later. Anyway, if you are interested in the project you can always use the website or add me on LinkedIn: https://www.removemd.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jules-esnault-b84b32373

Thank you for your interest (:
by imjonse | 2025-07-22 09:10:39+00:00
> Empirically speaking, electing communist governments almost always leads to reduced living standards.

Almost always leads to a CIA-backed coup or civil war which indirectly indeed reduces living standards. In the other scenarios it often resulted in generally improved living standards via industrialization, increase of literacy and social programs. In yet others gross mismanagement and large scale famines, or fluctuating results depending on the time scale. There is no commonly accepted uniform outcome, and "almost always worse living standards" is clearly not one.
by jajko | 2025-07-22 09:10:42+00:00
If you don't have kids, whats the reason to take some 100% corporate job? Life is darn too short and world is so beautiful and amazing to explore. I've seen few setups that work long term like that and none involved office time. No need to hoard wealth rather live in the moment(s). That really starts to make sense if you need to settle down ie for kids.
by k__ | 2025-07-22 09:10:45+00:00
"it had no sense of symmetry, beauty, anything. It was just a mess."

Reminds me of the square packing problem, with the absurdly looking solution for packing the 17 squares.

It also reminds me of edge cases in software engineering. When I let an LLM write code, I'm often confused how it starts out, thinking, I would have done it more elegantly. However, I quickly notice, that the AI handled a few edge cases I only would habe caught in testing.

Guess, we should take a hint!
by hulitu | 2025-07-22 09:12:41+00:00
> What have we accomplished in the last 35 years?

Just do an ldd on a random program on your machine. Or check how many libraries are doing the same thing (SSL, jpeg, NSS, etc).

If you are really brave, you can compare a "make menuconfig" between linux 2.4.x and linux 4.x.

Do we need all this ?
by homebrewer | 2025-07-22 09:13:04+00:00
There's still lots of poorly produced electronics that treat NiMH that is within its normal operating voltage as being out of juice, and either nag you or shut down completely. My supposedly high quality Logitech mouse is one example (probably not buying anything from Logitech ever again, they're one of those brands that are coasting on their old credibility).
Best Ticketing SaaS?
by mustansirg | 2025-07-22 09:13:33+00:00
Hi guys, I'm a full-stack engineer, I was working on a product, when I wanted to integrate a simple ticketing system, where a user submits a contact form on my website, I store it in my backend and create a ticket on some SAAS like zoho desk, freshdesk or helpscout, however none of them have good node.js sdk's, good free plans or any of the wanted features.

I wanted to know if this is a problem faced by many of you, and if this is a valid business problem to solve for. I'll be launching a solution if I get enough upvotes and feedback on this post, if I'm wrong let me know of good solution I can use.

I'm looking for a SAAS with a free-tier allowing for API access, basic API auth, email ticketing, and a few agents initially.
by xwolfi | 2025-07-22 09:14:36+00:00
It is normal, you add a layer between the two brains that communicate, and that layer only add statistical experience to the message.

I write letters to my gf, in English, while English is not our first language. I would never ever put an LLM between us: this would fall flat, remove who we are, be a mess of cultural references, it would just not be interesting to read, even if maybe we could make it sound more native, in the style of Barack Obama or Prince Charles...

LLMs are going to make people as dumb as GPS made them. Except really, when reading a map was not very useful a skill, writing what you feel... should be.
by alganet | 2025-07-22 09:14:42+00:00
There is a vast set of alternatives for describing LLMs using fiction terms, both anthropomorphising and non-anthropomorphising.

It all depends on the perspective.

For example, in the Neon Genesis Evangelion series, I consider it to be equivalent to the Lance of Longinus. A one-time launch that once deployed and spent is quite cumbersome to be recovered for later use. In the series, it goes off into cyberspace and out of control of Nerv. It can only be yielded by a clone of a celestial giant. It's a very birds-eye view of the whole thing.

There is nothing preventing someone from creating AIs with other kinds of personalities, so the description by Mr. Fowler is due to be outdated soon. For example, in 3.33 there is a new Lance of Gaius made from the spine of the first celestial giant clone which embodies different qualities from the other spears depicted in the series. It's not far-fetched to imagine that companies will soon experiment with different modes of AI assistants.

From a down-to-earth perspective of such metaphor, using an LLM is being part of Nerv (or Wille) and helping some weird giant cultural robot to perform some unknown and mysterious task of which you are not completely aware of.

Anthropomorphising things is quite dangerous, in my opinion. I am glad that other ways of describing such machines exist, it makes it easier to understand their overall purpose, not only what it can do for me in a very short term narrow mindset.
by Nursie | 2025-07-22 09:15:27+00:00
You're not wrong, though antipodes tends to pluralise antipode, rather than antipus!

That said, wikipedia mentions antipus or antipous may have been correct before the 16th century, and antipode is likely a sort of reverse de-pluralisation.

I can't say I'm familiar with many of the other -podes words: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordfinder/classic/ends/all/...

They seem largely to be part of scientific species names. 'pods' is more natural feeling. Tripods, bipods, gastropods, cephalopods!
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-22 09:17:13+00:00
The problem is, decision-makers will not go for the "secure" way, they want a solution out of "one mold" - and so do users. It is a common complaint when trying to set up a FOSS solution, users complain that they have to learn and memorize different ways of doing the same thing across different application... and made worse by many FOSS projects not having UI/UX designers at all that care about consistency even in the scope of the application itself.

And on top of that, many data exchange formats are not just "old", they're "fossil" and don't even come close to meeting the demands that people have come to expect.
by nchmy | 2025-07-22 09:17:49+00:00
Yeah, I regularly have MANY "staging commits" at the same time in jj, in which I just throw ideas in that I don't want to pollute or yet know how to integrate with the other ideas. I use squash, split, interactive split, rebase etc to move lines and changes around etc...

When I eventually figure it all out, I can tidy it all up into completely coherent, discrete, sequential commits that make it look like I knew exactly what I was doing from the start, then push to remote.

Conversely git staging around stashing was always an absolute, terrifying mystery to me. I could never remember what was stored where, and would consequently end up losing work, repeating work, and, most of all, just making massive commits that make no sense.

I was sold on jj from essentially the moment I found it, but I remain routinely amazed at how much more powerful (yet simple!) it is than I realized.
by stingraycharles | 2025-07-22 09:17:58+00:00
Right, maybe my definition of overfitting was wrong, I always understood it more as trying to optimize for a specific benchmark / use case, and then it starts failing in other areas.

But the way you phrase it, it’s just “the model is not properly able to generalize”, ie it doesn’t understand the concept of silence also makes sense.

But couldn’t you then argue that any type of mistake / unknown could be explained as “overfitting” ? Where do you draw the line ?
by rob74 | 2025-07-22 09:18:08+00:00
Yeah, if you think about it, this is a "discrimination" deeply enbedded in pretty much every language - or at least languages with European roots, not sure about others: "right" always has positive connotations (being right, human rights, words like "dexterity" etc.) while "left" has negative ones (not as often, but often enough, like the "sinister" mentioned by the other comment).
by sethammons | 2025-07-22 09:18:42+00:00
On incorrect language use, I have long been a fan of Stephen Fry's take, with kinetic typography as a fun backdrop:

https://youtu.be/J7E-aoXLZGY?si=2D27LKx73o0UOXoo

In short, context, convention, and circumstance are all. Long live the solitary octopi.
by dist-epoch | 2025-07-22 09:18:43+00:00
> If the author didn’t bother to write it, why should I bother to read it

There is an argument that luxury stuff is valuable because typically it's hand made, and in a sense, what you are buying is not the item itself, but the untold hours "wasted" creating that item for your own exclusive use. In a sense "renting a slave" - you have control over another human's time, and this is a power trip.

You have expressed it perfectly: "I don't care about the writing itself, I care about how much effort a human put into it"
by dspillett | 2025-07-22 09:19:07+00:00
I do many things in what is considered the right-handed way, but others the left way. I do a bit or martial arts (badly, but I enjoy it) and there are some things that work better for me the left-handed way there too. For a few things I'm just as good with either hand.

I think I was destined to be ambidextrous (well, ambiUNdextrous!) as I used to write the left side of the page with my left and switch over, and you'd be hard-pressed to spot where the change had happened. If teachers encouraged me to pick a side, the quality of my writing dropped on the other side of the page. I only started to favour the right when my eyes started going “properly funny” (I have a couple of faults there which interact in interesting ways) which meant to be comfortable I tended to turn what I was writing on clockwise (which made writing with the left much less comfortable/practical).

> I was a very awkward and uncoordinated kid

Same. And no different as an adult! (even worse now I get recurring vertigo…)

In my case I think it is largely due to my eyes though: my assumption being that because the faults with them changed a lot at the same time I was developing & growing generally, my body/brain were a bit hindered wrt working out the hand-eye coordination and general proprioception businesses.

One interesting note is that mix-handedness is more common than you might think, and it can confer an advantage in some sports and other areas just as full ambidextrousness can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dominance
by damnever | 2025-07-22 09:19:08+00:00
I like it, and I once thought about this as well:

> Python doesn't require a requirements.txt file, but if you don't maintain this file, or neglect to provide one, it could result in broken functionalities - an unfortunate circumstance for a scripting language.

https://twitter.com/_damnever/status/1697247813854503250
by kuhsaft | 2025-07-22 09:21:06+00:00
> Perhaps it's not enough for there to be a "push" to Open Source because you've been failed by a proprietary solution, there needs to be a "pull".

Absolutely. A company isn’t going to create a GitHub issue and wait around. You can’t make service agreements with FOSS. There needs to be market forces to sell this software to corporations and it’s a hard sell.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-07-22 09:21:45+00:00
The main things that drives me crazy about jj is that all changes are always staged implicitly. This is what SVN did back in the day, and git was a huge improvement by staging changes explicitly.

I almost always have more changes in my repository that those which I want to include in the next commit. With git, I just add the changes I want. With jj (and svn), there’s not obvious way around it—you have to manually copy-paste changes outside of the repository before committing.
by MrJohz | 2025-07-22 09:23:22+00:00
If you leave the WIP head change blank, i.e. don't give it a description at all, then JJ will block you from pushing it unless you pass a specific flag, which is useful for sanity checking this sort of stuff.

You might be able to configure JJ to also block commits with certain descriptions as well, which might be useful in your case.
Show HN: TurboStyle – Visual CSS editor inside the browser
by danielfulop | 2025-07-22 09:24:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I built TurboStyle, a Chrome extension that lets you visually edit CSS properties directly on any website - no dev tools or code required.

A few features:

- Edit styles, text, images, and videos in-place - Toggle between mobile/tablet/desktop previews - See before/after comparisons - Export CSS - Create and reuse style presets

Would love your feedback, ideas, or opinions.
by mobileturdfctry | 2025-07-22 09:24:46+00:00
Continued....

3. Misinterpreting Natural Selection as a Moral Imperative:

Misunderstanding: Darwin's theory of natural selection describes a biological process where organisms with traits better suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. It is a descriptive scientific theory, not a prescriptive moral or ethical framework. Misinterpretations often turn this into an "ought" – that society should operate like natural selection, with the "strong" prevailing and the "weak" perishing.

Far-Right Connection: This can manifest in arguments against social safety nets, or in justifications for aggressive competition, or even in the dehumanization of certain groups deemed "unfit."

Clues Online: Discussions that frame societal problems solely in terms of individual "fitness" or that advocate for policies that intentionally disadvantage certain groups under the guise of "natural order" might be drawing on this misinterpretation.

4. Racial Interpretations of Evolution:

Misunderstanding: While Darwin's work predates modern genetics and was influenced by the prevailing racial views of his time (and some of his own writings unfortunately reflect this), the scientific understanding of human evolution today emphasizes common ancestry and genetic diversity within a single human species. It refutes the idea of distinct "races" as biologically separate categories or that some "races" are inherently superior or inferior.

Far-Right Connection: Historically, and in some contemporary far-right circles, evolutionary concepts have been twisted to support racist ideologies, claiming a hierarchy of human "races" and justifying discrimination or even violence.

Clues Online: Any rhetoric that uses "evolution" to argue for racial purity, racial hierarchies, or a "struggle" between different human racial groups is a clear sign of misunderstanding and misapplication of scientific evolutionary theory. This often appears in white supremacist or ethno-nationalist online spaces.

In summary, the online landscape provides ample evidence that some within MAGA and other far-right ideologies misunderstand Darwin's research by:

Conflating biological evolution with "Social Darwinism."

Rejecting evolution in favor of creationism or Intelligent Design due to religious or ideological beliefs.

Misinterpreting natural selection as a moral blueprint for society.

Using distorted evolutionary concepts to justify racist or discriminatory views.

It's crucial to remember that these are misinterpretations and misapplications, not accurate reflections of modern evolutionary biology.
by ben_w | 2025-07-22 09:26:10+00:00
> PFAS atom

Mixing up atoms and molecules is not a great start as comebacks go.

> Equating Beyond's process to cooking is such a disservice when they literally state they use heat and pressure to alter protein structures in globular plant molecules to transform them into stuff resembling fibrous animal molecules.

You're literally describing "cooking" with that sentence. Not metaphorically, that is literally what cooking does to the proteins in food.

For example, bread dough is at a minimum flour and water, which you then knead.

Water partially unfolds the gluten (collective name for a category of various protein) molecules, the mechanical force then encourage the gluten proteins into a different configuration, and it polymerises: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...

Then you heat it.

On a related note, when you say:

> Are you seriously comparing something used to trigger an infrequent immune response vs something that we take in on a daily basis to run our bodies? The latter being things that are transformed and transported to every part of the body.

A lot of proteins are both of those things at the same time. The gluten in your bread, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_immunochemistry

Beyond Meat is apparently gluten-free, I picked bread because it's one of the least-processed foods you can get without it being raw.
by bartread | 2025-07-22 09:26:10+00:00
I think there's certainly an element of tall poppy syndrome here. Windows, for example, used to be targeted because its security was a complete joke until quite late in the XP era (SP3 IIRC). But there's always been, and still is, and element that it's targeted because it's a big, juicy target.

A huge portion of the desktop and server market are running Windows. It used to be almost all Windows, at least on the desktop. Nowadays mobile computing has become far more important so Windows doesn't have the end user dominance it once did, but there are still a huge portion of end user devices running Windows.

Same on the back end: it's just a big juicy target, and the bang for buck that hackers get from it is huge given how prevalent it remains in corporate and government environments.
by xwolfi | 2025-07-22 09:26:44+00:00
What are you saying, I'm in China it's completely false. There is very lax enforcement, and if there is enforcement, there's always an opportunity to bribe.

The communist party doesn't have "access" to a billion phones: what would they even do with all that garbage. They can ask Wechat what you send your friends, sure, and that's enough to police most crimes.

We don't have the budget or organizational acumen of the NSA.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-07-22 09:27:44+00:00
> The vast majority of conservatives do not intrinsically hate the LGBTQ/immigrant/welfare community, it's only to the extent that the former believes the latter is taking resources from them.

Politics is a complicated game that is easily lost over misjudged nuances. LGBTQ is different from immigrant/welfare and that's not even a nuance, the difference is fundamental.

It's the Democratic party that made LGBTQ a core and sore issue, knowing full well that it will undermine the rest of the left agenda and mislead their base to the point of blindness.
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-22 09:29:52+00:00
You can absolutely do that in git:

git checkout master git rebase [whatever] [rebasing stuff] git tag rebasing git checkout --detach master [do random other stuff] git tag todo git checkout rebasing [continue rebasing]

When you are not trying to modify the same branch you're rebasing, you can omit --detach and also git tag todo.

(To clarify, it has never occurred to me that I even want to do that, so I didn't knew how to do it. Yet I didn't even needed to consider a manual, it just follows naturally from the git user model even if it seams completely unidiomatic.)
by alganet | 2025-07-22 09:30:22+00:00
I haven't read it, but I have trouble understanding why, in this day and age, would a female colunist write about men. It's asking for trouble, troves of negative commentary and backlash.

I also have trouble understanding why would anyone submit such an article to Hacker News. Is there value in the perspective of tech workers in regards to relationships? Well, if there is, we should maybe charge for it! (I'm kidding!).
by LightBug1 | 2025-07-22 09:31:39+00:00
I'd love to see the stats on that considering everyone's algorithmic approach.

I often see anti-Israeli-government/pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide content across my platforms and, when lazy, I'll wonder why then there isn't more change.

And then I wake up and realise again that I'm in a bubble.

Other bubbles may vary.
by sinuhe69 | 2025-07-22 09:32:17+00:00
I’m mostly agreed with this statement:

@tao I think there is a broader problem wherein competitions (math, programming, games, whatever) are meant to measure something difficult for humans, but tools work so fundamentally differently from us that success for a tool isn't even necessarily meaningful. AI companies have long viewed the IMO Grand Challenge as a sign of achieving "AGI," but no matter what set of rules a machine follows, there's no reason to believe success for a machine will correlate with broader mathematical or "reasoning" abilities in the way it does for human participants.