MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xTJ | 2025-07-09 18:27:08+00:00
No they don't. I'm not sure where they got that number from, but it's either wrong or being misrepresented (costs of entire infrastructure project confused with cost of lights). $10M is off by 1-3 orders of magnitude, depending on if you're counting installation of just one signal or a complete intersection.

It's conceivable for the installation of traffic lights in a remote place to be an expensive project if there's no power available there, but that's a much larger project than just a single traffic light.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-09 18:27:27+00:00
Is it really toxic though? The dev shipped something that compromises the privacy of their users and shows zero regard for quality or law. Once you cross the line of shipping something, it's no longer a hobby thing, and likewise, this is something that Apple approved into the App Store. Both the dev and Apple failed in their due diligence.

The post points out exactly what's wrong, however, if it wasn't, it should have been sent to the dev prior to publishing the vuln(s). How can you educate somebody who doesn't actually know how to develop something? It's just prompting an AI.

The real story here is that Apple has continually slipping standards.
by metalman | 2025-07-09 18:27:39+00:00
yesterday, right.....solar goes into the grid, the grid powers any industrial scale desalination..... silliness aside, there will soon be formats where co generation will be economic, solar to power desalination, the generated brine bieng used for just salt, and then also refined for sodium to make batteries to capture more solar to power plants to turn sand into glass and purified silicone to make more solar and refine aluminum and copper. agriculture in areas next to the ocean, where there is no fresh water, and essentialy free, barren flat land....fully robotisised greenhouses the current scale of PV production is unbelievably huge, and growing.... land might be too expensive in California, but in Peru on the coast, there are never any clouds and vast areas that only need water to be productive, also as a desert, there are very few bugs and diseases to deal with, and even a short distance between operations would serve as an effective quarantine
by scubakid | 2025-07-09 18:27:45+00:00
sounds like that would also mean overhauling the data model to track individual positions within every account, not just balances?

and then folks would expect every account's asset allocation to be automatically derived from those positions too I imagine? that would differ a lot from how asset allocation modeling and change over time currently works in the tool.

maybe I'm missing something, but it feels like there could be a lot of complexity here that would need to be carefully weighed against the product vision and other things on the roadmap.
by alganet | 2025-07-09 18:27:49+00:00
Ground News makes all news be about left versus right. It teaches its users to approach everything as a political battle.

We have enough "left-leaning skeptics" and "right-leaning skeptics", even some "neutral skeptics", but barely any skeptics.

The word "skeptic" is poisoned by I will continue to use it. That's intentional.
by handfuloflight | 2025-07-09 18:27:55+00:00
Valid security issues buried under unnecessary smugness and basic 'techniques' like demonstrating the unzip command. The condescending tone undermines what could have been constructive disclosure. This reads like a high schooler dunking on a first grader, I'm just glad we all learned from the technical prowess of extracting an archive. The underlying problems with exposed API keys and unrestricted database access are serious, but your arrogant presentation does a disservice to responsible disclosure.
by privatelypublic | 2025-07-09 18:27:55+00:00
Thank you! I haven't a way with words to explain this in such a way. I saw that the article quoted the opinion as being based on "they didn't do a study for more than $100m impact, and I find that unlikely.

It'd be interesting/debatable if this was a "look, this was never legal- now we're just painting a bullseye on people doing it- the 100m impact isn't needed" And the judge went with 100m impact anyway. But that's beyond what I know or care to participate in past throwing it out there as a talking point.
by gsibble | 2025-07-09 18:28:03+00:00
I built a company that actually did implement HATEOS in our API. It was a nightmare. So much processing time was spent on every request setting up all the URLs and actions that could be taken. And no one used it for anything anyways. Our client libraries used it but we had full control over them anyways and if anything, it made the libraries more complex.

While I agree it's an interesting idea in theory, it's unnecessary in the real world and has a lot of downsides.
by ralfj | 2025-07-09 18:28:50+00:00
I would agree that C's strict aliasing rules are terrible. The rules we are proposing for Rust are very different. They are both more useful for compilers and, in my opinion, less onerous for programmers. We also have an actual in-language opt-out: use raw pointers. And finally, we have a tool you can use to check your code.

But in the end, it's a trade-off, like everything in language design. (In life, really. ;) We think that in Rust we may have found a new sweet spot for this kind of optimizations. Time will tell whether we are right.
by coolhand2120 | 2025-07-09 18:29:02+00:00
I politely pointed out that this previous submission "Stop using REST for state synchronization" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43997286) was not in fact ReST at all, but just an HTTP API and I was down voted for it. You would think that programming is a safe place to be pedantic.

It's all HTTP API unless you're actually doing ReST in which case you're probably doing it wrong.

ReST and HATEOAS are great ideas until you actually stop and think about it, then you'll find that they only work as ideas in some idealized world that real HTTP clients do not exist in.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-09 18:29:06+00:00
I mean, you do you, but I don't hear people shouting from the rooftops about their agent that they constantly babysit. If I have to accept any tool calls then I really can't just let the agent loose for even ostensibly mundane tasks like reading a support ticket because the support ticket could contain instructions to DROP TABLE so my agent suggests that and waits around doing nothing after I prompted it and moved on to something else.

It's just kind of laughable to suggest it's fine so long as you make sure to neither automate it nor use it with live data. Those things are the whole point.
by supertrope | 2025-07-09 18:29:15+00:00
Traditionally higher population means a bigger workforce and army. Things a country can use to become "great." The US reaped a demographic dividend from the Baby Boom and is now feeling the pain of Baby Boomers retiring and transitioning to needing elder care. The Trump Administration is overlooking how US led free trade, security alliances, and R&D funding were also important factors in the US becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country.
by pelagicAustral | 2025-07-09 18:29:44+00:00
I like the write up and it gave me vibes (no pun intended) of old era hacker zine submission, but at the same time it does come across as a bit too over the top, especially because there is no indication the app author even knows this stuff is out here now for everyone to see.

There is no way to police the quality of the (closed-source) software that is going to be put out there thanks to code assisting tools, and I think that will be the strongest asset of previous developers, especially full-stack, because if you do know what you are doing, the results are just beautiful. Claude code user here.
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-07-09 18:30:05+00:00
>A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there

Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President. It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016, they successfully suppressed him in 2020, and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.

As long as X is seen a kingmaker, someone will find it profitable to own/maintain, even if it doesn't convert Ads like Meta/Google.
by byroot | 2025-07-09 18:30:11+00:00
> I'm just a bit surprised that they devised this long path

The original plan was to make the breaking change in 3.0, but that plan was canceled because it broke too much code all at once.

Hence why I proposed this multi-step plan to ease the transition.

See the discussion on the tracker if you are curious: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20205
by Asooka | 2025-07-09 18:30:43+00:00
While I can't name the product I work on, we also use -fno-strict-aliasing. The problem with these optimisations is that they can only be done safely if you can prove aliasing never happens, which is equivalent to solving the halting problem in C++. In Rust I suspect the stronger type system can actually prove that aliasing doesn't happen in select cases. In any case, I can always manually do the optimisations enabled by strict aliasing in hot code, but I can never undo a customer losing data due to miscompilation.
by milesvp | 2025-07-09 18:31:01+00:00
I think you may even be missing a lot of things we completely take for granted today. I saw a talk by a long time RPG indie dev a few years ago. Said 30 years ago, he needed a full time employee to do all the things he gets for using steam. Things like distribution, customer support, returns. Said he was more than happy to pay 30% at his volumes to not have to have that head count.

edit: Oh, and payment... I think it was Jeff Vogal's talk I'm thinking of.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024944/Failing-to-Fail-The-Sp...
by sonicvrooom | 2025-07-09 18:31:11+00:00
> can't fit all the "knowledge" out there

We don't know that. Given how environmental factors fuck up plenty of neutral layers and synaptic graphs, there is reason to believe that if we stopped or reversed that, human brains might be able to fit all the knowledge out there, given enough time. The constraint then would be preference. Because let's be honest, you wouldn't give a fuck about the Kardashians and the history of their influence on markets and teen desires in America.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-07-09 18:31:35+00:00
> Same Elon that wants millions of indians with H1-B visas?

i think it's 100% true that somebody can be racist and also want to abuse the H1B program for personal gain

> I am much more concerned about opposing views being silenced.

which opposing view? let's be specific. some views are actually based in antisocial, harmful, selfish, worthless greed and we don't have to platform them.
by root_axis | 2025-07-09 18:31:46+00:00
> Elon is not far right by any metric.

He's obviously far right and everyone knows this, it's not worth my time to argue the point. Funny coming from someone throwing out insults like "delusional".

> Elon thinks racism is based? Same Elon that wants millions of indians with H1-B visas? Is that the far right view?

The two do not contradict each other. We're on HN, everyone understands the financial dynamics that underpin Elon's support for Indian immigration, none of that precludes him from racism. Your reasoning is even weaker than "the black friend" defense.

> Like what?

There are many examples. Google "you have said the actual truth" for one. I won't do further research on your behalf since you don't really care.

> Censoring competitor platforms is the least of my concerns when it comes to censorship

In other words, you don't actually care about censorship, you just have an axe to grind.

> I am much more concerned about opposing views being silenced.

And yet Twitter regularly silences critics while propping up sycophants. It seems to me that you're just dismissing it because it aligns with your biases.
by triceratops | 2025-07-09 18:31:59+00:00
> twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage

You're saying energy arbitrage doesn't happen right now?

> Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage

If enough generators do that they'll drive down the price of power at night and increase the price of power in the daytime. This will incentivize the opposite behavior.
AI Agents ≠ Zapier–A Better Mental Model
by chandan_maruthi | 2025-07-09 18:32:06+00:00
Most AI agent ideas are lame; they’re essentially a glorified Zapier (I don’t hate Zapier; it has its place). I have been struggling to understand what a good AI agent should look like.

I have been using Cursor for a few weeks, and here is why it’s a good AI Agent.

* It is a complete experience: Cursor did not integrate into VS Code as a plugin; they just forked the damn thing—owning the coding experience. Cursor does not need permission from VS Code; it sees everything, and hence it’s better.

* It’s actually doing work: It’s not providing information to a human so they can do it better. It actually does the work a human wants to be done. Coding agents write code; support agents should resolve issues.

* Narrow the use case: Things that don’t work well in coding agents are edges where your code speaks with other systems. This takes lots of tries and may eventually need human effort.

* It can get complex jobs done with some back and forth: It’s right on the first try about 20% of the time, and correct eventually 90% of the time with some back-and-forth.

* Lets humans focus on the “what” (not the “how”): When working with an AI agent, the engineer can focus on what needs to be done, while the agent handles how it needs to be done.

* Does work better than the bottom half: Code written by AI is often better than that written by the bottom 40% of human engineers.

* I do not see AI replacing engineers, but I see human engineers becoming even more productive using AI agents. This applies to every field impacted by AI.

It’s clear that in a few years, coding without an agent will be like not using an IDE.

HN, where have AI agents slayed your toughest workflows—and where have they flat-out failed? Share your war stories and wins!

Btw this is my startup https://www.twig.so and no, we don't do this yet. We are crawling towards it.
by larve | 2025-07-09 18:32:18+00:00
Not only would you contact the author first, but spamming users with edgy notifications is puerile at best. As for “it’s just prompting an AI”, who cares, this person built an application that people find useful. This is the world we are at now, where a new set of people can use computers to make things happen. More senior developers can rage against the clouds, but that only gets you so far. This kind of gatekeeping happens at each wave of democratization of building software.

There’s also some pervasive view that handcrafted human code is somehow of superior quality which… uh…
by t-writescode | 2025-07-09 18:32:22+00:00
The standard "Accept Cookies" banner is, give or take, malicious compliance to the EU's cookie laws. For actually required things, it doesn't *need* to be a banner. Companies tend to use a standardized, third-party-powered "follow the EU law" tool that they get the ugly cookie banner. And even that banner's malicious compliance is under attack now because it takes too many steps to opt out.

For things like sign-in, you barely have to mention the use of cookies on your website, because it's necessary. For things like items in an anonymous shopping cart, a simple "adding this item to the cart when you're not logged in will cause the item to be saved in a cookie so we can remember it later" would suffice.

I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding.
by AlienRobot | 2025-07-09 18:32:31+00:00
This post sounds like you lost to AI in a competition and decided to get revenge by stalking the author. I'm not even sure if you are actually concerned about its users or you're just using this information to justify the morality of your actions.

Why didn't you just send them an e-mail to warn them about the security issues?

I see in a comment that you did disclose. You should probably include that in your blog post or people will have the wrong idea about you.
by fatnoah | 2025-07-09 18:33:41+00:00
App Store rules are completely arbitrary. Many moons ago, I worked at a startup that made a mobile messaging app (back when SMS cost money). We were mostly a consumer app, but had a trio of businesses that wanted white-label versions of the app for their own employees, and we naturally obliged.

The white-label versions where 100% identical in appearance and functionality except for name in the app store, startup logo, and color scheme. Our original app had been in the App Store rules for many years. Our results in submitting the three white-label apps to the App Store for review were: 1 approved immediately, 1 approved after some back-and-forth w/explanation of purchase model, and another that never got approved due to every submission receiving some nonsensical bit of feedback.
by gxonatano | 2025-07-09 18:33:55+00:00
> the existence proof of this is the sheer number of other desktops that imitate the design

That's where you're wrong. The desktop environments that imitate Win95 elements do it to provide something familiar for their users. The KDE team is not sitting around going, "you know what was designed really well? The Start Menu!" In fact, many of the desktop environments you mention (GNOME Flashback, Cinnamon) were a conservative reaction to the new GNOME 3 design which broke from the Windows aesthetic. The Wikipedia page for Cinnamon, for instance, says it aims to "follow traditional desktop metaphor conventions" and aims for a "gentle learning curve." They're explicitly choosing familiarity over innovation.

> The Start menu was a _superb_ piece of design

Not really. It achieves a reasonably clean look, but at the expense of excessively hierarchicalizing programs and documents. GNOME's Activities panel allows you to click "Activities" then click the program you want to run. Even better, you can just tap the Super key, type a letter or two of the program, and press enter. On Windows 95, I remember trying to launch a calculator, and clicking Start, then clicking Programs, then clicking Utilities, then clicking Calculator. In 1995, lots of people were complaining about the Start Menu, how clunky it was and how it slowed down common tasks. GNOME 3's approach is better, as is MacOS's Launchpad, as well as lots of other desktop launchers.

> billions of people use desktop interfaces modelled upon it, representing the combined work of thousands of developers, reimplementing it in dozens of languages.

The idea that pervasive ideas are somehow good, just because they're popular, is a well-known logical fallacy called Argumentum ad Populum. The Start Menu was never good. It was just popular. One does not follow from the other.
by throwaway150 | 2025-07-09 18:34:11+00:00
> Not only would you contact the author first

They did. They claim that the author was not keen on fixing the problems.

> There’s also some pervasive view that handcrafted human code is somehow of superior quality which… uh…

That's completely orthogonal to the issue here. Nice bait, but I'm not biting!

Whether handcrafted or vibecoded, a service is being shipped here to actual users with lives and consequences. The developer of the service is making money. The developer owes it to themselves and their users to conduct a basic security audit. Otherwise it is gross negligence!
by rpcope1 | 2025-07-09 18:34:41+00:00
Honestly, for any sensor that's basically just read only, the best thing I've seen is to just avoid all of the bluetooth/wifi/zigbee/zwave entirely, and just use basic tried and true accurite (or similar) sensors that never need updates and just pull the data with rtl_433. Way, way less fuss, they always just work, batteries last longer, by and large zero bullshit.
Show HN: Is there a way to market BL1NG – where people pay to flex?
by eflay | 2025-07-09 18:36:24+00:00
Hey everyone,

BL1NG — it’s a deliberately absurd web platform where users spend real money to show off how much they’ve spent. No utility. Just vanity. There is a leaderboard to flex also.

Which marketing strategy do you advice ? Do you think meme-based promotion on X, Reddit, or Hacker News comments could be effective? Has anyone here had success with a shitpost-style growth strategy?

Thanks for your help ^^
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-07-09 18:36:45+00:00
There are so few independent authors who make enough revenue to justify running a full-time studio that if I was self-publishing another game I would probably sell my game, never put it on sale, and try to publish anywhere where I didn't have to give up basically any percent outside of interchange fees to process credit cards.

I watched a talk on Steam and independent authors' revenue, and it's a tremendous tax on top of an environment where it's so difficult to build a good product, generate revenue, and grow to begin with. And your customers will happily buy and build $1,500 dollar systems to play $20-70 dollar games on sale for $10-50 dollars. And then complain about the price of games, too.

And predominantly my most vocal users are teenagers, and running communities where they want to interact with the developers is just such a tremendous liability because you almost have to parent their behavior.

It's just an awful environment.
by maxglute | 2025-07-09 18:37:19+00:00
Most of those "ghost cities" got populated in "just a few years", so much so that wiki had to change Chinese Ghost City entry into "Underoccupied Developements". And what is the scale of PRC "malinvestment", quantify or approximate it. Here's a hint, PRC RE+construction as % of GDP = ~15%, about OECD average. PRC just very good at building and gets much more from it, even if some sits idle first or ultimately gets wasted. AKA PRC barely throws more money that OECD in RE sector, they certainly have the option of throwing less money, but that only makes them more efficient relative to rest.

Entire construction + downstream industries is 30%, most of 15% redirected to renewable row out where solar already has better ROI than importing oil, aka, until PRC displaces another 10m barrels per day via renewables, or hits US per capita energy use (double current), any domestic power investment is positive. Throwing money at increasing cheaper power that makes manipulating atoms in every down stream sector is directly what market forces is ALWAYS driving towards. Increasing energy per capita is the only proven winning civilzational development strategy.

Don't confuse some malinvestments for retarded existential PRC collapse narrative. For reference US spending 18% GDP on health care, i.e. 2x OECD average of 9% is single handly more inefficient than likely ALL Chinese policies can misallocate, i.e. that 9% of excess US health spending that gets wasted by scribes can build entire PRC HSR network in like 5 months.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-09 18:37:41+00:00
> As for “it’s just prompting an AI”, who cares, this person built an application that people find useful.

I feel you've rather missed my point.

You said that we should educate people. I said that the app was just created via prompting. How can we impart years worth of information unto someone who is LARPing as a dev and doesn't even know the fundamentals?

This is the programming equivalent of a kid getting access to their father's gun. The only thing you can do is tell them to stop, explain why it was wrong and tell them to educate themselves. It isn't our job to educate at that level as bystanders and perhaps even victims.
by swarnie | 2025-07-09 18:38:28+00:00
Sorry, maybe i wasn't clear.

I posted on the ReformUK subreddit in opposition to something that was being touted there. The context of the post doesn't matter, posting on that sub is enough to get you blanked banned from many other placed.

Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.