MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BrenBarn | 2025-07-27 19:21:56+00:00
Yeah. I feel like the main thing was it was the last version that still had essentially user-controlled updates. By default it would auto-update, but you could have it not do that, or have it download the updates but not install them until you decided to, and you could deselect individual updates and just skip them.

I suspect this is linked to its era: it came out on the cusp of the trend of having everything autoupdate on its own initiative. (I just looked it up and Firefox 15 came out around the same time and was the first version to have "silent updates".) This in turn came as some kind of tipping point was reached where it became simpler to assume everyone was always connected to the internet (and have some kind of "emergency mode" for when they weren't) than to assume they weren't (and have some kind of "online mode" for when they were). And that also led to the proliferation of telemetry and other such things that involve using that always-on-ness to talk back to the software company.

I see this as part of a trend away from what I call "bounded transactions" and toward subscription-type models, and I think it's been one of the most corrosive developments in our society. The thing about Win7 was that once you had a computer up and running with it, it was up and running and would continue to be, and you could just kind of leave it like that. You had security issues to worry about, but you still had the option of being the one to worry about them. In the following years, everything began to shift towards the "you own nothing" model where so much of the functionality of "your" hardware and software was actually just a short-term lease with some company on the other end that could decide to rugpull you at their convenience.
by jq-r | 2025-07-27 19:22:03+00:00
I'll never forget this. Tons of riders uploaded their rides, charted trails, routes, uploaded pictures... Without any of that data the app would have zero value. And if any of those riders knew that they'll do a rug pull later nobody would've upload anything. So they had to do it with a secret plan to introduce subscription abruptly, locking pretty much everyone out with a subscription and trying to justify this with "data costs money". Then they've packaged this data, along with pinkbike.com and and sold this out to outside.com. I would understand if they've say contributed the user trails to eg openstreetmaps or allowed it to be downloaded, but no, they've just taken what was yours and sold it.

This stuff should be illegal. And f them for doing it.
by MuffinFlavored | 2025-07-27 19:22:49+00:00
Great link, thanks.

I'm probably being conceited but the fact that some company somewhere thought it was a good idea to add this feature for commercial efforts probably makes me think it's missing from the open source world.

Given your knowledge on Dioxus, do you think Dioxus/Tauri/Wry will eventually support something like this? I guess it's kind of niche.
by erikvdven | 2025-07-27 19:23:01+00:00
Exactly. I love the comments by the way! I never expected this would take off like this. The fact that this isn’t clear in the article is excellent feedback, and I'll take it into account when revising it. After a few hours of writing, it's easy to forget to convey the real message clearly.

But you are absolutely right. To add a little: In practice, if a third-party library hardly ever changes and makes life dramatically easier, you can consciously decide to accept the coupling in your domain, but that should be the exception, not the rule.

Pydantic is great at turning large, nested dictionaries into validated objects, yet none of that power solves a domain problem. Inside the domain you only need plain data and behaviour: pure dataclasses already give you that without extra baggage. And that's the main reason to leave it out.

The less your domain knows about the outside world, the less often you have to touch it when the outside world moves. And the easier it becomes for any new team member to adopt that logic: no extra mental model, no hidden framework magic, just the business concepts in plain Python. And exactly what you mentioned: if you ever want to drop Pydantic, you don't need to touch the domain. The less you have to touch, the easier it's to replace.

So the guideline is simple: dependencies point inward. Keep the domain free of third-party imports, and let Pydantic stay where it belongs, in the outside layers.
by stlava | 2025-07-27 19:23:21+00:00
My worry is we're going to have a generation of engineers that have not built up the necessary critical thinking/pattern matching skills needed to weigh tradeoffs and bring in context to ask the right questions and interpret the answers.

Sure we can segment this into code generation models and code review models but are engineers really going to want to be questioned by a code review tool on "what are you trying to do?" or are they just going to merge and pull the slot lever again?
by not_your_vase | 2025-07-27 19:23:53+00:00
Let me tell something else:

Just before the pandemic I have enrolled in a bachelors programme at University of London, majoring in AI/ML - just before the boom. I didn't do it because of some sixth sense, but my main hope was to get a (very) deep understanding of CUDA, and what I can really do with it, also on a theoretical level (and of course AI also sounds exciting on its own).

I left before graduation. Even the third year spent multiple lectures about installing python and pip, configuring some crappy ide, and finally doing some hello world level 20 lines long python script with pandas. This level was true for most classes, not only the AI-specific ones.

I was very disappointed, I definitely not got what I hoped for. Of course this is one person's anecdata of one specific place. And it's only tangentially related to your question, if it's related at all - but I think it fits.
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-07-27 19:24:54+00:00
What you said is very correct.

there are a huge amount of one time costs associated with the design and engineering of a spacecraft or a satellite that could enable fairly cheap constellations compared to singular satellites, and the testing regimen becomes much more cheap when it’s done as part of a campaign.

I’m a proponent for the disaggregation of satellites from sensors using specified interfaces. Industry is definitely moving in this direction with their satellite buses you can buy fairly cheaply.

Will we want to stick a $3 billion sensor onto a $15 million satellite? I can’t answer that question
by advael | 2025-07-27 19:25:31+00:00
It's crazy to me that people can simultaneously understand that censorship is bad and still think we can allow for exceptions for things like "obscenity/pornography" or "hate speech"

Free expression means that objectionable things will be said, even published. There are certainly hairy exceptions, like doxxing, slander, or incitement to violence that can put people in immediate danger, but stuff like this clearly doesn't fall in that category, and giving finance the ability to censor in this way is not signficantly better than governments doing so
by gizzlon | 2025-07-27 19:25:43+00:00
> Basecamp has probably invested the most in making a fairly complex webapp without going full SPA, but click around for like 30 seconds and you’ll see it can’t hold a candle in performance to SPAs

Really? I just started using it, and it feels fast. Most SPA's are slow and/or buggy (in the "fails to mimic real browser behaviour" kind of way)
by anonzzzies | 2025-07-27 19:26:12+00:00
Well.. It depends what they are. Social networks, obviously are an issue. But for personal email, photos, vids, content etc, that's not isolating; the self hosted versions have the same sharing / coop features as the google/ms ones for most / all personal needs. And setting up is just not very hard. It is a niche, I agree, but at least where I live, people are getting increasingly angry with the big corps and are asking how to avoid them. It won't make a dent in google revenue, but I won't have the frustrating experience myself or being asked to fix the frustrating experience for someone else.
by poemxo | 2025-07-27 19:26:53+00:00
If a cloud-based system doesn't support technologies that deter social engineering, it's still a problem. Some login portals to check your credit history don't even support 2FA.

So I think it matters, I think access systems should be designed with a wider set of human behaviors in mind, and there should be technical hurdles to leaking a majority of customers' personal information.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-27 19:27:25+00:00
Monster Cable went after Blue Jeans Cable, a small boutique audio cable manufacturer in Seattle, threatening basically patent-driven extortion and licensing.

Except the guy that founded BJC was an ex-corporate lawyer. His response letter (https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/response041408.pdf) is full of zingers, but most appropriate for this exact point is this:

> After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation asa matter of principle...

> If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.
by czhu12 | 2025-07-27 19:27:35+00:00
I'm working on a Heroku / Render / Flyio alternative thats free, open source, built on top of Kubernetes.

Supports deployments of your own apps as well as 15k+ other packages (postgres, airbyte, dagster, etc) via helm charts.

https://github.com/czhu12/canine https://canine.sh

Reason? Got sick of paying for the massive markups on PaaS but missed the simplicity and convenience.
by brink | 2025-07-27 19:27:58+00:00
I'm working on what I hope to be a high-performance voxel engine from scratch in Rust in my free-time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlolXvBDmRY

Cubic chunks, full lighting engine, opting to be non-deterministic, everything is unsigned integer math except for rotation and rendering, multiplayer is mostly implemented, built to be able to handle heavy simulation.. the foundation work is almost done. Right now it's just a hobby to try to build the best thing I can build. I work on it because it's fun.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-07-27 19:28:23+00:00
Looks like the Next.js gish-gallop machine is firing on all cylinders, augmented by generative AI.

.env files are problematic because they often end up in version control or left lying on local disks unencrypted, increasing the risk of a secret leak. They're nearly impossible to manage securely at scale, are difficult to distribute across a team, and offer no access control or security.

Sure, if your developers live in a bubble and don't know any better. Otherwise, .env files are fantastic because they are dead simple. Keeping them out of VCS is simple. echo ".env" >> .gitignore.

Need to share a secret value? Use any number of secure communications systems your company has in place. Or generate your own from the system that is issuing secrets. It's not the 1950s, when sharing a secret was considered a national security endeavor. This doesn't need to be rocket science.

You can communicate what's supposed to go in the .env file with a .env.template file, with a list of env variables set equal to an empty string.

I'm glad they at least share the nightmare that is client-side environment variables. Prepare to waste days/weeks of your life sifting through unresolved issues in Next.js repo on GitHub, only to discover that you have to re-architect vast swaths of an application just so a secret (of any kind) is never required on the client. This is incredibly challenging and frustrating to deal with, especially when on a deadline and you're 95% done with a working solution.

In typical Next.js fashion, the official documentation for instrumentation.ts is complete dog crap. It's deceptively short, making the naive developer think it's simple to configure. In reality, you should first read through the 50 open and 71 closed GitHub issues related just to instrumentation (https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20stat...), and make sure you understand all the undocumented ways in which instrumentation.js will destroy any semblance of productivity or enjoyment of programming.

I'd highly recommend staying away from the dumpster fire that is Next.js. It's too bad it's like the top skill asked for by employers these days, who seem to have no idea what they're signing up for.
by rich_sasha | 2025-07-27 19:28:44+00:00
A big issue with asyncio is IME the documentation. The main document is a tutorial-style tour of the features, scarcely mentioning the important details. These are often hidden in comments on seemingly unrelated features or, more likely, reddit and SE.

Some Python documentation indeed includes a tutorial, but also has a comprehensive documentation. This is not my experience with asyncio
by bediger4000 | 2025-07-27 19:28:47+00:00
My sister, 5 years younger than me, got high school geometry with a set of overheads that were used by a different, older, teacher when I was a sophomore.

My memory of those lessons was that Mrs White only did things on the overhead slides, with wax pencils. A PowerPoint would have been lively compared to euclidean geometry on overhead slides.
by atlasunshrugged | 2025-07-27 19:29:20+00:00
I'm finishing up a "book tour" (mostly podcasts) for my recently released book on how the country of Estonia modernized so quickly post re-independence from the Soviet Union and became a leader in e-government services and a top EU startup hub (Skype, Bolt, Wise, etc.). I'd love if people checked it out and gave feedback as it's my first big published work and the culmination of quite a few years of research and writing. https://www.rebootinganation.com/ or https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rebooting-a-nation-9...
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-27 19:30:09+00:00
I'd be a very interested admirer, if not user, of such a project. I'm playing with J this past week, and otherwise have a couple of CL books under my belt. No other real experience programming, but I certainly think that sounds like a cool idea.

I wonder where April would fit in, with your idea? Joining forces with the fellow who made April might be a possibility. Strength in numbers, and all that.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-07-27 19:30:11+00:00
Jewels don’t appeal to me or my partner at all. De Beers diamonds are a scam. After reading this, those diamonds grown in Boston sounds so friggin cool though. The amount of technological innovation behind it is incredible. Maybe I’m just wooed by science and human innovation.

Shoot, if I was in the unlikely fictional scenario where I even wore a diamond and someone asked about it, I would be THRILLED to get into the science of how it was grown in a lab. What a cool story. Instead of just going “yeah, thanks, it cost a fortune and three kids died pulling it out of the dirt”.
by fernmyth | 2025-07-27 19:30:12+00:00
Here's Vitruvius in "De Architectura" claiming it's common, easily verified knowledge: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius...

Of course, him mentioning "Don't do this" suggests that lead water pipes into the home were common enough to need a warning against.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-27 19:31:18+00:00
If we're OK with regulating SaaS companies (and anyone who connects their information systems to the internet) the way we do the airline industry, that may be an argument.

Bottom line though a good many folks here would loudly resist that kind of oversight on their work and their busineses, and for somewhat valid reasons. Data breaches hardly ever cause hundreds of deaths in a violent fireball.

If the consequences of an airline crash were just some embarassment and some inconvenience for the passengers, they would happen a lot more.

Also people almost never go to jail for airline crashes, even when they cause hundreds of deaths. We investigate them, and maybe issue new regulations, not to punish mistakes, but to try to eliminate the possibilty of them happening again.
by giantg2 | 2025-07-27 19:32:08+00:00
Government employees have been getting COLAs. It just appears that the private sector has been giving larger increases and is subject to more competition. For example, as a developer you can job hop or negotiate raises in the private sector, but that doesn’t work in the public sector. I think inflation and wage growth in the covid era hit this especially hard. Why would I want to deal with DMV customers all day for $45k when I could work at an Amazon warehouse for $70k or even Walmart/McDonald's/etc for $50k?
by atlasunshrugged | 2025-07-27 19:33:11+00:00
Hadn't seen this before, this is awesome! I lived in Cameroon and Kenya briefly doing some consulting work and mosquitos still wreak havoc across the continent (and now living in DC I wouldn't mind having one of these in the summer for my place). I'm curious if you're also thinking about defense applications -- I would imagine that a super low cost drone that could help take out a shahed or other Russian drone that are wreaking havoc on Ukraine would be quite valuable
by dang | 2025-07-27 19:33:27+00:00
I'm sure you didn't mean to, but you've crossed into being aggressive with another user. Please don't do that on HN—not with anyone, and least of all new users who deserve to be welcomed and treated charitably, not harrassed for not already knowing HN's arcane and rather primitive formatting rules*.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* (which, btw, are at https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-07-27 19:33:30+00:00
My engineering colleagues could jump to SpaceX / Blue Origin / Newspace in a second, and they work insane amounts. Much Newspace pays NASA to borrow talent to help stand up their space programs.

However, they want to do NASA work which is very R&D focused and has great opportunities for innovation, plenty of low TRL work, and a bro ad variety of missions.

Industry isn’t doing that much low TRL work
by weinzierl | 2025-07-27 19:33:46+00:00
Aren't his songs owned by a label? Did he really keep all the rights, so he was able to do what the text above says?

If not, do we know which subset of his work is free?

EDIT:

His Wikipedia page lists the following labels:

- TransRadio

- Lehrer

- Reprise/Warner Bros.

- Rhino/Atlantic

- Shout! Factory

- Needlejuice Records

His sheet music was published by Crown Publishers Inc.

His public domain dedication is a noble gesture, but legally it probably doesn't mean much.
by franktankbank | 2025-07-27 19:33:49+00:00
Edited to add space between the enumerated list.

Hi HN, I was evaluating IDEs for a personal project and decided to test Trae, ByteDance's fork of VSCode. I immediately noticed some significant performance and privacy issues that I felt were worth sharing. I've written up a full analysis with screenshots, network logs, and data payloads in the linked post. Here are the key findings:

1. Extreme Resource Consumption: Out of the box, Trae used 6.3x more RAM (~5.7 GB) and spawned 3.7x more processes (33 total) than a standard VSCode setup with the same project open. The team has since made improvements, but it's still significantly heavier.

2. Telemetry Opt-Out Doesn't Work (It Makes It Worse): I found Trae was constantly sending data to ByteDance servers (byteoversea.com). I went into the settings and disabled all telemetry. To my surprise, this didn't stop the traffic. In fact, it increased the frequency of batch data collection. The telemetry "off" switch appears to be purely cosmetic.

3. What's Being Sent: Even with telemetry "disabled," Trae sends detailed payloads including: Hardware specs (CPU, memory, etc.) Persistent user, device, and machine IDs OS version, app language, user name Granular usage data like time-on-ide, window focus state, and active file types.

4. Community Censorship: When I tried to discuss these findings on their official Discord, my posts were deleted and my account was muted for 7 days. It seems words like "track" trigger an automated gag rule, which prevents any real discussion about privacy.

I believe developers should be aware of this behavior. The combination of resource drain, non-functional privacy settings, and censorship of technical feedback is a major red flag. The full, detailed analysis with all the evidence (process lists, Fiddler captures, JSON payloads, and screenshots of the Discord moderation) is available at the link. Happy to answer any questions.
by walterbell | 2025-07-27 19:33:56+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439810#40460118

GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant discoveries? TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but that's about it.
by gizzlon | 2025-07-27 19:34:14+00:00
> should have no perceivable latency between the action and the feedback that the action was received.

Huh, according to who? I think a small delay is totally fine.

Often better than the SPA's that tried to fix this non-problem and introduced much worse problems.

Edit: For example HN: I press update and there's a small delay.. So what? Most sites and SPA's have a much worse user experience than this.
by rpdillon | 2025-07-27 19:34:28+00:00
I'm still a fan of most every law having a sunset provision.

> The LLC, DC Gambling Recovery, revived the Statute of Anne in seeking to recover potentially millions of dollars in gambling losses from sports betting giants, including Caesars Sportsbook, BetMGM and DraftKings, that it says the law allows it to recoup.

> In D.C., the law states that gambling losses of $25 or more can be recovered in a lawsuit. If the plaintiff wins, the LLC would be required to split the damages in half with the city, and its attorneys estimate the District could take in more than $300 million. That is, if the D.C. Council lets the lawsuit move forward.