MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by linguae | 2025-07-31 05:44:42+00:00
Peak Microsoft to me was 1999-2000. Office 2000 (though Office 97 was also excellent), Windows 2000, and Visual Basic 6.0 were great.

In my opinion, things started going downhill with Windows XP, with the introduction of product activation and the later introduction of forced software updates in Service Pack 2. I also don’t like the UI changes that Microsoft made in the 2000s, notably the Luna theme in Windows XP and the introduction of the ribbon in Office 2007. I still don’t like the ribbon nearly 20 years after its introduction.

My take is that 1990s Microsoft software tended to get out of my way. From the 2000s onward, it seems that Microsoft software often gets in my way. I found a refuge in Mac OS X, but in the past decade macOS has gotten more annoying.
by lioeters | 2025-07-31 05:44:47+00:00
That's lovely writing about physics, people, and life in the Soviet times.

> We had some wild parties in Chernogolovka, with rivers of vodka, lots of dances, flirtation, sometimes ending with fistfights. We were young, talented, brazen, careless and free. I have never been so free in my life since then. When I came into the Big Real World where I happily live now I realized that one cannot live without responsibilities, but we had almost no responsibilities back then, in the golden 70-ties. Money meant very little, nobody had any money by modern standards, but all the good things of life were free back then, or so it seemed to us.
by pishpash | 2025-07-31 05:45:24+00:00
Surprisingly, 80's and 90's developers were quite skilled low-level developers who knew very well all the ways things could go wrong. The difference was the stakes were not high then. The blast radius was maybe a hundred thousand people and the worst was they lost their own files. Now some AI-controlled process or apparatus could ruin everyone's credit and maybe even kill you and all your neighbors.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-07-31 05:45:25+00:00
> What part?

That the Palestinians left on their own accord because the Arab League or whoever on their side told them to.

> lol. Arab violence against Jews was commonplace

No, it wasn't. It was much rarer than in Europe.

> They hit the facade of a church by accident, hit the facade, owned the error.

Ah yes, they've bombed every church "by accident" now.

> And admitted by UNRWA.

Actually, UNWRA was not able to confirm the Israeli government accusations, because the Israeli government refused to provide evidence. But you're tacitly admitting here that only a few UNWRA employees were ever accused of being involved with Hamas.

> Because they're brainwashed by Islamic extremism?

Because they live under military occupation. The Palestinian national movement was secular for decades, is multireligious, and not motivated by Islamism in any fundamental sense.

> So you think wanting to be martyrs and kill jews is neutral?

This has nothing to do with Jews. It has to do with Israel. Stop pretending this is 1940 Germany.
by 0x_rs | 2025-07-31 05:45:38+00:00
It's well known some things will trip those flags, probably not what all of them are or why, but most of them inappropriately (e.g. rating IP trustworthiness, but also simple HTTP requests that look "odd"). It's also well understood you have little to no options available as contacting support, live human or not as it may be, is made intentionally opaque and difficult or completely impossible. They just don't care, there's no reason to when you're one of the many hundreds of millions using their service most likely at no cost, and it's not unique to Microsoft. It's not that they became incompetent (they are, objectively), they simply never cared about you.
by devjab | 2025-07-31 05:45:58+00:00
Microsoft is still the best IT business partner for non-tech enterprise organisations. The sort of support you get as a tiny company or a private customer, like the stuff from the article, is similar to what you get from a lot of other tech companies. You get to talk with an AI if you're lucky enough that it's not just an automated system. Step into enterprise where Microsoft will call you when something goes wrong. Sure they've moved from old-scool product licenses to Azure, and their partner program is less "outsourced". The platform is still selling products that make it very easy to be an IT operations unit where your IT related corporate titles can tell the rest of the organisation that they are in constant talks with Microsoft who is working hard to resolve the issue.

It's an old tale, but Azure was sort of late to enter the market here in Europe compared to AWS (GCP was never really an option for a lot of sectors due to Google's inability to sell actual products without Big Brother). Anyway, in the early days AWS had terrible support, it was basically like trying to contact Google as a private customer even if you were a major company. Then came Azure and blew it's way into the enterprise sector, partly because Microsoft was already there but also because Microsoft did what they always do, and actually give you people to talk with. 3 months later we had an AWS representative calling us with a similar experience on sale. Google never adopted anything like it, but today AWS is frankly a great experience for enterprise as well.

The last part Microsoft has is that they bundle things. Teams didn't win because it was the best at what it did when it arrived. It won because nobody in non-tech enterprise would want to pay for a Teams alternative when they were already paying for Teams anyway. In Enterprise you don't pay the listing prices that you or I would if we were to buy office365, windows and some Azure services. You instead buy things through a partner program, and then some of the licenses are different than they otherwise would be.

There is no real alternative to it. All of Europe is looking into moving away from USA tech giants now. You can absolutely replace the Office365 platform with something like Open Deks, but you can't do it without having IT operations staff who can do a lot of the things Microsoft would typically do for you. Similarily you can absolutely run things on Hetzner or OVH, but not as easily as you could if you were doing the Azure vendor lock-in.

If it wasn't for the current geo-political situation, Microsoft would continue it's monopoly on non-tech organisations. For a good while anyway. Because ironically one of their strengths was familiarity. It used to be that when you hired someone, they knew Microsoft Office and they knew Windows, but they've lost that edge. Maybe because this blog entry is spot on as far as the private customer experience goes. Today the most frequently asked question from our new employees as far as IT goes is "can I get a mac?".
Ask HN: Handling Security as a Solo Dev?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-31 05:46:31+00:00
There’s a project that’s been on mind my mind lately. I think I can ship an MVP reasonably quickly, but concerns about security have been holding me back.

There’s so many different ways to screw up, depending on how the app is developed and deployed (an old style VPS deployment is a very different beast than something e.g. deployed on Vercel using S3 and Supabase), and I’m most experienced in mobile client dev (haven’t touched back end since ~2012) which makes for considerable blind spots. I’m aware of basics like not checking in API keys and secrets, but I’m sure there’s a laundry list of things I’m not considering.

What’s the best way to make sure my bases are covered here? It used to be that using well vetted, battle tested tools like up to date Rails w/Devise would take you a long way, is that still true?

Thanks, and apologies if the question is too vague.
by panarky | 2025-07-31 05:48:11+00:00
> assume I haven't thought the problem through

This is the essence of my workflow.

I dictate rambling, disorganized, convoluted thoughts about a new feature into a text file.

I tell Claude Code or Gemini CLI to read my slop, read the codebase, and write a real functional design doc in Markdown, with a section on open issues and design decisions.

I'll take a quick look at its approach and edit the doc to tweak its approach and answer a few open questions, then I'll tell it to answer the remaining open questions itself and update the doc.

When that's about 90% good, I'll tell the local agent to write a technical design doc to think through data flow, logic, API endpoints and params and test cases.

I'll have it iterate on that a couple more rounds, then tell it to decompose that work into a phased dev plan where each phase is about a week of work, and each task in the phase would be a few hours of work, with phases and tasks sequenced to be testable on their own in frequent small commits.

Then I have the local agent read all of that again, the codebase, the functional design, the technical design, and the entire dev plan so it can build the first phase while keeping future phases in mind.

It's cool because the agent isn't only a good coder, it's also a decent designer and planner too. It can read and write Markdown docs just as well as code and it makes surprisingly good choices on its own.

And I have complete control to alter its direction at any point. When it methodically works through a series of small tasks it's less likely to go off the rails at all, and if it does it's easy to restore to the last commit and run it again.
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-31 05:48:12+00:00
The highlighting is clearly designed for a dark background but has been given a light background in light mode. Change the bg-neutral-100 to bg-neutral-900 and it’s fine—still not magnificent, but fine.

(But as for barely… if you don’t run JS, then you just don’t see the code snippets, because for some inscrutable reason, unlike the rest of the document, they’re only rendered client-side.)
by namibj | 2025-07-31 05:48:42+00:00
Typical bicycle geometry is just tire limited in it's high speed cornering performance; a 4-wheel car with a center of mass relative to size anywhere near as high would just fall over before really hitting tire limits.

Coasting down switch-backs at whatever speed the car traffic on the road feels like, and not giving any car incentive to overtake by matching the speeds.
by petesergeant | 2025-07-31 05:49:19+00:00
> A mild damper at best, RAG-based pipelines are mature now.

I work with RAG pipelines all day, and the idea that hallucination isn't an ongoing major issue doesn't match my experience _at all_. Possibly a skill issue on my part, but, also on the part of everyone I ever talk to in the same space too.
by suprgeek | 2025-07-31 05:49:20+00:00
In the era of anything even remotely AI-adjacent raising ridiculous amount of money - and proving to vaporware - this is one raise that makes me happy. We need more of the Bryan mindset (and less of Larry) to ensure that when the AI-Enabled future shows up we have some semblance of a fair society that works for all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s
by zo1 | 2025-07-31 05:50:26+00:00
Except he's right. If you haven't noticed how crappy "AI" search is in Outlook and Teams then you probably don't use them. Even when it sorta works, it literally ignores search terms you put in the field, it gives you the search results first for what it thinks you want, then after that it gives you the actual results which are at least somehow using your search terms.

At this point they'd be better off throwing my entire inbox in a RAG workflow written by some junior halfway across the world. It's that bad. I find stuff quicker by remembering when I got an email and then scanning it myself with my own eyeballs and my finger on the scroll wheel.

Outlook used to be amazing. It used to be the hub to my work knowledge base and my memory. Now it's just the tool that does my emails mostly very well.
by EagnaIonat | 2025-07-31 05:50:34+00:00
> That is true for scanning in the cloud, but it's important not to conflate this with client-side scanning.

From what you say it's clear you never read Apples paper on this.

The client puts a flag on a match. It is only verified on the server both by another scan and a law enforcement.

If the client doesn't flag a file, it can never be decrypted on the server by anyone except the device owner.

The current system just checks everything. If your device never talks to the cloud in both scenarios nothing happens.

> That is already a structural problem:

You seem to have an over simplified view of how it all works. They don't just throw hashes in.

They can verify it by the chain of custody and documentation that is stored about that hash.

> the local devices of German citizens be scanned against a hash list maintained under US jurisdiction?

CSAM is a UN protocol that has 176 countries signed onto it. Including Germany.

Many countries also have their own independent department that works with CSAM. Germany has their Federal police (BKA) that work that role. They work with NCMEC on ensuring the CSAM hashes are correct. Germany is also one of the strictest countries in relation to CSAM.

> the entire system hinges on policy decisions that can change.

Again it's an over simplification. If the US government did do that.

- It would first be challenged in the courts.

- They would not be able to hide the fact they have changed it.

- This would lead to service providers not assisting with the corrupted CSAM.

- As this is a worldwide initiative the rest of the world can just disconnect the US from the CSAM until what is put in is confirmed.

> It is the default playbook.

If they wanted to do that, the CSAM database is the worst way to do it.

I'd recommend you read up on all of it a bit more. Most of your claims are unfounded in relation to the CSAM.
Ask HN: What are some advanced fact check strategies
by rudderdev | 2025-07-31 05:50:56+00:00
I have been reading a lot of technology news lately from diverse sources and observed some patterns that are easy to verify - outdated info presented as news, misleading title, etc. On the other hand, some news pieces look credible but when I start to verify it leads to a dead-end (or at least nothing that wouldn't take hours to verify). Google's fact-check tool seems to work only on old and popular news only.

The case in point right now, this article: https://techxplore.com/news/2025-07-vulnerability-packet-paralyze-smartphones.html

* I did not find any other reputed source linking back to this article. * The site has decent domain authority. * Searched the publishing institute (KAIST) website with google search (https://www.google.com/search?q=LLFuzz+RCE+site:https://www.kaist.ac.kr/) and did find the original article (likely the original source)

So far so good. But the concerns are

1. Is this enough fact-checking, what other techniques am I missing? 2. This whole process takes time, are there any other known techniques/tools to further reduce the time to fact-check and analyze
by iforgotpassword | 2025-07-31 05:51:01+00:00
Yep, on the rare occasion I deal with someone who uses Microsoft for email, I give them a heads-up that they probably miss an email every now and then. I remember my last employer's mails often didn't reach them, and at some point they added a big warning to their sign up page when you used one of the Microsoft domains for your email.
by Frieren | 2025-07-31 05:51:30+00:00
> The title is like saying that sending a magnet link to a copyrighted torrent file is distributing copyright material.

I interpret that the article is about AI being trained on personal data. That is a big break of many countries legislation.

And AI is 100% being trained in copyrighted data too. Breaking another different set of laws.

That shows how much big-tech is just breaking the law and using money and influence to get away with it.
by voxl | 2025-07-31 05:51:30+00:00
No, LLMs are not an "abstraction" like a compiler is. This is bullshit. LLMs are stochastic token generators. I have NEVER met someone in real life that has produced something I wouldn't throw in the trash using LLMs, and I have had the displeasure of eating cookies baked from an LLM recipe.

No, LLMs will not get better. The singularity bullshit has been active since 2010s. LLMs have consumed the entire fucking Internet and are still useless. Where the fuck is the rest of the data going to come from? All these emails from people wanting high quality data from PhDs only for them to be scammy. People only want to train these things on easily stolen garbage, not quality input, because quality is expensive. Go figure!

This optimistic horeshit hype is embarrassing.
by mikekaganski | 2025-07-31 05:52:24+00:00
Are you sure that a text describing one's thoughts when facing something has the same requirements as a mail to a mailing list? And do you always think using quotations in your mind? Like "Oh I come across this interesting place; it's rather popular [quotation1] [qotation2]; my friend suggested me to visit it [a link to the friend's spoken advise]; etc."?
Show HN: AgentGuard – Auto-kill AI agents before they burn through your budget
by dipampaul17 | 2025-07-31 05:54:04+00:00
Your AI agent hits an infinite loop and racks up $2000 in API charges overnight. This happens weekly to AI developers.

AgentGuard monitors API calls in real-time and automatically kills your process when it hits your budget limit.

How it works:

Add 2 lines to any AI project:

const agentGuard = require('agent-guard'); await agentGuard.init({ limit: 50 }); // $50 budget // Your existing code runs unchanged const response = await openai.chat.completions.create({...}); // AgentGuard tracks costs automatically

When your code hits $50 in API costs, AgentGuard stops execution and shows you exactly what happened.

Why I built this:

I got tired of seeing "I accidentally spent $500 on OpenAI" posts. Existing tools like tokencost help you measure costs after the fact, but nothing prevents runaway spending in real-time.

AgentGuard is essentially a circuit breaker for AI API costs. It's saved me from several costly bugs during development.

Limitations: Only works with OpenAI and Anthropic APIs currently. Cost calculations are estimates based on documented pricing.

Source: https://github.com/dipampaul17/AgentGuard

Install: npm i agent-guard
by Zanfa | 2025-07-31 05:54:53+00:00
LLMs would also need to use historic commits as context, rather than just the current state of the codebase in isolation. Most codebases I've worked with go through migrations from a legacy pattern A to a newer and better pattern B, used across different parts of the codebase. Rarely can these migrations be done in a single go, so both patterns tend to stick around for a while as old code is revisited. Like the HTTP example, even if LLMs pick up a pattern to follow (which they often don't), it's a coin flip whether they pick the right one or not.
by deterministic | 2025-07-31 05:55:53+00:00
Transactional vs. Reactive systems is not a good way to think about it IMHO.

A "Reactive system" is basically a "Transactional system" that in addition takes a system state as input and returns a (updated) system state as output:

reactive_system : (State * Input) -> (State * Output)

Which makes it identical (from a formal point of view) to a "Transactional system".
by galaxyLogic | 2025-07-31 05:56:16+00:00
That is a great insight, AI code is like legacy code, which is "legacy" because it was written long time ago and hasn't been worked on by anybody, so nobody knows and it is hard to learn how the code does its thing.

But so why couldn't AI-generated code be maintained by AI? Why couldn't AI in general be used to fix and evolve legacy code?
by algo_trader | 2025-07-31 05:57:06+00:00
> not an LLM! closer to something like AlphaGo, trained only on ARC, Sudoku and mazes.

ah! this explains the performance..

What is the conventional wisdom on improving codegen in LLMs? Sample n solutions and verify, or run a more expensive tree search?

I have thoughts on a very elaborate add-a-function-verify-and-rollback testing harness and i wonder if this has been tried
by adrian_b | 2025-07-31 05:57:30+00:00
Hafnium and zirconium dioxide are CMOS foundry compatible.

Hafnium dioxide has been the gate dielectric for MOS transistors in all dense CMOS processes for a couple of decades. It is certainly used in whatever smartphone or computer you have.

With the former gate dielectric, silicon dioxide, it was impossible to make MOS transistors as small as in modern processes, because it has a too low dielectric constant, which would have required impossibly thin gate layers (for high enough gate capacitances).

Hafnium dioxide has a much higher dielectric constant, allowing to achieve the same gate capacitance at a manageable gate thickness.

The chemical behaviors of hafnium and zirconium are almost identical, their similarity being as great as between rare-earth elements, but for the dielectric behavior of their oxide the substitution of a fraction of the hafnium with zirconium and appropriate treatments can make the oxide ferroelectric.

Many great applications have been proposed for ferroelectric Hf-Zr dioxide already for some years, but I have not heard of any commercial device. The reason is not any compatibility problem with CMOS processes, but I believe that it might be hard to obtain reproducible ferroelectric properties, as they might vary a lot depending on the exact parameters of the manufacturing steps.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-31 05:57:32+00:00
The way I draw the line is to focus on the "agency" aspect.

In workflows/pipelines the "agency" belongs to the coder/creator of the workflow. It usually resembles something like a "list of steps" or "ittt". Examples include traditional "research" flows like 1. create search terms for query; 2. search; 3. fetch_urls; 4. summarise; 5. answer

In agents the "agency" belongs, at one point or another, to the LLM. It gets to decide what to do at some steps, based on context, tools available, and actions taken. It usually resembles a loop, without predefined steps (or with vague steps like "if this looks like a bad answer, retry" - where bad answer can be another LLM invocation w/ a specific prompt). Example: Fix this ticket in this codebase -> ok, first I need to read_files -> read_files tool call ... and so on.
by ekianjo | 2025-07-31 05:57:44+00:00
> One exception, for sales.

either you have a rule or you dont. the moment you start to do exceptions this will call for more down the road.

there is tangible reason for sales to be commision based. you could say its just like another regular position. An engineer can also be a sales multiplier if they improve a product yet they dont get a commission. Same thing. Having boots of the field is no justification.
Show HN: DevNotify – Track Your Starred GitHub Repos and Issues (Open Source)
by SurajSuthar | 2025-07-31 05:58:17+00:00
Hi HN!

I built and just launched DevNotify — an open-source platform to help developers keep track of their starred GitHub repositories and open issues, so they never miss important updates or contribution opportunities.

Why I built it: As a developer, I often star GitHub repos or open issues I care about, only to forget them later. GitHub doesn’t make it easy to track changes across multiple projects you're interested in. I wanted a way to centralize updates from projects I follow or contribute to — so I built DevNotify.

What DevNotify does: - Shows updates from your starred repositories - Tracks issues. - Great for finding contribution opportunities - Fully open-source and privacy-friendly

Live App: https://devnotify.in/app GitHub Repo: https://github.com/yourusername/devnotify

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback — technical or UX-wise. I’m actively working on it, so open to suggestions, ideas, and contributions!

Thanks