MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Buttons840 | 2025-07-27 19:34:36+00:00
I say this often, and it's quite an unpopular idea, and I'm not sure why.

Security researchers, white-hat hackers, and even grey-hat hackers should have strong legal protections so long as they report any security vulnerabilities that they find.

The bad guys are allowed to constantly scan and probe for security vulnerabilities, and there is no system to stop them, but if some good guys try to do the same they are charged with serious felony crimes.

Experience has show we cannot build secure systems. It may be an embarrassing fact, but many, if not all, of our largest companies and organizations are probably completely incapable of building secure systems. I think we try to avoid this fact by not allowing red-team security researches to be on the lookout.

It's funny how everything has worked out for the benefit of companies and powerful organizations. They say "no, you can't test the security of our systems, we are responsible for our own security, you cannot test our security without our permission, and also, if we ever leak data, we aren't responsible".

So, in the end, these powerful organizations are both responsible for their own system security, and yet they also are not responsible, depending on whichever is more convenient at the time. Again, it's funny how it works out that way.

Are companies responsible for their own security, or is this all a big team effort that we're all involved in? Pick a lane. It does feel like we're all involved when half the nation's personal data is leaked every other week.

And this is literally a matter of national security. Is the nation's power grid secure? Maybe? I don't know, do independent organizations verify this? Can I verify this myself by trying to hack the power grid (in a responsible white-hat way)? No, of course not; I would be committing a felony to even try. Enabling powerful organizations to hide their security flaws in their systems, that's the default, they just have to do nothing and then nobody is allowed to research the security of their systems, nobody is allowed to blow the whistle.

We are literally sacrificing national security for the convenience of companies and so they can avoid embarrassment.
by scotty79 | 2025-07-27 19:35:05+00:00
We might get there at some point. But it's not natural for this technology. It wasn't trained to recognize what it does and doesn't know. But I'm hopeful. It was terrible at doing math as well and it's getting significantly better with just more effort.

It might be hard to tune it though so that AI won't claim that it doesn't know something when it does, by error, or just because it doesn't like you.

It's not uncommon for a student to say they don't know something they actually do when they are questioned.
by holowoodman | 2025-07-27 19:35:08+00:00
> As ever, hardware is an underappreciated factor. We have make-C-go-fast boxes today.

That is a very common misconception. There have been numerous attempts at architectures that cater to higher-level languages. Java-bytecode-interpreting CPUs have been tried and were slower than contemporary "normal" CPUs at executing bytecode. Phones and smartphones were a supposed hot market for those, didn't fly, native bytecode execution is dead nowadays. Object-orientation in CPUs has been tried, like in Intels iAPX432. Type-tagged pointers and typed memory has been tried. HLLCAs were all the rage for some time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_language_computer_a... ). Early CISC CPUs had linked lists as a fundamental data type. Lisp machines did a ton of stuff in hardware, GC, types, tagging, polymorphism. All of it didn't work out, more primitive hardware with more complex interpreters and compilers always won. Not because C was all the rage at the time, but because high-level features in hardware are slow and inflexible.

What came of it was the realization that a CPU must be fast and flexible, not featureful. That's why we got RISC. That's why CISC processors like x86 internally translate down to RISC-like microcode. The only thing that added a little more complexity were SIMD and streaming architectures, but only in the sense that you could do more of the same in parallel. Not that HLL constructs were directly implemented into a CPU.
by cibyr | 2025-07-27 19:35:46+00:00
I've been working on a little utility to transfer files between two computers using QR codes: https://github.com/cibyr/qftf

It's kinda like Magic Wormhole without typing. It uses iroh for the p2p networking - on both ends, and also in the little web app that you use to scan the QR codes and start the transfer.
by dang | 2025-07-27 19:36:25+00:00
Thanks for watching out for a fellow user!

By coincidence, I was just doing the same thing on the original comment. Since it's more or less identical now to what you posted, I'm going to move this subthread underneath https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44703481, where it will probably make more sense.

(Incidentally, mostly all we both did was add newlines, and it's on my list to see if I can get the software to do this automatically without screwing up other posts.)
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-07-27 19:37:07+00:00
I enjoy this idea, but it's undercut somewhat by the author asking ChatGPT to define the term they're writing a post about define.

I'm not sure what the anecdote is meant to add, either. ChatGPT and other hosted LLMs seem to be the antithesis of "freehold software."

Am I missing something?
by PicassoCTs | 2025-07-27 19:37:47+00:00
From my perspective this is a doomed ideological project, to restore a ecological "balance" that is already historic- as the climate this "balance" adapted to will vanish and the luxury of ecological preservation projects will evaporate with the funds available for such luxuries.

In my eyes, ecological historicism is just another sin, wasting precious finite resources on keeping up a facade. It would be much wiser, to take specimen from the developing bulb-belt and transplant them up the lattitude to near similar developing bioms, trying to breed them to survive the winter that now befalls there "migrated" biom.

Let the wulves fight for their own survival in this mess and remove protection status. The ground is moving, no sense in building cabins and planting trees on it. Cosplaying nature while sacrificing saveable species seems absurd to me.
by spauldo | 2025-07-27 19:37:51+00:00
We've had privatized tag agents in Oklahoma for as long as I can remember.

It actually works pretty well. If you need a driver's test or CDL background checks, you need the DPS office (which is very hit-and-miss). For everything else - tags, license renewal, etc. - a tag agent handles it. They all charge the same fees and offer the same services, so it doesn't matter which one you go to. If the local agency is always busy, someone will open another one.

I'm not normally a fan of privatization, but this is one of the cases where it makes sense. It's one of the few things Oklahoma gets right.
by 0rzech | 2025-07-27 19:38:28+00:00
PSP S.A. is expanding abroad, so perhaps BLIK will be available in more countries in some time: "In September, the first BLIK transaction was made in Slovakia, and BLIK Romania S.A. received authorization from the National Bank of Romania to operate in the country. In November, the Polish Payments Standard transformed into a joint stock company, to support the execution of its strategic goals." [1] [2]

BLIK has one ugly caveat, though: it has no chargeback procedure.

[1] Year 2024.

[2] https://www.blik.com/en/about-us#id-15ce9a61-2597-11f0-8657-...
by paradox460 | 2025-07-27 19:38:30+00:00
Click over to the computed styles tab, and now you have a list of all the styles that apply to an element, regardless of source. Click the arrow next to one and it shows you where it comes from

Also, have you ever tried to update old designs using tailwind? It's a disaster. Far easier to know what styles the ugly bem card class you mentioned apply to, rather than an arbitrary b-2 m-1
by bullen | 2025-07-27 19:39:13+00:00
You are in for surprises down the road, RAM and SSD breaks, the larger/faster they are the sooner they break.

DDR2 (667MHz) > DDR3 (1.6GHz) > DDR4 (3.2GHz) etc. in longevity. and cas latency

<100GB SSDs from 2010-2015 out last all later >100GB SSDs.

SD cards can last 12 years before failing I know because I ran 2x 32GB SanDisk into the ground, one is still up sort of...
Show HN: No Hype AI – get oriented in using LLM tools for software engineering
by SupremumLimit | 2025-07-27 19:39:14+00:00
Hey HN! When I started looking into LLMs and agents for software development and introducing them at work, I quickly realised that a person new to the topic faces a real barrage: - all the hype (AGI, engineers getting replaced by AI etc.) - conflicting opinions in virtually every discussion—for every person saying they’ve 10x-ed their productivity, there is a comment decrying LLMs as an utter failure - a lot of jargon (MoE, MCP, RAG, distillation, quantisation etc. etc.) - a profusion of models, IDEs/IDE extensions, CLI agents, other tools etc.

Sorting through all of this can be quite tricky for somebody coming in fresh! HN users have been discussing LLM tools for a long time of course, but many programmers I know still haven’t _really_ tried anything other than an LLM web UI and haven't been following the progress of tools much.

So my goal for this project was to provide a balanced overview of the topic, point people to substantive resources on eg. context management and productivity effects, and cover the concerns and risks as well (from prompt injection to shady training data sourcing). I hope it's useful!
by benreesman | 2025-07-27 19:39:27+00:00
Like a lot of the threads where you come in on my comments with "actually let's be a dick about this, I'll start" the rest of the thread seems to agree that some bad formatting in no way undermines an important bit of signal, that some language barrier adjacent friction is a tithe of noise to pay for it, and that erring on the side of tolerance around non-native speakers trying to navigate an English -dominated forum and industry is the better move.

I don't know how I got on your shitlist shortlist (I'll assume you don't do this with everyone), but give it a rest.
by kaleinator | 2025-07-27 19:39:56+00:00
In my own personal experience (chronic pain), "Real Doctors" seem to want to shove pills down your throat because "they work", or give things like steroid shots which have negative long term effects. Whereas "Functional Doctors" are willing to try more traditional things because historically they have seemed to produce good results and are typically less intrusive (but may require more effort from the patient).

So I can see "Functional Dentist" being more like a dentist that is willing to try more ways to save teeth & gums by using more traditional methods (eg. Balancing the oral microbiome, suggesting softer foods more often), rather than a "Real Dentist" suggesting extractions or root canals without ever mentioning the hardness of foods or oral microbiome.
by skydhash | 2025-07-27 19:40:50+00:00
If we're sticking with the accepted definitions, there is.

Computer programming is the idea of making a computer do some task in an automated manner by giving it instructions that it will follow.

Coding is using some kind of language for the above. You take some a spec and you transform it into a textual representation.

Computer science is mostly about studying what the computer can do and what it cannot. It is the actual foundation of everything

Software engineering is about producing software by following engineering principles. Coding is a small part of it. It's mostly about getting things done reliably. The constraints are rarely technical, but mostly about coordination and resources usage.

Most people talks about computer programming when they should talk about software engineering. Computer programming is easy and we have a lot of tools to assists with coding technicalities. Software engineering is hard and the more you do it, the more you see that the problem is mostly about truly understanding what needs to be done and do it well.
by jganetsk | 2025-07-27 19:40:50+00:00
The person to look to for explanations of why OCaml/SML and not Haskell is Bob Harper. For example, the module system vs ad hoc polymorphism: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-mat... He also has in-depth critiques of laziness-by-default but the one link I found is a 404.
by woile | 2025-07-27 19:41:05+00:00
I'm building yet another Pomodoro app. I wanted something multiplatform with low resource consumption, using the native OS styles, so it integrated well with the OS, I'm using slint for that.

It's possible to install with nix and I'm working on other package managers. I'm targeting Linux and Mac.

It has a ticking sound, and the notifications remind you to stay hydrated, stretch and walk. I've used many different Pomodoro and I'm trying to consolidate the features I like the most from each.

Right now it works quite well on Linux and it should work on Mac.

https://github.com/reciperium/temporis/
by seangrogg | 2025-07-27 19:41:09+00:00
As you sort of allude to, YMMV. I moved from California to Nevada and literally all taxation went down.

Income tax from progressive scheme nearing 10% to 0%

Sales tax from ~9% to ~8%

Property taxes are hard to pin to a single value, but with housing prices just being lower in general you wind up paying less for similar footage/amenities

While it doesn't mean the observation is fundamentally inaccurate, it's worth keeping in mind that people looking at states with 0% income tax may be coming from a place where they're just getting reamed because work wants them there. If you're not flying under the SALT cap and work is remote friendly it's worth at least looking around.
by rpastuszak | 2025-07-27 19:41:38+00:00
Because of a HN post(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44421776), I've got a ton of feedback for Ensō: my writing app for flow/stream of consciousness writing. So, I'm wrapping up the release and adding good support for non-Latin, esp. RTL languages (Arabic, Persian, Hebrew) + pinyin and Japanese input methods.

Recently I also made a font for it! https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/433-how-to-make-a-font-that...

I'm also thinking about organising the usage patters, because over the past few years I've collected a few interesting groups: mental health focussed users, script writers, neurospicy folks, bloggers, squirrel enthusiasts. I'm thinking about this here: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/how-people-use-enso/
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-27 19:42:22+00:00
One of the economists mentioned by the author, Dean Spears, is the director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at UT Austin. This is funded by Elon Musk without being disclosed.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/After-the-Spike/Dean-...

https://x.com/josheidelson/status/1804220475108921458 | https://archive.today/FtxTq

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-elon-musk-population... | https://archive.today/dm0gm

https://sites.utexas.edu/pwi/
by rpdillon | 2025-07-27 19:42:23+00:00
I'm an engineer and my general attitude is that when major new developments enter the space, it's worthwhile to understand how they work, why they were created, and what they could potentially be good for, and what they potentially won't be good for, and why.

I applied this methodology to mobile, cryptocurrencies, Web3, VR, and AI. I ended up being bearish about cryptocurrencies and Web3 and bullish about mobile, VR and AI. VR is having a fair amount of trouble taking off, but I think AI is not facing the same challenges. As such, I'm betting very strongly that it's going to be part of our future, and that means now is a good time to start understanding how it works and what people are saying about it and what might come next. I do this by putting my hands on the technology and running lots of different models locally and also experimenting with cloud models, as well as exploring what tools companies are building with these technologies. Simply reading doesn't quite do it for me.

I don't do this because I'm worried about being left behind, nearly as much as I want to be able to deploy these tools effectively in the future to solve problems. It's also fun!
by Animats | 2025-07-27 19:42:35+00:00
Maybe because the iPad has a more user-friendly interface than most avionics.

Here's the cockpit of the Gripen, Saab's current fighter aircraft.[1] One big screen across the whole panel. No sign of a classic altimeter or compass. There's a HUD as well, so there's a second device for the basic flight instruments.

[1] https://bestfighter4canada.blogspot.com/p/the-saab-gripen-do...
by scrubs | 2025-07-27 19:42:41+00:00
I keep writing and in my personal conversations with Trump people and moderates i keep reminding: overshooting stupid far right will lead to stupid far left. We don't need that either. Time and time and time again power structures flaunt justice, due process etc. It never lasts. It's a crap shoot what comes next if what's going goes too far: will it be an enlightenment movement? The political equivalent of luther nailing up his complaints? Or a repeat of 20th century revolutions. Om the whole in the long run people don't put up with run away kings and all the BS of palace intrigue that goes with it.

Control without accountability never lasts
by bee_rider | 2025-07-27 19:44:16+00:00
Ignoring the whole pain in the ass this will be for their customers—at what point does this become a tragedy of the commons failure? Actually, I don’t know the case-law on this sort of stuff. If your bank authenticates using credentials that are generally publicly known by black-hats for most people—stuff like your social security number and some random bits of trivia (mothers maiden name)—shouldn’t they be responsible for any breaches?
Warp.dev Terminal – Overpriced, Buggy, and AI-Sabotaged My Code
by MistermanX | 2025-07-27 19:44:28+00:00
I used Warp.dev on the Business Plan. Blew through usage limits in 3 days, and suddenly I’m being charged for over-usage. Even after disabling that, their LITE version (supposedly "unlimited tasks") is borderline unusable.

The AI started actively breaking working code after I hit the limit. Repeated errors, no learning, and corrupted scripts. It destroyed bots I had already built.

Anyone else feel this service is more hype than functionality?
by willquack | 2025-07-27 19:44:47+00:00
I had a good time being involved with a couple JavaScript runtimes which didn't make this list, most notably PythonMonkey [1] which embeds SpiderMonkey into Python and uses Python's event loop for its async stuff. Another interesting one was DCP which is sort of a pseudo js runtime that runs ontop of other js runtimes (including a custom sandboxed server-side runtime we made [3], but also any web browser), to provide cloud function like compute for js and wasm based workloads.

Unrelated to the article, and already well known, is Pyodide which is a Python runtime in JS/WASM. I shoved Pyodide into DCP so people could run Python workloads in web browsers [4]. Crazy stuff...

1. https://pythonmonkey.io/ 2. https://distributive.network/workers 3. https://gitlab.com/Distributed-Compute-Protocol/dcp-native 4. https://willpringle.ca/blog/dcp/pyodide-worktime/
by kaspermarstal | 2025-07-27 19:45:04+00:00
I'm continuing the work on Cellm, an Excel extension that let's you call LLMs in cell formulas like =PROMPT(A1, "Rate the sentiment of the customer feedback as positive, neutral, or negative"), and then drag the formula down to apply the same prompt to thousands of rows. I built it after my girlfriend had to manually classify 7,500 research papers. Cellm automates that kind of repetitive work.

Since we added MCP and the use of structured output to "spill" multiple return values into adjecent cells, it is the quickest way I know of to monitor competitors blogs everyday before my 09:00 meeting. And also the quickest way I know of to test new AI models. I have a sheet with SimpleQA, MMLUPro, or GPQA Diamond and testing a new model is a matter of adding a new column. The whole idea is to enable normal people (like, non-techies) to automate manual, repetitive tasks with AI like programmers routinely do.

https://github.com/getcellm/cellm
by dang | 2025-07-27 19:45:17+00:00
(First, thanks for this reply, which was nicer and more receptive than I was expecting!)

We don't want LLM-generated content any more than you do, and I'm confident that the vast majority of the community agrees. The problem is that there are lots of nuances yet to be worked out, so we shouldn't be heavy-handed.

Is it ok, for example, for a non-native speaker to use an LLM to fix up their English? I'd say it's clear that HN would be better off with what they originally wrote; non-native speakers are totally welcome, nearly always do just fine, and we want to hear people in their own voice, not passed through a mechanical filter. But someone who doesn't know HN very well and is nervous about their English couldn't know that.

People need to be treated gently. The cost of being hostile to newcomers, instead of focusing on what's interesting about their work, drowns out the benefit of enforcing conventions. It drives away people we ought to embrace. The community's zeal for protecting HN is admirable, but can easily turn unhelpful. The biggest threat to this site is not that its quality will collapse (it has been relatively stable for years now*), but that it will die due to lack of new users.

Like I said, I'm sure you didn't mean to have that effect. The problem is that most of us underestimate such effects in our own comments, so we end up propagating it without meaning to. The fact that several users replied indicating that they felt this way (edit: I mean that they felt your original post was too hostile) is a strong indicator.

* not that it's all that great, but these things are relative
by TFYS | 2025-07-27 19:45:26+00:00
I believe there's enough capable people to whom money is not all that matters for this to not be as big of an issue as you think. Sure, people who only care about their personal wealth and power will leave everything behind for a chance to get it, but the vast majority of people would pursue their dreams close to their family and friends for just a good salary if given the capital to do so. It might even be a positive for society to lose those self-centered power hungry people, as they have negative effects in addition to the positive economic ones, especially when you give them a lot of power.
by realty_geek | 2025-07-27 19:46:52+00:00
I recently built a site for guessing house prices. I thought I'd be done with it in a week. Over a month later I still have a ton of things to work on.

You can at least play some games now though:

https://housepriceguess.com/roundup/v/holiday-destinations/p...

Enjoy. And yes that really was my wife playing one of the games for the first time in the video ;)
by duncanfwalker | 2025-07-27 19:47:14+00:00
I really like it. I particularly like that you've resisted the temptation to include SQL itself or the jq queries in the DSL.

The validation piece makes it feel a bit a bit like the Rails mindset for people who work better in FP.

I'd make a could of suggestions for the docs: Maybe a bit more discussion of how we'd test our webpipe code. I see why you've called them 'middlewares' but, maybe the term 'macros' or 'pipeline functions' might avoid confusion with express/connect middlewares
by bloomca | 2025-07-27 19:47:32+00:00
I've been learning systems programming for a while and recently I discovered kilo[0], which inspired me to start building my own editor[1]. Not sure how far I'll go, but hopefully it will be usable -- how fun would it be to build another project of mine using my own editor?

[O] https://github.com/antirez/kilo

[1] https://github.com/bloomca/love