MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-07-01 11:48:48+00:00
> People aren't demanding that the app store host every application someone submits, they're asking for apple not to take a cut of things other people sell their own customers

There are two scenarios to this (probably more)

1) A developer wants to use a 3rd party app store to distribute their apps, using 3rd party payment solutions. This is fine, it puts no load on Apple. That's what we've had in EU for a year or more, and truth be told, nobody uses 3rd party app stores. It's a desire that exists because vendors don't want to pay Apple 30%, users have no desire for it.

2) Which leads to the second scenario, where developers will want to publish their apps on the App Store, because that's where the users are, but still use 3rd party payment solutions, meaning Apple essentially hosts their apps for free.

Even after a year in EU, there are literally no users (and not many 3rd party app stores): AltStore has about 1.5 million users, Epic Games Store has about 29 million users across iOS and Android, so best case they're all iOS users, or worst case it's less than half. There are 450 million people living in the EU.

The Apple App Store is overwhelmingly dominant in EU, despite there being a free choice. So, which scenario do you think is most likely ? 1 or 2 ? The store where nobody shops, or the store where the users are, and developers wants to live rent free ?

> Also, facebook can already be a "bad actor" right now

Facebook, and later Meta has been involved in several "controversies" over the past decade or so, too many to be an accident.

In 2015-2018, people discovered that the Facebook app on Android had been collecting call logs and SMS metadata, presumably to help you connect with people you know, but it was being done without your consent.

in 2016-2020, there were rumors that Facebook listened on conversations using the iOS and Android microphones for use with targeted ads. Nothing was proved, but it was verified in 2019 that Facebook kept the camera active on iOS while you browsed the feed.

The Onavo VPN 2013-2019 (later Facebook Research) app collected various stuff like App usage stats, Web browsing, private messages and network activity on both iOS and Android, until the App was removed from Play Store and App Store in 2019.

Facebook also tracks your location, despite you disallowing this, by using background access, Photo EXIF data, and WiFi//bluetooth beacon.

All of the above were default on, without any informed consent, and the behavior of Meta (and others) are a large part of why both iOS and Android have severely hardened their cross application data access.
by Tor3 | 2025-07-01 11:48:57+00:00
Hm.. I don't seem to have that particular problem. I use VPN sometimes, but for other reasons, so I don't normally do my searches there. With the native IP I get both English and Japanese results, depending on what it finds, but for multi-language sites in Japan I actually get English sometimes. If I only want results from Japan I prefix my Google search with site:.jp, or whatever for other places. I never get auto-translated documents. I get what I would expect, actually. With a bias from the country (in this case Japan) I am in, but that's about it.
by kvemkon | 2025-07-01 11:49:07+00:00
Due to this anti-feature I have many bookmarks with broken title and now looking for a way to automatically refresh them with the original one.

> Size: 123.22 kB

A not so small extension for getting rid of a problem seems so tiny. Feels a bit like overkill and I hoped there would be something I can forcibly set without any extension. Even with disabled cookies youtube uses local storage. Why not have there some variable for that purpose!?
by MrSkelter | 2025-07-01 11:49:23+00:00
IQ doesn’t measure intelligence. If anything it measures how well a person integrates the educational methodology they have been exposed to.

At best - and it’s a stretch - IQ correlates with intelligence sometimes. It’s far from a reliable measure though.

The problems in testing are obvious. You can depress someone’s results simply by changing the language used in the questions. I.e. you can make Americans score worse by using British English. That’s nothing to do with innate intelligence.
by lucideer | 2025-07-01 11:50:40+00:00
I've only been running it for about a year (August last year) & from skimming those comments I get the impression I got in at the right time - there's a sense that they've improved stability a lot lately compared to what it was like & it may still be burdened with the fallout of reputational damage from that period.

I also perform all my updates manually - it's fully automated: a simple script that runs in seconds across my entire home server - but I don't have it on any schedule so I'm not doing anything blind. That at least affords me the luxury of being present if/when anything breaks (though for Immich that has not occurred yet).
by tecleandor | 2025-07-01 11:51:02+00:00
I like T-Boxx, but they get very expensive (+€60, without accessories), and as I'm not using them commercially, it doesn't make sense for me.

Meanwhile, among others, I've placed alerts for their L-Boxx Mini, so I buy a couple of them each time they go €8 or less. (Less than 8 is unusual, but around 8 is possible)
by 9dev | 2025-07-01 11:51:18+00:00
This is a little tangential, but I've wondered for a while if there's a better way to visualise the composition of software systems.

Often, there's not only a single way to look at one: There's a user interaction flow through components, but those components also consist of hardware; the hardware might be virtual and composed of several, spread, sub-components, or even containers. You can go down this path pretty deep, and arrive at several different representations of the system that are either impossible to visualise at the same time, or make it incomprehensible.

Ideally, I would want to have a way to document different facets of the system individually, but linked to each other, and be able to change my perspective at anytime. This would allow to flip between UX, network traffic, firewall boundaries, program flow, logical RPC flow, and so on; all while being able to view connected components for a given component at anytime. For example, inspecting an application, then viewing its network ports, then its runtime container, the hypervisor the container runs on, the cloud provider that sits in, and so on.

My idea so far is a graph database that contains all components and the edges between them. The tool would have to be as extensible as possible, so using something like HCL to describe the graph would be great, with extensions for all kinds of components and edges. And finally a viewer to render visual representations of one or more composable layers to flick through, and export etc.

I never got around to working on it yet, but if anyone else had the same idea, I'd be open to collaborating :)
by jon-wood | 2025-07-01 11:51:49+00:00
Sadly these two things can be true at the same time. As a hacker I love devices which (maybe accidentally) expose a way for me to run arbitrary software on them. At the same time as a person carrying a computer in my pocket containing my entire life I'm not a fan if that allows anyone grabbing said computer to run arbitrary software on it.

The ideal here is the standard approach where a user has to explicitly take some sort of action which can't be found accidentally and done without understanding the implications to activate debug mode. On Android that's tapping a specific item in the about menu way more times than you might think would be necessary. On iOS it's hooking up to a computer, then authorising the connection on the phone. Either way you get both the ability to run arbitrary(ish) software without someone picking up your device when left on a train being able to do so.
by spacechild1 | 2025-07-01 11:51:50+00:00
Lot's of good stuff in there. My personal highlights:

1. classes

2. named parameters with default values

3. string interpolation

I love Lua, but it's a bit sad that everyone ends up hacking together their own OOP system (including myself). I would really prefer a standardized solution.

Named parameters are such an underrated feature IMO. It makes function calls so much easier to read, in particular if the arguments all have the same type. I know, we can "fake" named arguments by passing a single table argument, but this has some overhead and default values are still rather awkward to implement. The one big downside of named parameters is that the parameter names are now part of the public API.
by trainerxr50 | 2025-07-01 11:52:59+00:00
I don't see how this would work either.

Banning algorithmic recommendations would need to ban search engines.

Social media is ultimately just a website. Anything I can think of quickly gets down the road of banning the web browser and/or banning email.

The only solution is people have to have the freedom to use these stupid platforms or not. People have to have the freedom to be stupid on stupid platforms.

Brazil is going in a much different direction.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-01 11:53:23+00:00
I think the post office could have been this, but the political will wasn't there. Separation of banking from taxation and the postal system from both of those for separation of concerns for compartmentalization was probably at the forefront of the minds of the founders, since Washington himself had run a spy network and been personally hunted by soldiers and mercenaries on their own turf during the revolution, so I can't say these aren't legitimate concerns, but they haven't exactly aged well. At the time of the revolution and directly after the union, there was no federal income tax anyway.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-07-01 11:54:07+00:00
I've worked in Amsterdam. Used to take my car out to a park and ride station out in "the province" and joined the first standup of the day out of the "long yellow office building" [1], then a short walk to the tall grey one to actually get coding.

In or near Amsterdam I've seen and/or used busses, trains, ferrys, trams, bicycles, cars; and aircraft on approach to Schiphol looked like they almost flew past the window.

I also kind of like New Amsterdam (New York). It's cozy!

Can't argue with taste I guess. %-)

[1] Intercity trains: Long, Yellow, with electricity, free wifi, a place to sit, and you can bring your own Starbucks on board. Do try to avoid rush hour, or you'll be taking "standup" a bit too literally.
by qwerty456127 | 2025-07-01 11:54:28+00:00
In the EU I've never heard of a single union other than itself. Every time I see the word "union" it's about the US. This doesn't mean they don't exists in the EU, in fact it some googling uncovers they pretty much do, yet somehow they appear invisible unless you look for them actively. Meanwhile it seems they are always hot in the USA as they get mentioned so often.
by red75prime | 2025-07-01 11:56:30+00:00
It seems to be even easier: BB codomain is a set of standard natural numbers regardless of which model of ZFS we are using. Therefore BB(748)=Q is false for every non-standard natural number Q.

We can come up with some function BB' that admits that, but it's just a different function.

It seems we can't even define a function with standard domain and non-standard codomain while not using literals for non-standard numbers in its definition.

That is ~(BB(748)=ActualValueOfBB748) is false even if it can't be proven in ZFC. In a sense, busy beaver creates its own mathematical reality.
by npteljes | 2025-07-01 11:56:47+00:00
>If your answer is yes, then you're unsympathetic towards numerous innocent others

What this means is an incomplete understanding of sympathy / empathy. These feeling don't need to pick sides. And they don't have to influence outcomes either - even feeling these feelings, you can come to the conclusion that you don't want to associate with, or support that person at all. Or even speak out against them, or do anything else. You are free to do all that, and it's not a contradiction. Quite the opposite, not doing that is to artificially restrict natural human expression.

Also, you don't have to feel sympathy / empathy, and that is okay as well. Others might, and that is just as valid. Either of them telling the other that they are wrong, and should or should not feel it, is now wrong. Feeling something about it, and voicing that, is not wrong though again.
by imtringued | 2025-07-01 11:57:34+00:00
I had to quit halfway due to time constraints but I'll comment on this:

>A more explicit strategy: after producing a new document, take every pair of documents in context and ask the model if they should probably be connected. Ask what future queries could be helped by having those documents connected. Are those queries likely? If so, make the connection.

Congratulations! You have invented attention!
by sshine | 2025-07-01 11:57:40+00:00
My mom would have been thrilled when she was still in the workforce 10 years ago.

She still uses Thunderbird, but she stopped checking her email.

What a piece of software. I remember when I migrated from Outlook Express to Thunderbird 20+ years ago because Outlook Express had a bad habit of being vulnerable to exploits just by receiving them; you didn't need to even open the email, or download an attachment, or open the attachment. It was enough for the email program to be open upon receiving malware, and it'd automatically get it.

I've been using FastMail's mobile app and web app for 5-10 years now.

I wish there was something better, but it's good enough.

Asking for less makes me less focused on email, which is not bad.
by gwbas1c | 2025-07-01 11:59:01+00:00
When my daughter was 2, one day I saw a sign for a model train exhibit in a strip mall. We walked into a tiny-ish hobby shop, and were directed to a staircase in a corner.

At the top was a huge warehouse filled with model trains, tracks, and landscapes. She was obsessed with the largest Thomas the Tank Engine set I've ever seen, and all I wanted to do was to look at all the different landscapes.
by TuxSH | 2025-07-01 11:59:07+00:00
> Any established C codebase, for example the kernel or Postgres?

Obviously you mean the Linux kernel, specifically. Also C++ has gotten a lot better since 2003 and before.

Examples of C++ usage in commercial codebases:

- anything Nintendo has written since 2010 (including microkernel, entire OS and all, for 3DS and Switch 1/2)

- well-known, high performing databases like ScyllaDB

> you just have to be careful about allocations as C++ makes it way easier to accidentally allocate than C does.

With the exception of exceptions (and coroutines but that's easily customizable), it's merely a standard library thing and doesn't affect language features (incl. language features exposed as std:: funcs/traits)

C++ has got a bad rep because it never fixes broken stdlib parts due to API and ABI concerns, and has many footguns due to this, that might make Rust and C better choices in corporate environments. However, IMHO, C++ is a much better language than C for personal projects, or when having a team of experienced folks.
by vintermann | 2025-07-01 12:00:50+00:00
But sometimes you actually have to search for something in your native language. Plants and mushrooms for instance: I know them by their Norwegian names, I wouldn't often not know how to search for them in English.

But then Google serves up wikipedia articles auto-translated from English, often with made up (but plausible looking) domain terminology: "Russula cyanoxantha, ofte kjent som kullbrenneren eller spraglete russula" - No, that's not true, Google, Russula cyanoxantha may be known as the coal burner in English, but I have NEVER heard anyone call it kullbrenneren in Norwegian, and "spraglete russula" is also not something it's ever called.

And of course it weights its own AI translated garbage above the search results.
Show HN: I made an app to help you find problems with real demand from Reddit/X
by felixheikka | 2025-07-01 12:01:17+00:00
Hello HN.

I’m Felix and I’ve spent the last months building Buildpad together with my brother David.

What is it?

It’s a platform where you research and plan your product with AI. I like to simply describe it as an AI co-founder that guides you through phases from idea to product.

What’s one cool thing about it?

You can do simple market research by searching through social media discussions like Reddit and X to see if problems are real before you build a solution for them.

This lets you see:

- If people experience the problem - How it impacts them - Existing solutions

It’s been resonating very well with our users and we just hit $6k MRR after 9 months since launching.

It’s just my brother and I working hard on this project, doing marketing, building, customer support, everything ourselves.

I just wanted to share it here in case there’s anyone who wants to build a product but is unsure if there’s demand for it. The problem research part of the app is free, so check it out if that’s you.

Let me know if you have any questions.
by finiteparadox | 2025-07-01 12:01:23+00:00
I think you are missing the point a bit. With staging you can build up arbitrary levels of compile time abstractions and be sure that they will not appear in the final executable. Of course, an optimising compiler will reorder/rearrange code regardless. But it won't reintroduce all the abstraction layers that have been staged away. After enough abstraction layers, without staging even a compiler that optimises aggressively won't know to evaluate them away.

Let's put it another way: do you think there is utility in macros at all? And do you think that type safe code is better than untyped code? If you say yes to both, you must also think that staging is useful, since it basically gives you type safe macros. Now lots more things can be macros instead of runtime functions, and you don't need to deal with the ergonomic issues that macros have in other languages. For a more real world example, see Jeremy Yallop's work on fused lexing and parsing.
by slightwinder | 2025-07-01 12:01:37+00:00
Yes, in theory. But it's testing against highly complex, ever-changing systems, where small changes can have big impact on the outcome. So it's more akin to "weak" science like psychology. And weak here means that most finding have a weak standing, because of each variable having little individual contribution in the complex setup researched, making it harder to reproduce results.

Even more problematic is that too many "researchers" are just laymen, lacking a proper scientific background, and they are often just playing around with third-party-services, while delivering too much noise to the community.

So in general, AI has also something like the replication crisis in its own way. But on the other side, the latest wave of AI is just some years old (3 years now?), which is not much in real scientific progress-rates.
by BlackFly | 2025-07-01 12:02:54+00:00
Proton is explicitly suggesting that a company can choose to help a government with an authoritarian agenda, so they agree with you that a company has no obligation to protest. They make no assertions as to whether corporations should be above nation states but they do wear their politics on their sleeve (that authoritarianism should be opposed).

Their point is that they, as a separate company, can choose to object and attempt to offer products to help people evade authoritarianism and that Apple shouldn't be able to interfere with that in the US market in ways that they do. Obviously in the market of the authoritarian regime they can interfere, but that has no bearing to a US court.
by felixheikka | 2025-07-01 12:02:58+00:00
Previous Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42430923 I can easily say that Buildpad is significantly different to what it was back then. It was essentially just a chat interface back then with different phases. I’ve changed the workflow now to have a canvas, new phases, more sources for validation, research page for validating demand with your target audience, new tools, etc.
by thatthatis | 2025-07-01 12:03:22+00:00
Glad we have a name for this. I had been calling it “context shaping” in my head for a bit now.

I think good context engineering will be one of the most important pieces of the tooling that will turn “raw model power” into incredible outcomes.

Model power is one thing, model power plus the tools to use it will be quite another.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-07-01 12:03:37+00:00
Don't miss one of the comments:

> For another perspective, I help with undergraduate recruiting in a white-collar role that a lot of students from top colleges fall into (banking, consulting, finance). We used to primarily hire from top schools (“targets”) but also leave the pipeline open to cold applications from other schools. The quality of cold applications was usually lower, but there were always a few standouts.

> But the sheer volume of non-target applications, influenced by AI, has led us to drastically cut back non-target hiring. We literally can’t read them all. And so now we hire even more from our target schools, which means that the decision that most affects an applicants post-grad placement is whether an admissions counselor let them into Columbia or Duke at age 17. Our current state is an equilibrium, but it’s not a good or better one than what we had before.
by bumby | 2025-07-01 12:04:12+00:00
If your point is you can’t talk specifics about price of ownership, you’ve wasted both of our time during this entire discussion. That’s what it’s about. A better answer would have just been like the commenter below, who said the information is hard to come by. A hardliner stance where there’s a lot of uncertainty isn’t a great hill to die on.
by simonw | 2025-07-01 12:04:56+00:00
They arguably are two names for the same thing.

The difference is that "prompt engineering" as a term has failed, because to a lot of people the inferred definition is "a laughably pretentious term for typing text into a chatbot" - it's become indistinguishable from end-user prompting.

My hope is that "context engineering" better captures the subtle art of building applications on top of LLMs through carefully engineering their context.
by nic547 | 2025-07-01 12:06:36+00:00
Switching to a even more foreign language is a bit weird - in my experience the concern about English is much greater than about German. I'd expect people would just only speak swiss German (deciding between talking swiss German or standard German with a standard German speaker is a bit of a difficult question as well). Can I ask about your background? Switching to English is usually a tourist/clearly not german-speaking thing.

Disclosure: I do consider standard German a semi-foreign language.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-07-01 12:06:43+00:00
Well there's common crawl, which is supposed to be that. Though ironically it's been under so much load from AI startups attempting to greedily gobble down its data it was basically inaccessible the last time I tried to use it. Turtles all the way down it seems.

There's probably a gap in the market for something like this. Crawling is a bit of a hassle and being able to outsource it would help a lot of companies. Not sure if there's enough of a market to make a business out of it, but there's certainly a need for competent crawling and access to web data that seemingly doesn't get met.