MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stephen_g | 2025-07-31 05:01:53+00:00
They weren't asking for it - the small sample of parents (not a random sample of voters) agreed in principle with the impossible-in-real-life blocking with no age verification for adults system, but nobody actually really cared enough to push for it except one newspaper pressure campaign...

Yet, as I said the Government was making out like that this gamed survey meant it was basically unanimous support for a system that will require full identity/age verification for everybody (yet they’re still really trying hard to keep the ‘everybody’ bit quiet)
by adastra22 | 2025-07-31 05:03:03+00:00
Yeah, by adopting Lojban as our common language.

Joking of course, but only because Lojban doesn’t have formally specified semantics.

Computational semantics could, in principle, allow you to enumerate the possible logical meanings of a given informal English phrasing of the statement, and these can be either each proven or thrown out with explicit justification for why that was not what you meant.
by linuxandrew | 2025-07-31 05:05:45+00:00
NewPipe blocks ads, and optionally blocks Shorts. NewPipe does also happen to break YouTube's terms of service.

My opinion is that YouTube should be forced to permit third party clients (interoperate). NewPipe and the various other clients are proof that there is a desire for alternative experiences and more toggles and options. Forcing users to identity themselves online to watch videos (or certain classes of videos) is a privacy nightmare, dystopic even.
by maxbond | 2025-07-31 05:06:08+00:00
Don't historians already contend with a bunch of lies and misunderstandings people wrote down in the past? Eg, it's my understanding that the Salem Witch Trials were driven by property disputes and petty grievances, but presumably that's a product of historians reading critically and between the lines, and no one wrote down "it would be really convenient if Goody So-and-So died, because I want a bigger farm?"
by marcus_holmes | 2025-07-31 05:06:25+00:00
Back in the 90's I ran a dev team building Windows applications in VB, and had the rule that the dev machines had to be lower-specced than the user machines they were programming for.

It was unpopular, because devs love the shiny. But it worked - we had nice quick applications. Which was really important for user acceptance.

I didn't make this rule because I hated devs (though self-hatred is a thing ofc), or didn't want to spend the money on shiny dev machines. I made it because if a process worked acceptably quickly on a dev machine then it never got faster than that. If the users complained that a process was slow, but it worked fine on the dev's machine, then it proved almost impossible to get that process faster. But if the dev experience of a process when first coding it up was slow, then we'd work at making it faster while building it.

I often think of this rule when staring at some web app that's taking 5 minutes to do something that appears to be quite simple. Like maybe we should have dev servers that are deliberately throttled back, or introduce random delays into the network for dev machines, or whatever. Yes, it'll be annoying for devs, but the product will actually work.
by windexh8er | 2025-07-31 05:06:26+00:00
We've got plenty of examples where Microsoft (owner of LinkedIn) is OK with spying on their users using methods akin to malware.

People who've put data on LinkedIn had some expectation of privacy at a certain point. But this is exactly why I deleted everything from LinkedIn, other than a bare minimum representation that links external to my personal site, after they were acquired.

Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI... None of them should be trusted by anyone at this point. They've all lied and stolen user data. People have taken their own lives because of the legal retaliation for doing far less than these people hiding behind corporate logos that suck up any and all information because they've been entitled to not have to deal with consequences.

They've all broken their own ToS under an air of: OK for me, not for thee. So, yes, the hidden camera is a great analogy. All of these companies, and the people running them, are cancers in and on society.
by julik | 2025-07-31 05:06:33+00:00
I doubt I agree with this statement. If a junior is causing a full table scan by doing a where(), I will teach them how to detect it - and how to avoid doing this in the future. If the idea of how a joint does applications is that a junior should be able to work with the codebase without being able to generate a SQL query of arbitrary complexity - that is a valid desire, but let's not call it "a better architecture", let's call it "I want cheap labour from people I don't trust and don't want to teach".

Maybe if the generation of those queries is from templates and it is the concern at hand - a better approach is using a restricted templating system like Liquid where all possible queries are canned and pre-generated via specific template helpers, but I doubt this mandates a Repository still.
by ptero | 2025-07-31 05:06:37+00:00
This. I heard "gimp is free and will kill Adobe within a year or two" from 1997 or so. As much as I hate Adobe's methods it still wins hands down in UX for image editing. So, as a hobbyist, I have no plans to cancel my subscription.

I wish for some real competition in this space, but it will take a LOT of effort to dethrone Adobe. My 2c.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-07-31 05:06:40+00:00
The US is eliminating its $800 duty-free import threshold. This isn't radical. It mostly brings America in line with what other major markets already do (or are about to do).

EU: Only packages under €150 ($160) are duty-free, and they're planning to scrap even that. Since 2021, they collect VAT on everything, no matter how small.

Japan: Has a ¥10,000 ($70) threshold now, but already announced they're killing it by late 2026.

China: Basically no threshold at all. You only avoid duty if the calculated tax is under $7. Even their special e-commerce imports pay 70% of normal VAT.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-31 05:07:07+00:00
One of the examples was the night before the '91 Desert Storm started. For those that weren't around, there was a huge build up operation called Desert Shield and only became Desert Storm when they started shooting. It's not like that was a secret, and the Iraqis could have seen this data and not be surprised when the bombs start falling immediately after the pizza surge.

If you were bin Laden, maybe you might not have been caught unawares helicopters were about to crash in your garden. It's not like you didn't know they were looking for you.

I can't think of someone that the Pentagon or other agencies that this applies to that their adversaries would not know they were the adversary. This might be more relevant than you might think
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-31 05:08:04+00:00
Well, that's actually 3 failures: UX designed to create an impossible flow, AI-based user blocking, and a lack of customer service.

By comparison, something similar happened when I was hired by Meta. Visiting the 2FA page caused my account to be insta-locked. It turned out that I had another account under an email address domain I no longer had access to. They were eventually able to fix it with an Oops request.

In conclusion, it doesn't matter so much if tech is imperfect if the support is good. But without good support, any small inconvenience or issue can easily spiral to become a show stopper.
by jiawei1066 | 2025-07-31 05:08:52+00:00
That’s insane — throughout this past July, Chinese companies have been rapidly open-sourcing AI models. First came Kimi-K2, then Qwen3, followed by GLM-4.5. On top of that, there’s Tencent’s HunyuanWorld and Alibaba’s Wan 2.2. Now, most of the trending models on Hugging Face are from China. Meanwhile, according to Zuckerberg, Meta is planning to shift toward a closed-source strategy going forward.
by julik | 2025-07-31 05:08:57+00:00
I get the point, but on mobile devices especially it is vastly more pleasant to read a decently-formatted HTML email with a dash of responsive design, for font sizing for example. And showing some text and a "Download PDF" widget - to find a PDF with exactly the same content - can actually be infuriating, because you would expect that the PDF would contain something _in addition_ to the plain text.
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-31 05:09:02+00:00
> "You said 'but we wouldn't have a lot of improvement without telemetry'."

I did not say that. Within the context of Microsoft's internal funding, maybe, but we could have the same improvement by Microsoft throwing more money at the PowerShell team without this telemetry. The core thing I said was that the information the telemetry gets cannot be got by "talk to your users" not that the telemetry leads to amazing improvements.

It is still difficult for you to make the case that someone choosing to download PowerShell can be "not consenting" (and before you reply saying "PowerShell ships with Windows", the PowerShell which has telemetry does not [yet] ship with Windows).
Show HN: Binge-Worthy Shows
by emrah | 2025-07-31 05:10:11+00:00
Don't let YouTube algorithm dictate what you watch and don't binge Netflix because there is nothing else to watch

This site curates channels from all the best lists, designed to help you binge without guilt. Inventory is full of edutainment videos you will love watching or simply leave running in the background while you get your work done.

These is a suggestion box on the frontpage, please submit your favorites.

It is WIP, any feedback is welcome!
by junto | 2025-07-31 05:10:17+00:00
I adore minimal API and when paired with Carter it’s just gorgeous.

https://github.com/CarterCommunity/Carter

My current absolute favorite is .NET Aspire. Build distributed applications with an OTEL support dashboard - up and running in minutes.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/dotnet/aspire/whats-new/do...

Only gap in Aspire is deployment (k8s) tooling which is on the way.
by Agentlien | 2025-07-31 05:11:12+00:00
I use Msty all the time and I love it. It just works and it's got all features I want now, including generating alternate responses, swapping models mid-chat, editing both sent messages and responses, ...

I also tried LM Studio a few months back. The interface felt overly complex and I got weird error messages which made it look like I'd have to manually fix errors in the underlying python environment. Would have been fine if it was for work, but I just wanted to play around with LLMs in my spare time so I couldn't be bothered.
by silentpuck | 2025-07-31 05:11:21+00:00
I really appreciate you sharing that journey — it reads like a personal history of programming. I’ve heard others mention the elegance of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, especially the string handling. And yes — C macros and pointer syntax can absolutely feel like arcane incantations sometimes.

I guess in the end, we all gravitate toward the languages that feel like home.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-31 05:11:39+00:00
They had multiple peaks. DOS 6.22, Windows 2000, Windows XP/2K3 (kinda), and 7.

They're trying hard to make 11 rhyme with the histories of Vista and Bob.

(I only use Windows 11 Enterprise on my oscilloscope control and instrumentation logging lab box, and on a gaming-ish laptop with an eGPU.)
by BrenBarn | 2025-07-31 05:11:51+00:00
> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not.

Hard disagree there. I mean, suspect even you wouldn't agree with that second sentence on its own, outside the context of building webpage. (Like, what if "whatever they want" is releasing a cloud of poison gas into the neighborhood?)

But there's another dimension to it too, which is that in many cases my belief is not just "other people are doing something I don't want", it's "other people are doing something they don't actually want, they just don't realize it". The classic example is drugs. If someone spends their whole life drugged out of their mind, even if they have the money to do so, I think many onlookers would think, "You know, if a magic wand were waved and that person could somehow look at their life from the outside, from the perspective of a person who wasn't already locked into that druggie life, they themselves would not want to re-enter that life."

It's just the tyranny of small decisions. We as humans are prone to painting ourselves into corners that we think we chose to be in, although if several choice-points before we had known where we would wind up, we likely would not have chosen to be there. This is doubly difficult to resolve because a sunk-cost fallacy often leads us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we actually made a mistake. And it's triply difficult because it often requires extra work to climb out of the hole we've gotten into.

But it's still good to do this sometimes. It's possible for individuals to make mistakes, and for societies to make mistakes, and for both individuals and societies to make mistakes that they either don't notice or don't fully acknowledge. And it's good for individuals and societies to take stock of where they are and genuinely consider whether it's where they want to be. And it's even good for people to nudge, encourage, or exhort other individuals or society to do that kind of sanity check.

To do otherwise is to accept the strange, fatalistic viewpoint that whatever did happen is what should have happened.
by whartung | 2025-07-31 05:13:09+00:00
I’ll tell you what fast is.

I’ve mentioned this before.

Quest Diagnostics, their internal app used by their phlebotomists.

I honestly don’t know how this app is done, I can only say it appears to run in the tab of a browser. For all I know it’s a VB app running in an ActiveX plugin, if they still do that on Windows.

L&F looks classic Windows GUI app, it interfaces with a signature pad, scanner, and a label printer.

And this app flies. Dialogs come and go, the operator rarely waits on this UI, when she is keying in data (and they key in quite a bit), the app is waiting for the operator.

Meanwhile, if I want to refill a prescription, it fraught with beach balls, those shimmering boxes, and, of course, lots of friendly whitespace and scrolling. All to load a med name, a drugstore address, and ask 4 yes/no questions.

I look at that Quest app mouth agape, it’s so surprisingly fast for an app in this day and age.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-07-31 05:13:10+00:00
> suffice to say that the lightbulb does not turn on immediately like he claims

Many people said this, but he set up an experiment to test it and the light does turn on instantly as claimed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI_X2cMHNe0

> There second one takes a mathematical model for the path integral for light and portrays it like that's actually what is happening

I know nothing about this. Is there a more accurate mathematical model available than the one he uses? Otherwise, I think it seems sensible to portray our best mathematical model as "what's really going on". And I didn't get the sense that light was "choosing" anything when watching the video, I got the sense that the amplitudes of all possible paths were cancelling out except for the shortest path (or something along those lines)
by danielrico | 2025-07-31 05:14:06+00:00
Something I learned is prototype never should be shown to non technical C-tier officials.

They will push out to the moon even after all the technical staff had signed a report saying why it's a price of trash and why shouldn't be done.

Double that down of they are financial or research. Commercials are much more practical and understand you needed a real product for client retention.

Maybe we get something good of this push for AI and people begins to understand the difference between product and prototype.
by gronglo | 2025-07-31 05:14:10+00:00
I think this should be renamed "I know when you're vibe coding with a last generation LLM".

Claude 4 Opus would not make any of the mistakes mentioned, because it knows and understands everything in your codebase. It would know when there's an existing utility function for that particular task, or that you prefer a functional rather than OOP approach. You say you want developers to care about the code they write, well, this is the next best thing; I believe it's as close as we'll see to a machine being able to "care" in my lifetime.
by parpfish | 2025-07-31 05:14:37+00:00
> No one would write a class when we’re using a functional approach everywhere.

do people really think functional coding shouldn't involve writing classes?

i can't imagine writing what i think of as code in a "functional programming style" without tons of dataclasses to describe different immutable records that get passed around. and if you're feeling fancy, add some custom constructors to those dataclasses for easy type conversions.
by lmm | 2025-07-31 05:15:06+00:00
Very much the opposite in my experience. People, especially on this site, ask for "fast" regardless of whether they need it. If asked "how fast?" the answer is always "as fast as possible". And they make extremely poor choices as a result. Fast is useful up to a point, but faster than that is useless - maybe actively detrimental if you can e.g. generate research reports faster than you can read them.

You make much better code, and much better products, if you "fast" from your vocabulary. Instead set specific, concrete latency budgets (e.g. 99.99% within x ms). You'll definitely end up with fewer errors and better maintainability than the people who tried to be "fast". You'll often end up faster than them too.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-31 05:15:19+00:00
This is all true. The best way to treat LLM's as they are now is one step above the abstraction offered by compiled languages over assembly. You can describe something in plain english, note its explicit requirements, inputs and outputs, and an LLM can effectively write the code as a translation of the logic you are specifying. Using LLM's, you are best served minimizing the entropy they have to deal with. The transformer is essentially a translation engine, so use it as a translator, not as a generator.

That being said, every few months a new model comes out that is a little less encumbered by the typical flaws of LLM's, a little more "intuitively" smart and less needing of hand-holding, a little more reliable. I feel that this is simply a natural course of evolution, as more money is put into LLM's they get better because they're essentially a giant association machine, and those associations give rise to larger abstractions, more robust conceptions of how to wield the tools of understanding the world, etc. Over time it seems inevitable that providing an LLM any task it will be able to perform that task better than any human programmer given it, and the same will go for the rest of what humans do.
by abustamam | 2025-07-31 05:15:56+00:00
A lot of what the US did during Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, could have been considered terrorism.

Terrorism as a label is a very convenient way to justify committing atrocities, under the name of squashing terrorism.

I remember hearing a radio talk show in which someone said they were against the Iraq war and the response from the pundit was "so you don't want to fight against terrorism?"

When people's actions get reduced to a single label it becomes increasingly easier to hate them.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-31 05:17:16+00:00
Munching up VMware on-prem and AWS/GCP cloud, especially when they support Linux and Windows, it makes it less risky for megacorps to shift traditional non-webops, on-prem operations to them.

What FOSS needs is saner and simpler type-1 hypervisor storage and compute appliances because the existing solutions are too difficult to deploy and maintain.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-07-31 05:18:54+00:00
And this is one of the (many) reasons that I have self-hosted my email for the last 20 years. Sure, I have had outages, and one or two times I have had to drop everything to fix the server due to a botched upgrade. But each time this happened it was my own fault and I myself was able to fix it. I have NEVER lost access due to some automated system putting me in the wrong category.

By the way, the biggest griefs I have had with self-hosting my email has been due to Microsoft. Their way of categorizing spam can pretty much be summed up to: does it come from an explicitly whitelisted commercial email provider? Probably not spam, otherwise: spam. They are criminally incompetent (also) in this area.
by ryan_lane | 2025-07-31 05:19:49+00:00
> Developers ship more often when code deploys in seconds (or milliseconds) instead of minutes.

I don't want my code deployed in seconds or milliseconds. I'm happy to wait even an hour for my deployment to happen, as long as I don't have to babysit it.

I want my code deployed safely, rolled out with some kind of sane plan (like staging -> canary -> 5% -> 20% -> 50% -> 100%), ideally waiting long enough at each stage of the plan to ensure the code is likely being executed with enough time for alerts to fire (even with feature flags, I want to make sure there's no weird side effects), and for a rollback to automatically occur if anything went wrong.

I then want to enable the feature I'm deploying via a feature flag, with a plan that looks similar to the deployment. I want the enablement of the feature flag, to the configured target, to be as fast as possible.

I want rollbacks to be fast, in-case things go wrong.

Another good example is UI interactions. Adding short animations to actions makes the UI slower, but can considerably improve the experience, by making it more obvious that the action occurred and what it did.

So, no, fast isn't always better. Fast is better when the experience is directly improved by making it fast, and you should be able to back that up with data.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-07-31 05:20:07+00:00
Are there any plans to improve observability toolset for developers? There is myriad of various AI chat apps, and there is no clear reason why another one from Ollama would be better. But Ollama is uniquely positioned to provide the best observability experience to its users because it owns the whole server stack, any other observability tool (eg Langfuse) may only treat it as a yet another API black box.
by altairprime | 2025-07-31 05:20:39+00:00
Incorrect.

> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize

The author’s title is significantly lower signal than the first sentence of their post. When the original title is defective in such a manner, the site accepts alternate titles, with preference given towards those that use the words of the post linked to compose a more informative title. The submitter does so here: “Microsoft, anyone home?” could be generically applied to hundreds of different Microsoft issues over time; the selected quote is much more precise. Plus informative, minus rhetoric is an excellent generalization of what makes a good HN title edit.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-07-31 05:22:01+00:00
I dont know about research but I am building a production grade python and express application generator. For express, it would create an empty project with a README, setup typescript, setup path aliases, setup ts-node, setup linters and formatters with all required scripts, setup testing libraries, setup multiple environments aka dev, staging, production and testing and then setup logging that works differently on each environment, creates docker containers for each environment that works differently again, sets up integration tests for redis and postgres, sets up github templates for feature requests, issues, pull requests and adds github actions and gonna set up instant deployments to AWS at the minimum and see how that goes. Once this tool is fully ready, it would take you about 30 seconds to generate a full blown production grade application that works with the latest dependency versions. Everything is run inside docker and verified that it actually works. Gonna make SaaS a real breeze after i integrate ORMs and payment gateways with email providers to this