MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teamonkey | 2025-07-16 09:24:53+00:00
> I don't really know how to respond to something like this because I believe it is naive on a number of levels. I consider myself a realist. I believe "making your voice heard and exercising your democratic rights" is about as effective as talking to a brick wall (at least on a national level)

This is partly a perception issue. You need to adjust your expectations.

Individually you are unlikely to make a difference. You write a letter and are knocked back, you see no immediate impact and all your human senses are telling you “this didn’t work”. That is how the human mind works. It’s very demoralising (arguably by design).

You feel like you are the only one acting, because you do not see anyone else acting, and therefore you feel alone on this issue, and knowing you do not have the individual pressure to move the needle, you feel it is shouting into the void.

This is a human feeling but it is not necessarily reality. You don’t know who else has acted on this, who has written letters, what the various MP Signal chats are saying. You have no way to gauge support.

Therefore you should make the efforts even if there is no positive feedback, because there are unseen forces.

You might also need less political pressure than you think. MPs are human. Put yourself in the shoes of a MP receiving letters from the public. If one person sends a letter on this issue, it’s lost in the noise, one of many crazies talking about irrelevant topics, dismissed. If only 10 people send letters on the same topic, that starts to put the issue on your radar, no? 10 letters, then you hear about a 100k petition on the same topic that’s going to get noticed, do some research, maybe even discuss it between MPs. You’ve given a reason for them to make a self-important speech in parliament.

Continual pressure on all fronts. Keep pushing, help efforts that gain more support and build more pressure. It’s all you can do but also the least you can do.
Learning Founder Led Sales
by projectrevenue | 2025-07-16 09:25:02+00:00
Hey YC crew,

I'm building a sales bootcamp for Founders to help them upskill in sales.

I've spoken to a few YC founders and hear that YC provides little to no sales training.

Curious to hear how you personally took on the challenge of learning to sell, if you didn't have a background in sales.

Would love to get your thoughts.

Thanks! Xi
by croemer | 2025-07-16 09:25:30+00:00
It's not rocket science. You do a 2 stage thing: Why not check if the aggregation service has crashed before firing the alarm if it's within the first 5 minutes? How many types of false positives can there be? You just need to eliminate the most common ones and you gradually end up with fewer of them.

Before you fire a quick alarm, check that the node is up, check that the service is up etc.
by CalRobert | 2025-07-16 09:26:09+00:00
Apparently it’s getting dumbed down since the url bar on iOS* no longer shows anything but the domain. What subreddit am I in again? Hell if I know, apparently “Reddit.com” should be the only thing I see about my current site.

*(yes I know on iOS it’s fake Firefox but this is still a profoundly stupid change that shows they think their users are idiots)
Im looking to speak with non-technical founders
by alexnikityuk | 2025-07-16 09:26:14+00:00
I recently sold my first company and working on something new. Would appreciate 5-10 mins of time from non-technical founders so I can ask a couple of questions to validate hypothesis (async is totally fine if you prefer).

If you can spare a min, please comment/DM me at alex [at] maroo.us
by brabel | 2025-07-16 09:26:24+00:00
Mate, if you need to install something on a server how the hell can it be called client-only??? eMacs is an example of client-only perhaps, with TRAMP as it works purely on top of SSH , though you could argue it still isn’t client-only as it requires the SSH server to be enabled… so I thought the SSH connector for this would also work the same way but it also requires a full freaking Docker install not just SSH. This is totally misleading.
by taosx | 2025-07-16 09:26:49+00:00
Unpopular opinion: I think I’m going to wait for version 4 /jk. But honestly, I’ve been spoiled by modern languages like Rust, Go, and even TypeScript with modern tooling, strong typing, stability, and performance out of the box. Right now, I’m just interacting with LLMs, not building them.

That said, I remember writing myself a note a few years ago to avoid Python projects. I had to clean up code from all over the company and make it ready for production. Everyone had their own Python version, dependencies missing from requirements.txt, three way conflicts between 2 dependencies and the python version, wildly different styles, and a habit of pulling in as many libraries as possible [1]. Even recalling those memories makes my stomach turn.

I believe constraints make a project shine and be maintainable. I'd prefer if you throw at me a real python instead of a python project.

[1] Yes, I'm aware of containers, I was the unlucky guy writing them.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-16 09:27:13+00:00
I have a possibly mass produced bootleg SVCD of Star Wars in a folding jewel case, but it has some nice printed paper finishes and a retail box, so I guess it could be legit. I can't remember offhand if it's the whole trilogy or just the first movie. I think it's from the same era as the VHS and Laserdisc THX editions, pre-CGI re-release. It's from Malaysia iirc. It turned up at the computer repair shop I used to work at, and no one remembered from where, and no one wanted it, so I claimed it the same way I got my new-in-box new old stock Slackware 6.1/2 I think it was.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-16 09:28:55+00:00
> scandalously

Yes. Society hates teen pregnancy. Some societies will carve out an exception for married teens, which is a whole other can of worms. This is not a change in norms, it's the victory of the norms. People have been told not to have children until they are ready, and finally compliance with that is pretty high.

There were even worse alternatives, like the mass grave at Tuam or the Victorian practice of "baby farming". https://www.bbc.com/news/extra/4ko2zsk2tb/Tuam

The short way to get a baby boom is to make it OK to be a less than perfect parent.
by quonn | 2025-07-16 09:28:55+00:00
> Humans are tearing themselves apart and the only thing worth betting on is AI that can [...] end scarcity

Scarcity, wow...

- There is no scarcity in the rich world by historical standards.

- There is extreme poverty in large parts of the world, no amount of human intelligence has fixed this and therefore no amount of AI will. It is primarily not a question of intelligence.

- On top of that "ending scarcity" is impossible due to the hedonistic treadmill and the way the human mind works as well as the fact that with or without AI there will still be disease, aging and death.
by rasmul | 2025-07-16 09:29:08+00:00
some thoughts

- no such thing as open ai as a decision unit, there are people at the top who decide + shareholder pressure

- a narcissist optimizes for himself and has no affective empathy: cruel, extremely selfish, image oriented, power hungry, liar etc.

- having no structure means having a hidden structure and hence real power of the few above, no accountability (narcissists love this too)

- framing this meritocracy is a positive framing, it is very easy to hide incompetence

- people want to do good, great, perfect naive and you can utilize this motivation to let them burn out and work for YOUR goals as a leader... another narcissist is great doing this to people and the richest man in the world per share price

all in all, having this kind of mindset is good for start ups or get the lucky punch, but AGI will be brought by Anthropic, Google and Ilya :) you will not have series of lucky punches, you have to have a direction

I think Sam Altman, a terrible narcissist, uses open AI to feel great and he has no strategy but using others for their own benefit, because narcissists dont care, they just care about their image and power... and that is why open AI goes down... bundling with Microsoft was a big red flag in the first place...

when i think of openAI, it is a bit like Netscape Navigator + Internet Explorer in one :)

Anthropic is like Safari + Brave

Google is like ... yeah :)

Ilya is like Opera/Vivaldi or so
by dumb1224 | 2025-07-16 09:29:51+00:00
Not an expert in this field, but from their website https://www.hfnl.ustc.edu.cn/detail?id=23165 They seemed to have developed a vibration-based slicer scanner 'Blockface-VISoR' to scan 600μm 3d image but cut 400μm each time repeatly to reconstruct full 3d image. It says it's hydrogel treated sample.

P.S the visualisation tool to explore and navigate the slices is quite awesome too https://mesoanatomy.org/mesomouse/
by 112233 | 2025-07-16 09:30:17+00:00
It is good analogy.

Similarly, telcos keep accepting and showing any cooked up caller ID over their SS7, and when someone gets scammed because they trusted the caller ID, the messaging I hear always actually is "people should just be more careful."

Same as banks requiring only card number to give someone money from the account. "you shoul be more careful with your card number."

It is sad to hear the level of victim blaming from the big industry.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-16 09:30:43+00:00
> already unusual in the major languages for being a soup-to-nuts implementation rather than wrappers around an OpenSSL

What does "Soup-to-nuts" require in this context? Should I expect that Go has for some reason re-implemented the x86-64 machine code to do ChaCha20 or do you still consider it a "Soup-to-nuts" implementation if they reuse the same machine code for this that you'd find in everybody else's implementation so long as they wrote their own wrapper code ?

Unlike say compression there's no real room in these core features to innovate. You can't pick different "nothing up my sleeve" numbers, you can't can't offer more parametrisation, anything like that would be an incompatibility - it's intentionally a standardized component.
by sunshine-o | 2025-07-16 09:30:54+00:00
> Lead GrapheneOS developer was forcibly conscripted into a war

Just this headline should really scare us.

Grapheneos is a fantastic project and we should all support them but recent headlines here on HN make me believe we are just delaying a little what is unavoidable. Meaning, soon you will need:

1/ A common spyware smartphone turned off with your digital ID and banking app or whatever.

2/ Another device you can reasonably trust and use with confidence, hopefully with Internet connectivity.

I do not know what that second device will be:

- probably a PinePhone

- or a ClockworkPi uConsole with cellular modem

- maybe one of those LilyGo T-Deck with cellular modem

The open source community have greatly contributed to the success of Android but today I would rather have the smart people of GrapheneOS working on the real escape plan rather than trying to keep us just a little bit longer in the Google trap.

I understand they are working on their own hardware which is a bold step toward this direction.
by anon7000 | 2025-07-16 09:31:19+00:00
Agreed -- I'm using the hell out of Zen browser on Linux and Windows. It's missing a couple things, but it works pretty great as a Firefox wrapper.

The reality is that with so many different users, there will be lots of opinions about the best way to do things, and especially in OSS communities, it's literally impossible to keep everyone happy.

Mozilla should let others do UX experimentation (like Zen, which is an Arc copy), and focus on the core performance and compatibility of the engine itself. Keep FF itself more streamlined as a core browser, and empower others to build fancy stuff on top.

And ditch literally anything related to ads & sponsorships, which have no place in a piece of tech so foundational to the open web.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-16 09:31:42+00:00
The Jackpot trilogy has some strong original ideas, but IMO the writing has gone down a good couple of notches. I found myself getting annoyed by how clunky it was.

The Amazon show is very, very good, and definitely worth watching.

I don't understand what modern SFF has turned into. Many modern books do nothing for me at all.

It feels like at some point we stopped being able to imagine completely new futures and started recycling old futures as video games and CGI movies.
by yorwba | 2025-07-16 09:32:47+00:00
Reasoning models are trained from non-reasoning models of the same scale, and the training data is the output of the same model, filtered through a verifier. Generating intermediate context to improve the final output is not an idea that reasoning models are based on, but an outcome of the training process. Because empirically it does produce answers that pass the verifier more often if it generates the intermediate steps first.

That the model still makes mistakes doesn't mean it's not an improvement: the non-reasoning base model makes even more mistakes when it tries to skip straight to the answer.
by TFYS | 2025-07-16 09:35:44+00:00
This is probably one part of it, but I'm not sure it's a very big part. Sacrificing yourself for the group is still a part of some east asian cultures but they aren't doing any better in this regard.

I think we've always been this way, but before easily available birth control the need to have sex has been enough to keep the birth rate high. Now that sex no longer has to lead to reproduction, humanity will have to evolve some other way to increase birth rates. We will start seeing cultural and/or biological evolution; cultures and personalities that have more kids even when birth control is available will survive, and the rest will die off. Future humans might have a weaker physical desire for sex, but a stronger psychological desire for offspring.
by CoolCold | 2025-07-16 09:35:45+00:00
> Not only because the syntax is more human-friendly, but also because the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros

That's kind of very optimistic evaluation - literally anything beyond "import json" will likely lead you into the abyss of virtual envs. Running something created with say Python 3.13.x on Ubuntu 22.04 or even 24.04 (LTSs) / Rocky 9 and the whole can of worms opened.

things like virtual envs + containers (docker like)/version managers become a must quickly.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-07-16 09:36:09+00:00
It's not even on the screen for me when searching "putty"

1: putty.org

2: "People also ask, What is putty and why is it used?" then 4 other questions about the material putty taking up most of the page

3: Videos "How to use Putty to SSH on Windows"

----- Fold -----

4. Video "How to Use Putty?"

5: Video "How to SSH Without a Password with Putty"

6: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ the actual site
Ask HN: Reddit shadow banned me. What now for a SaaS founder?
by elemcontrib | 2025-07-16 09:37:43+00:00
So Reddit shadow banned me (you're just left dangling creating content not knowing any better) and Quora banned me outright with a phoney spam claim after submitting meaningful answers on their platform for two years.

You know the drill: "you're banned, don't appeal, go straight to jail, don't pass go. We're not content gobbling narcissists - it's just not working. Ok bye."

As SaaS founders you know Reddit's strategic importance to garnering traffic and launching (or is it?).

So what else are you doing besides the use of ANY social platforms?

For me now it's content sovereignty. My own server, my own blog, and the long hard walk to SEO freedom.
by anon7000 | 2025-07-16 09:38:15+00:00
While we're piling on Firefox, here's my current least favorite thing: it's not possible to share a bookmark hierarchy between desktop and mobile.

I want a basic tree style bookmark/tab combo like Arc. This approach works extremely well for me.

But in Firefox, you have:

- All bookmarks - Bookmarks toolbar - Bookmarks Menu - Other Bookmarks - Mobile bookmarks

I don't give a shit about toolbars and menus and others. I want to organize it by my own categories. I can get close by putting all my folders in "menu" -- then I can have a button to access my tree of bookmarks. but then on mobile, I have to click "desktop bookmarks > bookmarks menu" just to see those.

Plus whenever you install fixefox, new bookmark entries are created in random spots. Not a fan.
by dao- | 2025-07-16 09:39:04+00:00
> Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could

Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.
by ptsneves | 2025-07-16 09:39:18+00:00
You can reflash however you want for some bugs. The deal would be to make it a dormant attack not a destroy all in one go and expose the payload. There have been successful hacks where a buffer overflow was inserted in in a one off write, that was then targeted when needed. If employed carefully in special situations, this could be an important weapon. There are also deeper levels of compromise: why compromise the source code or a the firmware binary when you can permanently compromise the production in a subtle way. Working your penetration slowly so that the whole plant or even production system must be scrapped by the enemy. At the very least gather intel.

Look at successful cyber campaigns like stuxnet or an actual hardware sabotage from Israel. The attacks were dormant until they were ready for maximum effect. Randomly disabling a production site, without a strategic context, is going to be an isolated win, or an operational victory.

I remember reading some articles about the pentagon being a bit upset at some of the strategic decisions of Ukraine's armed forces where they often push for morale boosting moments at big costs(i think 2 years ago they spent lots of resources to get a strategically irrelevant town). And honestly this is also what it looks like: You dont see a coordinated attack but spurious disconnected events. I think when you are gasping for air you hold on to anything you can, but still the goal is to win, not just look like winning.
by tomhow | 2025-07-16 09:39:18+00:00
From your submissions and comments it seems you want HN to be something different to what it’s intended to be. Then you take it out on us with these kinds of comments that are full of false characterizations like “a small reactionary minority” and barbs like “you can’t tell me with a straight face”.

We look at flagged items and determine if they were reasonable given the guidelines. Plenty of people email us to share their thoughts about whether particular stories should be unflagged, and we’re happy to consider reasoned arguments about this.

But if you want HN to be different from what it’s intended to be, you’ll always be frustrated with how we moderate it.
by dspillett | 2025-07-16 09:39:38+00:00
> Chromium … it wants a password to initiate, which I understand but refuse to comply with.

That sounds like the the keyring issue that pops up if you have your user account auto-login on machine start. If you don't let Chromium store passwords⁰¹ this can be safely disabled: see https://archive.is/G6pPH#ID15 ²

I ran into the issue when setting up a simple temporary public kiosk a short while back.

--------

[0] I don't, I prefer to keep my internet facing UAs and my credential stores a bit more separated than that. It also removes some friction from moving between browsers, when one annoys me enough to (re)try another.

[1] If you do let Chromium store passwords, then you can still do this, but not safely as per the warnings in that article.

[2] Or https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/tips-1.html#ID15 for the original, if you enjoy consent dialogues or want to be commercially internet stalked
by impish9208 | 2025-07-16 09:41:06+00:00
> In 2003, then-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone launched a competition with a £100,000 prize for a tunnel-cooling solution, or about $159,500 at the time. Of the 3,400 entries, many simply suggested riders not wear clothes. Other proposals included handing out Popsicles or putting up pictures of snowmen. No practical designs emerged, and the competition was closed in 2005.
by CaseFlatline | 2025-07-16 09:41:51+00:00
Very nice. Its great to see how fast it boots, and it can run doom (framebuffer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce1pMlZO_mI (also nice to see the dev takes the time to reply to an aspiring CS student on what it takes to grow in this field - comments in youtube)
by crinkly | 2025-07-16 09:42:21+00:00
In the late-90s I worked for a manufacturing company in a firmware dev capacity. They did everything on paper still. They migrated successfully to an in-house built ERP system sitting on top of Oracle. Big celebration, everyone happy. Six months later someone drove a forklift through the wall of the machine room into the UPS which caught fire and destroyed three racks of kit including the Oracle node. Turns out no one really trusted the system and was running paper on the side. When I left 6 years later they were still doing it on paper and reporting on Excel. It works and is considerably more forklift proof.
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-16 09:43:04+00:00
Thinking Machines represent the new elite. People with the right pedigree that can raise billions with only an idea. If they fail, they’ll get paid anyway - and they’ll become billionaires.

It is a position that is completely unreachable for 99.9999% of people even in tech.

It is of course easy to write off critics as jealous has-beens and bozos.
by praptak | 2025-07-16 09:43:18+00:00
Not many companies explicitly prepare for the scenario where every single data storage unit in the company is effectively wiped and you have to redeploy from zero.

If you never bootstrap from zero (nor simulate this) then your systems probably have cycles in their deployment dependencies. Your config pusher is deployed from Jenkins/Puppet/Ansible but 2 years ago someone made Jenkins dependent on the config pusher for its own config. Now you cannot just deploy these systems in order, you have to replay the history before that change.
by skissane | 2025-07-16 09:43:33+00:00
Contemporary COBOL (the most recent ISO standard is from 2023) has all those things and more.

Rather than rejecting such features, COBOL was just slower to adopt them-because conservatism and inertia and its use in legacy systems. But there are 20+ year old COBOL compilers that support full OO (classes, methods, inheritance, etc)
by n4r9 | 2025-07-16 09:44:17+00:00
It's a good question. A related question is: "what's an example of something undeniably novel?". Like if you ask an agent out of the blue to prove the Collatz conjecture, and it writes out a proof or counterexample. If that happens with LLMs then I'll be a lot more optimistic about the importance to AGI. Unfortunately, I suspect it will be a lot murkier than that - many of these big open questions will get chipped away at by a combination of computational and human efforts, and it will be impossible to pinpoint where the "novelty" lies.
by TrevorStepnikkk | 2025-07-16 09:44:24+00:00
I see where you're coming from, but I think your examples actually prove the opposite point.

I've always seen Linux and Git not as projects run by a committee, but as projects guided by a single, trusted leader. Linus Torvalds is the owner of the kernel's vision. He has the final say. That isn't community consensus; it's benevolent dictatorship.

So while the putty.org situation is shady, I believe the core idea is right: great software needs a final arbiter with a clear vision, not just a crowd.