MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LoganDark | 2025-07-11 08:11:11+00:00
> But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.

Apple creates vertically integrated devices. For many people, Apple dictates their entire digital life - far more so than any megacorporation on the mere level of, say Google, could ever hope to, considering Apple owns the hardware, software, and everything in between. So they are in a position shared by no other company - they are entirely unique in this. You cannot buy a device with entirely Google-designed hardware and software - Pixels with Android come close, Chromebooks come close, but nothing reaches Apple, even without custom silicon. I would say the closest company that exists in terms of vertical integration is Oxide Computer, but those aren't consumer devices.

So it's not that Apple is the only company doing this. It's also not that they're "doing it worse than any other company". It's that when they do this it affects people on a level not shared by any other company. It has a much larger impact than anybody else ever could.

For the record, I don't mind Apple's vertical integration, in fact that's one of their main selling points for me. It just gives them the greatest possible leverage to implement these sorts of practices.
by EMIRELADERO | 2025-07-11 08:11:53+00:00
All arguments invoking privacy and security coming from Apple when faced with loss of control over the iDevice software aftermarket should be discarded as nothing more than bad faith excuses.

Why am I being so absolutist? Well, because we know this to be the case thanks to the Epic injunction compliance brouhaha. Employee slack chats show quite clearly that the "scare screens" were deliberately worded in a way that would deter any users from pursuing the linkout payment option, while we now know that it was all a ruse to prevent that option from ever being competitive with Apple's 30% IAP, only for economic (monopolistic) reasons.

We now have court-affirmed precedent of Apple intentionally using privacy and security as a veneer for darker, anticompetitive motives. After that, there's not much more to honestly debate.
by jstanley | 2025-07-11 08:12:09+00:00
There are often comment threads where people are arguing past each other about whether Cursor speeds you up or not, and if so how it speeds you up.

I recorded this session the other night to show some friends and thought it might be interesting to some here.

My feeling is that I got much more done in that hour with Cursor than I would have been able to do without Cursor.
by dominicrose | 2025-07-11 08:12:18+00:00
This project is interesting but all comparisons are fair with the end in mind, which is the cost per MWh or per "home" over its life. If you need 55 of those to produce 250MW you'll have to multiply the costs by 55 as well. Power also has to be available all the time, when there is no sun, no wind, no waves, etc. Nuclear and gasoline are sadly the top picks because of energy density (and in the case of gasoline also portability).
by rickdeckard | 2025-07-11 08:12:59+00:00
> I'm not sure why Apple leadership played it that way, maybe they have a stronger belief in the US administration ability to strongarm the EU into accepting a loss there

Apple is playing it that way because they are rallying their USERS against the EU. They want to create pressure from EU citizens against these EU regulations, and amplify their narrative also to US Apple users in political positions.

Unfortunately this strategy seems to work, there are already a few voices on how the EU taking offense with Apple's sole purpose of doing the best for its users, and that lawmakers try to force Apple away from this path...
by thangalin | 2025-07-11 08:13:11+00:00
Not the OP, but:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/notanexus.git

I don't know the PDF.js library. Writing both the client- and server-side for a PDF annotation editor would have taken 60 hours, maybe more. Instead, a combination Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, and Gemini yielded a working prototype in under 6 hours:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/notanexus.git/tree/HEAD/src/js

I wrote maybe 3 lines of JavaScript, the rest was all prompted.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-11 08:13:52+00:00
For 250 dollars I'd expect a motor you can barely hear, not one that needs hearing protection! And at least a partly alloy case.

Proxxon is a fairly pricy German mini-tool brand, has a far smaller addressable market (i.e. serious miniature hobbyists) and can still sell you a made-in-Europe MP 400 Micro Shaper, a mini router table, with 10 cutters, for about 200. The manual says it's 104dBA, but this video indicates it's actually fairly quiet in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpmzqvHqQM0
by ankit219 | 2025-07-11 08:14:45+00:00
Consultation workshops should not be needed. The rule should be clear enough that there is a clear interpretation for everyone. If you need these kind of consultations, you already signal it will be a moving target. Why not just publish clearly what they want Apple to do. In any case, if this was about reaching what works for both regulator and Apple, don't you think these would have happened before DMA went into effect. The timelines are that DMA went into effect in 2023, the first changes in March 2024, and then first set of workshops last year, and second set this year. Is this a novel way to first do the changes and only then discuss them?

I understand a situation where what they want is literally impossible via tech, but then if EU is already talking to others in the space, they would have the same understanding. Otherwise, why keep the regulations vague?

Based on various accounts it does not seem these workshops are looking at arriving at a consensus either. Morever, it seems Apple did consult with EU regulators while rolling out their changes.
by yorwba | 2025-07-11 08:15:02+00:00
If you click on the time next to the username, you get a dedicated page for that comment with additional options: | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | ... but you need some minimum karma for the "flag" and "vouch" options. The unofficial FAQ says 31: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-11 08:15:12+00:00
Big companies like that have a vested interest in paying their legal team A Lot Of Money to find stupid details like this and to argue the toss over them because a ruling can cost them billions. If arguing over a comma means they don't have to, or that it pushes the point where they have to pay forwards, it's worth the expense to them.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-11 08:15:13+00:00
Yep. A "strategic defense contractor" can do whatever it wants[0], and get away with even more[1] than the United Fruit Company (UFC).[2]

0. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-lawsuit-alleges...

1. https://thehill.com/newsletters/business-economy/4793579-boe...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
by maCDzP | 2025-07-11 08:15:53+00:00
I work in this field - below are my two cents.

I have a hard time seeing that this approach would work. The environment is very messy and there are many field tested methods that don't involve digging up the whole street. One example of such a method is pipe bursting.

There have been loads of research in using AI (neural nets etc.) to find and predict pipe bursts. But I believe simple linear regression is enough since my gut is telling me age and material is a good predictor.

Where I live there is a strong seasonality because the ground freezes over and during thawing we have a lot of leaks. This is a local issue since it depends on both weather and geological environment.
by vladms | 2025-07-11 08:15:54+00:00
For me personally they seem to be more expensive than competitors and have a more aggressive stance on openness (ex: compare PWA support on Android vs iOS, not to mention the multiple other things like no multiple stores, the browser engine discussion, etc). So, I am not amazed that people think "on top of all the other things that you annoy us with you also try to avoid the law?!".
by jorkadeen | 2025-07-11 08:16:28+00:00
But in Flix you can write:

def main(): Unit \ IO = Map.empty() |> Map.insert("Hello", "World") |> Map.get("Hello") |> println

So I am not sure what you mean? In general, if you like pipelines then you want the "subject" (here the map) to be the last argument. That is how it is in Flix.
by camgunz | 2025-07-11 08:16:34+00:00
I have two responses to the "code review fixes these problems" argument.

One: The work to get code to a reviewable point is significant. Skipping it, either with or without AI, is just going to elongate the review process.

Two: The whole point of using AI is to outsource the thought to a machine that can think much faster than you can in order to ship faster. If the normal dev process was 6 hours to write and 2 hours to review, and the AI dev process was 1 hour to write and 8 hours to review, the author will say "hey why is review taking so long; this defeats the purpose". You can't say "code review fixes these problems" and then bristle at the necessary extra review.
by zimpenfish | 2025-07-11 08:17:06+00:00
> The app asks you to move the camera or change your expression throughout the verification.

The Natwest app will sometimes ask you to say words / numbers when doing a verification for e.g. a large transfer. Probably beatable by decent OCR feeding into voice synthesis with facial animation though (they don't have voice prints to check against that I'm aware of but even if they did...)
by raphinou | 2025-07-11 08:17:50+00:00
I am working on an open source project where users provide signatures of their projects artifacts (this is oversimplified for the sake of the discussion).

Started using Minisign as the signature scheme. But we're struggling to find a clean solution for users keys renewal, revocation and updated public key distribution. I thought foks might help for that but the examples don't seem to confirm this. Basically the question I need to answer is :how can users trusting an existing signing key also trust the new key replacing it? I hoped we might outsource this to foks, but I think I misunderstood foks in the first place.
by moffkalast | 2025-07-11 08:18:38+00:00
That's pretty nice, a lot like pinout.xyz as others mention. Something that would really set it apart would be to be able to select pins and functionality and have other pins greyed out that can't be used in parallel.

At least that's my main pain point when working with microcontrollers. They give you like 20 pins and you plan out all the functionality and then it turns out that one of those pins is like an EEPROM pin that needs to be low at boot or linked to something else internally or some shenanigans like that and the idea is actually completely impossible to implement (looking at you ESP32-CAM lmao). Or PWM channel conflicts that set some specific sets of pins to the same frequency and the like. It would be such a great workflow step to be able to verify if something would theoretically work given the known limitations at least.

Microcontrollers are like if a PC had 4 USB ports and if you used two of them the third and fourth just stopped working cause nobody intended all four to be used at the same time. Absolutely maddening.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-07-11 08:19:23+00:00
> stores them in some kind of structured format

No, it stores them with binary metadata, rather than ASCII metadata. "Plaintext" needs to be parsed, which is expensive. You don't really think binary RPC formats like protobuf are slower than JSON because it's "structured format" compared to "plaintext" I hope. Or SQL databases are slower than CSV files.

> And no, I don't want to use the structured features.

I don't see why you'd prefer having to figure out different time formats to parse from different software logs compared to a standard time format.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-07-11 08:19:41+00:00
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it doesn’t take into account how annoying other methods can be. Or how tools open up possibilities.

I can beat 10 egg whites by hand. I’ve done it several times. But it sucks. A handheld electric beater is fairly cheap and way better. You know what’s even better? A stand mixer that cost several hundred dollars.

Is it worth it? If you bake a lot it’s worth it.

This biggest problem with this kids toy is that it’s for kids and cost ~$250. It’s really an adult toy or something for the classroom.

If it was half the price, I’d pick one up, have bit of fun and on sell it or donate to other families.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-11 08:19:58+00:00
It really depends, but it's also a factor of time, that is, "back in the day", databases were designed to serve many different clients, nowadays a common practice is to have a 1:1 relationship between a database and a client application.

Of course, this is sometimes abused and taken to extremes in a microservices architecture where each service has their own database and you end up with nastiness like data duplication and distributed locking.
by hansottowirtz | 2025-07-11 08:20:18+00:00
BubblyDoo | https://bubblydoo.us | Full-Stack Software Engineer | Onsite (Antwerp, Belgium) | Full-time | €60k+ with meaningful %

At BubblyDoo we believe the future of children's books will be personalized. We are on a mission to enable this worldwide, using our platform and website. We sell our products in 16+ countries, in many languages. In 2024 we were the 9th fastest growing tech company in Belgium.

We’re hiring a Full-Stack Software Engineer (3+ years of experience) to be the right hand of the CTO.

We’re looking for a highly autonomous person that understands the priorities of a startup and can balance nice to haves with company priorities.

This role includes working on various parts of our code and being fully responsible for implementation of new features, integrations, bugfixes, research, planning, etc throughout the whole stack.

Our stack includes TypeScript, Next.js on Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, tRPC. Common tools include PostHog, Klaviyo, Grafana, Fivetran.

If you’re interested, please email me at hansottowirtz@bubbly-doo.com
by scheeseman486 | 2025-07-11 08:20:35+00:00
Tim doesn't want open platforms, all he wants is EGS to be able to exist within a walled garden. As long as he gets that, he's golden. If he wanted to support truly open platforms he'd be putting more money and time into helping develop Linux into a stronger contender for desktop and mobile and fighting against things like Play Integrity API, which are just another form of vendor lock-in.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-11 08:20:40+00:00
[Insert obligatory personal although almost meaningless anecdotes about seeing Woz's castle-themed house when it was first built and almost running over SJ with my VW Westfalia.]

[And literally almost physically colliding into Tim Cook in Los Altos where Garage Technology Ventures used to be.]

[If you need someone important ran into accidentally, I guess that's about my only natural talent.]
by zimpenfish | 2025-07-11 08:21:41+00:00
> Makes me wonder: why do we not have a government provided service?

Because every UKGOV since about 1980 has had an obsession with small government and farming out as much as they can to private contractors[0] regardless of consequences.

[0] Until those contractors fail to perform / go bust at which point the government steps in, things get better (shockingly) for a while, and then the government farms it out to another bunch of idiots who have ~bribed~ lobbied hard and the cycle repeats.
by ankit219 | 2025-07-11 08:22:33+00:00
Meta offered Pay-or-consent model (nov 23) at 10 euros or so to placate the then GDPR regulators, as the court found contractual necessity as an invalid argument. CJEU stance seems like its valid for meta and they had a long opinion on that.

But DMA regulators dont agree calling it a false choice and asking meta to monetize by non personalized ads. The thing as you mentioned is how other publishers have the same model, which was never objected by any authority under GDPR either (so they clearly seem to think the model is valid). Its obviously a sticky situation where rules are different for different companies in the same jurisdiction when they are offering the same thing.

A counter could be whether if Meta isn't allowed, would no one else be allowed, but you already know the answer to that question.
by simonask | 2025-07-11 08:22:56+00:00
As a European, I have to say I am generally impressed with the EU in these cases. I'm from a country that's rich and capable, but with a GDP a fraction of Apple's market cap. There is no chance that national laws and entities would be sufficient to protect my consumer rights from corporations this size.

The EU is fundamentally a centre-right, liberalist, pro-business coalition, but what that means is that it is pro-competition. What's really impressive is that it seems to mostly refrain from devolving into protectionist policies, giving no preferential treatment to European businesses against international (intercontinental?) competitors, despite strong populist tendencies in certain member states.
by const_cast | 2025-07-11 08:23:30+00:00
The point is as stated - "women" does not mean the same thing as "pregnant person" or "person who may be pregnant", which are both more precise terms. Both forwards and backwards.

Meaning yes, not every woman can get pregnant, but also not every pregnant person may identify as a woman. Suppose an intersex person born with a uterus who is pregnant but has lived their entire life as a man.
by Ma8ee | 2025-07-11 08:23:39+00:00
We can determine the productivity of factory workers, and that is still(!) how we are seen by some managers.

And to be fair, some crud work is repetitive enough so it should be possible to get a fair measure of at least the difference in speed between developers.

But that building simple crud services with rest interfaces takes as much time as it does is a failure of the tools we use.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-11 08:25:47+00:00
While I hate Apple's anti-consumer practices as much as anyone, the PWA platform is a system set up by Google first and foremost. Take-up has been limited outside of Google Chrome. I wouldn't say Apple's PWA approach is necessarily an example of Apple's fuckery.

This wouldn't be much of an issue, of course, if Chrome would just run on iOS like it does on any other OS, so Google can implement PWAs themselves.
by KingMob | 2025-07-11 08:25:53+00:00
The point of my story that you're missing is that Hickey's confidence in giving a talk shouldn't be confused with knowing what he's talking about.

> "Maybe Not" is a speech by an expert talking in his field of expertise.

Writing a dynamically-typed language does not mean he's an expert in types.

> He doesn't need to be an expert in implementing types to judge whether they are a good language feature.

Hah! Love it.

Asimov: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
by sensanaty | 2025-07-11 08:26:24+00:00
As the fullstacker with a roughly 65/35 split BE/FE on the team who has to review this kinda stuff on the daily, there's nothing I dread more than a backender writing FE tickets and vice versa.

Just last week I had to review some monstrosity of a FE ticket written by one of our backenders, with the comment of "it's 90% there, should be good to takeover". I had to throw out pretty much everything and rewrite it from scratch. My solution was like 150 lines modified, whereas the monstrous output of the AI was non-functional, ugly, a performance nightmare and around 800 lines, with extremely unhelpful and generic commit messages to the tune of "Made things great!!1!1!!".

I can't even really blame them, the C-level craze and zeal for the AI shit is such that if you're not doing crap like this you get scrutinized and PIP'd.

At least frontenders usually have some humility and will tell you they have no clue if it's a good solution or not, while BEnders are always for some reason extremely dismissive of FE work (as can be seen in this very thread). It's truly baffling to me
by Freak_NL | 2025-07-11 08:26:25+00:00
My house has a number of left-hand scissors for me and my wife, but only since half a decade or so. For most of our lives right-handed scissors dominated, and no one ever seemed to care in schools etc., whereas we did get left-handed fountain pens at some point.

My son, fortunately for him, is right-handed. I have no doubt that this saves him a lot of frustration.

If you are left-handed and reading this, get yourself some nice left-handed scissors. Trust me.
by newswasboring | 2025-07-11 08:26:48+00:00
> Someone already operating at the very limit of their abilities doing stuff that is for them high complexity, high cognitive load, detail intense, and tactically non-obvious?

How much of the code you write is actually like this? I work in the domain of data modeling, for me once the math is worked out majority of the code is "trivial". The kind of code you are talking about is maybe 20% of my time. Honestly, also the most enjoyable 20%. I will be very happy if that is all I would work on while rest of it done by AI.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-07-11 08:26:51+00:00
It's probably a combination.

30-40 years ago, sugar wasn't in everything, or at least not in the levels it is found today. People also chuck down liquid sugar like there's no tomorrow, which is also something "new" that wasn't around 30-40 years ago.

People today are less active, eat much more calories, many in the form of sugar, and many in the form of fat.

The main problem is, even if you wanted to go back to a "1970s diet", you probably couldn't today. Processed food is everywhere.
by mrweasel | 2025-07-11 08:27:02+00:00
> Browser wars have begun.

Kind of a sad browser war. The majority of these Chromium forks should exist, nor are they particularly viable. Sniffing out which one is going to be successful is obviously the hard problem.

Ideally we'd get an extensions API for AI agents and various companies could just release their own plugins. Sadly I don't think the majority is interested, they want to control the "experience".