MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-18 19:47:16+00:00
I agree pretty strongly

Yeah it's not a fad, but I think it's really not as useful to me right now as the hype seems to suggest

I'm going to keep an eye on developments, but I'm not using it for my day to day either. I'm just not seeing the same value other people seem to be seeing right now and I'm not going to exhaust myself trying to keep up

One day Claude is the best. Next is Cursor. People are switching tools every two weeks trying to keep up

Not for me thanks. Especially not with how inconsistent the quality and output still are
by Expurple | 2025-07-18 19:47:27+00:00
> all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking (the article mostly hinges on such a case - LLVM).

Another comment trivially points out that this isn't true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607038
by andrewstuart | 2025-07-18 19:47:38+00:00
This is the new argument from the AI unbelievers “it’s an illusion, it’s imagined, it’s not real, it’s actually SLOWER”.

Then they demand proof that AI is faster which is of course very difficult to quantify, to which the unbelievers say HA! See! You can’t prove it so it’s all fake!
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-18 19:47:58+00:00
> I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool.

I use word processors so rarely that every time it's like learning a new tool. Whether it's Word, Google Doc, LibreOffice, or anything else.

I will say that Google Docs and Word both feel a bit more "polished" than LibreOffice which still feels very distinctly like a 1990's era desktop program. I guess because it is.
by andsoitis | 2025-07-18 19:48:20+00:00
> I know we’re used to having Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime (an even bigger range of issues there), and all these US-owned streaming services

These shouldn't really be viewed as tech (they aren't general places to find any content, unlike music streaming), instead it is more effective to think of them as studios, with Netflix being the most successful and most global, where you can find content from a huge variety of countries.
by smarx007 | 2025-07-18 19:49:15+00:00
I think Github already offers BYOK (bring your own key). I think the problem is that you are still expected to pay for all the premium subs, the key only allows you to go above the rate/monthly limits.

I think Jetbrains does it better with a full BYOM for models, including ollama. And I think if you go for ollama, you only need to pay for the IDE license, not for the AI add-on but don't quote me on that.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-18 19:49:20+00:00
Probably because the HHS secretary is vehemently opposed to lipid nanoparticles.

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/18/rfk-jrs-potential-future-ta...

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/nih-grants-mrna-vacci...

> National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research.
by anigbrowl | 2025-07-18 19:49:37+00:00
Last week I saw some dashcam video of a masked ICE agent (or similar, they don't have uniforms or proper identification) leaping out of a car and pointing a gun at someone who photographed the car's license plate.

Appellate courts in the First, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits have all held there's a first amendment right to film police, and that law enforcement officers do not have an expectation of privacy in the performance of their duties.
by diggan | 2025-07-18 19:49:51+00:00
> Arch developers can code "pacman -U" such that it performs a VirusTotal scan before installation for each package.

AFAIK, VirusTotal only flags known malware/viruses, any new/"looks-to-be-new" stuff wouldn't be flagged until they've picked it up, and once someone would have picked it up, it should be removed from the AUR anyways. So you'd have at least one user (most likely more) getting infected first, and once detected more users wouldn't be able to install it regardless.
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-07-18 19:50:25+00:00
Arch bugfix time is usually within 24 hours.

Not a single enterprise distro even reacts within that timeframe. OVAL advisories are weeks, sometimes months later.

As long as you don't have a virtualization approach similar to QubesOS, any linux distro will not fix this problem. Because that's not how separation of concerns works in the POSIX system. You need to have separate users for each and every program to isolate them, and that is practically unfeasible.
by coliveira | 2025-07-18 19:50:51+00:00
It is important to remind people of this, because they imagine that MS is integrating open source projects like git, linux, and others for the goodness of their heart. It's well know that this is just step 1 of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Next step (underway) is to add many features that will work only under the MS ecosystem and finally declare those original tools as legacy that should not be allowed in corporations.
by dataflow | 2025-07-18 19:52:14+00:00
> One could have put the picture out to the press, and asked, "hey, do you know this person?" type of thing and gotten the same answer.

There's no guarantee they would have done this or that they would have gotten the same answer, though, is kind of salient to the point. There's a chance they wouldn't, because you (hopefully) don't want to make someone look like a suspect to their entire community if their chances of being involved in a crime are low. And even if you do, there's a decent chance you wouldn't have gotten a reply -- especially if their loved ones believe they are innocent. And it would've alerted them and they would've had a higher chance to escape. Which is terrible thing for society if they're a genuine criminal, but a good thing when you're persecuting a non-criminal.

Probabilities and collateral damage matter. If you just treat everything that is "possible" uniformly, then you might as well claim that they COULD generate a random number and just happen to identify the person correctly by sheer luck, so who cares if they do anything to optimize that.
by paul7986 | 2025-07-18 19:52:28+00:00
Indeed just get out of tech and make a new living! Tech jobs are declining and will continue then fall off a cliff with one doing the job ten use to. Followed by other white collar and blue collar (AMazons warehouse robots) jobs.

Happily canceled my GPT Plus this week; personally not gonna feed that beast any longer! As well it can not generate maps (create road trip travel maps showing distance between locations to share with friends, a creek tubing map route & etc) at all like Gemini can for free.
by melvinmelih | 2025-07-18 19:52:37+00:00
> We identified a total of 1,862 MCP servers exposed to the internet. From this set, we manually verified a sample of 119. All 119 servers granted access to internal tool listings without authentication.

The tool listings are not necessarily a secret, so not sure how this is "exposed". We have a public MCP, anyone can read our tool listings, but to actually use the tools you need to authenticate.
by RomanPushkin | 2025-07-18 19:53:19+00:00
Thanks! I just realized we're mostly feeling normal, maybe even a bit more happy than average non-cancer family. It's only the side effects that are uncomfortable: losing money, a couple of jobs down the road, affected childhood of our 11 y.o., dealing with jerks, etc. Mood-wise psilocybin brought us back to normal life, maybe even slightly better than it was before :)
by lr4444lr | 2025-07-18 19:53:45+00:00
> Most of these departments have rules about how they use our data

Yes, but law enforcement agencies can typically be granted access for investigations, so long as the information is used only for such investigations. This is how CSAM distributors are hunted down. They don't literally need to amass evidence for each and every suspect and then get a warrant: they have a legally recognized enforcement directive, and so can perform surveillance of information sources where that people breaking those laws can be caught. Or in this case, they may have imperfect information on a variety of actual suspects, but not enough to find them or build a case. Medicaid data may provide those clues.
by alt187 | 2025-07-18 19:53:48+00:00
It's a nice idea everyone can get behind, but it's empirically false. Namely, fascism (and soon after, the cold war) was the raison d'être of rocket science and the computer (and a bunch of other things).

The main difference (and I think, the real argument against Fascism for Innovation™) is that all these innovations were created for the explicit purpose of turning human beings into minced meat as efficiently as possible.

This is not ideal, even from the point of view of the innovator. As much as you want to be able to move fast, your investors will demand faster results -- or someone who'll provide them.
by troupo | 2025-07-18 19:53:59+00:00
> it comes from the fact that Office is ancient and very, very complex with a huge number of features.

IIRC one of the many unfortunate decisions made by MS with OOXML (whether intentionally, or not, or both) is to codify a lot of display and formatting quirks directly in the schema with very little explanation or docs. Instead of making it s different namespace or layer.

So, to implement OOXML, you also needed to reverse engineer, say, behavior of Word97 etc.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-18 19:54:06+00:00
"Decent" is a tricky word here.

Most Americans can get pretty good care. It also tends to be painful to get. You don't just go to the doctor. You visit some horrible web site clearly built by someone who doesn't have to use it, go through the list of in-network providers, pick one, call, find out that the list is out of date and they don't accept your insurance.... And then come the surprise bills. The office coded your lab work wrong so it doesn't count as preventive, pay up, or spend an hour on the phone correcting it. You offhandedly told the doctor you're feeling tired lately during your annual physical, and they give you some tips on getting better sleep. Then you get a bill because that counts as a consultation for a specific medical problem, so your free annual physical now requires you to pay a copay.

God forbid you have a major incident. Nobody can ever tell you how much things will cost. You'll be dealing with bills for months, and you won't be able to trust that any of them are legitimate.

The actual health providers are usually OK. The health insurance is godawful.
by avgDev | 2025-07-18 19:54:30+00:00
Quite interesting to me and first time I am hearing about this.

Question for you, what do you do when it shows you may have cancer? Do you speak to your physician? Surely, this will change your life even if it doesn't need treatment for next 6 years? Does the treatment change? Can the treatment be done based on those results?

So many questions.

I'm hoping we find more stuff for Alzheimer's. My aunt and now mother have it. I fear that I am next and I am too scared of doing the DNA test to check for genes.
by hermitcrab | 2025-07-18 19:55:08+00:00
The reflexes definitely slow over time. But I can still sometimes beat my 19 year old son at table tennis, and I am 59.

George Foreman was still battering people in the ring at quite an age. But he was an outlier.

I would say that Ali was the greatest heavyweight boxer ever, in terms of sheer virtuosity and skill (before he went to prison anyway). ;0)
by jchoksi | 2025-07-18 19:55:13+00:00
> malware is already being executed at that point

To ensure reproducible / clean builds, I thought makepkg would always be run in a sandbox/chroot environment. The damage done would be localised to that sandbox.

> this is a terrible idea in regards to privacy/infosec.

Ok. Devs could setup an option to pacman -U which allows it to bypass VT for privacy sensitive people. This just puts the onus on you to not ensure you aren't installing malware. The default Arch user should still be protected while allowing for your privacy needs.

> 99% of new malware won't be detected anyway, and once it is known it is way more effective to just remove the offending package from the AUR

Its too late then. People are already affected.
by codebolt | 2025-07-18 19:56:38+00:00
Just subscribing to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google on YouTube is pretty helpful. They post demos of all major new feature releases that are good to skim through to get a sense of where the frontier is moving (just take all claims about capabilities with a grain of salt).

I've also got some gems from Microsofts Build talks, specifically whenever Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich get together, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIFDVOXMNDc
by tomgag | 2025-07-18 19:57:01+00:00
I guess I'll post it here as well. This is my personal take on the whole story: https://gagliardoni.net/#20250714_ludd_grandpas

A relevant quote: "this is your daily reminder that "How large is the biggest number it can factorize" is NOT a good measure of progress in quantum computing. If you're still stuck in this mindset, you'll be up for a rude awakening."

Related: this is from Dan Bernstein: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20250118-flight.html#moon

A relevant quote: "Humans faced with disaster tend to optimistically imagine ways that the disaster will be avoided. Given the reality of more and more user data being encrypted with RSA and ECC, the world will be a better place if every effort to build a quantum computer runs into some insurmountable physical obstacle"
by johnisgood | 2025-07-18 19:57:13+00:00
No, it is NOT accurate.

Pacman cannot be used to download, compile, or install AUR packages. You need the PKGBUILD file and use "makepkg -si" at the very least. If you want AUR packages, you'd install a package manager (in this context referred to as AUR helper) like "yay" that supports both official and unofficial (i.e. AUR) packages. FWIW AUR helpers are not even official packages, not even "yay" which is a popular one. You need to go out of your way to install "yay" (although it is one command away before, i.e. very easy).

TL;DR: Pacman does not download, compile, or install packages from the AUR, nor does it resolve their dependencies. "makepkg -si" builds and installs a package based on the PKGBUILD file, or use an AUR helper that overcomes the limitations of "makepkg". AUR helpers make it easy to install AUR (i.e. unofficial) packages.
by nickynickell | 2025-07-18 19:57:28+00:00
Coincidentally, I bought one of these recently and it was delivered this morning. Including the MultiPort II port replicator and floppy drive. Boots and runs fine (sans some unhappy memory locations and dead CMOS). Need to clone the disk so I can poke around on the stuff still on it. It's got NetWare on it, excel, word, powerpoint, netscape navigator, and mosaic. Somewhat spooked about spinning it up too many times.

The keyboard mechanism is much more satisfying than I expected. Jealous of anyone who got to use one when they were new.
by mlsu | 2025-07-18 19:57:30+00:00
I'm really confused as to how Section 174 made it in in the first place. It seems like a carveout specifically to target software engineers, who, despite being a wealthy bloc, still work for their money.

Why was this done? Simple vengeance in 2022 for how high salaries got and how many silicon valley people were bragging about buying a second house by the slopes? Or was there a deeper policy reason?
by ytpete | 2025-07-18 19:57:51+00:00
> The cognitive burden is much lower when the AI can correctly do 90% of the work.

It's a high cognitive burden if you don't know which 10% of the work the AI failed to do / did incorrectly, though.

I think you're picturing a percentage indicating what scope of the work the AI covered, but the parent was thinking about the accuracy of the work it did cover. But maybe what you're saying is if you pick the right 90% subset, you'll get vastly better than 98% accuracy on that scope of work? Maybe we just need to improve our intuition for where LLMs are reliable and where they're not so reliable.

Though as others have pointed out, these are just made-up numbers we're tossing around. Getting 99% accuracy on 90% of the work is very different from getting 75% accuracy on 50% of the work. The real values vary so much by problem domain and user's level of prompting skill, but it will be really interesting as studies start to emerge that might give us a better idea of the typical values in at least some domains.
by wvenable | 2025-07-18 19:58:21+00:00
Early BASICs didn't compile a program before interpreting it. The interpreter read the code as written and executed it step-by-step. There was some tokenization; keywords were turned into single or double bytes and that was literally done when you pressed enter on the keyboard. Your source code was these actual tokenized bytes. On the Commodore 64, you could type the tokenized versions of keywords instead of the full keyword as a shortcut. Even numbers were not transformed into bytes ahead of time.

This was used to save memory -- there wasn't much room to hold both the source code and an intermediate form. But also it wasn't that necessary, with the keywords tokenized and the syntax so simple that there wouldn't have been much savings in space or performance.
by walterbell | 2025-07-18 19:58:31+00:00
"Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)", 900+ comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145

"OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D", 300+ comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469124
by canucker2016 | 2025-07-18 19:58:36+00:00
Paul Allen states his version of the IBM selection of OS for their IBM PC in his autobiography, Idea Man.

see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591941 for the long version.

Hopefully short version.

IBM went to Microsoft (MS) for languages for the new PC. IBM asked if MS could provide an OS. As per unwritten agreement, MS told IBM to go to Digital Research (DRI) for an OS.

Whatever happened at DRI, IBM didn't get a licensing deal for an OS. No OS meant no need for MS languages. When IBM complained to MS about not getting a licensing agreement for CP/M for IBM PC, one of the MS people suggested Tim Patterson's CP/M clone. IBM was outsourcing everything to keep away the IBM bureaucracy, so they told MS to handle everything.

When MS asked IBM how they wanted to pay for the OS, MS gave several options including 1) per copy royalty, or 2) flat rate (which turned out to be $40K). For easy accounting, IBM chose 2). MS asked to be able to license OS to others. IBM said yes. MS didn't really care about how IBM paid for the OS, their bread and butter was languages. DRI wanted to be paid per copy of CP/M-86.

DRI still didn't have a retail CP/M-86 for IBM PC at launch time. By the time they did ship CP/M-86, charging much more than PC-DOS1.0, Lotus 123 would launch within a few months running on PC-DOS. By the time DRI lowered the price for CP/M-86, they were way behind in market share.
by k310 | 2025-07-18 19:58:49+00:00
ICE "officers" are almost always.

A. Without badges, or have badges without numbers. Toy-store style.

B. Are faceless.

C. Do not have names displayed.

D. Do not have warrants.

These were mentioned, IIRC, in an ACLU complaint which resulted in restraining orders (see [0]) though the order addressed two points not specifically related to the above.

> The first TRO bars immigration agents from stopping individuals without reasonable suspicion and from relying on four factors – alone or in combination – including apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or English with an accent; presence in a particular location like a bus stop, car wash, or agricultural site; or the work the person does.

> The second TRO orders DHS to provide access to counsel on weekdays, weekends, and holidays for people who are detained in B-18, the federal building in downtown Los Angeles.

IANAL, but the four points I mentioned above are beyond acceptable police behavior, and likely unconstitutional. People have a right to document both daily public police actions and ones that are beyond the pale and likely unconstitutional.

Regular police officers have badges with numbers, faces, names and warrants.

[0] https://www.aclusocal.org/en/press-releases/court-prohibits-...
by pizzathyme | 2025-07-18 19:59:32+00:00
Exactly. I have been questioning the need to "keep up". As the best AI innovations arrive, the ones that are useful will eventually make their way to the mainstream (and me). I didn't "keep up" with the nascent development of spreadsheets or Google Docs. Once they were widely used, I adopted them just fine, and haven't missed out on anything.

Unless you are building an AI startup furiously searching for PMF before your runway expires, I don't see the urgency.
by mitchoz | 2025-07-18 19:59:32+00:00
TidyHouse is a new AI-powered app that helps real estate agents, architects, and homeowners improve their housing photography.

It turns messy rooms into clean and polished visuals in 10 seconds.

How it works:

1. Upload a photo

2. Choose a style (Tidy up, Minimalist, Luxurious, Swedish Design, ...)

3. Wait 10 seconds for your image

TidyHouse is a service for professionals. It is subscription-based. Unlike other apps I've built before, this time there is no "free plan" or trial.

Launch Promotion: Coupon Code GOTIDY25 for 25% off any subscription (valid until July 31)
by lilly-lizard | 2025-07-18 19:59:48+00:00
it should be noted that these are different from the popular librewolf-bin (513 votes) and zen-browser-bin (176). with this in mind it's cool that these got identified only 2 days after being uploaded. I wonder if the reporter actually intended to install it or just reads the PKGBUILDS of new packages to be a good samaritan...
by ninkendo | 2025-07-18 19:59:51+00:00
> Build a crude router in front of it, if you must, or give it access to "the old Siri" as a tool it can call, and let the LLM decide whether to return its own or a Siri-generated response!

Both of these approaches were tried internally, including even the ability for the LLM to rewrite siri-as-a-tool's response, and none of them shipped, because they all suck. Putting a router in front of it makes multi-turn conversation (when Siri asks for confirmation or disambiguation) a nightmare to implement, and siri-as-a-tool suffers from the same problem. What happens when legacy siri disambiguates? Does the LLM try to guess at an option? Does it proxy the prompt back to the user? What about all the "smart UI" like having a countdown timer with Siri saying "I'll send this" when sending a text message? Does that just pass through? When does the LLM know how/when to intervene in the responses the Siri tool is giving?

This was all an integration nightmare and it's the main reason why none of it shipped. (Well, that and the LLM being underwhelming and the on-device models not being smart enough in the first place. It was just a slower, buggier siri without any new features.)

The answer is that they need to renege on the entire promise of a "private" siri and admit that the only way they can get the experience they want is a _huge_ LLM running with a _ton_ of user context, in the cloud, and don't hinder it all with backwards compatibility with Siri. Give it a toolbox of things it can do with MCP to your device, bake in the stock tools with LoRA or whatever, and let it figure out the best user experience. If it's a frontier-quality LLM it'll be better than Siri on day one, without Apple having to really do anything other than figure out a good system prompt.

The problem is, Apple doesn't want to admit the whole privacy story is a dead-end, so they're going to keep trying to pursue on-device models, and it's going to continue to be underwhelming and "not meeting our quality bar", for the foreseeable future.