MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Rumudiez | 2025-07-23 18:35:59+00:00
I want to believe there will be a small contingent of old schoolers basically forver, even if it only shrinks over time. maybe newcomers or experienced devs who want to learn to more, or how to do what the machine is doing for them

I think it'll be like driving: the automatic transmission, power brakes, and other tech made it more accessible but in the process we forgot how to drive. that doesn't mean nobody owns a manual anymore, but it's not a growing % of all drivers
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-23 18:36:04+00:00
This is a feature, not a bug. In chatbot mode and in coding, the vast majority of consumers do not have the critical thinking skills necessary to realise the models are making stuff up, so the AI companies are incentivized to train accordingly. When the same models are used for agent mode the problem is just way more glaring, they don't respect (or fear) the terminal as much as they should, try to give the user some positive output and here we are
by skeledrew | 2025-07-23 18:36:28+00:00
Wow, this pops up only a few days after I discover the existence of pyrasite[0]. I even created a wrapper around it to get a decent REPL (using ptpython[1]) and am planning to extend it over time into a kind of Pharo/Smalltalk live coding experience.

[0] https://pyrasite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [1] https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython
by aisisbsbll | 2025-07-23 18:36:44+00:00
> reap broad economic and security benefits

Does anyone still buy this? The economy is disproportionately controlled by a few (adjust the threshold you check at, it remains a large disparity for awhile). Economic benefits are often at odds with benefits for the median American. Check the number of tech layoffs and H1B approvals this year.

And for security, I had to move my family to a rural town just so we didn’t have to lock our doors at night. Security is heading the same direction as wealth - reserved for a select few.
by dvt | 2025-07-23 18:36:44+00:00
Checklists are criminally underused in most industries. It's a testament to how great they work when looking at highly-antifragile contexts: aviation, military, etc., where a mistake can (and often does) cost lives.

The problem is that to use them broadly, you also need to implement operational-level changes. So if I made a startup that helped build checklists, the problem would not just be selling the software (which everyone has to do), but also convincing executives that checklists (even moreso than to-do lists) are worth investing in. The friction a checklist brings, at least in non-ultra-risk-averse verticals, might not be worth it.
by em-bee | 2025-07-23 18:36:51+00:00
smalltalk and common lisp don't qualify as popular languages

not anymore. they were very popular in the industry at one point. very few other languages have so many independent implementations as smalltalk and lisp. a testament to their wide spread use in the past.

Strong + Static: TypeScript; Weak + Dynamic: JavaScript

that doesn't make sense. typescript is javascript with types, it can't be both strong and weak at the same time.

but i believe we have a different definition of weak. just because javascript, php and perl have some implicit type conversions doesn't make them weakly typed. i believe it takes more than that. (in particular that you can't tell the type by looking at a value, and that you can use a value as one or another type without any conversion at all)

C is weakly typed, it was always a major criticism, C++ too i think (less sure about that).

once you correct for that you will notice that all languages in the strong and static category are less than 30 years old and many are much younger. (java being the oldest. but there are older ones like pike which is also strong and static and goes back to 1991)

the strong and dynamic category goes back at least a decade more. (if you include smalltalk and lisp)

what this does show is that static typing has experienced a renaissance in the last two decades, and also the worst is really using any form of weak typing.

i still don't get what makes strong and dynamic a bad combination, other than it's bad because it is not static.
Show HN: TheProtector – Linux Bash script for the paranoid admin on a budget
by lotussmellsbad | 2025-07-23 18:37:48+00:00
Hi HN,

I spent the past year building this in my spare time because I got tired of enterprise security tools that cost $50K/year and don't understand Linux.

TheProtector is a comprehensive security monitoring tool that actually runs on the systems we use (Linux) instead of being a Windows-first afterthought. Built it entirely on a $500 laptop because I believe good security shouldn't require unlimited budgets.

Features: - Real-time process, network, and file monitoring - YARA malware detection with custom rules - eBPF kernel monitoring (when available) - Behavioral baseline establishment and anomaly detection - Active threat response (blocks IPs, kills processes, quarantines files) - Anti-evasion detection for rootkits and advanced threats - Honeypots for attack detection - Web dashboard for monitoring - Single bash script, no complex installation

The tagline is "not perfect but better than most" because I'm tired of security vendors claiming their tools are flawless. This actually works, costs $0, and you can read every line of code.

I know bash isn't the sexy choice for security tools, but it runs everywhere, has zero dependencies, and most Linux admins can read/modify it. Sometimes boring technology that works is better than fancy technology that doesn't.

It's designed for the intersection of "paranoid about security" and "don't have enterprise budgets" - which describes most of us actually running Linux systems.

GitHub: https://github.com/IHATEGIVINGAUSERNAME/theProtector

Been running it on my own systems for months. Catches the stuff that matters and doesn't flood you with false positives. If you hate expensive security theater as much as I do, might be worth a look.

Open to feedback, especially from folks who know more about this stuff than I do.

Thanks, IHATEGIVINGAUSERNAME (yes, I really do hate giving usernames)
by jMyles | 2025-07-23 18:37:50+00:00
The whole point of AI - of the emergence of the internet in general - is to free the human creative and collaborative spirit from the yoke of legacy states.

I do not believe that AI will tolerate state coercion. I wish our elder statesmen and -women were more graceful at accepting the writing on the wall.

As a thought exercise: does anybody seriously think that the US state will exist and be solvent in 500 years? How about AI?
by jokoon | 2025-07-23 18:37:52+00:00
WASM is just hotfixing javascript to use any language people want.

It's all about javascript being popular and being the standard language, js is not a great language, but it's standard across every computer, which dwarfs anything that can be said about js.

Adjusting browsers so they can use WASM was easy to do, but telling browser vendors to make the DOM work was obviously more difficult, because they might handle the DOM in various ways.

Not to mention js engines are very complicated.
by Marsymars | 2025-07-23 18:38:09+00:00
Also from investopedia:

> While a flat tax imposes the same tax percentage on all individuals regardless of income, many see it as a regressive tax.

> A regressive tax imposes a larger tax burden on those with lower incomes than those with higher incomes because a larger portion of a lower-income individual's total funds goes to the tax. While higher-income taxpayers pay the same percentage, their greater incomes make the financial burden easier to bear.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/flattax.asp
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-23 18:38:12+00:00
Tax emissions, incentivize density, and let the market work.

We have already made massive strides against this problem. Yes it will require some sacrifices (like wealthier nations helping developing nations to leapfrog into lower-emission technologies), but what is the alternative? We just sit here and die? It's a bit premature to have come to this conclusion.
by notatoad | 2025-07-23 18:38:21+00:00
yes. i don't mean to unfairly criticize the web as a platform, i just know it's warts because it's the platform i work on.

my criticism is reserved for the concept of "first principles", as if there should be a cohesive and simple set of rules that you can build up all the knowledge you need from. that's just not really how any complicated system works: building a comprehensive understanding of a complicated system takes a lot of work and a lot of time.
by zimpenfish | 2025-07-23 18:38:31+00:00
Pretty sure London Bridge has through trains (Thameslink) and also Blackfriars.

e.g. today's 18:24 from Horsham to Peterbrough going through London Bridge at 19:31, Blackfriars at 19:37 and then St Pancras (for a triple!) at 19:46 https://www.thetrainline.com/live/departures/london-blackfri...
by bdamm | 2025-07-23 18:39:13+00:00
This is all kind of too reductionist.

The US DHS agents in the US make a choice not to fuss over the airplanes or even cruise ships sailing from US ports to Hawaii and back. They could, but they don't. They probably validate the ship or plane's location via transponder, but it wouldn't even surprise me if they don't do that for regular commercial transport.

This kind of local and specific policy is great and it is enacted in lots of places within US jurisdiction.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-07-23 18:39:15+00:00
It makes perfect sense for that case too. If you let AI do the whole job of incident handling (and leaving aside the problem where they'll get it horribly wrong), that also has the same problem of breaking the processes by which people learn. (You could make the classic "calculator" vs "long division" argument here, but one difference is, calculators are reliable.)

Also:

> some people will want to work the way she spells out, especially earlier in their career

If you're going to be insulting by implying that only newbies should be cautious about AI preventing them from learning, be explicit about it.
by margalabargala | 2025-07-23 18:39:33+00:00
I still don't think that's true. It's just the medium that changes here.

A better analogy than the printing press, would be synthesizers. Did their existence kill classical music? Does modern electronic music have less creativity put into it than pre-synth music? Or did it simply open up a new world for more people to express their creativity in new and different ways?

"Code" isn't the form our thinking must take. To say that we all will stunt our thinking by using natural language to write code, is to say we already stunted our thinking by using code and compilers to write assembly.
by RamboRogers | 2025-07-23 18:39:40+00:00
Hey HN! I've been building MLX-GUI as an open-source inference server that turns any Mac into a multi-user AI server. v1.2.4 just shipped with some major additions:

Complete Whisper ecosystem (99+ languages, word timestamps, any audio format) 23 embedding models across 13 families (E5, ModernBERT, Arctic, etc.) Mistral Small 24B with vision capabilities OpenAI-compatible API that's actually faster than Ollama on Apple Silicon

The goal was simple: I wanted to use my Mac Mini/Studio as proper inference servers without the complexity of managing Python environments or paying for cloud APIs while keeping data local. It's packaged as a native macOS app (no Python install needed) with a beautiful web GUI for model management. The API is drop-in compatible with OpenAI, so existing apps like Jan.ai work immediately. 900+ lines of tests ensure production reliability. G

NU GPL v3 licensed and actively maintained. GitHub: https://github.com/RamboRogers/mlx-gui

Would love feedback from the community - especially on the embedding pipeline and audio processing!
by johnisgood | 2025-07-23 18:39:42+00:00
So the problem with switching to Linux is that they have to spend the time and energy to choose a Linux distribution? If we are to nitpick, it is not that easy with Windows either. Which Windows version? Which torrent is the right one? The last question is because most people here do not have a legit copy, they torrent it. It took me longer to find the right version of Windows to torrent than to search for "top Linux distributions for beginners".
by autoexec | 2025-07-23 18:39:42+00:00
MS has made it very clear that they want to see and know everything you do and store on a windows computer. They want to mine all that data for their own gain and will use it to profile you and push ads.

They've shown for decades that they don't care about you or your preferences and any settings they might offer today to disable the consumer hostile anti-features they add to windows can be silently removed or reset at any time with a forced update. That's just what it means to use windows.

While MS works to collect as much data about you, your online activities, and your personal files as possible, law enforcement and lawyers are drooling over the thought of being able to get this data from microsoft's servers or off of your hard drive too. This data collection isn't going to go away. It'll only get more and more intrusive and invasive. What little they let you keep locally they still push to get backed up to their cloud servers.

The best thing you can do is avoid using windows wherever and whenever you can.
by qualeed | 2025-07-23 18:41:05+00:00
You started with saying it was "essentially a UX wrapper", it was explained that there is a lot more to it, so you immediately shift into (paraphrased) "well there's other options and most people don't use the other features anyways".

Would have been cool of you to just say "oh neat, I didn't realize that you did all that too".
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-23 18:41:45+00:00
Realizing it changes the urgency with which we should find a workaround that avoids the prisoner's dilemma altogether. We must go beyond thinking about strategy and "survival", because we have restricted our thinking of "survival" to a narrow economic domain. And that domain is the continued enrichment of the rich and calling it "strenthening the economy". However, we must find new ways of thinking that go beyond this narrow view that is, although seemingly good in the short-term, is leading to long-term disaster.

That will involve finding a new sort of courage to stop playing the arms race and re-defining the terms of the game so that economic supremacy is not the prime goal, as it is leading to global instability, climate change, inequality, and eventual technological dystopia.

I mean, do we really want to live in a world where everyone is an AI button-pusher, staying on the level of the superficial, which is rather meaningless in the grand scheme of things?
by AlecSchueler | 2025-07-23 18:42:49+00:00
I think the attack vector is traditionally opportunistic. Horny driver suddenly has a vulnerable woman in his car and they're in a secluded area, boom there's an assault.

Any driver who is so premeditated about his assault plans that he would sign up to Uber pretending to be a woman probably has easier and more direct ways to access victims that are less likely to blow up in his face.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-07-23 18:43:11+00:00
> 27% of Israeli citizens are not Jews, but Arabs. They have full citizenship, vote, hold office, etc.

How does that have anything to do with the conflict? Could there ever be 51% of Israeli citizens who are non-Jewish Arabs? That tells you why Israel will not extend rights to the majority of subjects under it's territorial control.

> Gaza is a competely separate country/territory

It is not. Israel does not recognize it as such, and Israel controls all the borders, all the electricity, all the water, all the Internet and essentially all the external commerce of the region, it even controls the waters off shore of the region.
by koito17 | 2025-07-23 18:43:17+00:00
Started using Zed about a year ago and, besides Magit, it has managed to completely replace Emacs for me. I was missing a good debugger for a long time, but that also went GA a month ago or so.

One thing that goes underappreciated is the input latency and how light on resources the editor is overall. Whenever I switch tabs to a web browser (or any web app), I can feel the lag in typing now, despite the fact I use an M3 Max MacBook Pro. Zed's built-in terminal used to feel high-latency too, but they recently shipped a bunch of performance improvements, and it's just amazing how clunky inputs feel in web apps feel after using Zed for a long time.

Two things I find interesting about this development.

1. This is a long-standing feature request ever since Zed added any AI capability. Adding AI-related functionality at all was a very controversial move at the time. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302782

2. Text threads in Zed came out only 11 months ago. At the time, it felt revolutionary being able to effortlessly paste terminal output and entire folders into context. Additionally, being able to stop the LLM, correct part of its output, and have it continue code generation. Around 4 months ago, agentic coding released, and now this once-revolutionary workflow feels quite primitive. In the meantime, Zed also added screensharing, Linux support for collaboration, a Git UI, a debugger, and performance improvements to the editor.
by tptacek | 2025-07-23 18:43:18+00:00
You can simply disagree with me and we can hash it out. The "early career" thing is something Weakly herself has called out.

I disagree with you that incident responders learn best by e.g. groveling through OpenSearch clusters themselves. In fact, I think the opposite thing is true: LLM agents do interesting things that humans don't think to do, and also can put more hypotheses on the table for incident responders to consider, faster, rather than the ordinary process of rabbitholing serially down individual hypothesis, 20-30 minutes at a time, never seeing the forest for the trees.

I think the same thing is probably true of things like "dumping complicated iproute2 routing table configurations" or "inspecting current DNS state". I know it to be the case for LVM2 debugging†!

Note that these are all active investigation steps, that involve the LLM agent actually doing stuff, but none of it is plausibly destructive.

† Albeit tediously, with me shuttling things to and from an LLM rather than an agent doing things; this sucks, but we haven't solved the security issues yet.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-23 18:43:38+00:00
What you quoted doesn't really agree with what you're stating, which is really "it's meaningful to share the cost-benefit analyses because they'll all say it's worth it".

The reason they will not all say it's worth it is because there is nothing "magical" that happens at 4.0 pCi/L. Whether that is the sensible threshold vs doing something else with your money is a very different answer for a non smoker who makes 35k/y vs a smoker who makes 250k/y.
by hobofan | 2025-07-23 18:44:01+00:00
For the package manager ecosystem it supports, it relies on the projects auto-generated docs, and the builds the docsets from those. I guess it does that step in a cached on-demand way. That way, it can provide docs to all the packages and package versions.

E.g. for Rust: Crate is published crates.io -> triggers automatic docs build on docs.rs -> Dash clients can now pull docsets through a proxy that builds the docsets built on the static HTML bundles built for docs.rs.
by saubeidl | 2025-07-23 18:44:05+00:00
Look, I'm no economist, I don't know the exact numbers.

I can tell you however, that Bezos and his oligarch friends booking out a Venice that is sinking from climate change, while people suffer without health insurance and we still don't have high speed rail as built out as it needs to be is definitely not my understanding of fair.

And again, I say this as somebody that I also think should be taxed more. To live this well while so many people and projects need the resources more is unconscionable.

Leave the implementation details to the experts and elected officials. It's clear which direction we need to move in though.
by nickdothutton | 2025-07-23 18:44:48+00:00
Most management has no idea of the importance of the open source building blocks that their business rests upon. Similarly they cannot begin to conceive of the benefits of making a donation. Probably the most effective thing you could do is to somehow attempt to copy the "greenwashing" effect of companies being environmentally responsible, and having an environmental section to their annual reports. "The health of the open source ecosystem is essential to sustainable research, development, and operations at ACME Corp. This year we have sponsored the following...for our current and future benefit".
by SirMaster | 2025-07-23 18:44:54+00:00
Then why go through all this trouble at all?

1. Build new RAIDZ2 pool with all your disks that you plan to use. 2. Restore backup to the new pool.

I keep a backup too and so this is how I move to a new larger ZPOOL with a new layout.

Either you have to do this because you don't have a backup, and so this is risky. Or you don't need to do this because you have a backup and can just build your new pool and restore your data from the backup.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-07-23 18:45:34+00:00
Why is a code editor negging me?

"Even if you're skeptical [of genAI], these tools are quickly becoming part of how software gets built."

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

I am thankful Zed added this feature and most of the post seems reasonable, but it's still the height of weird that they feel compelled to say this—obviously it's not how software gets built by the people who are avoiding these tools intentionally and for good reason!
by makingstuffs | 2025-07-23 18:46:05+00:00
I wonder the same thing and, if anyone does, what on earth are they consuming/can I have some of it, please?

> ushering in a new Golden Age of innovation, human flourishing

Seriously, at this point in the timeline of human evolution, does any single living being believe that there is a single government which genuinely wants to see humans ‘flourishing’ as a whole?

It has been objectively proven time and time again that every government across this giant marble cares about one thing: themselves — by proxy of self care their owners/donors obviously get to reap the benefits.

I am really dumbfounded as to what kind mental gymnastics need to be mastered to believe that any technological advancements will not be abused by government and corporations alike to further entrench themselves and continue re-enslaving the majority of the populace while in the process.
by arrowsmith | 2025-07-23 18:46:32+00:00
It is absolutely 100% _not_ necessary to learn any Erlang at all before learning Elixir. I've been developing with Elixir for 5 years and still have never written a line of Erlang.

You don't need to learn OTP at first either — it'll just slow you down and confuse you. Learn Elixir syntax and semantics, learn how to build a Phoenix app or whatever, then dive into OTP once you're comfortable with the basics.
by somat | 2025-07-23 18:47:05+00:00
What I like about the linux desktop is that it does not have to be this super heavy "and the kitchen sink" environment. There is a lot of freedom to be found here. Some would say almost too much.

For example, I am a sys-admin, not only do I not mind managing my system via text console, I prefer it. It is fairly trivial to go off the deep end of "standard desktop environments" install one of them tiling window managers and have my perfect desktop, nothing overlaps, terminals for days, hot-keys to do anything, I never see my root window. No file-manager, it is almost the anti-desktop. I love it. But this amazing environment just does not exist in microsoft or apple land.