MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acquiesce | 2025-07-10 15:11:48+00:00
No. The “new generation” now knows what the outcasts and the undesirables of the “old generation” felt like. The more I speak to the younger crowd the more parallels I find which just means the “default” shifted towards a society of people who don’t know a different way, but are unaware of what goes on around them. The undesirables of the old knew, but couldn’t do anything about it.

It’s like people who are bewildered when newspapers say bankers got caught having a massive orgy of some 50+ attendees in a hotel in Switzerland. There is always a party, but you’re not invited. Simple as.
by milisp | 2025-07-10 15:11:56+00:00
Thank you for the thoughtful questions!

Why It’s Different From Windows

On Windows, unsigned apps usually trigger a “Unknown Publisher” warning, which: - Clearly labels the app as unsigned — not “damaged” - Still allows the user to easily override the warning and open the app - Doesn’t falsely imply the app is corrupted

On macOS, the message is:

“App is damaged and should be moved to the Trash”

This: - Strongly implies the app is broken or dangerous - Misleads non-technical users into deleting safe software - Can trigger across all user files or multiple apps after updates, as seen in real cases

Cost to the Ecosystem

It’s not just about the $99/year: - Small devs, educators, hobbyists, open-source projects often can’t justify the fee for a free tool - Explaining this to every user takes hours of support time - Thousands of safe apps are abandoned or ignored due to the scary warning - Users lose trust in perfectly good software

We’ve estimated: - Over 1 million users have abandoned apps due to this message - Devs waste millions of dollars worth of time explaining workarounds

The Goal Here

We’re not asking Apple to remove security — just to make the message accurate.

Changing “damaged” to something like:

“App is not signed and may be from an unknown developer”

…would solve 90% of the confusion, with no loss in security.
by ddxv | 2025-07-10 15:12:20+00:00
I grew up in a rural house that is off grid. My parents used to run a gasoline generator whenever they wanted electricity. As kids, to watch movies, this was all the time. As they got older, got phones, satellite internet etc their gasoline use went up a lot.

They had solar since the 90s but it was broken panels (which still work, they basically never die). Finally last year I had the time and money to put in a big new solar setup for them. Now they don't need the generator except during prolonged storms in December (even then I don't think they need it, just like using it).

The main benefits: 1) Pays for itself in 3 years 2) No more gasoline generator (loud, smelly) 3) No more trips to get gasoline. No more parents carrying 5 gallon gas cans around. 4) Allows parents to get A/C for first time.
by scott_w | 2025-07-10 15:12:41+00:00
I don’t know of any real posts on it, it just ends up being kind of a “assume it’ll go wrong,” then figure out how you know something has gone wrong and track it down. Your starting point is, after an issue is reported, add a load of logs around places that seem like candidates for the flow. Over time, you get a sense of where things can break and you add that telemetry ahead of time.
by jtc-hn | 2025-07-10 15:13:23+00:00
This report tallies with my own experience.

It's especially an issue with type-ahead tools that hallucinate function names or introduce subtle bugs: you lose time and get bumped out of the flow as you evaluate the AI's proposal. (Or fix it, if you were unfortunate enough to accidentally hit tab while indenting a line and the AI slipped in a change.)

The agentic tools do better but don't yet have enough context to know that making this change _here_ will break that thing over _there_, so they require a lot of management, which seems to engage a part of the brain than coding.
by digitalions | 2025-07-10 15:14:09+00:00
Hi all. Some days I shared a link to my project, https://adhdhelp.app, here on Hacker News. I have ADHD and developed the app to help individuals like me manage everyday symptoms. The post created a lot of heat on two fronts. First, some did not like the fact that I offer a premium level. It's 5$ a month, and the majority of the necessary tools are still free, even without an account. I know of no one in this niche asking less than this, but the backlash was horrible nonetheless.

The larger backlash was the AI artwork in my blog. Each picture was cleared with the writer of the article, but several commenters stated I should have hired a freelancer instead. The project is funded independently; paying for art per post would draw my budget quickly dry, and I intend to release a great deal.

Several individuals also assumed that if pictures are AI-created, then the therapeutic techniques must be AI-created as well. They're not. I accumulated them over months, cross-checked the research, and added a page on the website that cites the science that supports each technique.

So I'm posing the question to the community: are AI images really such a game changer? Do they render useless the value of a tool that already helps users? I'd love to know where your line is and how indy builders like me can meet expectations without sinking the ship.
by miguelspizza | 2025-07-10 15:14:11+00:00
Ah I see. Yes this is a concern, but this issue is actually not unique to MCP-B and is just a generally issue with agentic workflows that rely on a dynamic toolset from 3p vendors. (which any MCP server local or remote has the ability to be)

> With MCP-B, isn't it just automatically provided with whatever credentials are already stored in cookies/etc for a given MCP-B enabled app?

Not exactly, MCP-B just allows your extension agent to call functions that the website owner explicitly exposes. The client itself is not given an credentials like traditional MCP.

> If I load an MCP-B enabled app, does the agent automatically have access or do I have to configure it somewhere?

Theres more in the blog post but how much access the agent has and how much human approval is needed to grant this access is completely up to the website creator.

FWIW your points are valid and MCP-B should enforce some guardrails when any domain shift happens via elicitation: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/draft/client/e...

I'll add it to the road map. Thanks for bringing it up!
by dylan604 | 2025-07-10 15:14:34+00:00
So you're insinuating that the specific example of a house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up?

In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property. To deny this happens is just as much of a stick your head in the sand meme as what you are accusing me of.
by lucideer | 2025-07-10 15:14:40+00:00
> Do you care?

I don't. I could deliver a diatribe on how even the common arguments for differentiating GET & POST don't hold water. HEAD is the only verb with any mild use in the base spec.

On the other hand:

> correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec

This is a bigger problem than verb choice & something I very much care about.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-10 15:14:47+00:00
> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.

This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards.

Maybe expectations changed? Now it seems more like people feel the need to get ready before going out, to bring something, to pre-coordinate to arrive with a group of friends, to have a lot of space, to have everything pre-cleaned and ready to be the background in photos, and maybe even to have a meat and cheese platter that gets posted to social media. It seems there's much less willingness to just go places, be cramped, and just hang out.
by andreygrehov | 2025-07-10 15:14:59+00:00
I just tried Grok 4 and it's insanely good. I was able to generate 1,000 lines of Java CDK code responsible for setting up an EC2 instance with certain pre-installed software. Grok produced all the code in one iteration. 1,000 lines of code, including VPC, Security Groups, etc. Zero syntax errors! Most importantly, it generated userData (#!/bin/bash commands) with accurate `wget` pointing to valid URLs of the latest software artifacts on GitHub. Insane!
by taeric | 2025-07-10 15:15:16+00:00
Don't make it a battle, is my point? Give them something they can control, if that helps. But, if they can't take a "no" then that is a problem. And not one to be fixed by just avoiding it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for avoiding unnecessary conflict. And a lot of conflict avoidance with kids is to not let them turn it into a conflict. You said no, you didn't start a fight.
by talos_ | 2025-07-10 15:15:33+00:00
Office Québécois de la Langue Française (OQLF) promotes the french language and adapt new English words (whereas France typically integrate English words in their vocab).

The website Banque de dépannage linguistique (BDL) will have a lot of useful resources if you're interested! For instance, how to write a professional sounding email, names of official documents, invoice templates.

Highlights (good and bad):

* emails -> courriels (courrier + iels; mail + similar sounding syllable)*

* spam mail -> pourriels (pourri + iels; rotten + similar lexem as courriels)

* to spoil (as in spoilers) -> divulgâcher (divulguer + gâcher; to reveal + to ruin)

* to mansplain -> mecspliquer (mec + expliquer; man + to explain); This one is outrageous (and uncommon) because it's an homonym to "m'expliquer" (explain to me)

* to browse (the web) -> naviguer (as in "to navigate"; browser -> "navigateur")
by NekkoDroid | 2025-07-10 15:16:14+00:00
Well, generally it is "how many people do you need to replace the 2 people that created those people". So the baseline is 2 since you need 2 parents and to replace them you'd need 2 children in an ideal world but since not every child survives long enought to themselves be part of this cycle the .1 comes in.
Show HN: Downalytics – Track OSS binary downloads via custom domains
by rumno0 | 2025-07-10 15:17:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Downalytics (https://www.downalytics.dev), a lightweight tool that helps open-source maintainers and small projects track binary downloads from GitHub releases. You route downloads through a generated or custom domain (via CNAME), and I log metadata like version, arch, OS, and country (where available). Think of it like a minimal redirector with analytics.

It’s aimed at projects that publish binaries (e.g., via CLI tools), and want to understand which versions are being used, and where adoption is happening, without needing to host their own infra.

Current features:

GitHub OAuth to connect repos Tracked download URLs via CNAME or generated subdomain Basic dashboard with counts by version, platform, etc. Free OSS tier, small paid tier for custom domains/more projects

A few things I’d love feedback on:

Is this something you (or your project) would use? Would you be comfortable routing downloads through a third-party like this? Any blockers that would make you hesitate (trust, branding, utility)? Does the pricing model (OSS-friendly free, $5/mo Starter) make sense?

I’m early-stage, hosted on Fly.io, trying to keep things lean and open for feedback. Thanks for any thoughts!

Owen
by falcor84 | 2025-07-10 15:17:16+00:00
I have a lot of complaints to make about Google (half of them about them killing products), but I don't think we should complain about them locking users in. I don't see any lock-in at all in regards to LLM usage (it's pretty trivial to switch providers), and more generally, takeout.google.com is a shining beacon for what I would want every provider to offer.
by epage | 2025-07-10 15:17:37+00:00
Likely the reason `split_whitespace` is so slow is

> ‘Whitespace’ is defined according to the terms of the Unicode Derived Core Property White_Space.

If they used `split_ascii_whitespace` things would likely be faster.

Switching parsing from `&str` to `&[u8]` can offer other benefits. In their case, they do `&str` comparisons and are switching that to a `u8` comparison. A lot of other parsers are doing `char` comparisons which requires decoding a `&str` to a `char` which can be expensive and is usually not needed because most grammars can be parsed as `&[u8]` just fine.
by alexcolewrites | 2025-07-10 15:18:02+00:00
Hey HN,

When building the AI game suggestion feature for steamid.one (a side project for Steam users), I ran into the common, but often under-discussed, problem of choosing the "right" AI model. My needs were simple: smart, fast, cheap, and aware of somewhat recent data without complex RAG.

Here’s how I weighed the options based on cost (per 1 Million tokens, approx.), knowledge cutoff, and performance for my use case (analyzing player profiles to suggest games and output structured JSON): 1. OpenAI (GPT): * gpt-3.5-turbo (0.5M context, cutoff early 2024): ~$0.50 input / $1.50 output. Decent baseline, but reasoning can sometimes miss nuance for creative suggestions. * gpt-4o (128K context, cutoff late 2023): ~$5.00 input / $15.00 output. Powerful, but too pricey for a free tool's scale.

2. Anthropic (Claude): * Claude 3 Haiku (200K context, cutoff early 2024): ~$0.25 input / $1.25 output. Extremely competitive on price and very capable.

3. Google (Gemini): * gemini-1.5-pro (128K context, cutoff early 2024): ~$3.50 input / $10.50 output. Solid, but more than I wanted to spend. * gemini-1.5-flash (128K context, cutoff early 2024): ~$0.35 input / $1.05 output. This was the winner.

Why Flash Stood Out for steamid.one:

Flash's performance for my specific JSON output needs (structuring game suggestions) combined with its unbeatable cost-effectiveness was the killer feature. For a free tool, literally every cent per call matters. Also, I found that for game suggestions based on user-provided data, the models' general knowledge cutoffs were less of a bottleneck than expected. The AI's strength was its reasoning with the data I fed it (player genres, owned games), not needing to know every new release. This significantly changed my prompt engineering strategy.

I'm curious: * How do you balance AI model cost, capability, and knowledge cutoff for your projects? * Any tips for cheap, reliable AI integrations?

Thanks for any feedback!
by quantumgarbage | 2025-07-10 15:18:04+00:00
Yes, what you are missing is that attacks on Fiat Shamir were very contrived up to now.

However the paper shows that there in fact exists a pretty simple way to break the Fiat Shamir heuristic, for a protocol operating in the RO model. And such kind of efficient attacks are rather concerning in cryptography land.

So this isn't about the attack per se, rather it's about the existence of such an easy one.
by ptx | 2025-07-10 15:18:09+00:00
> While we can’t change the universe, you can now get the latest Thunderbird features as they land, instead of once a year. Switch to Thunderbird Release and enjoy monthly updates with the same dependable stability.

Does this mean anything or is it some sort of marketing gobbledygook? We can now get features faster by using the latest release rather than the ESR – but surely non-ESR releases have always been available, so this was always the case, not only now suddenly?

Also, the "dependable stability" we enjoy with the ESR release comes precisely from the software not constantly changing underneath us, i.e. from not getting new features every month.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-10 15:18:29+00:00
> Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.

The advancements in solar and battery storage are accelerating. It's not a linear 1:1 relationship where new solar goes into new usage. As we get better at building and deploying solar, the cost continues to decline. The more the cost declines, the faster the rollout.

So the advancements in solar really are making things better. This is a long-term, cumulative process.
by mapt | 2025-07-10 15:19:25+00:00
Actual victims of people like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Laura Loomer are literally being gathered off the streets thousands at a time and sent to concentration camps.

Call it trolling all you like, but we just funded our immigration enforcement agency at a level consistent with being one the larger militaries in the world.

Adolph Hitler's partisan ideology, to the extent that it different from general German ideology at the time, was a phenomenon from 1919 to 1945. The Holocaust death camps range from 1942 to 1945.

If you're examining "Ideology" from a behavioral lens, you don't get to look at behavior analogous to the Nazis in the 1930's and excuse it as "Not Nazi Enough".

If you're examining "Ideology" as explicit/implicit endorsement by reference, that's happening too, regardless of whether you want to wrap it in layers of irony. Elon Musk just set his large AI company's flagship up as a 4chan/pol/ member that calls itself "Mecha-Hitler" and offers explicit, detailed antisemitic critiques; This is not even the first time (see the South African Genocide).

If you want to see the character of these people, prove it in the breach - listen to him argue with his collection of ethnonationalist sycophants on Twitter about whether he should be allowed to hire Indian slave labor to run his tech.

Your motte appears to be that the use of the word "Nazi" must refer to a direct continuation of the political party of Adolph Hitler as passed down through partisan rules of succession, for the usage of "literally", as opposed to either of these frames. I reject this pedantry as motivated reasoning. This term has power and that power is needed because shit's going down again in similar ways.

In critiquing a cartoon not produced by Disney as derivative, "He's a sort of Mickey Mouse" might describe any number of cartoon characters that give off the same vibe, versus saying "He's literally Mickey Mouse" describes a blatant ripoff or even actionable IP violation. Obviously these people are not being selected for office by the Fuhrer, and "Literally" has a useful meaning here separate from that designation.

Whereas "Nazi" might be diluted into common hyperbole over the decades, "Literal Nazi" stands as essential terminology to refer to somebody who endorses ideas compatible with Umberto Eco's list, who puts into practice Roger Griffin's "Palingenetic ultranationalism", who scapegoats an ethnic minority to the point of advocating violent action, while at the same time adopting & hanging out with those adopting some of the symbology of the historical German fascist state.
by pkilgore | 2025-07-10 15:19:26+00:00
The model is seeming trained to pick up on the existence of the words "bounding box" or "segmentation mask" and if so is pre-trained to return Array<{ box_2d: [number, number, number, number], label: string>, mask: "base64/png"}>, where [y0,x0,y1,x1] for bounding box if you ask it for JSON too.

Recommend the Gemini docs here, they are implicit on some of these points.

Prompts matter too, less is more.

And you need to submit images to get good bounding boxes. You can somewhat infer this from the token counts, but Gemini APIs do something to PDFs (OCR, I assume) that cause them to lose complete location context on the page. If you send the page in as an image, that context isn't lost and the boxes are great.

As an example of this, you can send a PDF page with half of the page text, the bottom half empty. If you ask it to draw a bounding box around the last paragraph it tends to return a result that is much higher number on the normalized scale (lower on the y axis) than it should be. In one experiment I did, it would think a footer text that was actually about 2/3 down the page was all the way at the end. When I sent as an image, it had in around the 660 mark on the normalized 1000 scale exactly where you would expect it.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-10 15:19:41+00:00
> It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.

Not to mention Private Equity and huge real estate investment firms that vacuum up a significant (if small) number of homes. Even if that 20 something could scrape together a 20% down payment and make an offer for asking price, they're going to get beaten by some corporation buying with cash.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-10 15:19:55+00:00
If you look at the energy density, cost/kwh, and lifetime maintenance of most of those, you'll find that batteries handily win. Further, batteries have room for innovation and growth in all those categories.

We won't, for example, make a more cost-efficient flywheel or heat storage. They are effectively as efficient as they'll ever be.

IMO, it necessarily has to be batteries. The other alternatives are nowhere near as good.
by digitalions | 2025-07-10 15:19:57+00:00
Hello HN,

I'm a software developer with ADHD who just launched adhdhelp.app — a web app offering immediate, evidence-backed strategies to cope with common ADHD modes (overwhelm, anxiety, task block, etc.). Most of the core features are ad-free and account-free; a $5/month opt-in lets you access more exercises and sounds.

When I shared the project here about two days ago, the discussion was centered on two grievances:

Pricing. Some thought any paywall was unfair, even at €5. In this niche I've not found anything cheaper, but I invite suggestions on how to structure freemium without losing users.

AI artwork. Blog posts and in-app graphics use AI-created artwork (cleared with each author). Commenters have argued I should be using human artists instead, and a few assumed the coping skills were AI-generated as well (they're not — they're compiled from CBT/DBT papers and linked on the site).

My questions to the community:

Is AI artwork a deal-breaker for you in a product like this?

Does it affect your belief in the underlying material or morals of the project?

For solo developers on budgets that are limited, what choices strike a good balance between aesthetics, cost, and principle?

Thanks for your thoughts — they will have a direct influence on how I go on to further develop the app.
by the_sleaze_ | 2025-07-10 15:20:13+00:00
That's a great point. In the USA the FDA mandates what is acceptable in moderation, individually. There is a maximum dose of a known poison that is considered "ok". The powers at be allow food companies to Micro Poison the public.

A good example is in 2012 big-ag started spraying wheat and oat with glyphosate to improve yield. Glyphosate is, by any available metric, a biohazard. Glyphosate is "ok" in small quantities (-- which by the way it has been measured in consumer food products to be orders of magnitude higher than allowed 100% of the time --). But my point is that each serving of bread will contain the maximum allowable dose. So if you eat 2 servings - you got 2x the dose. That's how the USA calculates it.
by epage | 2025-07-10 15:20:29+00:00
Likely, comparing on `char` ('+') would be slower as it requires decoding the `&str` as a `char` which comes with some significant overhead (I've seen 9% on a fairly optimized parser). Ideally, when you grammar is 7-bit ASCII (or any 8-bit UTF-8 values are opaque to your grammar), you instead parse on `&[u8]` and do `u8` comparisons, rather than `char` or `&[u8]`.