MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rurp | 2025-07-18 16:15:36+00:00
If you ever end up working on large complicated code bases you'll likely have an easier time relating to the sentiment. LLMs are vastly better at small greenfield coding than for working on large projects. I think 100% of the people I've heard rave about AI coding are using them for small isolated projects. Among people who work on large projects sentiment seems to range from mildly useful to providing negative value.
by hcurtiss | 2025-07-18 16:15:40+00:00
It’s not all state dollars though. There’s a Medicaid match for ACA expansion populations. The OBBB reduces that match by 10% for states that expanded the population to include unauthorized immigrants. In Oregon, to maintain that program Oregonians are going to have to pony up hundreds of millions more per year. Much of the country is fine with that.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-07-18 16:15:43+00:00
This is why I continually advocate for more federalism in our government (the way we used to have, before the Civil War and the New Deal rebuilt the country around the federal government). The presidential elections encompass so many issues, with so much at stake, that they invariably become messy elections which suck all the oxygen out of the room. What we need instead is to make the presidential office (and Congress too!) as boring and limited as we can get away with, and let those decisions be made as locally as possible. Obviously not all things are practical to solve locally (defense being the classic example), but a lot of things are. For example, there is no need to have the federal government dictating standards for education, let states do that. There's no need to have the federal government dictating what drugs are legal, let states do that. When we limit the power of the federal government, the government as a whole will become more responsible to the will of the people, because your political power won't be filled diluted the way it is now.
by ranger_danger | 2025-07-18 16:15:46+00:00
I think those same people I mentioned would argue that being mainstream is also not a project goal, nor is utilization by corporations at all.

I have to admit I think a lot of people with this sort of "death to capitalism" mindset simply won't get anywhere, because they literally don't want to. I guess that means they may eventually fade into obscurity.

But the majority of project leaders I have talked to all seem to follow this mindset... they're not interested in making money, and "this is not a popularity contest."

Yet when a fork inevitably emerges, they go nuclear. Reminds me of a quote I saw one time... "they don't want open source, they want to be the ONLY source."
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-18 16:15:53+00:00
> I'm arguing it may still make sense to move, pay out of pocket for the 366 days, and gain residency for some folks.

It's trivial to construct a threshold and out of state pay structure which cancels this case out. What number of days and out of state pay structure do you feel would cover these cases? How many of these cases do you suspect will occur annually and what is the projected cost? It's a relatively easy problem to solve once we get down to the specifics.

> "you can't be a resident, ever, if you've got expensive healthcare costs"

Great! I'm not arguing for "ever". I think we're in the clear here.

Edit: Let's estimate the volume of this effect using migration after Medicad expansion as a proxy. Over 10 years (2009 to 2019) we find 56,659 interstate moves after Medicaid enrollment growth[1]. In other words, 0.23 percentage points greater annual population growth in the target population. Another study found an in-migration rate(to CA) of 1.4% for medicaid recipients. Being generous and taking the higher of the two, and multiplying it by California's net immigration of 500,000–600,000 annually, gives us an estimated 7000-8400 medicaid migrants a year a fraction of which are migrating primarily for medical purposes. What would you estimate the annual medical expenditures for this group would be and if an "new arrivals" insurance pool was formed, what would the marginal monthly premium cost be to its members?

I estimate that a CA new arrivals insurance pool would have $4B in annual disbursements, and $4-20M in annual residency fraud. Using averages, we can estimate a monthly premium for this group would be about $667/month.

This is roughly on par with unsubsidized ACA premiums for adults in many states. For comparison, ACA benchmark premiums for a 40-year-old in California in 2024 are about $450–$600/month.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39893838/

2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4011649/?
by TimorousBestie | 2025-07-18 16:15:54+00:00
I’m pretty tuned in to the conservative water cooler, and I’ve heard three realistic theories on post-Trump executive power. To be clear, these are real opinions I’ve heard self-described Trump voters espouse—not my opinions:

1. Most of the federal judges and SCOTUS will overturn bits and pieces of executive power once a Democrat tries to use them. See Biden and school loan forgiveness. They firmly believe that Thomas and Alito will retire during this administration, and they hope Sotomayor or Kagan retires or dies. I’ve also heard noise about impeaching Barrett.

2. Democrats are too skittish to use executive power to do anything revolutionary with it. Even when they had a trifecta during the first Obama term they barely did anything with it.

3. Regardless of the other two points, it’s very unlikely for the Republicans to lose control of House and Senate again, and the Senate can revert to being effective when the executive is a Democrat. A Republican House can constantly submit articles of impeachment and a Democrat president will get bogged down dodging the accusations, even if they’re spurious.
by danudey | 2025-07-18 16:16:13+00:00
Can easily imagine companies like Dell selling you a system with Ubuntu preinstalled but without Windows signing keys so you can't run Windows on an Ubuntu laptop (or vice-versa) with Secure Boot on an unmodified system.

Not out of malice, necessarily, but at least incompetence.

Likewise, having Microsoft signing the shim also means that any Linux installation with the signed shim can install on any system that supports Windows, whereas if RedHat had their own 100% comptent, rock-star PKI then a huge proportion of systems sold today would not be able to run Linux unmodified because the manufacturers wouldn't bother.
by benaubin | 2025-07-18 16:16:26+00:00
in seriousness: we don't listen to your microphone unless you click the button that says "start transcribing" in big letters.

we dropped the ball with the support response quoted the top of the thread. we don't process your microphone data until you click the button to start transcribing, and remind the user to confirm they have two-party consent. we merely detect when a meeting app is using your microphone.

source: i work at notion, just checked the code. it's electron, you're welcome to check for yourself.
by zettabomb | 2025-07-18 16:17:13+00:00
What do you mean by "blow"? There's often a polyfuse which will trip, and needs to cool down to reset. I haven't seen a normal fuse but I believe it's possible. Efuses are also common, to allow the system to automatically reset as soon as the fault condition is removed.

It's unlikely that anything will be damaged, but the device likely will not work until the issue is resolved.
by aforwardslash | 2025-07-18 16:17:49+00:00
I worked as a cobol dev in my first fulltime job. I did mostly cobol85 (microfocus) and object-cobol (netexpress/fujitsu cobol), with isam files. Did the whole "migrate to year 2000" process in a couple of big but old applications (healthcare management software and manufacturing management software). Cobol is a school by itself; there are so many ways you can shoot yourself in the foot that one either learn how to structure programs avoid a spaguetti mess, or slowly descend into madness trying to fix bugs :)
by abetusk | 2025-07-18 16:18:30+00:00
> ... it is also often the case in mathematics that we approach a problem by solving a more general problem and getting our solution as a special case.

This is a really good point. LLL and "Feynman's" integral trick come to mind. There are many others.

I got it in my head that this doesn't apply to NP-complete problems so should be discounted. When trying to "solve" NP-complete problems, the usual tactic is to restrict the problem domain into something tractable and then try to branch out other regions of applicability.

> Those are precisely the kind of areas where it's really important that you consider all the possible things you might want to do, and make sure you're not making some false assumption that will massively screw you over at some later date.

I will say that abstraction is its own type of optimization and generalization like this shouldn't be done without some understanding of the problem domain. My guess is that we're in agreement about this point and the talk essentially makes this argument explicitly.
I just got banned by Immunefi for reporting a real replay attack on LayerZero V2
by tangou | 2025-07-18 16:18:32+00:00
I just got banned by Immunefi for reporting a real replay attack on LayerZero V2.

I discovered that lzReceive() allows infinite replays of valid cross-chain messages, due to the lack of guid tracking. This results in repeated token crediting — a critical flaw.

My PoC used real deployed contracts, no forged data. The vulnerability is 100% reproducible.

Instead of investigating, Immunefi rejected my report without a technical rebuttal — and banned me for "complexity poaching".

Full Story: https://medium.com/@tangouvitch/immunefi-banned-me-for-reporting-a-real-replay-attack-in-layerzero-v2-71d5ee0ff102

Do you think this is a valid bug? Was the ban justified? Should Immunefi be held accountable?

Curious to hear what the Ethereum community thinks.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-18 16:18:41+00:00
If you can’t change their mind, and you can’t change their vote, and rural voters die faster than urban voters because of lack of access to healthcare services, state universal healthcare is the best we can do until electorate turn over through rural age out can improve political outcomes. Until then, we are held hostage by the irrational and unsophisticated with votes, which is unfortunate but the reality of the situation.

It’s exhausting being dragged by low empathy unsophisticated humans frankly, I am personally over it. I was naive about human nature, hard lessons learned.
by Expurple | 2025-07-18 16:18:41+00:00
The same could be said about non-corporate contributions. "People only contribute as long as they have a personal itch to scratch. The moment they get what they want, you're on your own again".

That's always been the deal. Open source is not a guarantee of free support forever! It's a guarantee that you can always fork and keep using the project (or even developing it further)
by ItCouldBeWorse | 2025-07-18 16:18:55+00:00
Turns out the law is just two in the ink, one in the pinky finger in the air "I swear!". But in the end, the law is in people, the society is in people, not in paper, not in officials, not in institutions.

If the people carry something and change their minds and moods, have fun holding back that energy with a creaking dam made of paper. Even this Ice nightmare, was voted in democratic and will be one day, when the mood has swung again, pushed back by the people in some colorful revolution.
by esafak | 2025-07-18 16:19:31+00:00
Joan Miro's '91 poster immediately made me recall the Turespana logo which, sure enough, is also his.

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/1991-roland-garros-c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turespa%C3%B1a#/media/File:Sol...
by uludag | 2025-07-18 16:19:54+00:00
> With enough time, any sufficiently large company can implement their own version of any software that anyone else has written. They usually won't write their own version if a high quality opensource version exists with a permissible license.

Is this a true assertion? If you define sufficiently large company to be Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. then sure, of course they can. That's an extremely high bar though and I would bet that even then, these companies would have to pick and choose their battles.
by Quarrel | 2025-07-18 16:20:42+00:00
The real kicker here, is the that it is not the case in China (which FWIW, has a roughly equivalent GDP to the EU).

Does China struggle if the US cuts off lots of these things? Sure. But they have a local ecosystem that has been forcibly, and which much complaint from big-tech, separated from the US ecosystem.

Are they reliant on Android? Sure, but only the open source bits. Google isn't allowed the same strangle hold over the rest as it is in the west.

I'm not necessarily sure that this is to China's credit, but if this is the discussion that Europe wants to have, then it is a good contrast.
by xrd | 2025-07-18 16:20:42+00:00
A friend asked me whether I was concerned about energy usage of AI. I didn't have a good answer. It feels inevitable.

But, I love the write-up here on why the sailboat, and why UXN, because those two things are complementary when you are living in a sailboat and are thinking intimately about your power consumption.

https://100r.co/site/why_a_boat.html

https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

Seeing Devine at StrangeLoop last year was a treat (and took a lot of mental energy!)
by 9rx | 2025-07-18 16:20:59+00:00
> Somebody who is self taught is _by design_ somebody who's extremely motivated and interested in the subject.

How so? I've self-taught myself plenty of things that I don't have an interest in. I dare say I even despised some of it.

It seems fair to say that motivation is necessary, however often the only motivation is a means to an end, not the endeavour into the subject itself. But motivation is always necessary. That is not limited to self-teaching. I am not sure that bit is actually additive.
by jajuuka | 2025-07-18 16:21:04+00:00
So adding more responsibilities to police to now also get expert level training in determining causes of fires and finding clues in a fire incident. That's kind of how we got here. Where the police are a panacea making them less effective and more corrupt since they are an even bigger keystone.

Separating out duties to experts is more effective. Let the fire department investigate fires and then pass on the information for the police to secure the suspect/s and follow the justice system. Same with mental health emergency cases. More social workers and experts dealing with a variety of mental disorders will be better to work people in crisis since they are trained for that.
by hilbert42 | 2025-07-18 16:21:12+00:00
"It is curious vs complacent w/ a heavy sprinkle of hard work, creativity, and intelligence."

Formal training brings with it information that others have shown to be vital knowledge that must be known. No doubt many self taught people master a profession better than those who've gone through formal training with a complacent attitude but it's the latter's training that guarantees students master certain points that the self-taught might put less emphasis on.

I'd be much happier crossing a bridge built by a structural engineer who has had certain rules (safety margins, etc.) drummed into him ad nauseam.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-18 16:21:18+00:00
One of the interesting things about the experience of LLVM and Clang isn't that it's killing off gcc--a decade after this was written, gcc is still the compiler of choice for most Linux distrubtions--but that it's killing off EDG, the C++ frontend that all proprietary C++ compilers used to use. Killing off proprietary software because the open source stuff is so much better is the vision of Stallman, and it's telling that a permissive license has been much more effective than a copyleft license in doing so.
by Expurple | 2025-07-18 16:21:20+00:00
Yes, but what's the better alternative? The article makes the point that you're not even getting table scraps back into your GPL project. In most cases, the companies prefer a proprietary rewrite. Now you're just stuck with a less-developed project, while the world around you uses more-developed proprietary alternatives and pushes you to do the same. But I guess, that somehow makes you feel better because you don't let the corporations "feed off your work" and instead just waste everyone's time on infinite rewrites?
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-07-18 16:22:05+00:00
From TFA:

> Medicaid, state and federally government-funded health care coverage for the country’s poorest, is largely available only to some non-citizens, including refugees and asylum seekers, survivors of human trafficking, and permanent residents. Some states, like New York, provide Medicaid coverage for children and pregnant people, regardless of their immigration status. States report their Medicaid expenditures and data to the federal government, which reimburses them for some of the costs.

The Trump admin is aggressively deporting refugees and asylum seekers who entered legally.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-07-18 16:22:52+00:00
It will only get worse with LLMs being at the core of ever more activity.

I'm not sure why only the USA is capable of creating state-of-the-art LLMs. As for Europe, I can say that it has a simple but effective strategy to keep falling behind:

1: Prevent innovation via regulation 2: Problem: Being dependent on foreign technology 3: Fight the problem with more regulation 4: Goto 1

Maybe people from China, Japan, India, or the UK can shed some light on why no state-of-the-art LLMs come out of these countries?
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-18 16:22:53+00:00
I worked in an IBM mainframe shop as my first job. The COBOL devs for the most part did not participate in programming/tech communities. It was a 9-5 job and they didn't think about it otherwise. Maybe they would have a subscription to Datamation magazine or something like that but I doubt it.

But keep in mind there was no internet, no podcasts, no youtube. If you needed to learn something you learned it at work, on work time. If something new was introduced, IBM came in and conducted training, at work. For something big you might get sent to an IBM training center for a week. There was no need for (and no real way to do) any learning on your own outside of work.
by elric | 2025-07-18 16:23:10+00:00
I've spent quite a few years doing software dev for various governments, including the EU. Every time this was brought up, the engineers (including myself) who brought it up were pretty much laughed out of the room. Apparently the question of where stuff is hosted was answered by people who are several paygrades above mine, and they're obviously very well informed (/s).

Ultimately it always came down to money. And AWS/Azure/GCP are apparently so much cheaper that nothing else matters.

It's a sad state of affairs.
by compiler-guy | 2025-07-18 16:23:58+00:00
This echoes the Joel On Software Classic, "In Defense of Not-Invented-Here-Syndrome", which gives some of the reasons Microsoft Excel won the spreadsheet wars. Of particular note:

=-=-=

“The Excel development team will never accept it,” he said. “You know their motto? ‘Find the dependencies — and eliminate them.’ They’ll never go for something with so many dependencies.”

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-...
by larsiusprime | 2025-07-18 16:24:04+00:00
I can think of at least a few counterexamples. The logic behind the hypothesis is decent and tells a plausible story, but I'd like to see a more robust analysis; has anyone done one since the article was first posted 10 years ago?

Noteable counterxamples (excluding e.g. Linux):

- Git (GPLv2)

- Blender (GPLv2 & 3, from the looks of it)

- Krita (GPLv3)

- MySQL (GPLv2) -- still seems very popular in 2025

- QGIS (GPLv2)
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-18 16:24:23+00:00
It's already making life worse on the Meta Quest 3.

I think a lot of what Big Tech does these days is about kneecapping their competitors. Meta is selling much weaker hardware than Apple, so if Apple manages to trick Meta into making a fancier-but-more-expensive interface for their XR headsets, Meta headsets get laggier, less reliable, maybe they screw up and you go VR-to-ER.

To little fanfare in the wider world [1], Meta rolled out an update for the MQ3 that adds more transparency. It isn't really bad, it isn't really that fancy, it probably doesn't lag the headset much. But I see it as a regression. It used to be if I wanted to follow somebody I was playing with in Beat Saber I could hit the Meta button and the screen was right there. Now I have to hit the Meta button, and I have to click on the Meta icon, then I have to pick "People" (I think) from the app library, and then it is open to the wrong tab so I have to pick a certain tab and finally I have a choice to follow somebody I'm playing with.

Being a leader in social software is not about being good at social software at all, it's just about your customers being locked into a two-sided market. It's about being careless, even about the bottom line -- it's not like they "enshittified" the UI to make money, they just made it worse carelessly and I think they did it to ape Apple.

[1] what a luxury it is to be able to live your life unexamined by the breathless -- Thomas Frank pointed out how frickin' lame it was that youth culture was worked over in the media which leaves me feeling today that being a Generation Xer meant I could have my youth (and middle age) without being a bug on a slide.
by javcasas | 2025-07-18 16:24:25+00:00
So the XOR initial trick is: use a hash to partition the data into batches so that each batch has up to 1 missing element.

Can't we use this again? I mean:

1. Partition the data so that some batches have up to 1 missing element.

2. Recover the elements where possible with the XOR trick.

3. Pick another hash function, then repeat finding more missing elements.

4. Repeat until no more missing elements.
by joshuaissac | 2025-07-18 16:24:35+00:00
> giving them the object code to relink it wasn’t enough for them (which would satisfy the spirit of LGPL)

Doesn't that also satisfy the letter of the LGPL v2?

> Accompany the work with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code for the Library [...] and, if the work is an executable linked with the Library, with the complete machine-readable "work that uses the Library", as object code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library
by lotsoweiners | 2025-07-18 16:25:11+00:00
Not a COBOL dev myself but for many years I worked in government healthcare for my state. Probably 75% of developers and BAs for the organization were working to support an extremely large mainframe system(s). I worked as a web developer and we had to use a product called Hostbridge that allowed our web applications to interface with the mainframe via javascript.
by dijit | 2025-07-18 16:25:14+00:00
I'm really glad people are starting to wake up to this.

It's been the case for a while, but we've been sliding more and more into the hands of the US.

Microsoft used to ship software that was local first, and removing the activation servers wouldn't have affected deployed software, now though? A removal of a subscription is an immediate revocation.

It's worse with Google Docs.

And of course, nobody knows how to run servers anymore unless they're in US tech company owned and operated datacenters, this is absolutely terrifying, but truthfully it's the office products that have the most capability to cause harm.
by noqc | 2025-07-18 16:25:26+00:00
This is a deep misrepresentation of my core stance here. Claiming that you have the special sauce to finding the "Truth" is cult behavior. I'm saying neither that people, not groups of people suck.

In fact, my argument is roughly "Less wrong is a religion by analogy to the religions that it resembles, like Christianity".

Arguing "well by that logic Christianity is a religion", is unlikely to sway me.