MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmicgadget | 2025-07-18 19:24:07+00:00
> is difficult for people in America to view the US negatively

You really gotta see past stereotypes and reductive takes. The absence of criticism of the US in a discussion about two different countries doesn't implicitly mean "Amurica o7".

> you will find a lot of people that don't really see much difference between Russia attacking Ukraine, and the US bombing the living fuck out of Afghanistan and Iraq...

Those people need to look a little deeper than "these are/were both voluntary wars". If someone is unwilling to engage beyond the shallowest possible academic level, it's not worth the effort.

> one cannot then turn around and scold others for not engaging in that boycott on a moral basis.

My intent was to defend the people engaging in the boycott. I don't recall scolding people for not participating but perhaps that was implied somewhere. Certainly I have not shied away from condemning Kagi/Yandex/Russia but it's not the same as saying "you should too". In fact, one of my main points has been that ideological inconsistency is okay of not great.
by ofalkaed | 2025-07-18 19:24:10+00:00
>The issue in most cases is that hardware that also runs windows will only support S5 Sleep so that Windows 11 can download fresh advertisements while your laptop is “sleeping”.

That explains some things. When I got my new laptop I played with Windows for awhile before installing linux, was surprised by how much the battery drained when unplugged and supposedly asleep. Was also surprised by how poor battery life in general was with Windows. Linux solved both issues, guess I got a laptop which properly supports deep sleep?
by jasonjayr | 2025-07-18 19:24:55+00:00
At one point LibreOffice + MS Office were pretty much on par with each other.

But MS has built this giant moat of integrated proprietary services around these systems that make it difficult to switch away once you are sucked into the environment.

It takes a pretty sizable expense to switch to anything else, while satisfying all of a companies different workflows for various roles and levels of experience.

If not MS Office + it's M365 Eco system, what then? Google Workspace? That's kinda the same problem in a different color?
by cogman10 | 2025-07-18 19:25:39+00:00
This sort of thing hasn't really done much to make me like ORMs.

It seems like a lot of code to generate the tables in the first place and you STILL need to read the output scripts just to ensure the ORM isn't generating some garbage you didn't want.

That seems like a lot of extra effort when a simple migration service (such as liquibase) could do the same work running SQL directly. No question on "which indexes are getting created and why". No deep knowledge of Django interactions with sql. Instead, it's just directly running the SQL you want to run.
by gpm | 2025-07-18 19:25:45+00:00
There's also the significant caveat with 2 that it's only "continues to work the same way" until everything changes all at once because you now need to update to the next version of Debian.

The "everything changing all at once" thing is what eventually drove me to arch (as the most popular at the time rolling release distro - and more stable at the time than debian sid), I'd personally rather have smaller breaking changes more frequently. Though it's probably less painful now to update debian versions than it use to be because things generally work better without configuration than they used to.
by pamelafox | 2025-07-18 19:27:17+00:00
Great list! I also subscribe to Gergeley Orosz' "Pragmatic Engineer" which covers many AI topics now, and to Gary Marcus' substack, which tackles topics more from an LLM skeptic perspective.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/ https://substack.com/@garymarcus

Plus I subscribe to updates from Python packages like Langchain and PydanticAI to see what they're up to, since that's usually reflective of what's happening in broader industry.

I'm not on X anymore so I can't follow many of the folks directly, but some of them (like Simon Willison) also post on BlueSky and Mastodon, fortunately. Some folks like Sebastian Raschka and Chip Huyen also post on LinkedIn. Kind of all over, but eventually, I see a good amount of what's happening.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-18 19:27:47+00:00
> construction is hard! i have no idea how the Japanese have such efficiency. they work fast and make it look relaxed.

I have no special insight, but I would speculate that it’s a byproduct of their culture of keeping everybody on the same page and measuring twice (or thrice) before cutting. In the US, we tend to try to speed up by making speed the goal which counterintuitively slows things down due to corners cut, i’s and t’s not dotted and crossed, poor coordination, etc.
by jchoksi | 2025-07-18 19:27:56+00:00
AUR packages are user-produced content i.e. packages built on their own machines.

They have to be installed via "pacman -U package_file"

Arch developers can code "pacman -U" such that it performs a VirusTotal scan before installation for each package.

VirusTotal's API is free.

- https://docs.virustotal.com/docs/api-scripts-and-client-libr... - https://docs.virustotal.com/docs/please-give-me-an-api-key - https://docs.virustotal.com/docs/consumption-quotas-handled

Since it is end users who are doing the upload and virus scan check, there won't be a consumption quota issue with VirusToal.

Lastly, "pacman -U" should flag failed VirusTotal scans to Arch Security.

Arch's pacman and Flathub's flatpak package managers should be the last line of defence when installing untrusted packages by end users.
Show HN: I built library management app for those who outgrew spreadsheets
by hmkoyan | 2025-07-18 19:28:34+00:00
I've been working on librari.io for the past several months and just launched the beta version.

The Problem: I have 500+ books across multiple rooms in my house and was desperately looking for an app to manage them properly. Most library management apps are either too basic or designed for institutional libraries with rigid workflows that don't fit personal use.

What I Built:

- Multiple libraries: manage collections in different locations

- Location tracking - remember exactly which shelf each book is on

- Loan management - track books you've lent to friends

- Custom fields & tags - store any additional book info the way YOU think about them

- Reading progress tracking - dates, duration, personal ratings

- Modern UI/UX - clean & actually enjoyable to use

Current Status:

- Beta version live

- Working on improving the responsiveness of the app and addressing initial user feedback

Would love feedback! Especially curious about:

- What features would make YOU actually use a library management app?

- UI/UX feedback always welcome

- Any book collectors here who'd be interested in beta testing?

Looking forward to your thoughts! Thank you in advance.
by jp42 | 2025-07-18 19:29:06+00:00
In undergrad(around 2005) we used to have a COBOL lab, most of the assignments were pretty much add/update/delete types. A friend of mine found COBOL so boring, in order to keep it interesting he wrote COBOL program for brothel(not real one), to maintain the customers, prostitutes, transactions and whole nine yard. Despite of not liking the language, he was the best COBOL programmer in college.
by reaperducer | 2025-07-18 19:29:30+00:00
So we are at a point where just a strong password stored in memory is actually the safest option (given brute force protection)?

The safest option is straight out of 1994: Sticky notes.

Security keys can get lost or stolen. If someone breaks into your house or office, they're going after something other than a sticky note in your desk.
by pseudosavant | 2025-07-18 19:29:34+00:00
How did this make the HN homepage? There isn't even any news here. It is an argument about ~20-year-old XML file formats, at a time when file formats couldn't matter less?

On top of that, Office supports OpenDocument formats, just like LibreOffice supports Office formats.

Also, IME the Office XML file format is far better supported by third parties - countless apps read/write them. I have multiple apps installed that can read/write an Office file, but MS Office is the only app on my machine that opens OpenDocument.
by jbreckmckye | 2025-07-18 19:29:43+00:00
> They have literally written down, stated in interviews, repeatedly, that these are what their goals are.

Something I find baffling - even disturbing - is the number of apparently intelligent, reasonable people who hear what these bad actors say, read what these bad actors write, but repeatedly construct alternative interpretations that amount to "when they say they to want break our society, they actually mean something else"
Ask HN: Would you use a serverless, pay-per-second model for AI inference?
by neuron-enix | 2025-07-18 19:30:02+00:00
Hey HN,

As a developer, I’ve been using the big AI APIs quite a bit for my projects. While the technology is incredible, I keep hitting a financial wall. I've had single, complex prompts with large contexts cost me $1-2 (claude opus 4), which is a tough pill to swallow when you're a solo dev paying out-of-pocket.

It feels like the current pricing models can be a real barrier to experimentation and building more ambitious, personal projects that my day job won't cover.

This has led me to explore a "what if" scenario for a more developer-friendly pricing model, and I'd love to get your thoughts on its feasibility.

The Idea: Serverless AI Inference My proposal is a platform that prices AI inference based on the actual compute time used.

Think of it exactly like AWS Lambda, but for LLM prompts. The model is simple:

You don't host or manage anything. You just send your prompt to an API endpoint.

We handle routing it to an available GPU from a large, shared hardware pool.

You get charged only for the execution time your task consumes the GPU, billed by the seconds.

This approach provides a direct, transparent link between the resources you use and what you pay. For tasks that are compute-heavy but don't necessarily have a massive word count, this could be a much more predictable and affordable way to build.

My Questions for the Community: Do you also find the cost of using AI APIs to be a barrier?

As a developer, would you prefer paying for compute time in a serverless model like this? What potential downsides do you see?

I'm a backend engineer, and while building this is a challenge I'm willing to take on, is this economically feasible? Am I underestimating the costs of managing a shared GPU pool and competing with existing players? Or could this be a sustainable business that genuinely solves a problem?

I haven't started building anything yet, but the high costs I'm facing are pushing me to seriously consider it. I wanted to tap into the collective wisdom of HN to see if this is a problem worth solving or if I'm just shouting into the void.
by zaruvi | 2025-07-18 19:30:08+00:00
Can you elaborate why you think this?

Personally I've been running Arch on my work machine for a few years now with very few issues. I'm not even very consistent with updates, and probably run them about once every 3 weeks on average. I have only had to manually intervene on a handful of occasions.

I like it a lot because everything is always up-to-date. I don't face any issues with unsupported versions for tools like I have with Debian in the past. The rolling release model also saves me the pain of doing a "hard" OS upgrade, which often come with issues.
by proberts | 2025-07-18 19:30:50+00:00
First, the NIW standard has changed significantly recently so it might not be a good option for your wife to pursue if her profile isn't very strong since the standard as now applied looks more and more like the EB1A standard and focuses more on the applicant's individual qualifications and achievements rather than end-purpose of the applicant's work. While one spouse's immigration actions can impact the other's immigration status and options, the real risk isn't until the I-485 stage. We've had many E-3 visa holders renew their E-3 visas without issue when their spouses have pending or approved I-140 petitions and even when the E-3 visa applicants have pending or approved I-140 petitions. Now, to be clear, the world has changed so what held true before might not hold true now but historically - and during the past 6 months - we have not had any issues with Australians traveling or renewing their E-3 visa under such circumstances.
by arrosenberg | 2025-07-18 19:31:04+00:00
Ok fair enough, I didn't read closely. Rojava and the Zapatistas both prove my point rather than refute it. The former is entirely dependent on US hegemony to keep them somewhat independent, otherwise they'd be absorbed by Turkey or Iran, and the Zapatistas exist within a much larger state as an insurgent paramilitary group. If the cartels disappeared tomorrow, the Mexican state would quickly reabsorb their territory and the Zapatistas would look more like FARC than an independent polity.

Given those examples, I think most people, myself included, would opt for the stability and moral ambiguity of the western liberal state.
by comfysocks | 2025-07-18 19:31:31+00:00
If I think of self-taught engineers who are my peers, they look great. But that’s selection bias.

If I think of every self-taught engineer that I’ve ever crossed paths with, there are some that engaged in unscientific magical thinking.

Also (solely) self-teaching seems to achieve good results in software more frequently than in other fields of engineering.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-18 19:31:46+00:00
Trying to keep up is like jumping on a 90mph treadmill. I have decided to opt out. I think AI (and currently LLMs) is more than a fad and not going away but it's in a huge state of churn right now. I'm not investing a ton of time into anything until I have to. In another few years the landscape will hopefully be more clear. Or not, but at least I won't have spent a lot of time on stuff that has quickly become irrelevant.

I'm currently not using AI or LLMs in any of my day-to-day work.
by davexunit | 2025-07-18 19:31:56+00:00
For what it's worth the association with GNU is basically historical at this point. RMS has never accepted the original vision of the project (to be the official GNU OS) and the project outgrew GNU's dilapidated infrastructure a long time ago, which the project is finally addressing with the migration to Codeberg. The FSF gave the project a place for people to donate specifically to Guix but have never really embraced it, otherwise. That has been superseded by a dedicated European nonprofit for Guix. The most recent Guix Days gathering before FOSDEM featured a lengthy conversation of breaking ties with GNU entirely but no decision has been made on that, yet.
by ninkendo | 2025-07-18 19:31:59+00:00
I think a difference in magnitude turns into a difference in kind. There's lots of systems where the unreliability of the underlying parts is low enough that it can be a simple matter of retrying quickly once or twice (bit flips in ECC RAM), and others where at least the unreliability is well-known enough that software has all learned to work around the leaky abstraction (like TCP. Although QUIC and other protocols show that maybe it's better to move the unreliability up a layer for more intelligent handling of the edge cases.)

But the unreliability of "the network" compared to "my SATA port" is a whole different ballgame. Filesystems are designed for the latter, and when software uses filesystems it generally expects a reliability guarantee that "the network" can't really provide. Especially on mobile internet, wifi, etc... And that's not even getting into places where NFS just can't do things that local filesystems can do (has anyone figured out how to make inotify/fsevents work?) and all the software that subtly breaks because of it.
by anonymousiam | 2025-07-18 19:32:12+00:00
1: If no gateway to the WAN exists, the certificate chain cannot be validated.

2: I did say "mostly" useless. If your LAN is at risk of spoofing or MITM, then TLS probably will not solve all of your problems anyway.

3: Obviously you can create a local cert and add it to your trust chain. You'll still have problems with various embedded devices that don't have a RTC.
by TheMagicHorsey | 2025-07-18 19:32:13+00:00
Are you generally able to quickly understand what is going on in somebody else's codebase written in Rust? I find it quite difficult to understand other people's Rust code. Is this just a familiarity thing? I have not written anything particularly huge or complex in Rust, but I have written a few CLI utilities. With an equivalent level of Go exposure, I find it much easier to understand code written in Go, compared to code written in Rust.

I'm quite proficient in C/C++ (started coding in C/C++ in 1997) but I still have a much harder time understanding a new C++ project compared to a C project.
by m463 | 2025-07-18 19:33:13+00:00
I kind of wonder if these kinds of arguments are really:

"I didn't go to college, and I turned out fine".

I personally think:

#1 college pushes you to learn theory in a sort of "code coverage" for your brain. The tech doesn't really matter (outdated or soon so)

#2 industry is practice, practice, practice.

many sufficiently motivated folks can start off with #2 and fill in the #1 stuff, but I don't know if they bother.

Also, people who do #1 require #2 or face becoming almost worthlessly outdated.

"self-taught" from the start or not, lifelong learning is required by everyone to be decent.
by tptacek | 2025-07-18 19:33:13+00:00
Obviously mass murder is worse (and a more severe crime) than murdering one person, but I'm still lost as to what the existence of this spectrum has to do with the actual story. If you throw a rock at someone, being apprehended by the police is not the nuclear option.

Note that we're talking about murder because the comment that set this off tried to pass off "throwing spears" as benign comparatively. No it isn't!
by bee_rider | 2025-07-18 19:33:27+00:00
I wouldn’t want to become dependent on something like OpenAI, at least not until we see what the “profitable” version of the company is.

If they have to enshiffify, I don’t want that baked into my workflow. If they have to raise prices, that changes the local vs remote trade off. If they manage to lower prices, then the cost of running locally will be reduced as well.

I’m also not sure what the LLMs that I’d want to use look like. No real deal-maker applications have shown up so far; if the good application ends up being something like “integrate it into neovim and suggest completions as you type” obviously I won’t want to hit the network for that.

Early days still.
by dataflow | 2025-07-18 19:33:38+00:00
I really don't understand what the face of a person has to do with understanding whether something is arson or not. Just as I see no reason why my local grocery store's security guard needs to be able to look up my face in a database directly. If they need to gather more data, then they can ask law enforcement to identify any relevant people and gather relevant information (potentially bringing witnesses in for questioning if there's a legitimate need), then do their investigation based on the evidence to analyze the circumstances of the fire.
by jahewson | 2025-07-18 19:33:42+00:00
> Now, there's basically nothing stopping immigration officials from immediately deporting anybody they want, citizen, non-citizen, illegal or legal immigrant.

What nonsense. We have the courts. There must be a valid determination made that a person entered illegally for expedited deportation to apply. Due process applies to that determination - if it is not made correctly then sue. But more importantly why on earth would it not be made correctly? If you can’t prove that you’re a US citizen then something is very wrong.
by kybernetikos | 2025-07-18 19:34:02+00:00
The big question for me at the moment is whether to go pay-for-tool or pay-for-model.

If I pay for a tool that includes access to frontier models, then they'll keep the models up to date over time for me, let me use models from multiple providers, and the tool is carefully designed around the capabilities and limitations of the models it works with. On the other hand I can't really use the powerful model the tool works with for other applications or write my own.

If I pay for models, then I can only really use it with that manufacturers tools or tools that aren't optimised for the model but allow you to bring your own keys, and if the model provider I'm paying falls behind then I'm tied in for the duration of the contract. The big advantage is that there is a lot of innovation in tooling happening at the moment and you can avoid being locked out of that or having to pay many times for access to the same frontier models accross multiple different tools.
by burntsushi | 2025-07-18 19:35:01+00:00
For many workloads, ripgrep spends the vast majority of its time searching through files.

But more practically, it would be a terror to implement. ripgrep is built on top of platform specific standard file system APIs. io_uring would mean a whole heap of code to work with a different syscall pattern in addition to the existing code pattern for non-Linux targets.

So to even figure out whether it would be worth doing that, you would need to do a whole bunch of work just to test it. And because of my first point above, there is a hard limit on how much of an impact it could even theoretically have.

Where I would expect this to help is to batch syscalls during directory tree traversal. But I have nonidea how much it would help, if at all.
Show HN: RateMyPrompt – share and rate prompts with auto AI evals
by jshchnz | 2025-07-18 19:35:21+00:00
Couldn't find a reliable, free place to share & rate AI prompts so I thought I'd take a stab at it

Already has 500+ prompts generated by AI using the latest model prompting guidelines

5 different supported prompt types: full prompt, enhancement, template, system, chain

20+ categories: coding, writing, marketing, business, creative, etc.

Every prompt gets evaluated automatically by multiple AI models (Claude 3 + GPT-4 Mini, more to come)

Then humans can rate and there is an overall score that takes both AI & humans into account

AI eval prompt here: https://www.josh.ing/ratemyprompt/evaluation-prompt

I'm still quite the noob when it comes to AI stuff so I'd love feedback about RateMyPrompt and ways that it could be improved
by noqc | 2025-07-18 19:35:44+00:00
You are conflating civil law with international law. In a civil context, my right to self defense is very weak. If my neighbor is stockpiling weapons, and announcing his intention to kill me, I am obligated to trust the deterrent of the state. The state has the monopoly on force. I could easily be killed by this person, but they would be prosecuted by the state, and this system defends me quite well. It is only when my life is in active danger that I am allowed to take proactive measures. If the person shoots me in the leg and drops his gun and starts running away. I'm not allowed to pick it up and kill him in response. That's the state's job (There's no chance I would vote to convict this man if I was on a jury to be frank, but that's the principle).

This is very different from the interstate case. If a state shoots another state in the leg and runs away, the only way to establish a deterrent is to shoot back. There is no police force to do it for me. This is the main diffference between civil law and international law.