MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by compressedgas | 2025-07-29 22:57:13+00:00
Charles Simonyi, _Meta-Programming: A Software Production Method_

> Simonyi’s 1977 dissertation, “Meta-Programming: A Software Production Method.” Simonyi proposed a new approach to “optimizing productivity,” in which one lead programmer, or “meta-­programmer,” designed a product and defined all its terms, then handed off a blueprint to “technicians,” worker-bee programmers who would do the implementation. Simonyi aimed to escape Brooks’s Law by forbidding the technicians to talk with one another: all communication had to pass through the meta-programmer.

> -- Scott Rosenberg, "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta", https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/01/01/227178/anything-...
Tell HN: macOS Time Machine will no longer support Time Capsules
by nodesocket | 2025-07-29 22:58:45+00:00
To my shock and anger, I just upgraded to macOS Sequoia 15.6 today and when I triggered a Time Machine backup was greeted with:

"Future versions of macOS will no longer support Time Capsule disks for Time Machine backups."

What? Why? My 2TB Time Capsule is still working fine, what could possibly be the justification for this change?
by nomel | 2025-07-29 23:00:00+00:00
> Campus leaders say the government actions could cumulatively cost the University as much as $1 billion a year.

So, 100% cut compared to 2024, or maybe expected funding drastically increased compared to 2024?

> The administration then said it was withholding $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contract value to the institution.

This doesn't math, but close enough I suppose.
by nojs | 2025-07-29 23:00:20+00:00
Wow, that whole page does not inspire confidence. It’s 99% LLM slop.

What We’re Doing:

-We are making ongoing adjustments to our infrastructure to improve stability and ensure reliable scaling under elevated load

-Analyzing system patterns and optimizing backend processes where resource contention is highest

-Implementing protective measures to safeguard platform integrity
by currymj | 2025-07-29 23:01:01+00:00
as a professor i'm tentatively pleased. it's hard to shake out the edge cases for anything like this so it may break down or cause annoying problems, who knows.

but even with this feature in this very early state, it seems quite useful. i dropped in some slides from a class and pretended to be a student, and it handled questions reasonably. Right now it seems I will be happy for my students to use this.

taking a wider perspective, I think it is a good sign that OpenAI is culturally capable of making a high-friction product that challenges and frustrates, yet benefits, the user. hopefully this can help with the broader problem of sycophancy.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-29 23:01:46+00:00
> The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.

With iOS 26 you can now export Apple notes to markdown as well, which I've done recently on the beta and put them in my Obsidian folder.

The switching cost for me is more so the stupid little conveniences I'm not quite willing to give up yet. I do regularly take advantage of clipboard sharing, universal control, AirPods device switching, auto-fill from messages & mail for TOTP (which works in Chrome now on macOS 26), and my Apple Watch has been hard to replace last time I tried (was with a pixel watch 2, maybe the 4 will be good enough this time).

I can recreate some of that with KDE Connect & Linux, but last time I tried it wasn't nearly as seamless.

Photos are the most important to me, and I already have those regularly backed up locally.

I suspect I'll switch eventually, I just have to mourn the loss of the little things.
by kkylin | 2025-07-29 23:01:48+00:00
I spent a lot of time on RC cars as a teen (Tamiya, Kyosho). I've not kept up. Recently on a trip to Japan I visited some stores, and was surprised to see that the tech doesn't seem to have changed all that much. I would have expected, for example, that it would now be possible to mount a camera etc. Can someone who's kept up with the hobby let me know if this is a reasonable reaction? Maybe there are new brands I don't know about? Mind you, I really liked building RC cars from kits as it was hours of fun and learning some basic mechanical engineering, and it seems this is still part of the experience. But that alone probably won't appeal to this generation of kids.
by ieuanking | 2025-07-29 23:02:08+00:00
Study mode should be for any account with an age under 18. It's more worrying that a student must uphold a trust transaction and not just cheat with the same chatbot without the study mode selected. To this day, as an AI researcher, digital anthropologist, and front-end dev, I love to learn, study, and work. But I would never recommend a student to use unmonitored ChatGPT. I literally built a whole effing agent and platform for finding academic sources and using those sources to answer my questions, specifically because I couldn't trust or learn with ChatGPT when conducting research. SMH study mode, please stop trying to redo teaching and learning. We should be trying to modernize already proven effective methods of learning that go hand in hand with teachers and classrooms. We are not in lockdown; this is not 2020. Teachers are irreplaceable, study mode is just a crutch or a brace for a problem created by irresponsible AI development. Ik that if I was a student right now (especially middle to high school) I would be cheating like you are lying to yourself if you think you wouldn't be, and at a certain point the definition of cheating changes from cheating the teacher to cheating yourself of the critical steps and thinking it takes to actually study and learn. No amount of conversation alone with a chatbot is as valuable as reading coursework and engaging with that coursework in a facilitated environment with a professional. Why are we going down the WALL-E path?
by patrickthebold | 2025-07-29 23:02:33+00:00
I happen to also have thought about this. Effects would listen to the global state and if needed do their side effect and update the state. As a type it's just State -> State, with an implicit side effect.

As an example: Say the user clicks a button to submit a form, clicking the button updates the local state to include something like `status: 'SUBMIT_REQUESTED'` then you make the request conditionally, and update the state to `status: 'IN_PROGRESS'`.

It might become a mess, but the point is to do no side effects based on any events, all effects happen conditionally based on the state. My hope is the forces you to actually track everything you should be tracking in your state object.
by xiasanhuasi | 2025-07-29 23:04:17+00:00
“The 996 work culture is, in fact, a symptom of corporate incompetence.”

Only when management is unable to deliver real results to investors do they fall back on saying, “Look, we’re all working passionately, we’re doing 996!” The implicit message is: “Even though I’m incapable, we’re working hard—please keep investing in us.” It’s a methodology of working for performance theater, not actual productivity.

I’ve worked as a professional executive in China for over 20 years. From 2000 to 2008, I grew in foreign enterprises. After 2010, I joined Chinese internet companies and worked with many firms, mainly focusing on IT governance to meet IPO-level audit requirements.

One principle has remained consistent throughout my career:

Overtime is a sign of managerial failure. And when a company turns overtime into culture, it is collective incompetence—from the organization and its leadership. That should be a source of shame.

When I began working in Chinese internet companies around 2010, leadership both appreciated my capabilities and deeply resented my foreign-corporate mindset. They felt I always touched their most painful nerve: that 996 is a mark of failure. They found it hard to work with me because I always structured everything with clarity, and what they hated most was clarity. I spoke in logic and market truths; they hated that, always insisting they were “crossing the river by feeling the stones.”

So when I see Silicon Valley now embracing 996, I know this is the final straw for the AI bubble:

When people start working for the performance, not for the purpose, the collapse is already on its way.
by pedalpete | 2025-07-29 23:04:25+00:00
https://archive.is/vTM4B#selection-3271.197-3271.271

I have a dog in this fight as the neurostimulation technology we're developing at https://affectablesleep.com has been shown to improve amyloid response AND memory in healthy older adults[1], as well as increase sleep in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's[2].

There are significant studies showing safety in slow-wave enhancement, and I am yet to see a single study that shows any negative impacts. The stimulation works (it is thought) by triggering a protective mechanism in the brain which increases the synchronous firing of neurons known as slow-waves which improves the glypmphatic systems power to flush out metabolic waste (amyloid, tau, etc).

Pharmaceuticals have complex interactions which, thus far, neurostimulation does not appear to have. As the article points out "the risk of brain swelling and brain bleeds means they need intense monitoring"

There is also https://www.cognitotx.com/, which uses an open-loop auditory and visual stimulation which seems to have similar response in the brain. However, from what I'm told the stimulation is quite exhausting.

https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.07.002
by barchar | 2025-07-29 23:04:43+00:00
On modern Intel systems sleep works the same as on android. You don't just ask the chipset for s3 anymore.

I wouldn't be surprised if one core stayed awake.

This is why tiger lake laptops had crummy battery life on Linux upon release (often on windows too). Without working s0ix they just never suspend, and old style s3 isn't really officially supported.
by dctoedt | 2025-07-29 23:04:48+00:00
How about "to give the public a cut of the economic rents — i.e., private taxes — that the public is allowing you to extract from the market, which you get from your legal monopoly that lets you block competitors from copying you"?

Would that be an exercise of raw political power? Yup.

(The older I've gotten, the more I've drifted into the camp of the folks who think that society was better off when we had top marginal tax rates in the 80% to 90% range: Back then, your salary, your bank balance, and your yacht size weren't the most important metrics with which to measure your success in life. That's because, once you hit a certain compensation level, the government took most of the incremental increases. Innovators and business execs weren't notably less motivated back then.)

Or how about this: After an initial period of low taxation, we should heavily tax all patents. The idea would be to encourage owners of low-value patents to let them expire early for failure to pay the increased taxes. That would allow independent reinventors (of whom there are many) and copiers to do their own thing without having to worry that, if they make it big, the owner of a zombie patent won't suddenly appear with their hand out, demanding a cut. (Believe me, that happens.) That's kind of how patent "maintenance fees" are supposed to work now, but the amounts involved are utterly trivial and should be dramatically increased.

Yes, I know ALL about the economic rationale for having a patent system to mitigate the free-rider problem that discourages innovation. I also know all about how people work very hard to game the system. They're aided and abetted by patent lawyers who fervently believe in patents — and who of course want the paying work. (I knew an old-time patent lawyer, now long dead, who would sometimes tell clients — only half-jokingly — "If you paint it purple, I can probably get you a patent on it.")
by phendrenad2 | 2025-07-29 23:05:05+00:00
From a security perspective, I don't trust the binary that downloads and installs a package to just download it. Some package installers, such as Bundler, like to run arbitrary code from the package on install. I don't trust that to not be invoked with a simple download. I'd rather use hardened tools like CURL or a web browser. It's just good security hygiene.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-07-29 23:06:45+00:00
Thanks for the clarification, albeit I still do not see which half you think is equivalent in public schools.

I will say that the likelihood of school trips in public schools is possible, but significantly fewer and less likely than for home schooling. A home schooled child can take a field trip every week. This will not happen for public school student, just for logistical reasons.

My point was to counter the argument that "they [home schooled children] all lack an awareness of the real world". If you look at my response from that context, it is clear, at least to me, that a public school student has significantly less opportunity to experience "real world".
by insane_dreamer | 2025-07-29 23:06:48+00:00
My favorite use of Claude (or similar) AI bot, other than coding, is to do deep dives into technical/science questions I'm interested in (mostly personal interests, unrelated to work). The ability to ask follow-up questions, get clarifications, travel down side paths, has helped me to grasp some concepts that I struggled with -- and offered more than I could just from just reading a few web pages.

Importantly, these were _not_ critical questions that I was incorporating into any decision-making, so I wasn't having to double-check the AI's answers, which would make it tedious; but it's a great tool for satisfying curiosity.
by gopalv | 2025-07-29 23:07:03+00:00
> Except that the textbook was probably QA’d by a human for accuracy

Maybe it was not when printed in the first edition, but at least it was the same content shown to hundreds of people rather than something uniquely crafted for you.

The many eyes looking at it will catch it and course correct, while the LLM output does not get the benefit of the error correction algorithm because someone who knows the answer probably won't ask and check it.

I feel this way about reading maps vs following GPS navigation, the fact that Google asked me to take an exit here as a short-cut feels like it might trying to solve the Braess' paradox in real time.

I wonder if this route was made for me to avoid my car adding to some congestion somewhere and whether if that actually benefits me or just the people already stuck in that road.
by purplerabbit | 2025-07-29 23:07:03+00:00
In case you find it interesting: I deployed an early version of a "lesson administering" bot deployed on a college campus that guides students through tutored activities of content curated by a professor in the "study mode" style -- that is, forcing them to think for themselves. We saw an immediate student performance gain on exams of about 1 stdev in the course. So with the right material and right prompting, things are looking promising.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-29 23:07:21+00:00
> Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups.

Hell, even Microsoft (on the enterprise side of 365) says do not treat their services as a backup.

But we do need to get stricter about the messaging these companies are allowed to put out there regarding their services. Microsoft with one side of their mouth says 365 is definitively not a backup, and then turns around and advertises OneDrive on Windows as a backup with the "back up your folders now" notification.

To consumers that don't know any better, it's misleading and leads to a false sense of security, though I suspect "this service is not a backup and you can lose your account and all your files at anytime" doesn't sell as many subscriptions.
by Isamu | 2025-07-29 23:07:43+00:00
>I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism

The good: it can objectively help you to zoom forward in areas where you don’t have a quick way forward.

The bad: it can objectively give you terrible advice.

It depends on how you sum that up on balance.

Example: I wanted a way forward to program a chrome extension which I had zero knowledge of. It helped in an amazing way.

Example: I am keep trying to use it in work situations where I have lots of context already. It performs better than nothing but often worse than nothing.

Mixed bag, that’s all. Nothing to argue about.
by SamuelAdams | 2025-07-29 23:08:23+00:00
The only way I’ve ever seen engineers care about PR’s is if the software or product is tied directly to their paycheck. If uptime or bugs directly impact a quarterly bonus, or result in a layoff / getting fired, they spend a lot more time reviewing PR’s. Furthermore, the work and its estimate is expanded to include enough time for the team to thoroughly review the change.

Unless someone is getting fired for bad code the “lgtm” culture will never die.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-29 23:08:32+00:00
I think I can answer this for you.

You ask ChatGPT if combining bleach and [chemical] is bad. It says there can be some dangerous irritation to the lungs, and not to do it.

You prompt it a couple times with new data that suggests the reaction could be worse, but its story doesn't really change.

So, you put on a respirator, mix the concoction - and it melts through 6 floors of your building while emitting neurotoxic gas.

ChatGPT told you it would be bad. It told you not to do it. But there's a huge difference between what it said would happen and what was actually foreseeable.
by chmod775 | 2025-07-29 23:09:25+00:00
Am I crazy or does all of that look ridiculously over engineered for what they actually provide? It looks like the 4-5 devs wanted to build something fancy like the big boys would, without having the manpower to deal with the overhead.

These kinds of issues usually arise because complex technologies are introduced, mostly by following some basic tutorials and light googling, without anyone actually understanding what that random NPM package (speaking a protocol of which they have at best a rudimentary understanding) actually does to communicate with the rust crate the other guy pulled.

I don't doubt their entire service could be a monolithic, small, and easily comprehensible node app running on some consumer PC hardware at the company HQ. You're never going to outgrow that in their business. It'd likely run off a macbook with some engineering discipline.

Instead it's probably a confusing mess of microservices in a Kubernetes cluster, each running in its own Docker container for "isolation", glued together with some YAML magic and a few bash scripts, tunneling XMPP over gRPC "because it's faster", behind an Istio mesh someone half-configured, talking to a bunch of managed cloud services across AWS and GCP "for redundancy", with Redis caches scattered around "just in case", logs streaming into three different observability tools (none of them fully set up), CI/CD powered by GitHub Actions triggering Terraform deployments through a Slack bot, autoscaling turned on "with default settings", and of course there's a blockchain component for audit logs - though no one remembers why - and a colocated 96-core fifteen-thousand dollar server running a cron job that updates a config file in S3 every hour "to keep things in sync".

Too bad the entire thing relies on those JIDs containing PII now, which everyone is afraid of changing. The solution? Slap another micro-service in front that translates them to something else. Devs have been unsuccessfully trying to get exactly that deployed for weeks now. But cut them some slack: getting shit done is hard when you're overqualified for your job.
by shagie | 2025-07-29 23:10:47+00:00
Visa and Mastercard have been sued in various jurisdictions for facilitating the monetization of illegal content by some merchant in that jurisdiction before. They've been made party to the defendants and the court refused their "we have no part in this, we only move money around" and have failed at their motions to be removed from those cases.

Collective Shout has tried to get Steam and Itch to remove the content they don't like / is illegal in Australia.

From the article:

> “We raised our objection to rape and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months,” reads a blog post from Collective Shout. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.”

So after they didn't succeed with Steam and Itch, they likely said to Visa and Mastercard "we tried to get your merchants to follow the law, they haven't. If we sue them, we're suing you too."

As Visa and Mastercard have lost that court case before, the payment processors then went to their merchants and likely said something along the lines of "If you get sued, we're getting sued too - so we're going to not process payments for you until you are not in danger of getting sued."

Could Visa and Mastercard rebuffed Collective Shout? Possibly... but then we'd be reading about how Itch, Steam, Visa, and Mastercard got sued in an Australian court and lost the case on illegal Australian porn.

It's Australia's fault that while they can handle a phallus on TV (as insinuated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717254 ), they can't handle a fur lined handcuff, schoolgirl uniform, or shaven anatomy.

Trying to blame the United States for this misplaced.

Visa and Mastercard (and all payment processors) are risk adverse and the risk of being included in another PR damaging and expensive lawsuit that they can't get out of despite having the limited role of moving money from customer to merchant.

If you want to blame someone for this fiasco, one should be looking instead at the laws in the country where this originated from and the courts that mandate the involvement of the payment processor as a defendant.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-29 23:10:55+00:00
> There’s a non-trivial chance that we will never come together, even on a millennial time scale

If you really believe that, then why do you think we deserve to infest the rest of the galaxy? We'd be planet killers, bringing death and mayhem wherever we god. Intelligent life would be wise to put us out of their misery before we pop our landers.

I believe our problems are solvable, because our problems all seem to boil back to the same tiny group of people fucking things up for everyone... And some of that group are the people privatizing space.
by CrimsonCape | 2025-07-29 23:11:14+00:00
I've been playing with Arch recently (is it ok to say arch instead of arch linux?) I installed the kernel and then... not much. Spent some time googling what to do with Arch once it's installed. "Could this be better than my Windows setup?" is the question. Not just "equivalent" but "better" such that "this is so good I abandon 3-5 cherished Windows-only apps"

Instead I waded into a soup of X11 vs Wayland, endless bickering about which tech stack, WM vs gui, etc. I would be curious to hear what people think linux's 'killer app' is. Not just "equivalent" but better. To your point, Linux needs a killer app, not just equivalent-app or "linux flavored" app that does the same thing, a DAW, a font editor, a GIS app, something.

If the best coffee comes from one coffee shop, naturally you go inside there to get the coffee. We are talking about an app so good it makes you want to install linux.
by throwaway290 | 2025-07-29 23:12:23+00:00
People like you champion crypto to work around pain and by this they prop up the same government that caused them this pain, good job

> will be immediately sent to prison were I to return to Russia

If this is true you can apply to asylum but for most people who fear this it is not true. Uunless you are literally famous, a rich guy or journalist or inconvenient criminal you are fine. Putler is not a total idiot and keeps an image of normal. My friends support Ukraine and one just recently came abroad again third time since the war started just fine. (To cash in crypto anonymous)

Send proof if I'm wrong!