MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-24 13:44:27+00:00
> What is the downside

Just of the top of my head:

- Timezone is set to UTC which means any web calendar input becomes confusing at best

- Canvases turn into random stripes, which leaves artefacts all over many websites

- Some websites outright block you as bots (twitch does this)

- Some web APIs break, which can be a pain if you're web apps that rely on them

You can add websites to a whitelist to avoid the downsides on some sites (privacy.resistFingerprinting.exemptedDomains) but it's a pain to do that for every website.
by Toutouxc | 2025-07-24 13:44:30+00:00
Dude, literally every single EV-related number you’ve mentioned around here is so insanely off. Two hours at a charger, 20 minutes of charge just to get home, charging an EV 0 to 100 % and now again, charging a 60 kW battery every day. I don’t know what kind of terrible EVs you’ve seen, but they weren’t what normal people drive. Either get some real world experience with EVs or just stop posting about them.
by ozim | 2025-07-24 13:44:46+00:00
Worst people I think I met would criticize me for attempting to copy stuff saying "oh you're just copying, stuff someone else made" or "oh that's simple this sucks, this music is only loops not real music".

I was a teenager trying stuff out I was trying to just show what I am doing not sell them "a product".

If you are making a copy for yourself to try things out or learn and then just to share because you think is cool — do it copy stuff and don't listen to negative folks.

Usually those folks would not even attempt doing anything and I will skip all the bad words that I would like to tell them.
Ask HN: Are we still writing and reading "tech books" in 2025?
by mgr86 | 2025-07-24 13:45:04+00:00
In the late 90s I bought my first "tech book" at 12. I have fond memories of _Sams Tech yourself Perl in 24 hours_. I had read the first few hours already. My mom would drive my brother and I 30 minutes to Borders what felt like every month. I always gravitated to the tech books.

As I walk into my office today I see two walls full of book shelves crammed with forgotten and well annotated books. Most inherited from my former boss who retired at the beginning of COVID.I have books on Unicode, XML, Java, Struts, Information Architecture, Sed, and a heck of a lot more. Some older books too. Like a 1990 edition of "Full Text Databases".

But it got me thinking, he last purchased a book about a decade before he retired. I haven't been to a book store in ages. Heck, I barely use my companies subscription to Proquest/Safari books online anymore. I was once enamored with all of the digital copies of Tech Books I had at my fingertips.

I've been at conferences with the writers of some of these old books I have in my office. Many aren't writing books anymore. A few will share horror stories about their own book writing experience.

I imagine my experience is not unique around HN. So to my question, are we still producing and consuming "Tech Books" in 2025?
by slightwinder | 2025-07-24 13:45:11+00:00
> We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods.

I think you have some misconceptions here. First, the article does not claim that thinking is writing, and especially not that there is no thinking without writing. They only explain that writing is supporting and driving a higher quality of thinking.

Second, paper isn't the only medium to write. And writing isn't the only persistent form of communication to support and improve thinking.

> Thinking used to be detached from writing.

It still is.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-07-24 13:45:45+00:00
There's no shot this will gain any traction, it would kill the US AI industry on the spot. And Trump has already signaled that he intends to allow AI companies to do whatever they want when it comes to content scraping, if only to allow them to be competitive with China.

But I'm curious, what do people think of this? It does feel like there should be some compromise. If copyright duration was shortened down to something more reasonable I'd be more sympathetic to limiting AI scraping.
by Izkata | 2025-07-24 13:46:14+00:00
> If anything, contributors need a local branch that is then merged to the trunk (unless, somehow, everyone is live-editing the main branch?).

The term originates in the svn or earlier era (hence "trunk"), when "commit" and "push" were the same operation. So there wasn't really such a thing as a local branch, just uncommitted changes. And svn was able to commit changes to any files that no one else had committed to yet, it wasn't whole-repo versioning like git that required you to be fully up-to-date before pushing.
by superkuh | 2025-07-24 13:46:49+00:00
>You can completely avoid the curl bash pattern if you can install the rustup binary and setup the relevant environment variables (like PATH) manually.

Are you saying that if you avoid the curl bash pattern then you can avoid the curl bash pattern? This is true, and trivial, and completely irrelevant to what the rust website recommends and what most people do.

There's definitely been a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is that you think people are installing rust from rustup from their repos. The website shows you this is not the most common case.

I do get your point that it doesn't have to be this way anymore. That rustup itself could be in repos and still work (even rustc/etc can't). But this is not not how it has been done for rust's entire existence and change is slow and hard. Is there a single distro that does do this now?
by hinkley | 2025-07-24 13:47:17+00:00
I know that Java resisted improving their FFI for years because they preferred that the JIT get the extra resources. And that customers not bail out of Java every time they couldn’t figure out how to make it faster. There’s a case I recall from when HotSpot was still young, where the Java GUI team moved part of the graphics pipeline to the FFI in one release, hotspot got faster in the next, and then they rolled back the changes because it was now faster without the FFI.

But eventually your compiler is good enough that the FFI Is now your bottleneck, and you need to do something.
by piker | 2025-07-24 13:47:21+00:00
This comes with some downside because to protect privacy Safari blocks some useful APIs. For example, you can't tell if the user is running Apple silicon or Intel. That means you have to ask them whether they want the Intel or Apple silicon version of a download. This is a non-trivial question for a lot of Mac users. And, sure, you can always publish through the App store but that comes with its own drawbacks.
by Someone1234 | 2025-07-24 13:47:40+00:00
1) You've already been fired. This is just checking the [legal] boxes. You likely got fired due to no personal fault, and rather mismanagement on their part (e.g. over-hiring, flip-flopping projects, etc.).

2) Start working on your next steps after hours. Feeling like this is a temp situation will help.

3) 100% yes, they're trying to pressure you into leaving. Try to get the best terms you can.

4) Doesn't sound very "strategic" to over-stay somewhere that you call "day-to-day emotional drain of working with a manager who you feel is actively trying to undermine you." You should work on your exit.

You're talking about strategy, but realistically what do you imagine is the fairy-tail ending of this one? You get to drag it out painfully for both sides? Best case scenario you get to find a workplace that makes you happy, and let them continue their dysfunctional hell until they burn through all their runway without any actual product to show.
by Grimblewald | 2025-07-24 13:47:53+00:00
Yup, and if you normalise "improvements vs time" graphs to not linear time but gpu hours invested per unit improvement we're in extremely incremental/small improvement territory as of a year ago. There are no major jumps coming. There are no more gpu hours to allocate to dumping onto this partciular bonfire to keep things looking like exponential improvement, all to keep that vc cash flowing.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-24 13:47:57+00:00
My point is in all cases profiling is stupid.

You seem to think shooting a gun is not stupid in all cases. I think shooting a gun at a person or a paper target are both stupid.

I didn’t bring up the morals, you did.

But besides that point, who says being paranoid, does not have as much genetic roots as having dark skin? I know it’s true for my family, many of us have anxiety and OCD and schizoaffective disorder. And guess what? I’ve owned several pixel phones with graphene OS on them in the past.
by NavinspireIA | 2025-07-24 13:48:08+00:00
Navinspire IA is an agentic AI company focused on building sovereign, autonomous systems designed to execute not just assist.

At the core of our innovation is Navin, Europe’s first general AI agent, designed to turn high-level intentions into real-world outcomes through integrated research, automation, and intelligent user interaction.

Far from being a simple chatbot, Navin is a true autonomous operator. It translates high-level human intentions into concrete actions, planning, executing, and delivering complex workflows with speed and precision. Whether it’s building and launching websites from a single prompt, running multi-channel marketing strategies, conducting live research, or automating SEO and outreach tasks, Navin operates transparently through real browser actions, just like a human, no hidden APIs.

What sets Navin apart is its deep native integration across platforms, enabling fluid task execution without context-switching. Users can watch it open tabs, navigate interfaces, and take visible, autonomous steps toward completing their objectives. Navin prioritizes privacy, user-centric design, and operational efficiency, evolving continuously through real-world feedback and iterative improvement.

Complementing Navin’s capabilities, RAG-DATALAKE is our advanced low-code/no-code platform that empowers developers and non-technical users alike to create AI-driven applications through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. By connecting modular, reusable components, users can quickly prototype, iterate, and deploy workflows. By combining the power of generative AI with the scalability of data lakes, RAG-DATALAKE transforms raw data into actionable insights turning complexity into clarity with precision and efficiency.
by satisfice | 2025-07-24 13:48:17+00:00
"There is often an attempt..." is completely compatible with my point. SOME people oversimplify. Other people are merely simplifying. Assigning blame is also a relative matter. Some people might claim that all the blame belongs in one place, while most would admit, under cross-examination, that not ALL belongs in any one place.

Of course blame follows the lines of ideology and self-interest. This is also not indicative of people being stupid and not understanding complexity-- because it's not a problem with understanding. It's a problem of damage control.

It's entirely rational to want to control damage!

Yes, it's uncommon to acknowledge systemic problems. My point is that educating people about such things won't help much, since lack of education is not to blame for this pattern. See what I did there?
by kevindamm | 2025-07-24 13:48:17+00:00
The browser version will have some variance because releases are rolled out to clients over time, and users don't restart their browser immediately. I don't know all the signals FingerprintJS use but they obviously depend significantly on the user agent string (which has the precise version) seen by how the author could spoof it with Tor's UA randomizer.

BTW, the article is incorrect that Chrome doesn't allow for user agent modification or other fingerprint resistance; you can: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode/overr... and there are extensions for more convenience. The article is also incorrect about third party cookie leakage from ads but it was possible to sniff the session ID in some cases, back a decade ago before everything went cookieless and dropped session identifiers from the protocol entirely. However, it is possible for advertisers to parameterize their campaigns and analytics to such a detail that they can link demographics to their internal user IDs, though it's against policy it is easy to go unnoticed. And things like location exfiltration in too many Android apps, I'm not trying to give Google a complete pass on privacy but it's clear the author made some assumptions based on bias.

Back to your question, though, there are other things you can use as part of the fingerprint. The fonts that are installed are a proxy for which applications have been installed. The artifacts at the edge of text rendered onto a canvas can indicate which graphics chip and drivers are installed, sometimes with differences even within the same GPU model and driver version. Touch tracking can tell whether you swipe with your left hand or your right hand. Timing signals can indicate CPU specs and even hint at whether you're in a VM or behind a VPN, etc. There are more, accessible from JS in most cases, and really most of it is more reliable than what's in the user agent string.
by trjordan | 2025-07-24 13:48:27+00:00
I love the innovation. The basic idea here appears to be:

- Nobody wants this to be closed source. The code is freely available, and you may do with it as you want. The marginal cost to distribute the code is 0, after all.

- The maintainers, as people, don't want to do charity work for companies. Their time is limited, and if they're going to support revenue-generating activities, they want a cut of the revenue.

So even if this doesn't get perfectly enforced (and it won't), that's fine! The maintainers are now free to respond to complaints with "you need to pay us for us to care." Companies that pay get some level of support; hobbyists get the same experience. Only the companies that ignore this warning will see the consequences, and it's particularly effective for reports where the author leans on "but there are a huge number of important users [to me] that are affected." Pay up if it matters!

It strikes me as a pretty clean solution to a pretty common strain of open-source headache, _especially_ as AI-generated code/reports/etc. are on the rise.
by Roguelazer | 2025-07-24 13:48:28+00:00
It's really "cool" when you get vendors like 6sense that combine browser fingerprinting with semi-licit data brokers to do full deanonymization of visitor traffic. Why bother doing marketing when you can just get a report of the name, email address, mailing address, and creditworthiness of every person who's visited your website?

I've seen people argue with a straight face that these tools and their reports don't run afoul of GDPR/CCPA because they don't involve information that a user gave you on purpose, so it's not protected. Ghouls, all of them.
by mitkebes | 2025-07-24 13:49:12+00:00
Brave has built in fingerprinting protection (https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Fingerprinting-P...), that's enabled by default. It seems like it's less aggressive than firefox's though (since firefox's fingerprint protection is disabled by default because it breaks things), and it doesn't seem to be able to block this companies fingerprinting tech. I got the same ID in a regular window and private browsing window.

The brave shields setting section also has an option for blocking scripts, which may work. It prevents the demo from being able to show an identifier for the user at all, but I'm not sure if it's preventing identification or just preventing the displaying of the identification.
by markhahn | 2025-07-24 13:49:43+00:00
We think by association. We can sometimes tighten up the process when there's a formal logical framework that applies, but it's not as natural or automatic.

What writing changes is that in words, you have to make it explicit how one thing leads to another. Partly, that's just due to the imposition of sentence structure.

Ironically, this is precisely the crazy thing about Trumpspeech: it's just associations - vibe-chaining if you will.
by Karawebnetwork | 2025-07-24 13:49:53+00:00
See:

> In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
by _heimdall | 2025-07-24 13:50:39+00:00
I don't see this as a problem of only one party or one end of the political spectrum.

Congress is full of politicians getting rich off of investments that almost certainly are informed by insider information.

During the pandemic we saw plenty of examples across the political spectrum of those in charge pushing harsh rules and lockdowns on the public while ignoring it themselves.

The list could go on, bit this isn't a conservative problem even if it may be more prevalent there.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-24 13:50:53+00:00
What a silly objection. You just made up a random argument in your head what that talk was about or what arguments are being made.

It actually does matter a whole lot what developers think. It matters far more than any "CS definition", not that anything here is about computer science.

>What matters are language implementations

No, they do not matter at all. They are totally irrelevant to the topic. In python you can construct your hierarchies to match real world hierarchies. You also can not do that. It is totally irrelevant how the language is implemented.
by Karawebnetwork | 2025-07-24 13:51:08+00:00
Important follow-up page to the US AI Action Page:

"PREVENTING WOKE AI IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT"

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...

> In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI.
by apelapan | 2025-07-24 13:51:18+00:00
There must be some connection between traction control and regen braking in newer Teslas, because I didn't really have any problems with it during the past winter. A friend working in auto industry was involved with doing competitor analysis and was shocked back in 2014 or something like that, the Teslas they tested simply spun out of control when letting go of the accelerator in slippery conditions.

They didn't care much for convential wisdom and car building competence in the early days of Tesla.
by playcache | 2025-07-24 13:51:35+00:00
Hey,

I am Luke, an open source developer. I originally worked a lot in security (I created a software supply chain project called sigstore). Over the past couple of months, I spent some time building AI agents alongside chatting with other developers attempting the same , and there seemed to be a fair amount of fog in the air around how to do auth, middleware, and all the normal trappings.

AgentUp came out of that. I started to make the agents I was building into reproducible things, so I could then easily spin up other agents. From there I started to add more and it became a framework eventually.

I also noticed a lot of folks were building their own Tools / Function calls over and over, and i thought, it would be nice if these were pluggable, which is where the AgentUp plugin system came from.

So there is what I have started calling 'Core' agentUp, and then plugins (tools) are entry points with their own dedicated interfaces, yet they can inherit all of the cores middleware. Plugins are also limited by scopes, so the core can enforce fine grained access control to each plugin, using the familiar style of domain:type:capability (e.g system:admin: ["system:write", "system:read"]), this way systems can scope policy within token scopes (jwt, oauth2) and AgentUp will enforce for each user. I am yet to really dig into the isolation capabilities in python, but will try to spend some more time there if the project gets momentum.

Last but not least, the Agents are A2A compatible. JSON RPC, streaming / non streaming, Tasks, Parts, Artifacts etc. MCP servers exposed via the Agents are streamable HTTP.

At the moment, I am self funded so not a startup as such, but I am previous founder and my last gig was a distinguished engineer at Red Hat.

Let me know if this interests you, there will be a bucket load of bugs, so lots of fun to be had if anyone wants in!
by conartist6 | 2025-07-24 13:51:52+00:00
Thank you for educating me. I don't actually work with Rust so I shouldn't be spreading misinformation about it without knowing what I am talking about.

It doesn't really change my multitude of problems with Rust as a language for a project like Zed. Zed feels like a cathedral to me in the Eric S Raymond sense. Rust feels like a language for building cathedrals. Javascript is the language of the commons, which is why the idea of a hackable IDE in JS was so brilliant. Somewhere along the line the team forgot what made Atom great (despite its flaws).
by klabb3 | 2025-07-24 13:52:07+00:00
> Any ideology that accepts taxation - practically all of them - believes [the idea that certain people is just above others and they deserve more for free].

Only if you anchor the baseline of "deserve" to private property rights and open markets. It's a fine foundation for civilization, but it's still "just like your opinion man". You could have different viewpoints of deserving, such as strongest-wins: "If I can steal 'your' stuff, I deserve it". This is how things work in nature. On the other extreme, you can say "everyone deserves exactly the same" (as in equal outcome). For the former, being imprisoned for theft is an intervention in their moral code, whereas for the latter, protecting free (in their view exploitative) markets is an intervention. Property rights fundamentalism is kind of radical centrism in the grand scheme of things.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-24 13:52:15+00:00
Many of those tiny foreign cars are unfortunately not economically useful to sell in the regulated markets of the rich west, and even when they are they often aren't without the developing nation sales volume to amortize a lot of the fixed costs over.

I agree that there's a lot of stupidity going on when it comes to station wagons vs crossovers vs compact SUVs and the OEMs really do SUV-ify a lot of things that ought not to be.

The shape of these vehicles is fairly preordained by the nature of the fuel economy regulations and wind resistance and other regulations that apply equally to all of them. You're not gonna find "more space" in something like a Subaru Outback by squashing it on the vertical axis unless you stretch it in another dimension or find somewhere else to find space. Maybe you might be able to eek out a slightly better angle on the hatch or something but it ain't gonna be much. Fuel economy regulations make cars with thicc asses like the big sedans and station wagons of yesterday nonsensical.

The snark is not needless. It is tautologically impossible for the overwhelming majority of people do be "doing it wrong" on a matter that is in large part a subjective one of preference. If someone wants to assert that then I will talk down to them.

People buy these small SUVs left and right because they're seemingly the best option when it comes to well rounded boring A to B vehicles.