MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by strcat | 2025-07-26 02:33:05+00:00
> Plenty of laptops exist you can get away with running fully open source and auditable firmware, and a few that are mostly open hardware too, by the MNT Reform team.

MNT Reform has a regular closed source ARM SoC as the main component along with a bunch of other closed source components. The chassis, board and boot chain being open doesn't make a device mostly open hardware. Anything simply using an ARM or x86_64 SoC at the core is not truly mostly open. It's a closed source system (the SoC) with open source components between it and other closed source components like radios, a display controller, SSD, etc. The same applies to other ARM and x86_64 laptops. They're built around closed source components even if the board many components go in and the boot chain is open source.

Having an open source boot chain and not requiring loading proprietary firmware from there or from the OS doesn't mean the device has open firmware. It's conflating not needing to load firmware with the firmware not existing or being open, which isn't the case.

> The Precursor is the only pocket computer platform that is maximally open hardware, software, and firmware but you revert back to the 90s in terms of power as a consequence with alpha quality software today. If Bunnie is successful with his IRIS approach and making custom home-user-inspectable ASICS then maybe a middle ground path can be forged in the next few years.

This is far closer to being how you're describing other platforms. However, it does have closed source components including the FPGA and Wi-Fi. It's as close as it gets to being open hardware and that has a huge cost. Platforms simply using a closed source ARM SoC and many other closed source components are not anywhere close to being open. This is what it takes to get close, and it's not fully there.

> For now the only modern computing experience with fully open hardware and software I am aware of are the ppc64le based devices by Raptor Engineering, but at a very high cost due to low demand, with huge form factor and no power management. I still own one anyway because we have to start somewhere.

It's the motherboard that's open source. The IBM CPUs used with it are not open hardware.

> For those that want this story to get better, please buy and promote the products of the few people trying to break us out of dependence on proprietary platforms.

Laptops with a nearly completely closed source SoC / CPU are not a fully open platform, especially when it's an SoC providing most of the functionality. Talos II has a lot of functionality on their open motherboard vs. an ARM SoC with most of it on the SoC, but either way the CPU being closed source is still the most core component being closed source.
by cwnyth | 2025-07-26 02:33:29+00:00
Or, you can copy and paste code from examples, StackExchange, open source code, etc. Or you can read about it once, use it, and forget why it worked.

Besides all that, though, it's really the fact that LLMs bring up interesting ways to tackle problems that I hadn't thought of before, or uncover neat libraries/packages (when I program in R) that I just am not aware of.
by queenkjuul | 2025-07-26 02:34:17+00:00
I took visual basic in high school (I'm old now lol) then 100 level C++ and Java, but dropped out of college after one year. Most of my self teaching was Linux/homelab/server stuff, very little programming, though some web dev (jekyll/html/css)

I did an apprenticeship in 2020. 6 months of class, 6 months interning at a Fortune 500. Paid the whole time. That company hired me after the 6 months, i worked there another year after that, moved companies and cities in 2022 and been in the same spot ever since.

I was technically full stack at first but I've been front end exclusive for three years now. I've dabbled in angular and vue, been full time svelte at this job, plus a little bit of JavaFX, and took my classes in React and Express.

The job placement that accompanied the apprenticeship was clutch, and i couldn't have done it if i hadn't been getting paid (barely living wage, but still) during the class portion.
by _zoltan_ | 2025-07-26 02:34:38+00:00
of course that's an option. then you can get a house for a measly 2 million! public transport will only take an hour or more from there .. :)

my wife doesn't drive and we wanted to have access to good public schools and good transportation. this is not a given if you go more rural. The postbus goes maybe every hour or so.

the lakeside communities near Zurich are great and all of our friends live in one of them (on the same side of the lake of course). not living here would have severe effects on my wife's and our kids' social lives.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-26 02:35:12+00:00
They are greatly exaggerating. One tangible advantage to living somewhere expensive with higher salaries is that anything you can buy online is effectively that much cheaper. An iPhone costs the same in Arkansas as in San Jose, so you'd end up working many more hours to buy one in AR than in CA, on average.

Yes, housing is more expensive. A lot more. Everything else is way cheaper.
by skydhash | 2025-07-26 02:35:40+00:00
That may be one of the reason for the conflict of opinions. I usually build the thing mentally first, then code it, and then verify it. With tools like linters and tests, the shorter feedback make the process faster And editor fluency is a good boost.

By the time, I'm about to prompt, I usually have enough information to just code it away. Coding is like riding a bicycle downhill. You just pay enough focus to ride it. It's like how you don't think about the characters and the words when you're typing. You're mostly thinking about what you want to say.

When there's an issue, I switch from coding to reading and thinking. And while the latter is mentally taxing, it is fast as I don't have to spell it out. And a good helper to that is a repository of information. Bookmarks to docs, documentation browser, code samples,.. By the times the LLM replies with a good enough paragraph, I'm already at the Array page on MDN.
by rustystump | 2025-07-26 02:36:44+00:00
Once again people totally miss the point of SPA. What does SPA stand for? Hint, there is no website in there.

Id argue all the grousing of spa is because people made websites as apps when they should have been websites instead.

Btw view transitions are pretty slick and require zero js to get snazzy transitions.

Edit: there are some significant limitations with view transitions around performance and a few other gochas I should mention when they are used with pure css. I still love em tho.
by xtracto | 2025-07-26 02:37:32+00:00
This is so funny. For me, it was as if the "monkey's paw" had played me.

Back in the early 2000s, I loved desktop applications. My thinking was that there's no way a web app could do what a desktop application could. I loathed slow, proprietary, online-requiring, HTML based web apps .

25 years have passed, and now we DO have some "native" device apps... but they are just HTML web elements bubdled in a freaking custom browser.

Edit: anyone remember the "PortableApps" wave? I loved having that in a usb drive.
by cortesoft | 2025-07-26 02:39:00+00:00
First, your stock has a much higher than 50% chance of being worth less, even at the best startups. This is why early stage investors invest in so many companies… a vast majority are worth zero, but the few that make it big pay for all those and more.

This is why you would never see an early stage investor invest in only one company. They need volume to be able to survive the high risk/high reward nature of startup investing.

Now, maybe you think you are a better judge of the probability of success for your startup than an investor, so the risk is lower. You would be wrong; if there was a way to reliably predict which startup would hit it big, then investors (who spend all their time trying to predict exactly that, and have a lot more data and history to use in their evaluation than you do as an employee) would have a much higher success rate.

So even if you have a very promising startup, your equity is a huge risk. Your company probably won’t hit it big, and if it does you have to hope you aren’t screwed out of your equity by the millions of tricks they use to screw employee shareholders; dilution, preferred shares, etc.

Even worse, you are taking double risk. Your startup is risking both your equity AND your salary. You want to diversify your risk, so you can use your investment when your salary fails and use your salary when your investment fails. In this case, those both will fail together if your company doesn’t make it.

Look, equity and stock options are great, but you REALLY have to discount its value as an employee because of the way the risk shakes out as an employee.
by parpfish | 2025-07-26 02:39:07+00:00
> equity should be an incentive to contribute the the company's success

the much bigger motivation is "keep the company afloat so i can keep drawing my salary", so just boring old non-equity paychecks provide plenty of motivation.

if you're an employee that thinks your contributions are so great that you are single-handedly juicing the stock price or valuation, you're probably wrong but if not... you should probably take those skills and found your own startup.
by toledocavani | 2025-07-26 02:40:11+00:00
Worked in an enterprise project where they use a BPMN engine for all business logic (designed by non-technical people).

Each process can either have predefined fields (take time to implement) or key-string value store (yes, they chose this).

Either the BPMN logic or some JSs (some, as not all people can code) in PBMN nodes or some Java hooks (a lot, wrote under those other people requests) edit those values.

So when something's wrong, we swam in the sea of key-value, search all the code for who update this field, and why it's value is not JSON nor null nor boolean but a string "Not used, waiting for policy 1234".

After that project, I'm happy every time I can use a DB to store data, more so if it can run in local, much more so if it's relational.
by quantummagic | 2025-07-26 02:40:53+00:00
I suspect that a lot of people who object to this censorship, would be perfectly fine with a game being pulled because say it glorified owning slaves, or if gameplay was explicitly anti-homosexual. Then they would see the harms, employ their empathy, and support the censorship. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of the people who are outraged about this article.

Seems like everyone is pro-censorship, when they disagree with those being targeted. Most people supported censorship for anti-vaxers during Covid for instance. So in most cases it really just comes down to how many people are anti-porn, rather than any stance on censorship in general.
by shermantanktop | 2025-07-26 02:41:01+00:00
Right, that’s how I view it.

Access my data = high creepiness, low value

Aggregate all the data = lower creepiness, high commercial value

The big fat caveat to the first is if I’m a target of a nation state, or the police attempt to use circumstantial location data to pin something on me. Which is very real, and more so now than ever.
by toss1 | 2025-07-26 02:41:22+00:00
YUP

Terms and phrases I've heard verbatim from investors and/or founders:

"There's a thousand ways to screw minority shareholdeers."

"Cram-down" (repeatedly, like it is an ordinary thing to do, effectively repudiating or diluting away entire classes of debt and/or equity)

"I hate to lie, but you often have to." (said as if there is no choice in the matter)

"You have to screw the other guy before he screws you."

"If there's a problem in a joint venture and you put out the resources to fix it, you're the chump."

It is a good idea to not do business with people who say these kinds of things.

It is delusional to think you will be the special one who they actually treat fairly and not be targeted by their greed and lack of ethics.

If you are really lucky, you will escape and find an attny willing to take your case and win a lawsuit and still get to chase them for the judgement.

The only winning move is to not play.

(Not to say there are no honest ones, but it is really getting scarce, and many honest ones have left the biz.)
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-26 02:41:25+00:00
Average, yes, probably an exaggeration. Some apps

iOS:

wechat: 740meg gmail: 672 google chat: 585 uber: 582 tiktok: 572 headspace: 498 instagram: 467 doulingo: 462 bank of america: 456 capital one: 435 expedia: 412 linkedin: 402 doordash: 392 google: 379 facebook: 365 unitied airlines:355 chase: 352 google photos: 348 line: 346 amex: 339 google maps: 336 youtube: 329 booking.com: 320 citi: 319 amazon music: 317 snapchat: 316 lyft: 307 wells fargo: 292 strava: 283 twitch: 279 rotten tomatoes: 262 airbnb: 254 youtube music: 245 whatsapp: 239 mlb: 220 discord: 212 tinder: 202

of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps like Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc...

I am quite surprised at a few apps I know are just a webpage, because I can to go to the webpage and see it's exactly the same, are still 40meg to 80meg. I'd expect them be able to be as small as a few K. Open a webview, navigate to https://mycompany.com. The end
by apatheticonion | 2025-07-26 02:41:37+00:00
I use multi-threading extensively in JavaScript (it's part of my day job). I can tell you that you have to _really really_ want it and it is very hard to use it to improve performance.

Serialization/deserialization overhead is non-trivial while shared primitives like SharedArrayBuffer are mostly useless and disabled without prohibitivly restrictive security headers.

To get anything useful out of JavaScript threading, you need to implement hydration and synchronization mechanisms which are slow and unbelievably complex.

Meanwhile, multithreading is effortless and performant in Rust or Go.

If my backend is in Rust already, I could simply reuse my API types/structs.

I could use language specific serialization formats for REST endpoints (like Rust's bincode) rather than JSON or protobuf - which is faster to parse and compresses better.

If the web opens up more maybe we could gain access to raw TCP/UDP sockets and have access to highly efficient streaming from our servers - enabling use cases like usable game netcode (which is currently impossible). This benefits other realtime application use-cases too, like finance applications, chat applications and streaming services.

Don't forget the memory footprint of web applications. Imagine if the browser figured out there was no JavaScript running and it didn't spawn a JS runtime - imagine a tab consuming 15mb of RAM rather than 250mb.

...

I'm not saying JavaScript is bad and that we don't need it to evolve - I'm just saying that the ROI on a fully featured wasm runtime in the browser is massive and that browser vendors & the standards committee are sleeping on it - which is hugely frustrating.
by Defletter | 2025-07-26 02:42:26+00:00
Oh absolutely. I admittedly haven't used Spring beyond trying it out for a couple hours and deciding never again, but I can easily imagine Ktor being an improvement over Spring. When I wrote my comment, I was more thinking about it in comparison to Netty and Java-Websockets (relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43800784), rather than as a web framework, though I have used it as such.

Netty is also a struggle to inspect so perhaps I just struggle with deep abstraction in general? I find code to be far better documentation than actual documentation, particularly when so much of it is along these lines:

/** * Gets the next string. * * @return Returns the next string, or null. */ public abstract @Nullable String getNextString();

This documentation is entirely unnecessary because everything it says is present within the method signature. But say you have an abstract method that users override to handle incoming data, often documentation will not contain things like: whether the ByteBuffer is a slice or the whole buffer at a particular offset; or whether the buffer is a copy or a view; etc. So I end up doing a lot of defensive copying which is possibly unnecessary, but because it's very difficult to figure out where that buffer is coming from without first trudging through a seemingly endless forest of abstractions first.
by _jab | 2025-07-26 02:43:57+00:00
The company should have been worth at least the cash it had on hand, which has been reported as ~$100M. It's also been reported that all vested equity and VC shares were bought out (although apparently perhaps with a few exceptions for people who declined the offer), which meant that the employee unvested equity stakes were "undiluted" from whatever they were before (hard to judge, but maybe 5-10%), to 100%. So every employee had their stake in the company increase 10x-20x. So if the company had then decided to simply close up and distribute the remaining cash as dividends to the employees, it would be as if each employee had simply been bought out pre-deal at a $1-2B valuation. And that was the absolute worst case scenario - clearly Windsurf found a better deal with Cognition.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-26 02:44:21+00:00
1) You are probably overestimating the sophistication of IT controls at most companies. It's not uncommon for companies to give their employees local admin. Even if they don't, there's quite a few remote desktop tools which don't require admin privileges.

2) Windows, and its surrounding software ecosystem, don't make it easy to run on an "allowlisted software only" basis. Vendor drivers and autoupdating software make this particularly difficult. It's doable, but takes some effort.

3) Some North Korean operations use hardware remote desktop devices (along the lines of NanoKVM) to evade detection. I'm not sure if they were doing that here - the photos in the article are tiny - but it's known to be a thing.
by lazide | 2025-07-26 02:45:30+00:00
By the time a man has hit his 40’s, it is exceptionally uncommon he hasn’t seen someone hit with a false rape claim - or had one himself - by a vindictive ex. Or has been threatened with (or directly attacked) with physical violence.

By people going on the same sort of rants like you just did.

Some People are terrible, especially when they think they can act without consequences.

Does that excuse men doing bad things too? No.

But it sure does (or should!) make anyone with a brain question hyperbolic claims of abuse or violence without actual evidence.
by cheema33 | 2025-07-26 02:48:58+00:00
> And why does a developer care about those things...

I have several apps on my phone where I am interested in receiving notifications.

1. Airline app. While traveling I need to know about gate changes, flight time changes, etc. etc. 2. Credit card app. I have turned on notifications for all changes above $10. 3. Bank app. I have turned on notifications for all transfers. 4. Moen water meter app. If there is a water leak at my house, I need to know. 5. Server monitor app. If my website goes down, I need to know right away. 6. Google smoke detector. If there is smoke in my house, I need to know right away. 7. Tesla app. If I didn't close the door properly and walked away, the app lets me know. 8. Security camera app. If there is unexpected movement at my home or office, I get an alert. 9. WhatsApp and other messaging apps. When someone sends me a message, I get an alert.

And those are only the things that immediately come to mind. If you were a developer of some of these apps, would you be able to provide these same functions in a user friendly way with a web app? Genuinely curious.
by imglorp | 2025-07-26 02:50:22+00:00
> sleeper cells of drones are a pretty reasonable attack vector

What exactly is the attack vector here? If we're talking about sleeper agents sure but these restrictions are focused on importing commercial products by citizens here: crop dusters and photography etc. sure they have a cloud service and might exfiltrate some aerial photography, but then anybody can see the same on Google Earth.

I think this is just a negotiating tactic and a little bit of red scare to amp up the defense story
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-26 02:51:08+00:00
> What gives you the impression that I might be offering my critiques lightly or arrogantly, as opposed to only after arriving at them through extensive, careful, and deliberate thought?

Perhaps the fact that you made a claim without bothering to explain this supposed "extensive, careful, and deliberate thought" of yours? Also the fact that your tone generally comes across as ideologically charged; in my experience zealots rarely engage in patient critical thinking.

Certainly I don't suggest that one should blindly favor the status quo when given the chance to think things through. However absent careful thought the status quo is the obvious default. When in Rome and all that. There is nearly always a reason that things are done the way they are done although often the particulars will be quite convoluted.

> It is not arrogant to assert that loss of innocent human life is reprehensible and the societies that normalize it should be condemned.

Is it really your intent to imply that I have called for such? That is quite the wild leap. I feel compelled to object that the turn this exchange has taken does not come across as being one of good faith.
by Scoundreller | 2025-07-26 02:51:17+00:00
Cool article;

Layman’s article: https://cacm.acm.org/research-highlights/technical-perspecti...

Also seems like ACM republished the author’s paper from 2022? https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3503222.3507710

My summary:

DRAM is not a safe place to store your secrets due to cold boots, so it gets stored in SRAM (which includes registers and L1/L2 cache) instead.

Buuuuut, you might be able to dump SRAM across boots with this technique.

If I understand correctly: SRAM/cache/registers all require a lower voltage to maintain their state than the cpu requires to run.

So attach that intermediate voltage on the VCC pin closest to/running the SRAM and pull the plug on everything else. I guess they’re either not cross-connected internally or the choice of voltage stops that from being a problem. Just don’t let your voltage sag lower than required to maintain the SRAM.

Now your cache/registers/SRAM are maintained. Power up with JTAG or a custom/debugging bootrom/mode that hopefully doesn’t overwrite much/any and dump away.

> Our experiments across various devices reveal that hardware SRAM resets during boot are uncommon. Most boot with undefined SRAM states, persisting until overwritten by software.

Oops.