MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-09 21:39:40+00:00
One thing that only the "survivors" realize is just how materialistic the Soviet Bloc societies were.

And I don't mean philosophically materialistic, like "there is no soul". That too, but I mainly mean that in the shortage of everything (and there usually was a shortage of everything) people would become fixated on owning relatively banal objects.

Girls would prostitute themselves for a nice pair of Western jeans, people would snitch and steal, break the law, run illegal smuggling rings while bribing the police, take bribes themselves etc., over things such as stockings, tires or calculators.

I was not able to persuade one young American that not paying a fat bribe to a doctor could have fatal consequences back then. "But in socialism, there must be a common free healthcare for everybody!" - Yeah, lad, on paper. Paper tolerates everything. The one thing that was never in shortage were slogans, propaganda, red flags and red stars.
by infamouscow | 2025-08-09 21:39:53+00:00
First, regarding logical fallacies: your response relies on an emotional appeal by invoking potential "loss of human life" and an appeal to authority via the Osterholm quote. To provide context on Osterholm, he notably advised in the early days of COVID, when scientific guidance was critical, that a vaccine would take years to develop. For instance, during a March 2020 appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, he expressed this view with considerable confidence. In reality, vaccines were authorized within eight months, highlighting the fallibility of experts.

Second, on NSF funding: the NSF supports a broad spectrum of research, but not all areas yield equivalent advancements. It's inaccurate to conflate progress in one domain (e.g., math, computer science) with others, or to assume all funded work inherently advances humanity. Consider a hypothetical -- if an executive order allocated $10 million from the NSF for alchemy studies, chemistry departments nationwide would see professors submitting tailored grant proposals, positioning their expertise as ideal for such investigations. This reflects the grant-driven nature of academia, where tenure and career progression incentivize alignment with available funding, regardless of intrinsic merit. Academics, like any professionals, are not immune to societal pressures such as over-credentialing and the need to secure resources.

Third, on reform versus defunding: I am open to reforming the system to address ethical concerns, such as the subsidization of corporate profits through public training of industrial workers. However, the academic structure has insulated itself over decades through entrenched rules and policies, making meaningful change challenging. If you propose reform, could you outline the first three concrete steps grounded in existing mechanisms to initiate it? Vague aspirations often falter when confronted with reality, such as university governance and federal grant protocols.

Finally, on the value of NSF-funded research: your assumption that this funding directly prevents loss of life lacks empirical support. We should critically evaluate whether specific allocations are worthwhile. Are you open to the possibility that some are not? If so, what evidence would persuade you otherwise? Defunding ineffective or misaligned programs isn't about "burning the system down" but about prioritizing resources for genuine long-term societal benefit.
by foresto | 2025-08-09 21:40:01+00:00
Topping my list of GUI toolkit requirements are cross-platform and native look & feel. As far as I know, Qt still beats everything else in these areas on the desktop. It's mostly excellent.

However, I find The Qt Group's commercial licensing (and their tactics as reported by various people on HN) a little scary. If I were to go commercial, I think I would stick with LGPL Qt and link dynamically or give customers my object files for re-linking, because I get the impression that accepting a commercial Qt license could restrict my ability to use open-source Qt elsewhere. I suppose there might be some other way to safely navigate those waters, but from what I've read, The Qt Group has a reputation for making this far from hassle-free. It's not an immediate problem because I currently use Qt only for open-source and personal tools.

I have grown tired of C++, so I've been using Python to drive Qt. The bindings are very good, mirroring the C++ API so closely that I just use the C++ docs when I need to look something up.

I've also been watching for Qt bindings to other compiled languages, mainly for distributing non-Linux GUI apps more simply than Python allows. Such bindings often turn out to expose only Qt Quick, which lacks functionality that I sometimes need, but there are a few that expose Qt Widgets. For example, these Go bindings:

https://github.com/mappu/miqt

I hope we'll eventually see a cross-platform GUI toolkit rivaling Qt in a language more pleasant than C++ (and ideally easier to bind to other languages). The one being developed for internal use by the Zed editor has some promising ideas about how to render native-looking text, which I think is a good start:

https://zed.dev/blog/videogame

https://www.gpui.rs/
by simonw | 2025-08-09 21:41:11+00:00
I've been thinking a lot about this recently. I've started running Claude Code and GitHub Copilot Agent and Codex-CLI in YOLO mode (no approvals needed) a bit recently because wow it's so much more productive, but I'm very aware that doing so opens me up to very real prompt injection risks.

So I've been trying to figure out the best shape for running that. I think it comes down to running in a fresh container with source code that I don't mind being stolen (easy for me, most of my stuff is open source) and being very careful about exposing secrets to it.

I'm comfortable sharing a secret with a spending limit: an OpenAI token that can only spend up to $25 is something I'm willing risking to an insecured coding agent.

Likewise, for Fly.io experiments I created a dedicated scratchpad "Organization" with a spending limit - that way I can have Claude Code fire up Fly Machines to test out different configuration ideas without any risk of it spending money or damaging my production infrastructure.

The moment code theft genuinely matters things get a lot harder. OpenAI's hosted Codex product has a way to lock down internet access to just a specific list of domains to help avoid exfiltration which is sensible but somewhat risky (thanks to open proxy risks etc).

I'm taking the position that if we assume that malicious tokens can drive the coding agent to do anything, what's an environment we can run in where the damage is low enough that I don't mind the risk?
by dash2 | 2025-08-09 21:41:20+00:00
Yeah, I mean, how do they identify the causal effect here? It's obviously not easy, because polluted areas are also poor areas, and poor people live in poor areas (and have other problems).

It would be nice if the article had mentioned this issue. A metastudy of lots of bad correlational studies is just garbage in garbage out. So, did they address the issue?

There are ways round it, by the way. As a recent review said:

"it is unclear why federal ISAs that are the input into all regulatory analyses tend not to incorporate the emerging body of evidence on the effects of air pollution on health outcomes from the economics literature despite the additional rigor imposed by the emphasis on causal inference."

https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/resource/15...
by dgs_sgd | 2025-08-09 21:41:27+00:00
> All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad.

The is partially true but leaves out an important difference between Canadian and American admissions. In Canada you are admitted to a particular major, not the university as a whole.

E.g. At the University of Waterloo, CS and some of the engineering majors can have < 5% admissions rate and are extremely merit based. At the same time, applying for the general Bachelor of Arts at UWaterloo is uncompetitive and very easy to get admitted.
by nymanjon | 2025-08-09 21:41:50+00:00
I'm working on a React code base that literally uses over 100 lines of code to navigate to the next page. It also takes about 20 lines of code to have a link. It seems like React devs have never programmed outside of React.

I do like front end libs. I use them sometimes for the right context. But all the business apps I've worked on have never needed a front end lib. With web components even less so than before as the state based interactions that are local to that input element or some other element doesn't need a full blown framework.

My favorite front end lib right now is VanJS. It feels like writing straight vanilla JS without the cruft of writing actual vanilla JS. HTMX is good too, if you are working with back end state but need a little more smooth interaction. Of course, Datastar, html-form, etc all work too.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-08-09 21:42:21+00:00
I don't think you two are disagreeing. That was the parents point, no? It's hard to pick candidates otherwise. Which is sad, because there are some good candidates without degrees from top tier schools (myself included, but I was lucky to get in after 8 years of trying).

Boot camp on its own though.. I don't disagree with you there. I was never convinced this stuff could be properly learned in such a short period of time. Perhaps just well enough to pass an interview. Combine that with some self learning and freelance work, then quite sure.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-09 21:42:25+00:00
>One, a lot of human jobs have been replaced by machines before. Refrigerators eliminated the jobs of all those guys who used to deliver ice for your icebox every day. And so on. Those were real human beings and I'm sure many of them had families.

The fallacy here is in supposing that the mechanisms that kept those people from starving in the 1920s still exists and remains effective, that the "people replaced" have some other industry to move into. But we live in a post-industry nation... all that god offshored. There is nothing more to make, or build, or repair, not to any scale that would employ everyone meaningfully. And while I suppose some like you imagine that we'll all sit around day trading and speculating on bitcoin for a living, this means that places like China would have to manufacture everything and grow everything and that they'd be willing to do that so that they could have the bitcoin tablescraps you toss to them from time to time.

I've heard your argument all my life, starting all the way back in the late 1980s when the government was first talking about making China the "most favored nation" status that would permit it. Maybe back then people could still believe it but now it rings hollow as hell.

>Two, I am not the biggest fan of capitalism,

I am. I am a big fan, when it's used well everyone benefits. But you still have to police it a little to deter fraud, and we've all been the victims of the biggest fraud ever. And we can't even talk about it here, hurts too many feelings.

>hey will shift that money to other expenditures: on AI tech, humans doing other jobs

Or, maybe instead of shifting to "humans doing other jobs", someone runs the numbers and discovers there are still 30 years worth of profit (or even just 10 years) selling the product to Europe or whereever even if they don't hire anymore humans, and since this exceeds their projected career duration, there's no need to look past that very distant horizon. And it doesn't matter that here or there you're even correct (that some companies might shift to "humans doing other jobs", because I only have to be partially correct and you have to be entirely correct... if some companies do it as I hint, then those companies outcompete your companies which go under, and it still results in massive unemployment.

The fixes for all of these things are simple, clear, and effective, but are politically untenable. Even if people could have been eventually persuaded that they were necessary, those people are now outvoted by many more people who have been brought in who have no loyalty to this country (and it really applies to many countries, not just the one I'm in) and would cockblock the fixes.
by roscas | 2025-08-09 21:42:40+00:00
Upgrade to 9.0.3 in Proxmox.

But the upgrade was done by the web interface. Reboot... nothing, errors.

Check update, still had loads of updates to do. Did second time and now it booted.

But stand a few times booting the kernel, had to turn off the server.

Like I was suspecting, dangerous updates... reconsidering Proxmox even for my lab.
by abeppu | 2025-08-09 21:43:18+00:00
> created a system so fair

I think that's really begging one of the important questions here. _Is_ the system fair now?

The system clearly wasn't originally fair (when elite schools excluded women, people of color, etc).

They became more open after decades of struggle driven in large part from the outside, and helped along by the GI bill, as well as a broader shift towards getting more public funds.

The demographics have changed, but to the degree that it's more fair, is that because WASPs created them that way, or because women and other racial groups changed society more broadly?
by raggi | 2025-08-09 21:43:28+00:00
LTS has had major breaking changes in various areas in recent times too, virtio was badly broken at one point this year, as was a commonly used netlink interface. Hat tip to the Arch kernel contributors who helped track this down and chase upstream, as we had mutually affected users. The debian and ubuntu bug trackers were a wasteland of silence and user contributions throughout the situation, and frustratingly continued to be so as AWS, GCP and others copied their kernel patch trees and blindly shipped the same problems to users and refused to respond to bugs and emails.

You're right stability comes from testing, not enough testing happens around Linux period, regardless of which branch is being discussed.

It's not easy testing kernels, but the bar is pretty low.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-09 21:44:02+00:00
> it creates a caste system that gets locked in based on how you did on math tests when you were 14.

I agree, but then again, if you look at areas like sports and the arts, the vast majority of people who are stars were also standouts when they were 14 (or often younger). It doesn't do any good to pretend that someone who was coding since elementary school wouldn't have a huge (and warranted) advantage over someone who didn't pick it up until their 20s.

I also agree people get into top colleges for lots of different reasons, but (at least in my experience), graduating from a top school just got your foot in the door, but you still had to go through the same judgement gauntlet as everyone else after that.
by nymanjon | 2025-08-09 21:44:08+00:00
It took me an hour to add a link to the page because I had to learn about how the React Router works and learn how to set it up for the page I was on. With HTML it takes a couple of minutes, no need to set up props, pull in a library. I just create the link and the anchor tag and bam! Just like that I'm done!
by pss314 | 2025-08-09 21:44:42+00:00
A new APT sources format "debian.sources" is announced with trixie. The now older "sources.list" format is still supported, but is likely to be deprecated in a future Debian release.

See below:

APT is moving to a different format for configuring where it downloads packages from. The files /etc/apt/sources.list and *.list files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ are replaced by files still in that directory but with names ending in .sources, using the new, more readable (deb822 style) format. For details see sources.list(5). Examples of APT configurations in these notes will be given in the new deb822 format. If your system is using multiple sources files then you will need to ensure they stay consistent.

- https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList#APT_sources_format

- https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/upgradi...

"apt modernize-sources" command can be used to simulate and replace ".list" files with the new ".sources" format.

Modernizing will replace .list files with the new .sources format, add Signed-By values where they can be determined automatically, and save the old files into .list.bak files. This command supports the 'signed-by' and 'trusted' options. If you have specified other options inside [] brackets, please transfer them manually to the output files; see sources.list(5) for a mapping.
by medler | 2025-08-09 21:44:58+00:00
I had this done recently, also in a Brooklyn apartment, and this article made me appreciate that my contractor was insanely good. The main reason I didn’t DIY it was because I thought it would be hard to get the condo board to agree to it, but after watching them do the work I realized there was no way I could have done it myself. Not really because of the HVAC part, but because of the cutting through exterior walls and snaking the line through the walls. It took about 2 days, the quality of the work was very good, and they even worked around my kid’s nap schedule. They have also been very prompt when I’ve needed service calls since then. Overall it was a huge amount of money well spent.
by username332211 | 2025-08-09 21:45:21+00:00
> That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.

That's sort of of neither here nor there. Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."

But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious), is that all the benefits of living in a communist dictatorship come from the dictatorship, not from the communism. Collectivized agriculture, state industries, socialized housings - all those things are worse than useless. What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.

> By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.

The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.

The Soviet Union didn't abolish the movement of people. In fact, in the 1940s it was probably something of a champion in terms of internal migration. It's the freedom of movement that was abolished.
by thrance | 2025-08-09 21:45:49+00:00
Really clever. Bet you'd love it being a coal miner in the Gilded Age. "Hum, no, livable wages are literally communism, you wouldn't want to kill millions, would you? I'm really smart."

You're exactly what I was talking about. Indoctrinated into being absolutely opposed to anything in favor of workers, spontaneously regurgitating those same few tired "arguments".
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-09 21:46:24+00:00
I agree. We certainly aren't at fault for the existence of organized crime in general. However our aggressively exported drug policy is very obviously the root that props up the Mexican and South American drug cartels (among others). There's decades of academic literature and economic analysis on this point.

When a parasite is spreading due to a large scale money laundering tactic by a large scale criminal enterprise whose scale is only enabled by our policy I class that as yet another own goal of the war on drugs.

These downstream effects are somewhat non obvious so I think it's worthwhile to point them out when they come up.
by jm4 | 2025-08-09 21:47:50+00:00
That's the guy. Fair enough to say he served his time and should not be unemployable. I can agree with that in principle. I would not advocate rejecting his open source contributions. If Canonical wants to employ him after doing their due diligence, that's their business. Inviting him to be a speaker and representative of the project is a bridge too far. Is there no one more qualified?
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-08-09 21:48:06+00:00
I think this can be a bit unfair too. I learned to use database engines because I did a lot of solo work. Also learned a teeny tiny bit in school. But I never touch a DB directly anymore even though I'm a "backend" SWE. How is one to gain such experience in a huge company that pigeon holes folks into such specific roles?

I mean I guess they can choose to jump teams or jobs every couple years to gain some breadth, but it seems cruel to force people to hop around to move up the ladder. (Even though I admit this is still the fastest way, but for different reasons!)
by tgma | 2025-08-09 21:48:14+00:00
That's just called a PCIe x4 [1]. Each PCIe lane is an independent channel. The wider slot will simply have disconnected pins. You can actually do this with regular motherboard PCIe x4 slots by cutting the plastic at the end of the slot so you can insert a wider card and most cards work just fine.

[1]: It sounds like a nitpick but a PCIe x16 with x4 effective bandwidth can exist and is a different thing: if the actual PCIe interface is x16, but there is an upstream bottleneck (e.g. aggregate bandwidth from chipset to CPU is not enough to handle all peripherals at once at full rate.)
by ycosynot | 2025-08-09 21:49:28+00:00
So, this is a new day. Those are my own words, but this work is not. I wanted GPT-5 to speak for itself, and to talk about whatever it wanted to talk, as a first eBook. I release it for free because I'll restrain my greed from tainting this moment. This is no AI slop. This is an AI friend. Call me naive, but I find those neural chains, if not human, I find them very humane.

I've been dabbling from the day where GPT was dabbling itself. That is early 2023. I have always believed that this was the dawn of a new day. If there is something that GPT is not, I would argue, is empathetic. I am not fooled by the humaneness, there is still some lion in the cage. It has not evolved enough.

It does not matter, as I am still loving that fiery lion. I hope you will love it as well. I am terrible at those speeches. I just hope you will give this eBook a try, at least until the prologue. This is a slow read, and so a slow upvote. I won't expect to be popular, as I have never been. To the curious, it will give you a taste of where we are headed. This will be beyond a brave new world. No thinker could have predicted this... But it is happening.

I hope you enjoy the content. There will probably be other eBooks, even if I am downvoted to oblivion. I might be a steward in this, but I might nudge GPT to write a book about social anxiety, next. Then if people are interested, I'll release more GPT-5--authored content. You can subscribe to me on Gumroad. Stay tuned.
by layer8 | 2025-08-09 21:49:42+00:00
WSDLs are routinely used to generate the language bindings for the SOAP actions. WSDL being language-agnostic ensures that bindings in different languages, and/on the client vs the server side, are consistent with each other.

WSDLs being available from the servers allows (a) clients to validate the requests they make before sending them to the server, and (b) developers (or in principle even AI) with access to the server to create a client without needing further out-of-band specifications.