MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diggan | 2025-08-12 09:13:19+00:00
Indeed, I've also found that various models are good at various tasks, but I have yet been able to categorize "Model X is good at Y-class of bugs", so I end up using N models for a first pass "Find the root-cause of this issue", then once it's found, pass it along to same N models for them to attempt to solve it.

So far, which model can find/solve what is really scattered all over the place.
by rovmut | 2025-08-12 09:13:26+00:00
Interesting framing around error cost. The piece that seems missing is accountability. A core function of a CEO is to be the single person ultimately responsible for a decision. If an engineer ships a bug, their manager is accountable. If an LLM hallucinates a disastrous market strategy, who gets fired? You'd still need a human to formally accept the risk, making the LLM more of an advisor.
by npteljes | 2025-08-12 09:15:17+00:00
Hanlon's razor applies here, I think. It's just ignorance, not malice. I doubt the maintainer has connection, or was pressured by these two random dictionary websites to include this - nor do I think that they gain any advantage of it.

People need to be on the lookout though, the xz incident showed that FOSS is indeed vulnerable.
Show HN: 12 Years Building an Interval Timer App
by melvinzammit | 2025-08-12 09:15:29+00:00
In 2013, I couldn’t find a decent interval timer for my workouts on the Android Market (Google Play wasn’t even called Google Play yet!). Could you believe that? Typing 'interval timer' returned nothing! So I decided to build a simple App while in college.

Fast forward 12 years, that simple timer has grown into an ecosystem: Android, iOS, Wear OS, Apple Watch, and a coaching platform. All built solo, with no AI assistance, and redesigned 4 times to keep up with UI trends.

Over the years I’ve learned a lot about long-term app maintenance, cross-platform challenges, and keeping codebases alive, shifting frameworks, database migrations and OS updates.

Here's to all the solo indie App Developers out there!
by fxtentacle | 2025-08-12 09:15:52+00:00
Yes. I’m an AI skeptic. And I’m quiet. Because AI is the single best thing that ever happened to my consulting business.

Vibe coding generates an infinite stream of „companies“ with proven business model and market fit and obviously unmaintainable, buggy, and impossible to scale software. But once there’s profits and their life depends on that pile of vibe-coded AI vomit continuing to work, they are happy to pay through the nose for a rewrite by experienced human coders. AI might ruin the job market for beginners, but the market for experts is exploding.

So why would I loudly complain about AI? It’s buggy as hell, but from my point of view, that’s a major upside.
by yetihehe | 2025-08-12 09:16:58+00:00
> During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children.

I have thought about this a lot over the years and your comment only enforces my opinion: we think more about procreation and having children when we are in more survivally stressful situation. That's why developed societies have less children and poor people have more: rich people or people with enough wealth to live comfortably don't have a lot of children because they don't face death every day and don't feel the need to spread their genes.
by cjs_ac | 2025-08-12 09:17:37+00:00
This mirrors my opinions on LLMs. LLMs are a deeply impressive technology, but, to explain the punchline to a Douglas Adams joke, technology is what we call stuff that doesn't work yet. I don't want my tech to be exciting, I want it to be reliable, which is pretty much the opposite of exciting.

A lot of other people seem to be very excited by LLMs and are having a great time with them, and I think that's great. One day, LLMs will be boring enough for me to like them, and it's the people who find them exciting today who are bringing on that boring future for me.
by pron | 2025-08-12 09:19:42+00:00
I thought there's no such thing as "safer". There's only whatever guarantees Rust happens to make that can prevent almost 1% of the bugs a language like ATS can prevent, which is safe, and anything that doesn't make those exact same guarantees, which is unsafe and completely worthless.

Anyway, you help prove my point, which is that even those who claim to believe in a binary distinction between what Rust happens to guarantee and anything else don't actually believe that, and understand that it's all about numbers and risks. There are many measures to reduce bugs - some through guarantees in the language, others without guarantees - that each have some level of effectiveness and some cost, and the goal is to balance those costs and reduce bugs as much as possible.

Anyone who follows the research in software correctness over the past five decades should know that in the seventies we thought we had the answers, but since the nineties we've known that there is no one right answer to correctness, and that there's no way to tell in advance which methods will be more or less effective.
by account42 | 2025-08-12 09:20:12+00:00
> 2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.

This is way too optimistic. Maybe they'll make it as a campaign promise but in all likelihood they'll be happy to have it without being blamed directly and the law will stay unless people put up enough of a stink that it's clear the alternative would be violent revolution.

Increasing government control over the population is not a partisan issue.
by CorrectHorseBat | 2025-08-12 09:21:22+00:00
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's acceptable for a Debian packager, but I think that it's much more likely than malicious intent.

>It's difficult to imagine how somebody to whom Debian's values are alien could even accidentally stumble their way into the position of being a Debian packager

It's not for me.
by alex-moon | 2025-08-12 09:21:50+00:00
I use Wayland! I like it a lot and I think that it's a sensible way to take window management in the 21st century. However, it's clearly not _mature_ yet (which is understandable - it's very new!). My use case specifically is a bit unusual:

1. I'm on an NVIDIA graphics card - this struggles a lot, I won't lie, and it's really odd issues which are difficult to track down. 2. I'm running Deskflow for virtual KVM - this is using literally someone's hand-rolled attempt to hack Wayland to make it work - it manages the most important element: my keyboard and mouse are shared between my Linux desktop and my MacBook - but much of the incidental functionality, most notably copy-pasting and repeating held keys, doesn't work at all. Mod keys seem a bit fucky as well.

That said, I'm committed - am excited to see the tech honed in the coming years.
by npteljes | 2025-08-12 09:22:27+00:00
I'm sure if people discovered that a Debian package offering "AI suggestions" would send the clipboard over unencrypted HTTP to two Chinese servers, it would make a similar noise.

Actively listening to the clipboard, and immediately, automatically sending the content elsewhere is akin to keylogging, spyware, plain and simple. It's a questionable practice even after accepting a huge popup, not to mention that the functionality is practically buried in TFA case.
by moi2388 | 2025-08-12 09:22:46+00:00
No, they do get it. They just don’t want to invest time in it, so only through a third party.

But AI is sexy, so LLMs doing document search? Yes please, let’s have some teams dedicate their time and effort to develop it ourselves.

It’s because AGI is going to come, you know, so if we invest now they can replace everybody with AI

Are you laughing as hard as I was when they told me this?
by est | 2025-08-12 09:23:02+00:00
> Data is leaked to Chinese dictionary servers

stardict is a Chinese software and the bug you listed says it "leaks" data to stardict.cn which is one of its official website.

https://stardict-4.sourceforge.net/index_en.php

Btw looks like the stardict.cn is dead today

> with the knowledge they're internet connected

Yeah that's pretty much the whole argument.

I do agree that programs should not send data in an arbitrary way. Clear text over public network is not OK
by dileeparanawake | 2025-08-12 09:23:02+00:00
In theory - CEO's have ultimate responsibility. In practice it's more complex - boards, delegation, company structures, hr etc etc remove a lot of ultimate responsibility from CEO's. The buck stop's here, unless, the CEO's decides otherwise. Carlos Tavares is a good example of this. Got away with more screwups than many senior employee's could dream of. Ditto lots of legacy autos. The board / shareholders typically have a lot of sway and delegated accountability / responsibility.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-08-12 09:23:58+00:00
While you are right about being able to combine higher-order functions in the way you describe, I might not find your examples compelling, because they require 2 passes over the data.

On the other hand one could argue, that one pass of those is checking some condition (index below some number, or element followed by element that satisfies a predicate, or similar things), and the other pass is then blindly applying some other function, without having to check the condition again. Maybe that is in the end equal in performance.
by kgeist | 2025-08-12 09:24:24+00:00
I've been using simple text files too, for 7 years now.

Except I create a new file for each new day, to have peace of mind (as opposed to having a million-line-long file). Instead of Ctrl+F, I use grep. The format is Markdown.

My typical TODO file has 3 sections: TODO, Pending, and DONE. If something is done for the day, I move it to the DONE section. When I create a new file for a new day, I copy over everything except the DONE section. The Pending section is for something I can't act on immediately (say, waiting for a coworker's response). I look there less often.

Every morning I also re-prioritize the items in the TODO section.

The only problem is that if I'm away from the work computer, I have to add items in a separate app on the phone (Notepad Free) and then manually copy them to the PC.

This system is something I naturally came to over those 7 years via trial and error, something that works well for me. I had other formats that didn't catch on.

Just my two cents.
by simon_void | 2025-08-12 09:25:02+00:00
I wonder if that confusion is due to the fact that you haven't yet wrapped your head around the fact that extension functions are "just" syntactic sugar for static functions. The implicit "this" becomes the the first parameter of the static function and function parameters can be null. Now you might ask "why not use static (/first class) functions then? Because those "feel" like less ideomatic to use then extension functions or methods that are defined on the object (hirachy) itself. But understanding why the extension type can be nullable is not the same is using it on nullable types. I restrict my extension functions to non-nullable types most of the time as well. The best exception to this preference -just to see where it makes sense- is the build-in function [toString](https://kotlinlang.org/api/core/kotlin-stdlib/kotlin/to-stri...), since you want it to return "null" if you invoke it on null.
by gnfargbl | 2025-08-12 09:25:13+00:00
The category thresholds are very clearly spelled out in a Statutory Instrument [1]. This is surely the "actual rules" by any definition. The thresholds are exactly as I stated.

If some smaller sites have made the individual decision that the residual parts of the OSA expose them to sufficient legal risk that they must close, that's really a matter for them. I would hope that they actually checked [2] the level of risk before taking any decision.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2025/226/contents/made

[2] https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/Regulati...
by pjmlp | 2025-08-12 09:25:46+00:00
Yes, all the industries where C and C++ are the industry standards like Khronos APIs, POSIX, CUDA, DirectX, Metal, console devkits, LLVM and GCC implementation,....

Not only you are faced with creating your own wrappers, if no one else has done it already.

The tooling, for IDEs and graphical debuggers, assumes either C or C++, so it won't be there for Rust.

Ideally the day will come where those ecosystems might also embrace Rust, but that is still decades away maybe.
by d--b | 2025-08-12 09:26:21+00:00
Poker is a winner-take-all game, so it could be argued that it incentives kids to push their self interest first.

It's based on deception, so teaches kids to distrust others and deceive others for the sake of winning.

It gives crazy adrenaline rushes that even adults fail to control. That can't be good for the brain.

You don't seem to realize that 4-year-old is extremely young, and kids that age need security more than anything. They need to know adults have their backs and are not in it for themselves. They need to know people aren't lying to them.

Sure you need to prepare kids for the real life, but there is an age for everything, and my opinion is that 4-year-old is not a good age to learn poker, just as it's not great to put 6-year-old in front of horror movies, or give wine to 10-year-olds.

There is plenty of time to learn money management.
by benrutter | 2025-08-12 09:26:49+00:00
I liked reading this - permacomputing is often a nice contrast with today's world where everything is constantly improving and changing and breaking at the same time.

I wonder what "peramcomputing in action" would be when you're just trying to build a website, or a SAAS app. Those things aren't really the cool alternative dreams of 100 rabbits, but they could still benefit from these kind of ideas.

One thing that often strikes me, is that the web, despite being a huge part of the problem, actually poses a lot of solutions. PWAs and WASM offer some pretty great opportunities for portability, and WASM in particular is probably the closest we've got yet to a "universal virtual machine" (I know it's still got a long way to go)
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-12 09:27:03+00:00
I actually think physical property rights are much more problematic than copyright.

Works are so sparse, and there is such an explosion in how many texts there are that when someone has a right to the exclusive use of one of these huge numbers that are almost unrepresentable, you lose almost nothing.

If someone didn't announce that they had written, let's say, Harry Potter and there was a secret law forbidding you from distributing it, that would be really bad, but it would never matter.

Copyright infringement is a pure theft of service. You took it because it was there, because someone had already spent the effort to make it, and that was the only reason you took it.

Land, physical property, etc. meanwhile, is something that isn't created only by human effort.

For this reason copyright, rather than some fake pseudo-property of lower status than physical property, is actually much more legitimate than physical property.
by npteljes | 2025-08-12 09:28:06+00:00
Android has its fair share of issues as well. For a recent issue, take a look at the localhost tracking, wherein "Meta devised an ingenious system that bypassed Android’s sandbox protections to identify you while browsing on your mobile phone — even if you used a VPN, the browser’s incognito mode, and refused or deleted cookies in every session":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235467
by acdha | 2025-08-12 09:28:54+00:00
> makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.

As a DC resident, this would be comically wrong if the stakes weren’t so high. Even if you’re only talking about the downtown areas where tourists go, you have to go looking for a handful of places where homeless people hang out. The city has had problems providing housing capacity after the pandemic but that spike has been ebbing and it’s not something the National Guard can help with unless they’re deploying field housing and a kitchen.
by dileeparanawake | 2025-08-12 09:29:01+00:00
Why does wealth inequality drive price inflation? Good question and not obvious. Here's the answer?

How much does a bottle of water cost?

- Supermarket? - Festival? - In a drought, when you're standing in line behind a thirsty billionaire?

People with a large relative net worths, drive asset prices up, like bids in an auction - even if they aren't the final bidder.
by goodcanadian | 2025-08-12 09:29:16+00:00
Computational simulations have been involved in aircraft design for decades. However, at some point you still have to verify the simulations with real world tests. I think (as a non-expert) the main reason no aerodynamically novel aircraft have been developed lately is because we have essentially optimised designs, already. To be clear, I am not saying that we can't do better. I am saying that the manufacturing (and other) cost of incremental improvements is large and the benefit is small. For commercial aircraft (as an example only), it is really hard to beat a tube with wings for the lowest cost of moving large numbers of people or volumes of cargo. Military aircraft with specialised roles are a bit more varied, and a lot more expensive to build and fly.
by eru | 2025-08-12 09:30:06+00:00
> All tail recursive functions can be rewritten as a loop but there exist loops that can not be rewritten as a tail recursive function.

And the other way round: how do you (sanely) write a state machine as a loop?

See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lambda:_The_Ultimate_GOTO for some examples.

I agree that (most) functions that only ever tail-call themselves can relatively easily be expressed as loops, if for some reason you really love loops. But state machines aren't like that.

With tail calls, you can represent each state as a function, and you can pass different parameters to different states. Very neat, and just works.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-12 09:31:02+00:00
A lot of that work is basically fixing documentation bugs, labelled "ghosts" in your text. Places where the ISO document is so bad as a description of C that you would think there's Undefined Behaviour but it's actually just poorly written.

Fixing the document is worthwhile, and certainly a reminder that WG21's equivalent effort needs to make the list before it can even begin that process on its even longer document, but practical C programmers don't read the document and since this UB was a "ghost" they weren't tripped by it. Removing items from the list this way does not translate to the meaningful safety improvement you might imagine.

There's not a whole lot of movement there towards actually fixing the problem. Maybe it will come later?
by pyrale | 2025-08-12 09:31:08+00:00
The cost/information function of moves exists in poker regardless of whether it's tied to actual money. You put your money in a hand if you believe that you have good ev, whether that ev is labeled in chips or dollars. I don't see how changing the rules of chess (therefore changing the ev - of course if you change the ev that changes players' behaviour. But that would be like changing the poker ruleset, not changing the money value of chips) makes a comparable case.

Let me give you a counter-comparison: if regardless of which chess piece was moved, after both players had made a play, they could bet on the game outcome (therefore not changing the ev of a move), I'm not sure players would want to play differently.
by ismailrohaga | 2025-08-12 09:31:10+00:00
any AI would do. but if you wanna try claude code, instead of paying the $20/mo pricing you can start by just using the API instead (https://console.anthropic.com). topup $5 and just try to prompt.

the thing with AI is that you better try to give them "direction", give detailed instructions or expectations. it's better for you to do it rather than asking it to decide (because they tend to be always agree with you)

so in claude you can setup Claude.md, there are no rules here, but with AI we're talking about tokens and i usually write it in "json" structure despite of it being a markdown file. why json? it's more structured and CMIIW most AI "speak" with it
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-08-12 09:31:50+00:00
Take a look!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=...

It's a large number of templates doing transclusions.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Transclusion

You can have snippets like this

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Today%27s_featured_a...

Which shows up on the main page under featured article, and these pages are prepared by humans Just In Time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Today%2...

A website where everything happens in public -including all the editing- is still kind of cool and relatively unique, even in 2025!.

And most pages are a bit less complicated to handle than this. But the main page obviously gets a lot of attention.
by linguae | 2025-08-12 09:32:30+00:00
I feel the same way about Windows XP. Windows XP may have brought NT-based Windows to regular consumers, which is partly why there's nostalgia for XP, but for those who were already using NT-based Windows at the time, Windows XP wasn't that much better than its predecessor, Windows 2000.

To me, Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Windows XP introduced activation, which I find an annoying hindrance, and weird UI decisions in the form of the Fisher-Price Luna interface and the search dog. It was all downhill from there, though Windows 7 was solid and I greatly appreciate the introduction of WSL in Windows 10.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-08-12 09:32:53+00:00
>It's easy to demonstrate (3) for an age verification system - practical experience will amply demonstrate it to everyone.

No. Absence of evidence that I am not anonymous does not constitute evidence that I am anonymous. Verifiable unlinkability is also difficult to prove.

It may be possible to create a system like this technically, but all social and economic incentives that exist are directed against it:

- An anonymous system is likely more expensive.

- The public generally does not care about privacy, until they are personally affected.

- You have no idea as a user whether the server components do what they say they are doing. Even if audited, it could change tomorrow.

- Once in place its purpose can change. Can you guarantee that the next government will not want to modify this system to make identification of dissenters, protestors or journalists easier?
by metalman | 2025-08-12 09:32:58+00:00
aaaah! just going for it! call it optimising or just running lean, it is a resiliancy that cant be taken away. one thing I like very much about sleeping, is waking up with my next move all figured out, even a cat nap will do I have stopped checking the time, unless there is an appointment, wake up, get up, do something, dopey sleepy, back to bed, wake up, work, hungry ....awsome , some days are zero's, and some days click, nothing but net all day long but nothing like a sleep reset when solo running hard and lean
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-12 09:33:11+00:00
All projects I worked with, that used ORM, were burning pile of shit and ORM was a big part of this. I hate ORM and would prefer SQL any day. In my projects I almost never choose ORM.

I trust that some people can deal with ORM, but I know that I can't and I didn't see anyone who can do it properly.

So, I guess, there are some radical views on this issue. I wouldn't want to work with person who prefers to use ORM and avoids know SQL, and they probably hold similar opinion.

It is really weird to me that someone would call SQL low level. SQL is the highest level language available in the industry, definitely level above ordinary programming languages.
by pyrale | 2025-08-12 09:34:23+00:00
> (Same applies to playing for pennies. The amounts have to be at least somewhat meaningful.)

That's kind of an issue, though. Richer players are advantaged, as are seasoned players who are used to lose large amounts of money. That's not really related to game skills, since there is no way to ensure that players bet something equally valuable to them, which in your reasoning means that some players start with an advantage.