MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zrobotics | 2025-08-26 09:41:43+00:00
OK, so this is getting ridiculous. The internet permission isn't exposed to the user, unless you are saying that 'exposed to the user' is the same as 'system default and can't be modified'. The user has no way to see or modify that permission.

I pretty solidly refuted your first reason (internet connection is ubiquitious, apps don't need it). I pointed out that there are whole categories of apps that don't need a network connection. You never bothered to refute my argument and are now claiming that I didn't address that point. You claim it is a 'ubiquitous' permission, but haven't said why a level sensor app that just reads the MEMS gyro sensor would need a network connection at all. So that's point 1 sorted, which I already addressed and you are pretending wasn't refuted.

Point 2 was "2) It's not robust, apps without Internet permission can still exfiltrate data relatively easily by bouncing off of other apps using Intents and similar"

I never addressed this, because it seemed extraneous to the discussion. This data exfiltration is purely a hypothetical at this point, since apps can always rely on a network connection. Sure, if the network setting was exposed to the user and was able to be toggled, there might be ways to bypass that. But that is hypothetical, and relies on hypothetical security loopholes. No apps are currently doing this, since apps can't have their network permissions toggled. The possibility of potentially bypassing the system network permission toggle doesn't seem germane, since it's a hypothetical. To use your words, it's a 'whack-ass conspiracy theory' and not a germane concern.

You've resorted to ad-hominem by insinuating that my viewpoint as a conspiracy theory and haven't even attempted to address my point that there are whole categories of apps that don't need network connections. You also are trying to claim that I haven't addressed points you made, while ignoring my argument that rebutted those claims. I'm sorry, but since you want to engage in this way,why are you so addicted to the taste of Google boot leather? Why are you trying to say that Google doesn't want to protect its ad network? Android apps using Google adsense to serve ads to users clearly benefits them, I don't even see why this is controversial.
by mnky9800n | 2025-08-26 09:42:13+00:00
I really like this idea. I organized a conference last year for around 100 people, 2 days, wiht a dozen speakers. It was a ton of work to organize everything and i had spreadsheets everywhere and had to interact with a bunch of people about it. I think what would also be useful is having

* some kind of internal, only to VIPs, information or something like that. Like, if you register for some kind of conference but you are a speaker there, there is extra information for you that other conferences don't have.

* It would also be cool to have like a tie-in hotel booking system or something like that because conferences will have relationships with hotels to get discounts and so driving it through the event management system would be cool.

* Also, having it tie in with some kind of submission platform for conference proceedings would be cool.

* Having some kind of interaction tool so that your event organizing team can look at things would also be cool. Like I worked with the University of Oslo Science Library, they produced a bunch of posters and flyers and social media posts and stuff like that. It would be cool to have a store for all this kind of marketing material.

Those are just some ideas based on my experiences organizing workshops and conferences.
by thisislife2 | 2025-08-26 09:42:52+00:00
This is just an extension of the increasing censorship and government / BigTech control that we have been witnessing in the past few years, with Google seeking the ability to prevent installation of any apps that is on a blocklist controlled by the government. And, like with the iDevices, this will also kill many free independent and open source apps once developers are forced to pay for "developer verification". "Free" apps are an anathema to the App Store business model.
Show HN: Lumi – AI apps and websites builder (base44/lovable alternative)
by swelzh | 2025-08-26 09:43:40+00:00
Hi HN — we’re the team behind Lumi (lumi.new). Lumi is an all-in-one platform to build and launch websites or lightweight apps simply by chatting—no code needed to write, no external services needed to integrate. We’re a 10+ person team.

What’s UNIQUE: ANYWHERE: Multi-country language support out of the box (create & maintain multiple locales in one project) ANYONE: With built-in Database + Sign-In + more internal tools coming soon, anyone can achieve anything without technical stuff being barriers ANYTIME：No waiting list! Works right now to bulid CRM system, e-commerce portal, photo - sharing platform and more

In DEVELOPMENT: email sending, file storage, Stripe payments, and more!

Closest analogy is Base44, but Lumi is leaning into i18n + bundled DB/auth so founders can go live in multiple markets without extra setup. And Lumi performs far better in achieving more stunning page effects and handling more complex logic.

We’d love feedback on the localization workflow, DB/auth defaults, and what else would make Lumi more useful on day 0. (Disclosure: creators here, happy to answer questions!)
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-26 09:43:48+00:00
This is another version of "we don't need to pretend to be stupid."

Yes, one could cook up all sorts of uses for the things called nuclear weapons, which we designed by people to kill other people. But we don't have to pretend to be stupid and assume nuclear weapons don't, I don't know, exist in a context of warfare which shapes their design and warrants actual thought about their use and regulation?
by znpy | 2025-08-26 09:43:58+00:00
> Stallman actively hurts the cause with his behaviour.

People arguing this should realize that actors fighting oh the other side of the war might act kind and use politically correct wording, but they're still eroding our freedom little by little.

Arguments like this ("his behaviour") really mean that people care about policing other people's behaviour more than they care about the actual topic being discussed.

Downvote me if you want, I don't care:

- Stallman, singlehandedly, did more than anybody else for freedom in the computing industry.

- People pushing those arguments a huge part of the problem.

- People like Stallman are a huge part of the solution.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-26 09:44:06+00:00
No, that isn't the problem. The problem is that you are comparing a human in one corner (mortal, fallible, made of meat, imperfect, objectively poor) with a very large conglomerate of corporations on the other side (immortal, disembodied, transnational, legal staff on retainer, very, very wealthy, made of paper, hard to criticize in the same way that you could criticize a person). No corporation is even going to put weird stuff in their mouth on camera or look unkempt. They'll make their arguments, reasonably, legally watertight and accompanied with bags of money through their lobbyists.
by janfoeh | 2025-08-26 09:44:06+00:00
"Programming Ruby" [0] ("the pickaxe book") and "Agile Web Development with Rails" [1], both from Pragmatic Programmers.

I learned Ruby and Rails through them in the late 2000's; they are still being released as new editions. It has been a while since I bought new books from PragProg, but they used to have a recurring sale of ~40% off around late autumn (thanksgiving?).

[0] https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby5/programming-ruby-3-3-5th-e...

[1] https://pragprog.com/titles/rails8/agile-web-development-wit...
by sunshine-o | 2025-08-26 09:44:22+00:00
The only reason to be surprised by this sentence to associate this corporation for the cool "Don't be evil" Google of 25 years ago.

But in 2025 Google is some kind of IBM, Oracle blob with here a middle age MBA woman trying to gas-light you into an orweilian world she is paving for an awesome remuneration.

Also notice they do not say "open source" once in the post... now it is just "open". It is "open" but not your phone anymore.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-26 09:46:02+00:00
Software developer used to be one of the most 'free' professions. But now you need a stamp of approval from some corporation to get through the day, even if you are nominally independent. And woe to you if they should ever revoke your license to feed yourself. Because 'verified developer' is just another way to say 'not a threat to Google or Google's corporate image'.
by dudeinjapan | 2025-08-26 09:46:40+00:00
Right. Today Ruby has essentially a global namespace, where every defined module/class/const is put in the same "global dumping ground" and can override/"monkey patch" each other.

Ruby 3.5 will introduce a new language keyword "namespace" that scopes behavior to that namespace.

class Foo def foo; puts "foo"; end end namespace Bar class Foo def foo; puts "bar"; end end Foo.new.foo #=> "bar" end Foo.new.foo #=> "foo"

Fun times.

This is intended for isolated code loading similar to "modules" in Python or ES6, but I am worried it will be abused badly. I'm also unsure whether they will add a "use Namespace" construct...

See here: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/21311
by notachatbot123 | 2025-08-26 09:46:54+00:00
Imagine having built some software, abiding to a standard that to your understanding is the standard to abide to. Then comes people who ask you to break that standard and change your software. Again and again they come. Others ridicule your stance on social media and forums like these. It's burning out.

It's free and open-source for heaven's sake! If you don't like it, fork it, patch it, make your own custom version. But stop pestering maintainers with demands.
by latexr | 2025-08-26 09:47:03+00:00
You’re making a bunch of wrong assumptions. Yes, the system is deeply broken, but not in that way. Some people from inside Apple have given small insights into it. Of course it’s not true that anything without a sysdiagnose is auto-closed, because otherwise they wouldn’t be asking for one years later. And of course they’re not just grouped into categories, when they can’t even manage duplicates properly (they have the ability to do so and you get notified, but it’s also common to open something as an explicit duplicate of something else with reference number and it’s never flagged).

Speculating about the system and then criticising that speculation isn’t helpful. We have to criticise the system as it exists.
by schiffern | 2025-08-26 09:47:06+00:00
Higher extraction volumes also make heating and cooling bills go up.

It's one of those ideas that works fine when it's just a rare thing, but if 100% of households had one I guarantee we'd see headlines like "Wasteful Exhaust Vents Burn As Much Energy As Cleveland" etc etc.

I for one welcome our fume hood inspired overlords. The nice thing about fume hoods is that they're optimized for maximum extraction efficiency for a minimum extraction volume.

Everyone notices the side walls, but an overlooked secret of fume hoods is that they extract air backwards toward the back wall, not just upward.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-08-26 09:47:08+00:00
To be honest I don't see an easy path to escaping the walled garden in our interactions with big companies and governments (banking, traveling, mainstream social networks, etc.).

But at least we can build alternatives for interpersonal communication and other uses independent from big companies, like the late 90s-early 2000s Internet, and access that with free devices.
by Freak_NL | 2025-08-26 09:47:57+00:00
> […] it'll be an explosion of creativity just as with image generation currently.

I'm mostly seeing people who lack the skills or means to create their own works go nuts with prompting gen-AI tools, but it rarely strikes me as creative in either the 'having the ability to create' sense — they've outsourced that — or the 'original, expressive, imaginative' sense.
by benrutter | 2025-08-26 09:48:07+00:00
I'm a python developer, and a big fan of the features with gradual typing etc. This article really highlights for me though, how python has very much changed from the language it was even 5 years ago.

Initially, the celebrated feature of python was that it allowed easy and fast development for newcomers. There was a joke a long the lines, "I learned python, it was a great weekend".

As much as I like python's type system (and wouldn't want to see them ever go way!), part of me wonders if moving into a world where hello-world can look like this, is a world where python is no longer the "lean in a weekend" language:

from typing import Annotated import typer app = typer.Typer() @app.command() def main( name: Annotated[str, typer.Option("--name", "-n")], ) -> None: """Prints out 'HELLO {name}!!' (name upper cased) to the console""" print(f"HELLO {name:upper}!!") if __name__ == "__name__": app()

(obviously the example is silly, and I know this is a lot more than you need to do, hopefully you get my point though!)
by fdgjgbdfhgb | 2025-08-26 09:48:10+00:00
This truly sucks, since in this day and age we need unmodified phones for banking apps (and I think for oncall my company requires Android/iOS as well). I guess this will be the final push for me to change to iOS, since I already have a bunch of Apple stuff otherwise, and I was holding out on the phone side for this exact feature.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-26 09:49:18+00:00
LSP (Language Server Protocol) was the final nail in the coffin of Emacs for me.

VSCode was "good enough" for pretty much every language with LSP at that point, I did't even bother with Jetbrains ides outside of work after that.

And when Obsidian replaced org-mode for me, I deleted my .emacs directory from my dotfiles repository.
by nashashmi | 2025-08-26 09:49:42+00:00
I can understand Defending bad people. He is railing against freedom of injustice. I understand being abusive. He is feeling hopeless. I haven’t seen Harassment so I don’t know what to make of it.

He seems to walk the path of purity of ideas. And may come off as aggressive. As a by product, he may also be aloof from the career ladder. His trust in being nice to people is broken (autism?).

He has some good civil rights stuff https://www.stallman.org/
by pjmlp | 2025-08-26 09:50:22+00:00
First of all they can make it easier option for OEMs go for Windows/XBox handhelds and thus push SteamDeck out of market, by making it a niche device only a minority cares about, netbooks attack plan style, which they are starting now.

They can also introduce Windows/DirectX APIs that Proton will have a hard time copying, by requiring additional hardware or subsystem features not easily copyable.

They can let their legal team have some fun.

Finally, companies don't last forever, and I am betting as the 2nd most valuable company in the planet, Microsoft will outlive Steam's current management and eventually deal with the problem in another way.
by pbmonster | 2025-08-26 09:50:37+00:00
I remember some engineer doing tests on youtube. TL;DW:

* Double-bagging your ears (plugs + shooting range plugs) seems to help a lot.

* With a little more effort, you can build a handheld shield. Thin, hard layer on top (like plexiglass), which acts like a reflector, then a standard foam layer and cardboard to dampen whatever makes it through the reflector.

Besides that, it's not that much different than a water cannon truck or a phalanx shooting tear gas. Confronting both is a relatively high risk activity, and should be avoided by most protesters.
by nunclieh | 2025-08-26 09:50:53+00:00
Wow. My bank provided me with an external token to do 2FA. If I have to guess, however, the code that generates the OTP code (assuming that is a code that is requested) should be easy enough to reverse engineer.

I admit, though, that being forced to RE a f**ing android app just to do banking is grounds to change the aforementioned bank. Isn't there any other alternative in Singapore?
by andrepd | 2025-08-26 09:51:35+00:00
Apples and oranges. Blacklist→allowlist is 2010s social justice virtue signalling thing. Sideloading→installing is about a word that is scary to normies vs a word that's completely normal and neutral.

See the history of words such as "jaywalking" or "carbon footprint" and how their usage cements the respective ideas.
by safety1st | 2025-08-26 09:51:41+00:00
> We have to keep defending our own freedoms against non-stop assault until the end of time

That's the human condition. The price of liberty.

However, there are easier ways and harder ways to do it. The key concept to think about is sovereignty. What do you own? What do you control that depends on as few externalities as possible?

The big shift people are going to have to start thinking about is abandoning the network, because the enemies of freedom are increasingly locking it down.

- I own PC hardware that runs Linux. I own a copy of Linux which runs entirely offline. To the extent I get updates to it, they are licensed and distributed in such a manner that it's very hard for the bad guys to mess with them, as Microsoft does with Windows 11.

- I own copies of many media, books, music, movies, TV series, games, these reside as non-DRM'ed bits on my SSD that do not phone home, they don't need the network. I have local copies of software that does not require the network to play them. I have physical copies of these things in some cases.

This is not to say that I never use Netflix, Youtube, Spotify, Steam etc. but I keep them at arm's length and cut back on my usage of them at every opportunity. They are all network tools owned by our enemies, and need to be treated as such.

There really isn't shit they can do to me that would sting, short of cut off the electricity. In the event that the Internet purveyors of slop go Full Evil, and they probably will, I am well equipped.

Now of course the topic of sovereignty is far far bigger than consuming media, and we could get into things like desktop applications or where you interact with your friends as well. But the principles are the same. Go offline.
by phatfish | 2025-08-26 09:53:20+00:00
I am not a big social media user, to be honest it is too stressful. Minimal social interaction is fine for me, and I'm happy with the boundaries IRL social encounters create where you can walk away (politely at the end of course) and it's over.

News and politics was a big waste of time for me too. Before 2015 I just kept up to date with big issues, but Brexit and then Covid really got me addicted to news and politics.

I ditched Reddit (with the API thing) and news websites about a year ago. It really is nice not knowing about every tiny event. It's not even necessary for being politically aware as so much of the "news" is hearsay and random Tweets turned into content by the media.

I have started looking at the BBC News business section every now and then. This really shows what a content factory other news media sites are. The BBC business page adds new articles maybe twice a day. There is no point checking more often than that (unless you go down a comments rabbit hole).

Sites like The Guardian have new articles hourly and sometimes multiple "live blogs" going on at once. That sort of output can happen in just the "business/economy" section, never mind the rest of the site.

Like social media there is just no way that amount of content can be useful, in fact it's most likely the opposite.
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-08-26 09:54:11+00:00
you are missing the point. (proving yourself wrong?)

that movie has tons of AAA-grade creatives, AAA-grade actors, tens of thousands of people work, brand new music, licenced music, photos, drawings, videos, animations and motion graphics, 3D assets, pictures, photos, whole buildings and set built for this, that borderline tiny real towns. LotR had to develop brand new state-of-the-art VFX rendering tech, which is often the case with such projects.

VFX for say "fake" UI Iron Man suit, had to write tons of code to make it work. amount of work those movies and games take in creatives (very often it is just code) is unbelievable.

now, with this utility app. what did it produce? not even close.
by nikodotio | 2025-08-26 09:54:14+00:00
My experience as a musician and huge linux nerd is: sure, it was all free, and very powerful, on linux, but I never actually made music because of the setup times, learning, hacking, and refining the systems.

Since getting a mac and paying for tools like this, the immediacy of being productive has caused me to actually make music.

it's the same with OBS - wow, what a piece of software. I spent a week going through and configuring it. They really thought of everything. Audio Hijack solved my problem in 30 seconds and made sense for my use case while doing it.
by jonwinstanley | 2025-08-26 09:54:31+00:00
A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone.

Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark.

Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-08-26 09:55:11+00:00
There are tons of things you can do, from spreading the word, organize politically or work on building an alternative ecosystem. Also donate to organizations like EFF.

We're being pushed a message that we're all impotent but the reality is that collectively we can change things, and apathy is exactly what these people try to push onto us.

Things get worse but there are also good laws being pushed: see for example digital markets act and GDPR. 2008 when I started using Linux, gaming on Linux was horrible. Now it's day and night, and linux, while still small, is more popular and usable than ever. Recently alternative social medias like Bluesky, and Mastodon enable more open ecosystems and they've gained a lot of traction.

Android has alternative ecosystems like F-Droid and GrapheneOS that can be built upon and hopefully we can get it to a point where we can ditch Google. We need to keep up the fight.
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-26 09:55:12+00:00
“Zig not being memory safe” is what's being called “a massive setback for the industry”.

Maybe you can make a hierarchy between technical criticism like this and the fact that Go isn't technically memory-safe[1], with Loris' abusive behavior of calling Rust maintainers names like “wankers”…

[1]: which is a criticism mostly coming from the Java crowd, by the way, not Rust, like the criticism of the simplistic garbage collection management in Go
by dark-star | 2025-08-26 09:55:20+00:00
I certainly have thought this through.

Network packets don't need a destination address. Broadcast addresses exist. Also, packets to invalid/unknown destinations exist. You can send network packets with invalid source or destination addresses already anyway.

Taking a raw chunk of data and putting it on the wire as-is is the most logical interpretation of "writing to the ethernet device". Does it make sense to allow everyone to do that? Certainly not, that's why you restrict access to devices anyway.

The fact that not every chunk of data "makes sense" for every device in /dev is certainly nothing new, since that is the case for all other devices already (I mentioned a few in my post above).
by jacquesm | 2025-08-26 09:55:32+00:00
I'm holding on to my rolling token generator like it is made of gold, they won't give me another one and force me to use their app. But the app requires a non-rooted phone or it will refuse to function. I've already asked them to give me a free phone just like they gave me a free token generator. So far no dice. Oh, and better still, for large transactions you are not allowed to use the phone app.