MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jama211 | 2025-08-30 20:00:57+00:00
I think this is somewhat dangerous, it can lead you to categorise people unfairly and permanently. Also, in my experience this has a critical flaw - the managers love morts in my experience, not Elvises. They don’t care about the technical details, so “fastest and fits the business outcome the most” is ideal.

Also the actual solution is proper team leadership/management. If you have morts, make sure that code quality requirements are a PART of the requirements their code must pass, and they’ll instead deliver decent work slightly slower. Got an elvis? Give more boundaries. Got Einsteins? Redefine the subtasks so they can’t refactor everything and give deadlines both in terms of time but also pragmatism.

Either way, I don’t love this approach, as it removes the complexity from the human condition, complexity which is most important to keep in mind.
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2025-08-30 20:01:54+00:00
I worked on a similar TI SoC -- with War-and-Peace-sized datasheet. My eyes burned out and brain exploded. Ultimately, another engineer had to take over the project -- or rather TEAM of engineers, of which I did only a part. It's simply to much complexity to expect one engineer to grok it all, do the schematic & PCB & power supply & hi-speed MIPI connections and radios and... and THEN to write the software for it all. It's too much. (This is the Life one gets in Startups, it seems -- worked to the (beagle)bone!)
by ajross | 2025-08-30 20:02:31+00:00
FWIW, framed the way you do, I'd say the block device layer would be an *even better* place for that validation, no?

> Personally, my data feels important enough to make that level of effort, but not important enough to do anything else.

OMG. Backups! You need backups! Worry about polishing your geek cred once your data is on physically separate storage. Seriously, this is not a technology choice problem. Go to Amazon and buy an exfat stick, whatever. By far the most important thing you're ever going to do for your data is Back. It. Up.

Filesystem choice is, and I repeat, very much a yell-on-the-internet kind of thing. It makes you feel smart on HN. Backups to junky Chinese flash sticks are what are going to save you from losing data.
by dang | 2025-08-30 20:02:59+00:00
v1 (the submitted URL) was https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo.... We've replaced it now v2, for more complex analytical em dash explorations :) - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45075379 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45072635.
by NaveenBabu98 | 2025-08-30 20:03:00+00:00
Hi HN

I built Sidekick AI, an open-source VS Code extension that works like GitHub Copilot. But it’s 100% local, free, and privacy-first.

Why? I saw developers struggling with:

Paying $10/month for Copilot

Code being sent to cloud servers (privacy + compliance issues)

Slow responses on weak internet connections

Painful account/payment setups

I wanted to build something different: a tool that anyone can install in 2 minutes, that runs entirely on their machine, with no subscriptions or cloud dependency.

What Sidekick AI Does (Today in v1):

-Inline completions (~450ms latency on CPU)

-Copilot-style interactive chat

-Smart code fixes + context-aware refactoring

-Code explanations (great for onboarding/learning)

-Automatic unit test generation

Tech Details:

Current model: Qwen 2.5 Coder (1GB) → lightweight

Achieved 30 tokens/sec on local hardware using llama.cpp + smart caching

Multi-language support (8+ languages) via prompt engineering

Built-in server health monitoring + auto-restart for stability

2-minute zero-config setup wizard (detects and configures automatically)

Roadmap:

Adding DeepSeek Coder 6.7B in v2 → should bring it close to Copilot-level performance while staying fully offline.

Impact So Far:

Already 70+ organic downloads on the VS Code Marketplace (no marketing, just devs finding it).

Early feedback: devs like it for privacy, offline workflows, and avoiding subscription costs.

Links:

GitHub: github.com/Naveen-babu1/sidekick-ai

VS Code Marketplace: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=NaveenBabu.sidekick-ai

I’d love feedback from the HN community:

What features matter most to you in an offline AI coding assistant?

Any optimizations you’d like to see for local inference speed/UX?

Thanks!
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-30 20:03:04+00:00
Are they leaving due to funding issues or are they simply completing their mission of espionage to extract knowledge from the US and bring it back to China? There has been a lot written about Chinese nationals performing espionage through government or corporate or academic positions in the US.

Also what makes this person a “top researcher” as the article claims versus just another academic with funding from NIH? Is this really some big loss or just an advertisement for this Chinese program to attract US researchers, centered around some random individual.
by tguvot | 2025-08-30 20:03:10+00:00
so you support that some people who could be on iranian payroll (written that they also whitewash iran) will create altered version of reality that will influence millions of people ?

it's not about pendulum swinging, it's about state sponsored misinformation campaigns.

this kind of stuff essentially make wikipedia useless. probably you okay with it as long as "pendulum swings"
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-30 20:04:03+00:00
IQ does actually measure quite widely, but only one of many parts (the visual pattern matching part) is widely know outside of academic use. But even then it should not be used for hiring or intelligence scoring people against one-another.

If you actually want to test people for hiring, using domain specific interview questions and tests is a-lot more reasonable and usefully correlated with real-world job performance.
Show HN: I built a free worldwide holiday and disruption tracker
by reverseblade2 | 2025-08-30 20:04:14+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the creator of Alarms.Global, a free tool I built while working in logistics. I was constantly juggling scattered holiday calendars and scanning local news to figure out why shipments were delayed.

What it does: Tracks public holidays in 190+ countries (so you know when offices, ports, and customs are closed) Aggregates real-time transport disruptions (strikes, port congestion, weather issues, etc.) Shows everything on a filterable world map

Works in 14 languages The idea was to create a single open platform to see what might stop goods from moving today. Tech: It’s built with F#/.NET on the backend, Qdrant for vector search, GDELT + custom feeds for disruptions, and Leaflet.js/MapTiler for the map UI. I kept it lightweight to be fast and browser-friendly.

It’s still early some features are in progress but the core is live. I’d love feedback: What disruption sources would you want added? Anything confusing in the interface?

Try it here: https://alarms.global
by bigyabai | 2025-08-30 20:04:26+00:00
It's surprisingly common, if you ask around. I owned a Mac for a few years, daily drove it, and the first-party advertising eventually pushed me over the edge to GNOME. Been using Linux for ~6 years now, every time I log onto a Mac the issue is only worse.

You might not be able to conceptualize this being an issue. Half the Mac owners I've known in my life eventually left MacOS over an arbitrary software default that impeded their workflow.
by maxbond | 2025-08-30 20:04:40+00:00
I don't disagree but I do wonder if a.) discoverability is really so intractable in a decentralized environment if you're willing to throw a lot of resources towards indexing and b.) if that middle ground isn't like balancing a pendulum upside down - a very fragile equilibrium. A bunch of decentralized units might join together, or a large centralized unit might fail, pushing the pendulum to either side.

You can think of the golden age of blogs and search as an example of both. Search engines formed a centralized hub with blogs, forums, etc. forming the spokes. For a while that worked well before it was degraded by spam and consolidation of disparate forums etc. into a handful of major platforms (fueled partly be acquisitions).
by Bender | 2025-08-30 20:04:40+00:00
For smaller semi-private circles IRC especially with web front-ends that provide scroll-back are still great but in my experience when they get too big there is just too much politics and too many cultural differences and things start to fall apart much like agilob's example. IRC is still great for groups of like minded people that do not need to bring in the entire world into their tent. In the early internet more people were like or similar minded and so it worked well for the most part. Some would even argue it still works great for the general public but I am not so sure. Keeping web interfaces semi-private with simple-auth and disabling referrers reduces the risk of botters, agent provocateurs and other forms of riff raff trying to sow division among people, or third party AI bots snooping or arguing.

NNTP is also great but most people can not afford individually to mirror entire binary groups and most ISP's no longer perform this so most people just use commercial news feeds if they want binaries or one of the free NNTP / Usenet providers if they are just using text. People can certainly peer with some of the free providers [1] and probably should to reduce the risk of people being censored. Much like IRC people can create their own little private or semi-private linked NNTP servers to replicate a distributed thread based forum of sorts.

[1] - https://www.eternal-september.org/index.php?showpage=peering
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-08-30 20:05:02+00:00
The problem's cause really is about _who_ has to pay for the traffic, and currently that's the hosting end. If you turn that model around, suddenly AI web scrapers have to behave and all the issues that we currently have are kind of solved(?), because there is no incentive to scrape datasets anymore that were put together by others, and there automatically will be a payment incentive instead to buy high-quality datasets.
by rayiner | 2025-08-30 20:05:11+00:00
EDIT: I wrote a bunch of stuff, but realized Glenn Loury said it a thousand times better: https://x.com/nashvilletea/status/1961683711511969904?s=46. Watch to the very end: “You will not be equal at the end of that argument, even if you get what you ask for.” I almost felt bad for Harris after the election. It became obvious how few people actually respected her as a leader. They installed her as a generic “woman of color” because it made them feel good and like they were achieving a milestone in the “arc of history.” It’s pitiable, not admirable.

I raise my kids the way my dad raised me—and how white elites raise their own kids, in contrast to how they see brown kids: to always have an internal locus of control, never make excuses, and never demand society’s protection or accommodation.
Ask HN: Is building a Google Maps alternative from scratch bad idea?
by piratesAndSons | 2025-08-30 20:05:31+00:00
want to build a Google Maps alternative from scratch. I’ll start with one city, focusing on the downtown area, and then expand from there. I know there are open-source versions available, but I want to build this map for a specific use case.

On a scale of 1 (a stupid idea) to 10 (a great idea), where would this fall?
by jama211 | 2025-08-30 20:06:10+00:00
Precisely. Also people underestimate the power of mort code. The world runs on it, and besides, at the end of the day unless you are an executive or own significant stock in the company, making decisions about speed/outcome vs tech debt actually isn’t your job IMO. Give your opinions and advice but at the end of the day build what they ask you to in the manner they’re happy for you to build it - if they demand speed over quality that’s on them.

And you can improve everything with a system. A team of morts forced into a framework where testers/qa/code review find and make them fix the problems along the way before the product is shipped is an incredibly powerful thing to behold.
by physidev | 2025-08-30 20:06:35+00:00
I think the viewpoint articulated in this post fits quite well with the one expressed in the often-shared "Programming as Theory-building" article (I think it was shared here just a few days ago).

Scientists, mathematicians, and software engineers are all really doing similar things: they want to understand something, be it a physical system, an abstract mathematical object, or a computer program. Then, they use some sort of language to describe that understanding, be it casual speech, formal mathematical rigor, scientific jargon -- or even code.

In fact, thinking about it, the code specifying a program is just a human-readable description (or "theory", perhaps) of the behavior of that program, precise and rigorous enough that a computer can convert the understanding embodied in that code into that actual behavior. But, crucially, it's human readable: the reason we don't program in machine code is to maximize our and other people's understanding of what exactly the program (or system) does.

From this perspective, when we write code, articles, etc., we should be highly focused on whether our intended audience would even understand what we are writing (at least, in the way that we, the writer, seem to). Thinking about cognitive load seems to be good, because it recognizes this ultimate objective. On the other hand, principles like DRY -- at least when divorced from their original context -- don't seem to implicitly recognize this goal, which is why they can seem unsatisfactory (to me at least). Why shouldn't I repeat myself? Sometimes it is better to repeat myself!? When should I repeat myself??

If you want to see an example of a fabulous mathematician expressing the same ideas in his field (with much better understanding and clarity than I could ever hope to achieve), I highly recommend Bill Thurston's article "On proof and progress in mathematics" <https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236>.
by Eduard | 2025-08-30 20:06:42+00:00
Hacker News is the kind of place where you can have _this_ submission (PRC-sponsored Tencent-owned network devkit) on the front page next to a submission about how PRC-sponsored cybercrime group Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45074157
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-30 20:06:51+00:00
In my mind his work was the best of the 1980s and that's a decade that produced some pretty powerful stuff like Ender's Game and Forge of God. Vinge coined the term "The Singularity" which is now almost a given to be a future event in some circles. His then wife also wrote some pretty good sci-fi such as The Outcasts of Heaven Belt I liked Vernor's A Fire Upon the Deep a lot but not his later books.
by andix | 2025-08-30 20:07:13+00:00
> a lot of (software) engineering wisdom and best practices fails in the face of business requirements

They fail on reality. A lot of those "best" practices assume, that someone understands the problem and knows what needs to be built. But that's never true. Building software is always an evolutionary process, it needs to change until it's right.

Try to build an side project, that doesn't accept any external requirements, just your ideas. You will see that even your own ideas and requirements shift over time, a year (or two) later your original assumptions won't be correct anymore.
by ghusto | 2025-08-30 20:07:18+00:00
I'm fairly sure this was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

There's a fair amount of arse-hatery in MacOS that by itself won't make you switch, but I can easily imagine it mounting up past intolerability. In fact, I don't need to imagine it, because I'm nearly there.

The iPhone is even worse, because at least on MacOS I can fix most the design decisions via secret settings in the terminal.
by MrJohz | 2025-08-30 20:08:04+00:00
I mean, you get to decide what the unit is. I think this is one of the biggest issues with Java and some similar languages, in that it puts so much emphasis on classes (each class gets its own file and is the unit of import) that people used to Java think of classes as _the_ unit boundary, as opposed to being one type of boundary that can sometimes be useful.

So `BankAccount` as a class is probably a useful unit boundary: once you've designed the class, you're probably not going to change the interface much, except for possibly adding new methods occasionally. You have a stable boundary there, where in theory you could completely rewrite the internals of the class but the external boundary will stay the same.

`FooSystemFrobnicatorPreparer` sounds much more like an internal detail of some other system, I agree, and its interface could easily be rewritten or the class removed entirely if we decide to prepare our frobnication in a different way. But in that case, maybe the `foo.system.frobnicator` package is the unit we want to test as a whole, rather than one specific internal class inside that package.

I think a lot of good test and system design is finding these natural fault lines where it's possible to create a relatively stable interface that can hide internal implementation details.
by sho_hn | 2025-08-30 20:08:27+00:00
Star Trek went into this a bit. There was an episode in which the technology behind the android Data's artificial brain had been turned into a medical treatment used to prolong the life of a recurring character who got injured, and the ethical question of the subplot was roughly "how much of their brain can you subsitute with functional but essentially generic hardware before they cease to be themselves, making the rescue attempt fruitless".

Most people will probably not remember this - it was the death of Kira's lover Bareil on DS9 - because it was almost throwaway, but it was one of those sparkling little ideas and questions Star Trek used to be filled with that has stayed with me life-long.
by omgwtfbyobbq | 2025-08-30 20:09:16+00:00
Part of the problem is that a BA/BSA who writes Python, SQL, etc... as part of their day to day work will get lumped with those who don't and their salary doesn't reflect their skills and work product.

Obviously the same can apply in any given title, and does with data engineers like you pointed out, but it's not as simple as just title inflation.
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2025-08-30 20:09:24+00:00
People are nailing it here -- it's not the "OS" per se (heck, look at CP/M or original unix and this gives you a floor) -- it's the drivers and the required Standard Pieces: DMA, memory protection, TCP/IP, BLE, WiFi, Ethernet, GPU, USB (+ vast USB drivers), etc. Lotta 'standard' software must work on any new OS + drivers for all that hardware that is always changing. Great 'fun' .... Now, I do think Minix had a chance for a very short window, but lack of resources made sure it's now only an OS history footnote. All because a microkernel sucks 3% performance away from monolithic kernels. We are confused as an Industry... Performance uber alles -- that has just GOT to get fixed. Security; maintainability; simplicity > performance; or rather, those are worth some performance degradation.
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-30 20:09:26+00:00
Agree.

I don't think people realize the stats based on studies:

Unit testing catches about 30% of bugs

Visual code inspection catches about 70%

End to end testing also catches about 70%

All are important, but emphasis should be on the more effective methods.

> We’ve had decades of thought leadership around testing

I really disagree that this is the case that the industry has had thought leadership. I think we've had people pushing automated unit testing very hard when end to end is more effective. I don't think the position was based on facts but more of a few people's opinion.
by merelysounds | 2025-08-30 20:10:03+00:00
For iPhone users, the last point in the article’s FAQ addresses iOS; excerpt below:

> No evidence of abuse has been observed in iOS browsers and apps that we tested. That said, similar data sharing between iOS browsers and native apps is technically possible. (…) It is possible that technical and policy restrictions for running native apps in the background may explain why iOS users were not targeted by these trackers.
by themafia | 2025-08-30 20:10:42+00:00
> You can't fly anonymously and, as far back as I can remember, never could.

This is only true for commercial flights. If you charter a plane you can be as anonymous as you like.

> But he already knew who you were before you signed a lease

Add a single third party, like the police to this mix, and the problem should become apparent. Whether or not my landlord has access to this information is one problem, who they can share it and how they share it is another.
by lyu07282 | 2025-08-30 20:10:43+00:00
> So why mediate using these tools through an IDE (over a new protocol) rather than just using the tools directly through the command line or mcp

The IDE is in-between because it asks the user for confirmation before doing anything, if that's what you are asking. It's not adding any indirection or something, this is just how coding agents talk to the IDE already, all this does is standardize the language they speak which would be a win for everybody.
by simion314 | 2025-08-30 20:12:41+00:00
I do not see this Apple fanboys asking Apple to remove the camera and microphone features in their OSX operating system. They have many stories about grandma getting tricked to sideload soem evil app from Facebook but somehow same grandma does never get tricked to share her microphone, camera or screen. So I concluded that it is all their minds creating a narative to feel better about them getting screwed by Apple (we all have this problem where we invent some reason to justify some decision we did but in this case is a big mob)
by ghusto | 2025-08-30 20:13:09+00:00
If I clicked download on some screensavers, I would never think it had downloaded _4K@240FPS resulting in 47 GB of lost disk space!_ The fact that a big warning doesn't come up with this fact makes it even less excusable.

It's like if I went to the dentist for a filling and received a bill for 1k because "you know, those titanium fillings are expensive". Who asked you for titanium you lunatic?!
by ajb | 2025-08-30 20:13:38+00:00
Definitely not saying that the problems are all on one side here. Agreed that going on the attack was bad (as well as dumb).

I just think that while, yes, the kernel folks have tried to explain, they didn't explain well. The "why" of it is a people thing. Linus needs to be able to trust that people he's delegated some authority will respect its limits. The maintainers need to be able to trust that each other maintainer will respect the area that they have been delegated authority over. I think that Kent genuinely doesn't get this.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-30 20:15:09+00:00
It’d be difficult to make work reliably on iOS due to how it handles background processes. Processes can’t just hang around forever, they’re expected to quickly and efficiently finish their task and close until their next scheduled run (which is determined by the system — devs can request to run whenever they want, but processes that are badly behaved get downranked and run less often). If its task is taking too long the system unceremoniously kills the process.

This is limiting and makes implementing programs like Syncthing more challenging but also helps keep the battery eaters and eternal listeners until control.
by computerdork | 2025-08-30 20:15:31+00:00
I like the digital note-taking tools, Evernote and Onenote - actually, used to use Evernote, but it started slowing down after my notebooks became too large, so switched to Onenote.

And eventhough Onenote is MS product and Evernote was the original that OneNote copied off of, OneNote is a better engineered piece of software (I have tons of notes and a few of them very large documents), and Onenote rarely has problems.