MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dokyun | 2025-08-21 01:26:54+00:00
> it should be possible to run completely independent atproto networks today

But does anyone do it? It doesn't really matter if it's /theoretically possible/ if no one actually does it.

Running an ActivityPub server is piss easy, anyone can do it on a $5 VPS or in their basement, and that's one of its big strengths.
by oehpr | 2025-08-21 01:27:42+00:00
Just some food for thought: I was recently brainstorming ideas for building a more decentralized moderation system, and one of the ideas I arrived at was using the rules themselves as part of the flagging system.

It would work like this: When you flag a post for breaking the rules, the community's guidelines will pop up. You are then asked in this window to highlight the relevant section or sections of those rules that this post has violated. And I don't mean just "select which rule was violated", I mean "use your cursor and highlight the text of the rules that were violated." (with support for highlighting multiple sections if so desired).

This serves the following functions:

1. Communicates why something was flagged (obviously).

2. Forces the person who's flagging the submission to actually read the rules.

3. The subjectivity of the highlighting system is used to make Sybil attacks more obvious. I'll explain why after this list.

4. It differentiates flagging from downvoting. Downvoting is for saying "I don't like this". Flagging is for saying "This violates our community's rules".

As to why this helps reveal Sybil attacks: There are several subjective points on what, where, and how people will highlight rules. Should punctuation be included or not? Should the key word in the rule be highlighted? The key sentence? The whole section? What about examples? Should we include them? Or only highlight them? Users operating in good faith will cluster around common points in common areas, but will have different ways of doing so. So, if a block of users all have: the same input, in the same way, clustered around the same time, then it was likely a Sybil attack.

This system doesn't require that it de-anonymize the people who submit flags, but it does provide a form of publicly visible transparency as to why something was flagged.

Edit: I forgot to make clear, you would be able to see a heat map of the rules that were highlighted for a flagged post.

I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on this idea.
by jemiluv8 | 2025-08-21 01:27:53+00:00
I'm not particularly attached to this position. I just don't believe in a world where interests don't collide and often the person doing more should probably have a better say in things. If we built the product, we get to dictate some of these privacy features by default.

But giving users an escape hatch is something that people take for granted. I'd understand all these furor if there was no such thing.

Besides, I reckon Zed took a lot of resources to build and maintain. Help them recoup their investment
by rerdavies | 2025-08-21 01:30:24+00:00
Pretty sure that was 25 years ago, not 10 years ago. And then, 20 years ago, we were coming to terms with the fact that all of that stuff was a spectacular failure. And then, 15 year ago, we had found much better ways to do things.

I don't miss that phase of the evolution of software development practice at all.
by foxfired | 2025-08-21 01:30:26+00:00
I used a similar metaphor in the past referencing "They Machine Stops" [0] by E.M. Forster. Yes, in the near future, we will still be able to read code and figure out what it does. I work on legacy code all the time.

But in the long term, when experienced developers actually feel comfortable letting LLMs write large swats of code, or when the machine no longer needs to generate human readable code, then we will start forgetting how it works.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909111
by marcus_holmes | 2025-08-21 01:30:41+00:00
How does this work, though?

We can't just have "send me a picture of your ID" because that is pointlessly easy to spoof - just copy someone else's ID.

So there must be some verification that you, the person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies. The UK is rapidly finding out that that is extremely difficult to do reliably. Video doesn't really work reliably on all cases, and still images are too easily spoofed. It's not really surprising, though, because identifying humans reliably is hard even for humans.

If we do it at the network level - like assigning a government-issued network connection to a specific individual, so the system knows that any traffic from a given IP address belongs to that specific individual. There are obvious problems with this model, not least that IP addresses were never designed for this, and spoofing an IP becomes identity theft.

We also do need bot access for things, so there must be some method of granting access to bots.

I think that to make this work, we'd need to re-architect the internet from the ground up. To get there, I don't think we can start from here.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-08-21 01:31:06+00:00
> The term of art for these systems is "content protection", which is what I think Anubis actually wants to be, but really isn't (yet?).

No, that's missing the point. Anubis is effectively a DDoS protection system, all the talking about AI bots comes from the fact that the latest wave of DDoS attacks was initiated by AI scrapers, whether intentionally or not.

If these bots would clone git repos instead of unleashing the hordes of dumbest bots on Earth pretending to be thousands and thousands of users browsing through git blame web UI, there would be no need for Anubis.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-08-21 01:33:06+00:00
Surely you understand that the word socialism means a lot of different things to different people?

You argument is that this is "just generally bad"? Or somehow a socialist mayor will be the downfall of western civilization or something? It seems like if his policies are bad, he won't be reelected and you'll have a more succinct example to point to than "all of human history". The great thing about a mayor is that they have very limited ability to impact civil rights, Giuliani notwithstanding.
by em-bee | 2025-08-21 01:33:30+00:00
I think you also don't really need to set the default namespace to xhtml

you are right. i removed it, and it works. typical "copy from stackoverflow" error. these namespaces are a mystery and not intuitive at all. i suppose most people don't notice that because it only applies to xml data within the stylesheet. most people won't have that so they won't notice an issue. the less the better.

for the other error, my mistake, duh! in my original example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961352 i am comparing $current/@name to a hardcoded value, so if i want to keep that comparison i have to add that value to the nav-menu data. or use a value that's already in there.

i went with adding a name="about" attribute to the nav-menu because it keeps the documents cleaner: <document name="about"> just looks better, and it also allows me to treat it like an ID that doesn't have to match the URL which allows renaming/moving documents around without having to change the content. (they might go from about.xhtml to about/index.xhtml for example)

i am also probably going to use the document() function instead of exsl:node-set() because having the menu data in a separate file in this case is also easier to manage. it's good to know about that option though. being able to iterate over some local data is a really useful feature. i'll keep that around as an example.

the final piece of the puzzle was:

<xsl:if test="position() != last()"> | </xsl:if>

to put a separator between the items, but not after.

that sorted, now it all works. thank you again.

btw, it's funny that we are turning hackernews into an xsl support forum. i guess i should write all that up into a post some day.
by patcon | 2025-08-21 01:33:50+00:00
I like the spirit of these, but there are waaaay more. Like you only mentioned the ones for professional and skilled coders who have another option. What about all the sub-examples for people all the way from "technically unskilled" to "baby-step coders". There's a bunch of things they can now just do and get in front of ppl without us.

Going from "thing in my head that I need to pay someone $100/h to try" to "thing a user can literally use in 3 minutes that will make that hypothetical-but-nonexistent $100/h person cry"... like there is way more texture of roles in that territory than your punchy comment gives credit. No one cares is it's maintainable if they now know what's possible, and that matters 1000x more than future maintenance concerns. People spend years working up to this step that someone can now simply jank out* in 3 minutes.

* to jank out. verb. 1. to crank out via vibe-coding, in the sense of productive output.
by johnfn | 2025-08-21 01:33:54+00:00
> Regarding the memory of reasoning from LLMs, I think the issue is that even if you can solve it in the future, you already have code for which you've lost the artifacts associated with the original generation. Overall I find there's a lot of talks (especially in the mainstream media) about AI "always learning" when they don't actually learn new anything until a new model is released.

But this already exists! At work, our code is full of code where the original reasoning for the code is lost. Sometimes someone has forgotten, sometimes the person who wrote it is no longer at the company any more, and so on.

> Correct, but humans writing code don't lead to a Bus Factor of 0, so it's easier to go back, understand what is wrong and address it.

But there are plenty of instances where I work with code that has a bus factor of 0.

The conclusion of your article is that vibe coding is "fundamentally flawed". But every aspect you've described about vibe coding has an analog in normal software engineering, and I don't think you would claim that is "fundamentally flawed".
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-21 01:33:59+00:00
I loved Zed Editor, Infact i was using it all time but being a "programmer", i wanted to extend it with "extensions", it was hard for me to roll out my rust extension, with apis and stuff missing.

I went ahead with Vscode, I had to spend 2 hours to make it look like Zeditor with configs, but i was able to roll out extension in javascript much faster and VScode has lot of APIs available for extensions to consume.
by koolba | 2025-08-21 01:34:11+00:00
> When I review code, I like to pull the source branch locally. Then I soft-reset the code to mere base, so that the code looks as if it was written by me.

This is eerily similar to how I review large changes that do not have a clear set of commits. The real problem is working with people that don’t realize that if you don’t break work down into small self contained units, everybody else is going to have to do it individually. Nobody can honestly say they can review tons of diffs to a ton of files and truly understand what they’ve reviewed.

The whole is more than just the sum of the parts.
by Paradigm2020 | 2025-08-21 01:35:12+00:00
So yeah was interested for a second than checked all the comments user account creation dates... Most in June some in Aug...

I would appreciate if @dang or @tom?? Make a blacklist of all these accounts and/or start making webs of trust etc.

Anyway probably time to start surfing the hn news page of the "classic posters" good thing algolia works again.

To any devs out there that wanna build / are building a news site software with web of trust / vouching to create proof of humanity etc I think the market is gonna be huge soon and would be interested in promoting it.

Eternal September for the whole web seems to be coming...
by pron | 2025-08-21 01:35:41+00:00
What's interesting is that I wouldn't really call any of the things you list software development. With the exception of the "testing starting point", they're mostly about translating from one programming language/API to another. Useful for sure, but not quite "the future of programming". Also, they all sound like the kind of thing that most "basic" models would do well, which means that the "thinking" models are a waste of money.

Finally, the productivity boost is significant from the perspective of the programmer, but I don't know how big it is from the perspective of the employer. Does this significantly shorten time-to-market?
by ben-schaaf | 2025-08-21 01:35:49+00:00
ST developer here. We aren't happy that happened either, it was a big oversight in the ST4 release that made people like yourself lose trust in us. I'm sorry and will do my best to not have something like that happen again.

> Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted.

I'm curious what you don't like about this model? The most common complaint with regards to updates was the long waiting period between major versions, which we've now eliminated, and without changing the perpetual nature of our licenses.
by joeyagreco | 2025-08-21 01:36:51+00:00
Using how GPT-5 generates text within an image is a terrible way to test it.

If you ask it to list all 50 states or all US presidents it does it no problem. Asking it to generate the text of the answer in an image is a piss poor way of testing a language model.

I heavily dislike GPT-5 but at least have a fair review of it.
by bmitc | 2025-08-21 01:37:27+00:00
That is why I gave the whale counterexample in the first place. If you place humans in the ocean with magic to allow them to survive, you will not get technology. If you placed whales on land with dextrous hands, you would very likely get technology.

Our mental faculties are not wholly unique. Look at an orca brain vs a human brain and ask who the smooth brain is, even ignoring the size.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-08-21 01:38:22+00:00
Yes, but a single bot is not a concern. It's the first "D" in DDoS that makes it hard to handle

(and these bots tend to be very, very dumb - which often happens to make them more effective at DDoSing the server, as they're taking the worst and the most expensive ways to scrape content that's openly available more efficiently elsewhere)
by shortsr | 2025-08-21 01:38:26+00:00
If you've ever had to share a huge, confusing link on WhatsApp, Instagram, or email, you've probably realized it's not practical at all. That's where link shorteners come in—tools that transform long URLs into short versions that are easy to remember and click.

In 2025, there are several options on the market, each with different features. In this guide, you will get to know the best free link shorteners in 2025, understand their advantages, and discover which one best fits your needs.

What is a link shortener? A link shortener is a tool that converts a long URL into a shorter, easy-to-share, and often customizable address. Besides convenience, many services offer statistics, such as the number of clicks, traffic source, and devices used.

Best free link shorteners in 2025 1. Bitly Pros: Simple interface, customizable links, detailed statistics. Cons: Free version has limitations on reports. Ideal for: Small businesses and creators who want to monitor clicks. 2. TinyURL Pros: Extremely simple, no registration required, unlimited links. Cons: Few extra features, no complete reports. Ideal for: Users who just want to shorten links quickly. 3. Rebrandly Pros: Allows using custom domains, branded links, good app integration. Cons: Free version is limited in the number of custom links. Ideal for: Companies that want to reinforce their brand in the links. 4. BL.INK Pros: Advanced statistics, integration with marketing tools. Cons: Focus on paid plans, free version is very limited. Ideal for: Marketing teams and companies that need detailed reports. 5. Shortsr Pros: Fast, free, with real-time statistics. Cons: Growing, but already functional for daily use. Ideal for: Those looking for a simple and reliable alternative for 2025. Conclusion If your goal is just to shorten links quickly, TinyURL is still a good choice. For those who want detailed statistics and custom links, Bitly and Rebrandly are interesting options.

And if you're looking for practicality with modern features, it's worth trying Shortsr, which combines simplicity and updated technology for 2025.

Extra tip: Use short links on social media, marketing campaigns, and even digital business cards. They not only improve the user experience but also help measure the real impact of each click.
by Max-Limelihood | 2025-08-21 01:39:11+00:00
>Chrome telemetry underreports a lot of use cases Sure; in that case, I would suggest to the people with those use cases that they should stop switching off telemetry. Everyone on HN seems to forget telemetry isn't there for shits and giggles, it's there to help improve a product. If you refuse to help improve the product, don't expect a company to improve the product for you, for free.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-21 01:39:47+00:00
Why can’t you build this by yourself? Even pre-LLM, a halfway decent mid level developer could do this by themselves 3 months. This could definitely be vibe coded in less time.

What exactly do you bring to the table? Do you have relationships with people in the music industry? Relationships with VCs?

The fact that you couldn’t find anyone in the industry you’re targeting to give you angel funding is telling.
by Gigachad | 2025-08-21 01:39:55+00:00
I live in the suburbs, not really any high rises around be but some townhouses, I can “see” 180 nodes, but I can’t reliably message my friend 1km away. I get a lot of messages on the public chat but if I send one it’s a 50/50 if it will be acknowledged by any nodes.

I tried it while staying in a high rise hotel and the experience was great. Instant acknowledgement and super reliable communication
by xenotux | 2025-08-21 01:40:00+00:00
Eh? With the "anonymous" models that we're pushing for right now, nothing stops you from handing over your verification token (or the control of your browser) to a robot for a fee. The token issued by the verifier just says "yep, that's an adult human", not "this is John Doe, living at 123 Main St, Somewhere, USA". If it's burned, you can get a new one.

If we move to a model where the token is permanently tied to your identity, there might be an incentive for you not to risk your token being added to a blocklist. But there's no shortage of people who need a bit of extra cash and for whom it's not a bad trade. So there will be a nearly-endless supply of "burner" tokens for use by trolls, scammers, evil crawlers, etc.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-08-21 01:40:35+00:00
Now that Microsoft's role has become apparent, and which has had a significantly larger impact compared to Sequoia's inaction, why do developers continue to use Github? There are several alternatives which provide equivalent features. Why is this type of inaction not condemned?

Furthermore, if accepting funding in this manner is considered a violation of their CoC, then surely the use of Github is even more of a violation. Why wasn't that brought up earlier instead of not at all?

And finally, ycombinator itself has members of its board who have publicly supported Israel. Why are you still using this site?

Turns out when you try to tar by association, everybody is guilty.
by chasil | 2025-08-21 01:41:13+00:00
After looking at it, there are many things that I do not like about Graphene, and many ways that it tries hard not to be likable.

Beyond the monochrome icon pack that cannot be changed in the included launcher (which is so aesthetically challenged with an appearance that only a mother could love), the browser that cannot grasp dark mode, and the lack of the accustomed pattern unlock, I find the lack of one singular thing intolerable:

I want root. At a minimum, adb rooted debugging.

I realize that I could unlock the bootloader and Magisk this thing, but with the number of correct decisions that have been made by the authors of this operating system (and they are legion), they do not recognize one fundamental need of administrators:

I want control of my systems.

That is really a shame.
by oehpr | 2025-08-21 01:42:11+00:00
Well... Yah. For the record I'm saying this to trick humans into making better comments for humans. It is very difficult to convince people to do this otherwise, in my experience.

buuut...

I will also mention that these agent files are typically generated by agents. And they're pretty good at it. I've previously used agents to dissect unfamiliar code bases in unfamiliar languages and it has worked spectacularly well. Far far FAR better than I could have done on my own.

I have also been shocked at how dumb they can be. They are uselessly stupid at their worst, but brilliant at their best.
by arpinum | 2025-08-21 01:42:35+00:00
I think there is some nuance needed here. If you ask support to partition your bucket then they will be a bit annoying if you ask for specific partition points and the first part of the prefix is not randomised. They tried to push me to refactor the bucket first to randomise the beginning of the prefix, but eventually they did it.

The auto partitioning is different. It can isolate hot prefixes on its own and can intelligently pick the partition points. Problem is the process is slow and you can be throttled for more than a day before it kicks in.
by userbinator | 2025-08-21 01:43:23+00:00
As I've been saying for a while now - if you want to filter for only humans, ask questions only a human can easily answer; counting the number of letters in a word seems to be a good way to filter out LLMs, for example. Yes, that can be relatively easily gotten around, just like Anubis, but with the benefit that it doesn't filter out humans and has absolutely minimal system requirements (a browser that can submit HTML forms), possibly even less than the site itself.

There are forums which ask domain-specific questions as a CAPTCHA upon attempting to register an account, and as someone who has employed such a method, it is very effective. (Example: what nominal diameter is the intake valve stem on a 1954 Buick Nailhead?)
by zoom6628 | 2025-08-21 01:43:30+00:00
My work is primarily market strategy and product ideation. I do this in obsidian. Generally have a top level canvas and linked documents.

All the usual obsidian goodies work as expected.

I do like this app though. Great tool for preparing presentations to explain things and probably also great whiteboarding tool (company uses figma for that and it is beyond annoying!).
by NDxTreme | 2025-08-21 01:44:56+00:00
The emacs everywhere package and a browser extension allow you to edit text live in the browser from emacs, every keystroke, copy/paste etc is mirrored in the browser.

I haven't used terra.bio, but this works for any text box, so should just work.

Of course, emacs has modes for Jupiter and other notebooks, as well a Org Mode and a way to run code from Org Mode to function similarly to such notebooks, just you can execute code in any language, not just python, and can then immediately use the results in the rest of your file, including tables. You can even reference tables in your code blocks.