MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fluoridation | 2025-08-25 21:57:26+00:00
For years I've been buying middle-of-the-road Android phones because they provide pretty good bang for the buck, but if I can't use a computer I paid for however the fuck I want, I'm just going to start getting the cheapest crap I can get away with and use it as little as possible. "Vote with your wallet" doesn't have to mean total abstinence.
by Smalltalker-80 | 2025-08-25 21:57:41+00:00
Hi all, I'm the creator of SmallJS, and was wondering why its GitGub star count had suddenly shot up :-). Feel free to ask me any any questions here. I'll try to respond to some. Here's a short presentation that has fallen off the News page: https://small-js.org/News/Why_SmallJS.pdf
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-25 21:58:04+00:00
>At least most of the world has until 2027 to install LineageOS or GrapheneOS.

Which only work on a tiny, almost insignificant sub-set of phones. If you don't have one of those, you're screwed.

Not to mention the bootloader is getting locked down so you can't even install one of these in the first place.
by black3r | 2025-08-25 21:58:30+00:00
> This is such an odd statement. I mean, surely they have to be willing to review the contents of apps at some point (if only to suspend the accounts of developers who are actually producing malware), or else this whole affair does nothing but introduce friction.

Requiring company verification helps against some app pretending to be made by a legitimate institution, e.g. your bank.

Requiring public key registration for package name protects against package modification with malware. Typical issue - I want to download an app that's not on available "in my country" - because I'm on a holiday and want to try some local app, but my "play store country" is tied to my credit card and the developer only made it available in his own country thinking it would be useless for foreigners. I usually try to download it from APKMirror. APKMirror tries to do signature verification. But I may not find it on APKMirror but only on some sketchy site. The sketchy site may not do any signature verification so I can't be sure that I downloaded an original unmodified APK instead of the original APK injected with some malware.

Both of these can be done without actually scanning the package contents. They are essentially just equivalents of EV SSL certificates and DANE/TLSA from TLS world.
by greazy | 2025-08-25 21:58:33+00:00
Id argue that the average user is not a good barometer. They are okay with slowly being boiled alive. See windows 11 as a good example.

What's being sacrificed in the name of security is not worth it imo.

Enabling side loading on android is not a standard setting you can flick on. Is there any data on the number of devices who have this enabled and are falling for hacked apps?
by liquidgecka | 2025-08-25 21:58:40+00:00
> > CDUs exchange heat between coolant liquid and the facility-level water supply.

Oh interesting I missed that when I went through in the first pass. (I think I space bared to pass the image and managed to skip the entire paragraph in between the two images so that’s on me.

I was running off an informal discussion I had with a hardware ops person several years ago where he mentioned a push to unify cooling and eliminate thermal transfer points since they were one of the major elements of inefficiency in modern cooling solutions. By missing that as I browsed through it I think I leaned too heavily on my assumptions without realizing it!

Also, not all chips can be liquid cooled so there will always be an element of air cooling so the fans and stuff are still there for the “everything else” cases and I doubt anybody will really eliminate that effectively. The comment you quoted was mostly directed towards the idea that Cray-1 had liquid cooling, it did, but it transferred to air outside of the server which was an extremely common model for most older mainframe setups. It was rare for the heat to be kept liquid along the whole path.
by ianpenney | 2025-08-25 21:58:56+00:00
Between 2006 and 2012 I was in DCs. I didn’t live there but I had to visit at stupid o’clock too often.

It’s not a hospitable place.

I would have loved it if cooling was quieter and less extreme.

The reason interfaces are on the back is that’s the intake side. So, bring a sweater.

Or just go to the other side of the rack to warm your hands back up.
by jmward01 | 2025-08-25 21:59:18+00:00
I think I need to try Cursor. I have held off but the world is changing fast and jumping into a more code assistant first approach may be a good answer. The thing that is driving me crazy in this world though is the 'tab tab tab' view that these approaches have. It is hard enough when predictive text tries to finish the word I am typing much less a whole sentence or code block. It is very hard to think freely when something is whispering in your ear what you should say next.

I am very hesitant to look at VSCode. I have strong push back against Microsoft related tools (related, best alternative to GitHub?) That is mostly on principle now though. I have avoided them so long that I can't honestly comment on their quality anymore. Everything Microsoft though long term seem so to...degrade. It does it in a way that when you finally realize you hate the tool you also realize you should have jumped 2 years ago. They are so good at finding the line where it is just good enough and just barely keeping you there, but not clearly above it.

Thanks for the suggestions!
by aw1621107 | 2025-08-25 21:59:22+00:00
IIRC C++ and Rust don't technically prohibit throwing exceptions out of destructors; it's triggering unwinding during unwinding that's the main problem.

Does make me wonder about the specifics behind that. I had assumed that there are some kind of soundness issues that force that particular approach (e.g., https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/110975, "Any panics while the panic hook is executing will force an immediate abort. This is necessary to avoid potential deadlocks like rustc hangs after ICEing due to memory limit #110771 where a panic happens while holding the backtrace lock."; alternatively, some other kind of soundness issue?), but I don't have the knowledge to say whether this is a fundamental limitation or "just" an implementation quirk that basically got standardized. Rust' first public release was after Java 7, so in principle the precedent was there, for what it's worth.
by bri3d | 2025-08-25 21:59:23+00:00
The parent poster is just either extremely confidently wrong or talking about a very different project from the one in the linked article - here's an article from 2005 with Figure 1 dating from (according to the article) 1965 (!!) showing the same CDU architecture shown in the chipsandcheese article: https://www.electronics-cooling.com/2005/08/liquid-cooling-i...

I do think Google must be doing something right, as their quoted PUE numbers are very strong, but nothing about what's in the linked chipsandcheese article seems groundbreaking at all architecturally, just strong micro-optimization. The article talks a lot about good plate/thermal interface design, good water flow management, use of active flow control valves, and a ton of iteration at scale to find the optimal CDU-to-hardware ratio, but at the end of the day it's the same exact thing in the diagram from 1965.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-25 21:59:26+00:00
This one I presume? https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/new-dictators

Notice the date -- 2016. This has been brewing for a long time, and I will never forgive / forget that the people who recognized it and called it out early [1] were mocked and ridiculed to no end. They were shunned in their professions, called alarmists, and liars. But they were right the whole time, they were just ahead of the curve. If we had just listened to them, this could have all been avoided.

[1] https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... (also from 2016, as far as I know the first person to make the connection between Trump's narcissism and his inevitable attempt to become a dictator. She predicted January 6 five years before it happened just by pattern matching his personality disorder to dictators of the past).
by jraph | 2025-08-25 21:59:28+00:00
Buying closed stuff to show we want an open ecosystem?

At this point, I believe the most effective ways one can help with this is:

(1) advocacy - it's slow and difficult, but having people at least agree / be familiar with the idea that closed stuff is bad is a good first step.

Open ecosystems can't work for the general public if it's trapped in closed networks that won't work on anything else than the two big mobile operating systems, so making people start using open chat apps and such will help a lot. It'll take years, but so be it. It's worth it I think.

(2) helping improve the more open stuff.

I think Linux mobile for instance is a potentially viable alternative in the medium term for at least the basic use cases: Calls, SMS, GPS / Maps, Signal, photos. All this has no reason not to work with some polish. I daily drove Linux mobile 4 years ago for a year. The main thing I'm missing is good hardware for it, and a lot of polish but nothing impossible. Yeah, indeed, no payment with the phone (Google Pay / Apple Pay). But it's still possible to use the physical cards and not use the phone for this.
by hinkley | 2025-08-25 21:59:29+00:00
One of our customers was paying a third party to hit our website with garbage traffic a couple times a week to make sure we were rejecting malformed requests. I was forever tripping over these in Splunk while trying to look for legitimate problems.

We also had a period where we generated bad URLs for a week or two, and the worst part was I think they were on links marked nofollow. Three years later there was a bot still trying to load those pages.

And if you 429 Google’s bots they will reduce your pagerank. That’s straight up extortion from a company that also sells cloud services.

I don’t agree with you about Google being well behaved. They were doing no follow links, and they also are terrible if you’re serving content on vanity URLs. Any throttling they do on one domain name just hits two more.
by cyanydeez | 2025-08-25 21:59:58+00:00
Yeah, basically this is the rise of computer-credit agencies.

Youc an see the zeitgeist forming around corporations wanting to lock out any small unlicensed company from working on phones.

The key is mostly fascism in the guise of "security". Witness stuff like the ICE tracker app. Google would love a way to freeze out both it's appearance on the app store and any developer who'd program similar.
by xp84 | 2025-08-25 22:00:00+00:00
Can confirm that sticking an old iPhone, say, connected to power in your garage to serve as a kiosk device 24/7 will 100% result in the battery swelling up. I had it happen. Now, in my case it didn't cause any harm and I was even able to replace that 5S's battery. But tbh I would not trust an Apple device in a permanently-powered situation for this reason.

Especially since Apple, in their benevolence, software-restricts the technology of the "only charge to 80%" option to only their newest devices (14 series and up, only) so anything older than that will be torturing its battery if left on a charger long-term.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-25 22:00:37+00:00
All Ryzen mobile chips (so far) use a homogeneous core layout. If heat/power consumption is your concern, AMD simply hasn't caught up to the Big.little architecture Intel and Apple use.

In terms of performance though, those N4P Ryzen chips have knocked it out of the park for my use-cases. It's a great architecture for desktop/datacenter applications, still.
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-25 22:01:11+00:00
> Back in 1994, they were small enough like a big PC tower,

Back then their model lineup ranged from the small size like you mention to approx 3 or 4 refrigerator size at the high end.

When I did some system work out at Costco in the 90's they had 4 of the largest models connected together in one system image (sysplex I think).
by toast0 | 2025-08-25 22:01:14+00:00
Google also used to show you which apps used Internet permission in Play Store. But they removed it, which makes it harder to notice which apps don't use it.

Google mostly doesn't let you deny permissions while running apps that require them; recently there's some permissions that you can pick at runtime. So it's not suprising that they don't let you deny this one, when they don't even show it in the store.
by nullc | 2025-08-25 22:01:36+00:00
they've been demanding signing keys for apps distributed on the play store for years.

The only credible explanation I can come up with is that they need the keys in order to produce indistinguishably backdoored versions of applications, handy for tools like signal.

Otherwise one would never think of requesting the private keys-- if google wants to rebuild apps themselves they could sign with their own keys and possessing anyone elses private key is just pure liability as if there is any discovered abuse they can't show that they weren't the vector.
by antman | 2025-08-25 22:01:48+00:00
This was probably the reason Nokia died. Symbian development, already cumbersome and app deployment required some such procedure. I remember there was an joint effort in a china based forum and many of us got a cert and a key for our phones. I was reading Nokia obituaries from its executives and the sorry state of Symbian development and app deployment was not considered as a cause. So here it, is young executives repeating a simplistic and destructive strategy. ibm, xerox, nokia and intel will be very proud.
by didibus | 2025-08-25 22:02:08+00:00
For me the difference is that Android is an open-source operating system. It sold itself and differentiated itself to users, developers and phone manufacturers as an open ecosystem built on open-source foundations.

Over the years, it seems Google has been trying to have their cake and eat it too, by basically subsuming others to use Android through this appeal of a more free and open operating system ecosystem, but have tried to slowly close and close it down now that it has won the other half of the market on that promise.

This feels more sly, because it's kind of a bait and switch. Apple never made such claim and was always upfront, so while I don't like it, I never bought into it in the first place for them to have the rug pulled under me after giving them my money as Google might be doing.
by CharlesW | 2025-08-25 22:02:35+00:00
> I spent a fair amount of time on it…

That's a red flag for me if true.

> …just saying "its bad" isn't really helpful feedback.

Not sure if serious, but you can start with these:

• Trademark misuse – Legal exposure, identity confusion, invites takedown

• Gmail contact address – Unprofessional, lacks credibility, signals amateur status

• Anonymous "we" – No trust, no track record, only named person using alt email

• Lovable-generated site – Bad looking, substance-free, designed to farm email addresses
by abraxas | 2025-08-25 22:02:56+00:00
Is my life so boring that this is of no use to me? I don't think I get 30+ emails in a week (various commercial quasi-spam excepted) let alone that many on a 40 minute drive.

I think I represent a typical office employee where I get maybe a dozen emails at work and a few calendar invites. Nothing I can't get through in the first 10 minutes of work in the morning. Usually emails that take time are those that I can't outsource to AI anyway.

Nevertheless congrats on the launch and best of luck.
by abeyer | 2025-08-25 22:02:59+00:00
Even aside from the privacy implications (which aren't trivial themselves,)

Doesn't this make it prohibitively difficult to do local builds of open source projects? It's been a long time since I've done this, but my recollection was that the process to do this was essentially you would build someone else's (the project's) package/namespace up through signing, but sign it locally with your own dev keys. A glance at the docs they've shared makes it sound like the package name essentially gets bound to an identity and you then can't sign it with another key. Am a I misremembering and/or has something changed in this process? Am I missing something?
by afandian | 2025-08-25 22:03:25+00:00
I don’t use any utility apps (identity, banking, services etc) on my phone and stick to the desktop web. And don’t use services that do require me to have a Google or apple account and phone. (Spoiler: I do)

I hope my tiny datapoint shows up in some aggregated stats somewhere.

It’s use-it-or-lose-it.
by jmward01 | 2025-08-25 22:04:15+00:00
I totally preferred the 2024 stuff but it wasn't able to use 3.13+ which is a deal breaker. 2025 has been a horrible experience all around. Their filesystem change detection is broken, debug in async has basically stopped working and the rework of the menus and the git integration nearly made me fallback to 2024 and accept that it could barely use 3.13 venvs. I liked their product. I don't know what is happening but it seems like they have been going in the wrong direction.
by xenotux | 2025-08-25 22:04:22+00:00
I don't think there's anything that would put some new, esoteric math concept in your mailbox every week, although there's plenty of books that cover recreational mathematics in an accessible way (Martin Gardner, Ian Stewart, etc). And for QM articles, I recommend searching the web - you can often find better explanations on some 1999-style blog somewhere.

The problem with this particular article is simple: busy beavers numbers aren't interesting because they're big. They don't break mathematics because of that; you can always say "+1" to get a larger number. There's also nothing particularly notable about Knuth's up-arrow notation, which is essentially a novelty that you're never gonna use. Instead, the numbers are interesting because they have fairly mind-blowing interactions with the theory of computability.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-08-25 22:04:23+00:00
Great for you. What about the normies ? You know the people that protest and make things change, how they are going to organize themselves when their government gets authoritarian and apple/google obeys to governments request to forbid some app. You know like what happened during Hong Kong protest with Apple App Store.

I’m not saying I have a solution but looking at yourself and pretending it’s all fine because you’re 10 times more tech savvy than the average citizen isn’t a viable answer. That kind of issue must be solved by regulation, hopefully Europe gets to bring back on earth whoever at Google agreed on that idea.
by JohnMakin | 2025-08-25 22:04:29+00:00
I disagree with that characterization of the post - merely commenting that a user that could come away with this take has never managed a web-facing service, because you'd immediately see the traffic is immense and constant, especially from crawlers. Sorry if I didn't elaborate that point clearly enough, point taken, I will more carefully craft such responses so such a point isn't misinterpreted or flagged.
by imiric | 2025-08-25 22:04:41+00:00
> Average users benefit greatly from their pocket appliance not being a full fledged computer.

Why, though?

There's certainly no technical reason that a pocket appliance can't be a full fledged computer. The primary reason it isn't is because device manufacturers benefit greatly from having a tight control over their products. This is not unique to mobile devices; we see the same trend of desktop operating systems becoming increasingly user hostile as well.

The claim that these features are in the best interest of users is an inane excuse. Operating systems can certainly give users the freedom to use their devices to their full capabilities, without sacrificing their security or privacy. There are many ways that Google could implement this that doesn't involve being the global authority over which apps users are allowed to install. But, of course, they are in the advertising business, where all data that can be collected, must be collected.
by Smalltalker-80 | 2025-08-25 22:05:13+00:00
The Playground example in SmallJS actually does this a bit. You can compile arbitrary ST expressions within a running web page. Underneath HTML <script> nodes are created. But I didnt think it was worth it to create a fully live IDE. VSCode is very nice and compiling a change takes only a second or two, side effect free. :)
by Havoc | 2025-08-25 22:05:26+00:00
Thanks for the sincere response to my comment that likely came across quite direct.

I do think for critical mass this will need a 3rd party custodian or platform of sorts though. DIY crowdfunding may not be hard to set up legally, but it's still facing the same rug pull risks as other crowdfundings.

To be clear my concern here is structural - not challenging your personal integrity. I'm sure your heart is in the right place

>I want to help power that.

Same - I love the direction. Especially given risk of the big players running away with this and OSS gang being left with no competitive models. Think it would need a bit more guardrails before I drop in cash though
by basitmustafa | 2025-08-25 22:05:38+00:00
Aerospace is great, but macos is not, and unfortunately, there are enough immutable things (given the discussions in the GH issues around them in the Aerospace repo) about macos' walled garden/closed approach that annoyed me/got in my way enough after a few weeks of using it that I have concluded (for myself/my purposes at least) that macos is not tiling/custom WM workable now or in the forseeable future.

How Aerospace (and others) degrade under heavier system load, etc (again, not b/c they are poorly written, but b/c macos inherently does not want these kinds of packages to even exist and makes things very hard to say the least, if not impossible, requiring some very awkward gymnastics) made this incredibly frustrating at the worst possible times.
by sllabres | 2025-08-25 22:06:13+00:00
You are right. I'm not working myself on these systems but they are often still called with their older name here due to the frequent renaming...

Regarding the processor: yes the processor spare is new to the Power11 but features like "Processor Instruction Retry" and "Alternative processor recovery" are older. Here are documents describing the feature for old 8284-22A (S822 with Power8 CPU) [1] or even older 8204-E8A (System Power 550 with Power6 CPU) [2]

[1] https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp5098.pdf (topic 4.3.4 and 4.3.5) [2] https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4404.pdf
by tokioyoyo | 2025-08-25 22:07:11+00:00
> This won't end well for Google or the governments involved when the people get so angry

The amount of people this makes angry is so minuscule that it probably wouldn’t even pass one of those theatrical “sign this petition to get the government to discuss it” thingy. Mind you, the only reason the whole side-loading court cases were going forward is because a giganormous company (Epic) wanted to make more money instead of paying the Google/Apple tax. Not because some people were angry.
by joshmarinacci | 2025-08-25 22:07:20+00:00
Incidentally the size of sockets and screws (including the Allen wrench) is very much a technology. William Sellers pushed standards in the mid 1800s specifically to benefit American industry through interoperability. Standards we still use today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sellers

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3102001