MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Cheat-code, a collaborative to-do list
by demegire | 2025-08-20 19:58:58+00:00
I've used all kinds of productivity apps but the best I've used (8 years and going) was a Google Sheet that I maintained with my friends where we would keep our to-do lists. Being able to see each others lists would make us actually complete those tasks in the face of peer pressure and shame. So we decided to make our sheet into a web app so that everyone can use it. It's basically a calendar where you keep a to-do list and your friends can view them. You can also comment on those tasks (it's great for keeping up with friends if you don't use Instagram like me) and get notifications. It's completely free, lmk what you think!
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-20 19:59:04+00:00
>You give politicians far too much credit

I'm not. The goal of all politicians in every country is to manage public opinion so they can keep their seats, it's that simple. And EU politicians they finally realized how important control over internet media and speech is to managing that public option, so they'll seek to control it like the state controls TV broadcasting.

>There is one driving force behind all Chat Control legislation, and it's the U.S.

There's no evidence for this. EU politicians are the ones pushing for this to "save the children" or to "prevent fascism" lol.

>but the real issue is not that they govern too much, it's that they govern too little

Why not both? They govern too much on useless bullshit that hurts the economic competitiveness, and then govern too little on the things we need them for like sustainable policies for welfare, education, housing, immigration, birth rates, etc.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-20 19:59:09+00:00
They'll also make noises about buying money from nuclear plants that will take 10-20 years to build. I'm an advocate for 4G nuclear power development and think it is worth researching, for that matter if we can cost-optimize 3G and 3+G plants that's also a good thing. But just saying you want to buy nuclear electricity without a plan seems daft to me, and that's speaking as somebody who's spoke at conferences about nuclear energy, reads a lot, etc.
by coldpie | 2025-08-20 19:59:12+00:00
Remember soft touch plastics? Grippy and didn't waste all the space of a case? Then some dingleberry marketer decided slippery metals and glass were "premium" and braindead phone reviewers happily parroted that crap and now everyone buys several mm thick cases made of soft touch plastics to cover up the "premium" materials they bought. Sigh.
by xp84 | 2025-08-20 19:59:18+00:00
I don't like Reduce Motion as it still forces you to wait through the half second of delay while it slowly fades things. I just want all animations deleted to avoid delaying the action itself. You used to be able to do this on a jailbroken phone by setting the global animation duration to be like zero or something, but of course Apple basically won the war on us "users" having any control on the devices we buy from them, or should I say, 'license the privilege of using'?
by ranger_danger | 2025-08-20 19:59:20+00:00
I do not see the words "residential" or "proxy" anywhere in that article... or any other text that might imply they are using those things. And personally... I don't trust crimeflare at all. I think they and their MITM-as-a-service has done even more/lasting damage to the global Internet and user privacy in general than all AI/LLMs combined.

However, if this information is accurate... perhaps site owners should allow AI/bot user agents but respond with different content (or maybe a 404?) instead, to try to prevent it from making multiple requests with different UAs.
by lastofthemojito | 2025-08-20 20:00:01+00:00
Very neat! I was confused as to how the possible paths would lead me to France, or if I slightly moved my phone, Brazil. Then I remembered French Guiana - it might be worth adding awareness of things like overseas departments rather than just the parent country.

Also, it reminds me of this HN conversation I found fascinating a few years back: Finding the longest straight line you could sail without hitting land - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965650
by andsoitis | 2025-08-20 20:00:57+00:00
while I would agree in general, there could theoretically be SOME applications where the range of UI controls (and systems) is small enough where it could pay off. But things tend to expand in surface area...

So with that, this presents a HUGE opportunity for someone to build something akin to Zed, but not with the baggage that their technical strategy brings.
by addaon | 2025-08-20 20:01:02+00:00
> …which we know isn't actually chaotic. It's just a path defined by mathematical functions.

I don't know what function is being presented, so I can't speak to whether it demonstrates chaotic behavior -- but the whole /point/ of chaos is that it's an emergent property of deterministic mathematical functions. Perhaps the author meant "random" or "non-deterministic" rather than "chaotic"?
by nikisweeting | 2025-08-20 20:01:29+00:00
Chromium bug tracker is where issues go to die, but aside from that I've had nothing but lovely individual interactions with core chrome devs so far. The devtools frontend/protocol repo is definitely active and more approachable than Chromium itself.

I have not spoken to people that work directly on CDP yet, but I believe we have a call with them soon!
by 101008 | 2025-08-20 20:01:38+00:00
Seems like a great idea but the search is horrible. I tried a few ones and products were completely unrelated, or if related (because of a keyword) completely different from what I wanted. I understand you are working on the dataset, etc., but releasing too early may be bad for you guys. Most people won't try it again if the quality is bad. You have one chance to make an impression.
by benou | 2025-08-20 20:01:43+00:00
Yep, AI scrapers have been breaking our open-source project gerrit instance hosted at Linux Network Foundation.

Why this is the case while web-crawlers have been scrapping the web for the last 30 years is a mystery to me. This should be a solved problem. But it looks like this field is full of wrongly behaving companies with complete disregards toward common goods.
by fsckboy | 2025-08-20 20:01:55+00:00
when it gets past the "intro" slides and into the A-B-C explanation, slide 11 says "A helix is a shape that loops around and around, like a spring." Unfortunately, what is shown is not a helix nor a normal spring, it's just yet another spherical helix progression.

also, the progress dots at the bottom should be toc nav buttons, single stepping backward to find the slide above was torture.

and the derivation of a circle from two sines and a sphere from three, to me should really be separated out as a "pre req" presentation. this thought goes along with the above "hey, where's my helix" thought
by 8organicbits | 2025-08-20 20:02:19+00:00
Email is a great example of this. There's a bunch of complications like the 'to address' not matching the MX record, the MX record being served without DNSSEC, and a history of self-signed certificates. Unless you do something special you're likely transmitting email using TLS without validating the certificate.

This is strictly better than plaintext as a passive eavesdropper cannot listen in; an active attack is needed.

I wrote much more here: https://alexsci.com/blog/is-email-confidential-in-transit-ye...
by xp84 | 2025-08-20 20:02:40+00:00
I agree so much. I get why: "Designers" consider plastic to be low-class, metal is radio-opaque, so that leaves glass as the only option even though it has zero functional advantages over plastic (glass is heavier and more fragile).

Imagine if it was a panel of plastic, and that you could easily replace it if it got too scuffed up.
by hattar | 2025-08-20 20:02:46+00:00
I don't think the iPhone Air will actually be smaller in the dimensions I care about, just thinner which I assume will compromise battery life.

My mini is holding up ok. Battery needs replacing but I haven't done it. Like mikepurvis, I carry power banks around if I'm doing anything where I'm not going to be able to recharge easily. I use one like this https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Magnetic-Slim-B2C/dp/...
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-08-20 20:03:40+00:00
I've written a response below, but the summary is that mapping from Vulkan 1.3 with dynamic rendering to D3D11 is easier than targeting the lower-level D3D12. The latter does have some form of dynamic rendering too, but I suspect the authors woud've had to re-think their CPU code much more than what has currently been done. Getting Windows Vista and 7 support is a freebie.
by phire | 2025-08-20 20:04:28+00:00
As one of those users who migrated away around the time of the "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" incident, that's not what happened at all.

Digg never had much in the way gray/illicit content; The AACS key was only posted because it was newsworthy (and can a 128bit number even be considered illicit?)

There were a bunch of other issues at the time centering around digg power users (like MrBabyMan), and a perceived lack of action/communication from the digg staff. The disconnect had been boiling away under the surface for years.

The much bigger issue that the front page of digg at that time was increasingly just links that hit the front page of reddit 12-24 hours earlier. Users increasingly choosing to cut out the middle man and get their content directly from reddit. And at the same time, many fell in love with reddit's much better commenting system.

The censorship was just the catalyst for it all to finally boil to the surface, and the only news-worthy event to happen around that time. It might have been the final straw for some people, but for most it was tangentially related, at best.
by kevinbuzzard | 2025-08-20 20:04:37+00:00
That is correct, the title is currently misleading (arguably the title of every paper I ever wrote was misleading before I finished the work, I guess, and the work linked to above is unfinished). If you are interested in seeing more details of the proof I'll be following, they are here https://web.stanford.edu/~dkim04/automorphy-lifting/ . This is a Stanford course Taylor gave this year on a "2025 proof of FLT".
by xp84 | 2025-08-20 20:06:03+00:00
I think the EU or the US (one of them) is trying to force Apple to give third parties access to the things Apple Watch has access to, so there might be relief coming for one of those continents (one assumes that the petulant child that is Apple's leadership will, after appealing to the maximum, region-gate any remedy, exactly as they did for third-party app stores in EU).
by dyauspitr | 2025-08-20 20:06:12+00:00
None of those things matter to me. What does matter to me is that to get stuff off my iPhone I have to do a weird sync process and/or use iCloud. Infact, a lot of my issues with the iPhone stem from refusing to use iCloud. Can’t use Apple Pay or FindMy.

For now I use Airdrop to move photos from my iPhone to the computer but it’s very error prone and fails 1/5 times and way more often if you try to do it with more than 30 images/videos. Is this situation better in the Pixel?
by hinkley | 2025-08-20 20:06:25+00:00
Unpowered in a warehouse is a huge latency problem.

For storage especially we now build enough redundancy into systems that we don't have to jump on every fault. That reduces the chance of human error when trying to address it, and pushing the hardware harder during recovery (resilvering, catching up in a distributed concensus system, etc).

When the entire box gets taken out of the rack due to hitting max faults, then you can piece out the machine and recycle parts that are still good.

You could in theory ship them all off to the backend of nowhere, but it seems that Glacier is all the places where AWS data centers are, so it's not that. But Glacier being durable storage, with a low expectation of data out versus data in, they could and probably are cutting the aggregate bandwidth to the bone.

How good do your power backups have to be to power a pure Glacier server room? Can you use much cheaper in-rack switches? Can you use old in-rack switches from the m5i era?

Also most of the use cases they mention involve linear reads, which has its own recipe book for optimization. Including caching just enough of each file on fast media to hide the slow lookup time for the rest of the stream.

Little's Law would absolutely kill you in any other context but we are linear write, orders of magnitude fewer reads here. You have hardware sitting around waiting for a request. "Orders of magnitude" is the space where interesting solutions can live.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-20 20:07:03+00:00
Continents are a social construct. In North American English, we typically divide the Americas into a North and South America. The collective noun for North and South America is the Americas. (Though this remains ambiguous in respect of the Caribbean and Pacific Islands.)

Getting pedantic about calling America America is sort of like insisting on referring to China as Zhonghua. Like, sure. Whatever. But you’re clearly insisting on substituting a substantial discussion with a semantic one.
by buran77 | 2025-08-20 20:07:05+00:00
> I can’t repair a car. My friends would be correct in not trusting me to go under their cars’ hoods unsupervised

What a let down of an answer. Who said anything about "going under the hood"? This is about simply using a device. Unfortunately the control of your phone is shared with a manufacturer or OS developer with shady practices and interests that don't align with yours. You are tasked with operating a device that is more than occasionally actively hostile and subversive towards you, the owner and user.

You probably don't fully understand almost any of the things you will ever interact with in your entire life. When some of those things will betray you I bet you won't find it a matter of your incompetence. Come to think about it, one day you'll realize you lived long enough to screw something up in almost every area you touched.

> who cannot be trusted to understand the device they’re using

In my previous comment I made it crystal clear that this is about using a device and gave concrete examples of dark patterns that would challenge even an expert. And you still misunderstood, and still wrongly assume that it's a matter of "competence". That's a fracture of competence if I've ever seen one.

Like a victim of a robbery in a bad neighborhood showed a fracture of competence by not understanding bad-neighborhood-dynamics.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-20 20:07:09+00:00
> Plenty of writers and programmers also spend a lot of time cutting down and editing what they just wrote - to get sharper prose or more concise and understandable code. Which is NOT something that can be done with a goose quill.

Disagree. At least for prose, I do my best editing that way. (All right, not a goose quill - I use a ballpoint.)

I find it easier to draw a line through some text than to move the cursor to the start, hold down shift while moving to the end, then hitting backspace or delete. I find it easier to move some text from one place to another by drawing an arrow than by selecting the start, shift selecting the end, ctrl-x, move to the destination, then ctrl-c. And so on.

In short, pen and paper break my mental flow less, so I can put more uninterrupted brain onto the actual editing.

Now, sure, after I'm done with the editing, then I have to go to the actual file, find the start of that text to delete, hold down shift while I move to the end, and all that. But I'm not making the edit decisions while I do that.

This is just what works best for me. If it doesn't for you, that's fine. Don't use it.
by nikisweeting | 2025-08-20 20:07:16+00:00
Yeah I started building this in my first week at the company haha: https://github.com/browser-use/desktop

Shipping a whole electron app is not a priority at the moment though, our revenue comes from cloud API users, and there we only need our custom chrome fork, no point messing with electron and extension bridges when we can add custom CDP commands to talk to `chrome.*` APIs directly.
by wahern | 2025-08-20 20:07:20+00:00
> I always have understood that snprintf does not write a null character when the produced string is longer than the given size.

snprintf always null-terminates when the buffer length is greater than 0 and there's no error. That is, if snprintf returns >= 0 and the buffer length is > 0, the output is null-terminated.

This should be clear from your local snprintf(3) man page (e.g. https://man.openbsd.org/snprintf), but also see the C23 standard (https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3220.pdf) and POSIX (https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/).
by qcnguy | 2025-08-20 20:07:38+00:00
Candidates don't matter much. Labour routinely put forward absolute loons and they get elected anyway. The lack of seats in 2024 is because the election was called with three weeks notice and Reform didn't even exist at that point. Getting any MPs at all was remarkable. Since then Labour have messed up so badly that people are saying they will vote Reform without even knowing who the candidates are.
by Animats | 2025-08-20 20:07:46+00:00
> (Why do I do it? For most of them I don't enable JS so the challenge wouldn't pass anyway. For the ones that I do enable JS for, various self-hosted gitlab instances, I don't consent to my electricity being used for this any more than if it was mining Monero or something.)

Hm. If your site is "sticky", can it mine Monero or something in the background?

We need a browser warning: "This site is using your computer heavily in a background task. Do you want to stop that?"
by throw84a747b4 | 2025-08-20 20:07:59+00:00
Why would a company that wants to stop AI crawlers give talks on LLMs and diffusion models at AI conferences?

Why would they use AI art for the first Anubis mascot until GitHub users called out the hypocrisy on the issue tracker?

Why would they use Stable Diffusion art in their blogposts until Mastodon and Bluesky users called them out on it?
by ergsef | 2025-08-20 20:08:21+00:00
3. It's very hard to know what kind of compensation employees are actually getting in an acqui-hire. I've been involved in a few of these - money flows through the cap table, so investors and founders get most of it depending on liquidation preference. Retained employees get a typical, levelled offer + some cash/stock (probably more stock) incentive with the usual 1 year cliff and 3-4 year earn-out. Incentives are also usually contingent on specific business goals.

In other words, the scenarios I've seen if the acquired company is not doing well the acquirer pays off the investors and gives the employees a small bonus contingent on staying for 1+ years and hitting goals. It's not necessarily a crazy windfall.
by pkulak | 2025-08-20 20:08:48+00:00
2/3 of your complaints seem to be down to Apple's insistence that filesystems are silly and should be hidden from users. Unless it's iCloud, then show the user 2 identical filesystems and scatter everything at random between the two. Really, it's a write-only filesystem. Apps will constantly save things there, but god help you if you ever want to find something.
by asadm | 2025-08-20 20:08:52+00:00
I think you and I are having very different experiences with these copilot/agents. So I have questions for you, how do you:

- generate new modules/classes in your projects - integrate module A into module B or entire codebase A into codebase B?

- get someones github project up and running on your machine, do you manually fiddle with cmakes and npms?

- convert an idea or plan.md or a paper into working code?

- Fix flakes, fix test<->code discrepancies or increase coverage etc

If you do all this manually, why?
by xp84 | 2025-08-20 20:09:23+00:00
An underrated question. The answer of course is twofold:

* Paternalism (Apple believes users are too stupid to be trusted to control their devices, and no amount of "I really know what I'm doing" confirmations could change that)

* Apple's biggest fear is being disintermediated by Google or Meta, the way WeChat did to phone manufacturers in China. An ability to side-load an app could allow a foothold for a powerful competitor who could wean you off of all their lock-in features in favor of an experience that would tie into a competing ecosystem.
by k310 | 2025-08-20 20:09:26+00:00
"Breakthroughs" get commoditized. When something new becomes pervasive, people will refuse to pay anything but zero. "But everyone has it."

So, like Apple's "Google is the preferred search site", which is the first thing I undo, any "serious" will be spent by companies providing real products and services and paying some other company to provide them. Give or take some companies, or government agencies, ahem, with internal uses.

Like auto companies paying Tesla for carbon credits.[0]

[0] Tesla's Carbon Credit Revenue Soars to $2.76 Billion (Jan 2025)

https://carboncredits.com/teslas-carbon-credit-revenue-soars...

My opinion.
by cpard | 2025-08-20 20:09:43+00:00
It's great to see content coming from people with real experience of the impact of AI.

The balance between more productivity versus less people is probably something that each team and company has to figure out but there has to be some kind of limit in terms of both.

Would be great to understand more that part, this will make it easier to reason about the longer term impact of AI in the market.
by j1elo | 2025-08-20 20:09:55+00:00
It is Google themselves choosing to prevent GrapheneOS from passing the validation checks required to make GPay work (which is the app that makes the actual payment).

Wallet is there, you can hold digital cards, and transit cards, and your Ikea member card, etc. It's GPay that won't work to do the payment. And it's Google the one being a bully and deliberately making you think like that towards any alternative that's not in their list of approved systems that can be used in your own phone.
by m463 | 2025-08-20 20:10:03+00:00
I can understand point #1

- 99% of people put a case on their phone

- the more thickness you have for the camera (sensor+lens), the better you can make the optical design. (bigger sensor, more range of focus, etc)

- the camera - especially wide angle lens - must be even with surface of case, not below it (otherwise the case occludes the edges of the photo)
by jimmytucson | 2025-08-20 20:10:18+00:00
So if I understand this correctly, this works on a single large document whose size exceeds what you can or want to put into a single context frame for answering a question? It first "indexes" the document by feeding successive "proto-chunks" to an LLM, along with an accumulator, which is like a running table of contents into the document with "sections" that the indexer LLM decides on and summarizes, until the table of contents is complete. (What we're calling "sections" here - these are still "chunks", they're just not a fixed size and are decided on by the indexer at build time?)

Then for the retrieval stage, it presents the table of contents to a "retriever" LLM, which decides which sections are relevant to the question based on the summaries the indexer LLM created. Then for the answer generation stage, it just presents those relevant sections along with the question.

That's pretty clever - does it work with a corpus of documents as well, or just a single large document? Does the "indexer" know the question ahead of time, or is the creation of sections and section summarization supposed to be question-agnostic? What if your table of contents gets too big? Seems like then it just becomes normal RAG, where you have to store the summaries and document-chunk pointers in some vector or lexical database?
by 8organicbits | 2025-08-20 20:10:49+00:00
EFF has a great write up of the 'validation domain CNAME' approach this uses. It's great to see another entry in this space. As great as ACME is, there are still sharp edges we can improve with tricks like this.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-se...