MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latexr | 2025-08-09 11:50:10+00:00
Article is from 2024. Email referenced in title was sent in 1991, August 28, by the crew of the Atlantis space shuttle.

> [T]he message reads, “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,…send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,…we’ll be back!”

It was sent “using a Macintosh Portable and AppleLink software”.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-09 11:50:39+00:00
> Also, now those people affected have no wages.

Nah, most of them are most likely already employed somewhere else at a 25% wage increase.

Note that the unemployment actually didn't spike up according to a different study: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/california-minimum... so that allows us to assume these people got a better wage somewhere else, at only a marginal increase to the consumer.
by t_mann | 2025-08-09 11:50:53+00:00
Great effort, a strong self-hosting community for LLMs is going to be similarly important as the FLOSS movement imho. But right now I feel the bigger bottleneck is on the hardware side rather than software. The amount of fast RAM that you need for decent models (80b+ params) is just not something that's commonly available for consumer hardware right now, not even gaming machines. I heard that Macs (minis) are great for the purpose, but you don't really get them with enough RAM or at prices that don't really qualify as consumer-grade anymore. I've seen people create home clusters (eg using Exo [0]), but I wouldn't really call it practical (single digit token/sec for large models, and the price isn't exactly accessible either). Framework (the modular laptop company) has announced a desktop that can be configured up to 128GB unified RAM, but it's still going to come in at around 2-2.5k depending on your config.

[0] https://github.com/exo-explore/exo
by berkes | 2025-08-09 11:50:59+00:00
Is it not a big deal? Or do customers lack the choice?

If Apple had two lines of smartwatches, one for city/work crowd with the WiFi, Bright screen, NFC, powerful processor etc. but with tiny battery life. And another for hike/off-grid/travel/festival crowd without wifi, a slower, blander screen, slower hardware, less features but over a week)weeks on one charge.

Would people not buy the second option?
by johnyzee | 2025-08-09 11:51:23+00:00
I really want a smartwatch with proper always on screen (so memory LCD, like those COROS ones), but I also need LTE so I don't have to bring my phone on short errands. Unfortunately no such product currently exists for some reason.

The Apples, Galaxies and Pixels offer always-on, but they dim down a lot in order to not drain the power, which kind of defeats the purpose. A memory LCD screen on one of these watches would be perfect for me.
by delusional | 2025-08-09 11:52:14+00:00
> but in theory they need welfare checks now to survive since they probably can't justify anyone paying them $20/hr

Are you implying that there are people in the world who just can't do anything productive enough to be worth $20/hour? That they are so useless that this was the only thing worth doing with them?

That seems fucking insane. If that's true, we have a huge problem with misallocation of value.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-09 11:53:39+00:00
Your vehicle is traveling straight and there's debris in the road in front of you. If you swerve left there's an oncoming vehicle. If you swerve right there's a ditch and a power poll. You're going to hit something no matter what you do. Which is the least bad option?

It's entirely possible some of them are merely paying lip service and don't really believe that it will ever affect them personally. But taking them at their word they accept that they will be impacted one way or another.

I don't happen to agree with them but I still think it's worthwhile to understand other's reasoning. The dismissiveness that's all too common drives dogmatic behavior and polarization.
by ghaff | 2025-08-09 11:53:50+00:00
Yes, people can cheat. In my example, you can mitigate by having them also do a live presentation and ask probing questions about what they've written if that's part of the job.

The coding equivalent would be asking them why they took some specific approach or used a particular algorithm. I'm not sure about my feelings with respect to coding takehomes but there are circumstances where someone doesn't have an openly viewable body of work where takehomes can make sense.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-09 11:53:50+00:00
That's what I have too. I upgraded about 9 months ago from an M1 Max 32 GiB + 1 TiB SSD to 64 GiB + 4 TiB SSD, and donated the old one to a FOSS developer in Europe who can now support macOS. The "new" one is used, but had about 15 cycles on it and 99% battery health... like it was in someone's closet for 3 years.

It's a total waste of money paying zillions for tiny improvements.
by hoppp | 2025-08-09 11:53:59+00:00
Local is important for compliance with GDPR and closed source software

I hate sending my code to openAI or my client's code.

I find local llms to be usable for short snippets but still too slow for a lot of things.

I just spent hours debugging code mistral ai gave me and had multiple errors, rtfm is still most of the times better than relying on an llm
by perihelions | 2025-08-09 11:53:59+00:00
I disagree. It seems clearly better, as a user, to use an uncensored, un-backdoored service based in a foreign country, then a censored/corrupted service controlled by their own country's government. The former meets the user's requirements, today; the "democracy can fix it!" one is an unrealized promise of the future.

If, concrete example, e.g. Kagi doesn't censor or harvest data from or otherwise maltreat its users in any way, then what tangible benefit is it, to the European user, to avoid American-based Kagi, for so-called "sovereignty" reasons? What do they actually need, which is missing, that their democratic government can fix? For this question I'm not counting "other users are using it in a way I don't like"—I'm asking about the user themselves asking on their own behalf.
by shahbaby | 2025-08-09 11:54:06+00:00
As much as I dislike leetcode style interviews, if I fail one of those, I learn what I can and move on.

Failing a take-home is an entirely different thing. It's a huge loss in time and mental energy.

I've only done 3 of those in my career and only because the projects sounded interesting. 1 of those 3 resulted in a job offer which I can now confidently say in hindsight was the worst job in my career (...so far!).

I'm now leaning towards just filtering out companies that do take-homes because it signals to me that they don't care about their candidate's time and how a company treats its candidates is usually a good indicator of how they treat their employees.
by donatj | 2025-08-09 11:55:57+00:00
At my first employer circa 2005 we had a simple 1-2 hour interview and a 90 day probationary period. Respected people's time, gave everyone a fair chance to prove themselves. I don't know why it's not more common in the industry.

Part of what lead to it I think is we hired largely straight out of college and doing a 9-hour interview with someone with little experience is a waste of time.

It worked great. In my five years there we only had a couple people not make it past the probationary period.
by ezst | 2025-08-09 11:56:02+00:00
Clearly, American social platforms are the vehicles to deliver this division, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that the message is being equally engineered and promoted by other powers as well (Russia and China as a bare minimum, from the top of recently documented elections interferences).

That's not to absolve Americans at all, but rather to reinforce the idea that the EU should reign over those platforms in the EU, and/or promote its own.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-09 11:57:06+00:00
That's the wrong solution to the problem, as it means learning a second kernel and all of its stuff and making compatibility shims, whilst still facing the real problem that is not software at all.

The right solution is actually explained the headlined WWW site, where Peter Tribble points out (in the About page and in the Use guide) that the significant constraint is that xe does not own the actual physical hardware to develop against. It's the usual story with small projects: good donated hardware, and developer time (and workspace, and food, and water, and housing, and electricity supply (-:), needed.
by dcminter | 2025-08-09 11:58:31+00:00
> 2) if you have thousands of applicants for a position, and probably a dozen stand out by passing a really tough bar, wouldn’t you want to find those dozen?

It's a reasonable assumption, but you might not. If the role doesn't actually require those skills you might hire someone who's going to get fed up and leave in 3 months or (worse) who invests time in making their job more interesting instead of solving your actual business problems.
by sillyfluke | 2025-08-09 11:58:54+00:00
>Not sure I agree with that. It's a lot better on battery life...

The parent is talking about privacy and your first counter argument is privacy irrelevant battery life?

The tracking and telemetry abundance in native far exceeds the browser. Nevermind a lot of apps remain running in background because the user forgets or can't be bothered to close them.

Follow the money. Why are random companies begging me to download their mobile app and get ridiculous discounts in the process whenever I use their website? Why are weather apps known to be spyware vectors but weather websites don't have that stigma?
by kevindamm | 2025-08-09 11:59:15+00:00
Current search trends, and which results get clicked for which queries, are still intrinsically valuable. Mostly for the search index signals as you mention, and other things like updating recrawl rates, etc.

Even for established players these have value because the index gets stale quickly for certain queries that many people care about a lot. Even though that value isn't fungible, or enough to break even if it were, it's the kind of value that keeps the search engine competitive.
by roland35 | 2025-08-09 11:59:22+00:00
I don't mean to be harsh, but as an engineer you owe it to yourself to try and get better at interviewing. Does it suck? Yeah absolutely. Is it an annoying process? Definitely. But even if you have an easy and stable job things can change quickly at any company. You're only closing doors on yourself.

If you get nervous, the main thing you can do is more interviews. My personal anxiety peaks right before the start time, luckily my bathroom is next door to my office! But after doing dozens of interviews I settle in once it gets rolling.

If you hate leetcode, well just get good at it. Yeah it is kinda dumb but it is straightforward to practice. And there is a lot more to a leetcode interview than knowing tricks - you need to communicate well.

Take homes? Yeah they are time consuming. If you really need a job do them, otherwise pass on the company!

Overall as a candidate you really need to try and go one level up on selling yourself - not just why you are a great candidate (which you are of course!), but why you would succeed at this role in particular.
by delusional | 2025-08-09 11:59:51+00:00
> but the best that can be said is that it has no impact.

You're doing what you disavow here. If it doesn't affect the number of jobs, then it increases the value of that job. If you can sell a carrot for a dollar more, and still sell out of carrots, you have a increased the economic activity without increasing production. The same is true for hours.

This is not about increasing productivity. It's about increasing the share of that productivity that's paid out to workers.
by toast0 | 2025-08-09 12:00:02+00:00
Labor reduction in fast food doesn't necessarily look like 'automation'

It's things like self-ordering, machines that make change (if cash handling still matters), conveyor ovens/charbroilers, more centralized food prep, self-service and automated beverage dispensing.

Plenty of automation is happening outside of California though. Here's an Illinois bases company's blurb about beverage automation [1].

Reducing labor in small amounts increases service capacity, and in large enough capacity lets you operate a restaurant with a smaller minimum crew.

[1] https://dimontegroup.com/projects/cornelius-quick-serve-pro/
by pron | 2025-08-09 12:00:02+00:00
> just another memory unsafe language

Also, treating all languages that don't ensure full memory safety as if they're equally problematic is silly. The reason not ensuring memory safety is bad is because memory unsafety as at the root of some bugs that are both common, dangerous, and hard to catch. Only not all kinds of memory unsafety are equally problematic, Zig does ensure the lack of the the most dangerous kind of unsafety (out-of-bounds access) while making the other kind (use-after-free) easier to find.

That the distinction between "fully memory safe" and "not fully memory safe" is binary is also silly not just because of the above, but because no lanugage, not even Java, is truly "fully memory safe", as programs continue to employ components not written in memory safe languages.

Furthermore, Zig has (or intends to have) novel features (among low-level languages) that help reduce bugs beyond those caused by memory unsafety.
by diggan | 2025-08-09 12:00:33+00:00
> So I would ask for recommendations on similar tools. Not bare Docker containers but fully lanaged platforms wirh one click installs where it is easy to add/remove users.

I've done a similar journey for my self-hosted stuff, started with Sandstorm, moved to Yunohost, but got frustrated with the configuration, and how different every package was and eventually have landed on using NixOS for my home servers. It's not a "fully managed platform" in the traditional sense, but if you're a developer, that's almost what you get. Adding new services is usually just adding the configuration for them.

Bit of a learning curve learning the language, tooling and ecosystem, but once you're over that hurdle, having all declerative configuration in SCM together with easy linking of configuration options together (define service ports once, reference them in other services, for example), and everything being easy to rollback, have been a god-send so far. Been running it for maybe 2 years or something by now, with more or less zero issues besides the ones I introduce myself.

Adding/removing users can be as easy as adding/remove one line of configuration, and redeploying. Simple enough for me and my family so far.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-09 12:02:18+00:00
With due respect, in practice it's essentially the exact opposite of what you're describing.

During the Apollo program any sign of weakness or vulnerability would be a reason to ground an astronaut, very likely permanently. So they regularly concealed absolutely anything and everything that wasn't directly expected or related to the mission. This included various forms of sickness or injuries, space adaption sickness, psychological issues, and more. Alan Shepard even managed to conceal symptoms of what would later turn out to be Meniere's disease.

Aldrin was friggin touring around Antarctica in his 80s where he ended having to get on an emergency evac! It's not exactly a caution first attitude to life. In general the secret to longevity is healthy living, good diet, and a positive outlook on life. Even the Ancient Greeks had countless people living into their 80s and beyond.
Tell HN: Chrome and Spotify dropping support for macOS11
by Kalanos | 2025-08-09 12:02:42+00:00
My 2014 MacBook Pro is locked to macOS 11.7.10

Chrome: "To get future Google chrome updates, you'll need macOS 12 or later"

Spotify: "Your OS is out of date. To enjoy Spotify's latest features, upgrade to a newer version."
Show HN: I made 3 cursed captchas
by getToTheChopin | 2025-08-09 12:03:07+00:00
* level 1: show a banana

* level 2: slice 20 fruits

* level 3: play snake with your head

built with tensorflow, mediapipe computer vision, threejs, vanilla javascript

this project will continue until I have found the most cursed captcha

if you have ideas, please let me know :)
by grues-dinner | 2025-08-09 12:03:51+00:00
> Even ChatGPT 5 confirmed this,

>> why does the gpt-4o api not do this?

> ChatGPT said:

>> Because the GPT-4o API is tuned and delivered in a neutral, low-intrusion style by default.

But how sure are you that GPT-5 even had this data, and if it has it, it's accurate? This isn't information OpenAI has publicly divulged and it's ingested from scraped data, so either OpenAI told it what to say in this case, or it's making it up.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-09 12:04:18+00:00
The author must have lived in a very different 80s than I did. I get the sense that he thinks that the US portrayed in the movies of the time were a reflection of the US is reality in the time. They weren't. They were pure escapism because the reality sucked.

In any case, regardless of how things were then, things are getting even worse now.
by rvnx | 2025-08-09 12:04:27+00:00
The thing is that in practice, if China knows my secret, they can't do much with it, first because I don't criticize China (I don't live there, I don't know there, why then ?), and the second, is that it is a rather isolated world. Unless you speak Chinese, they don't really care about you. So it's in some way "safer" (unless they resell the data to americans or israeli companies for 'advertising' purposes)
by lurking_swe | 2025-08-09 12:05:36+00:00
so who is in charge for organizing repairs/replacement of common area things? Fences, parking lots, elevators, roof, pool, dog park, interior carpets, re-painting walls, etc?

I guess i’m thinking of a condo HOA. Maybe some of that is less relevant in a neighborhood with single family homes?

I do agree some HOAs are awful. But many actually help keep a place from looking shitty and from collapsing like the condo tower in florida a few years ago.
by Amezarak | 2025-08-09 12:05:40+00:00
> which is the primary problem we now face

I am actually really, really confused as to why you think that. That's not at all what the past several years have shown - we've seen over and again again individual Senators (who have more power, of course) and small blocks of Representatives hold things up over and over and over again. It's simply not practically possible to primary most Reps in their own districts because the primary problem isn't money, is that their constituents really do support them and not some nameless figure propped up by national campaign spending. For a party primary, the most important thing is far from getting some sort of national political support. That is not even remotely on the radar. It's garnering the support of the local party (people who actually live there and run the local outlet), local "elites" (politically involved business people, city and county pols, etc), and being someone known in your community - not through ads, but because you've lived there and done something. There are exceptions but this is definitely the rule.

Of course, it's also the case that people often overstate the influence of money in the first place. It's votes that decide the election, not dollars. You can't buy your way into electing somebody that nobody wants to vote for. You can only try to persuade them and encourage them.

> As for the second, I think it is rather clear from history of the early presidency that the Presidency was not trusted nor viewed as being equal to Congress in terms of power.

On the contrary, it is quite clear from the Constitutional Convention that one of their greatest fears was making the executive in any way dependent on the legislative, and the first several Presidents took a very expansive view of Presidential power - the accusation that Adams wanted to be a king was not just wild slander. Of course it is difficult to compare modern times with the past, to some degree - the reach of government in the 1900s increased by orders of magnitude, and the APA in 46 created a sort of shadow Constitution, so the field where people could even imagine the President ordering anything changed.
by sasmithjr | 2025-08-09 12:05:42+00:00
For me, AI code generation for F# has been pretty good! There's one annoying thing Opus/Sonnet do (honestly don't remember what other models do): use old syntax for array indexing.

values.[index] // Old way of indexing required a . values[index] // Supported for awhile now

That's the "biggest" issue I run in to, and it's not that big of a deal to me.

Yesterday, it did try to hallucinate a function that doesn't exist; compilation failed, so the agent changed the function to a fold and everything was hunkey-dorey.
by ghaff | 2025-08-09 12:07:11+00:00
Well, historically, taking a new job often meant relocating which is a big expense for the employer (who typically paid relo for engineering jobs) and is hugely disruptive for the employee. Definitely not just a shrug for everyone concerned if things don't work out after a bit.

Less true in hotbeds for a given industry. But I've had relocation paid twice in my career and it was just a given.
by diggan | 2025-08-09 12:07:37+00:00
> to any values surrounding freedom

The quoted part doesn't say anything about "freedom", are you sure that maybe your perspective (coming from the US I guess?) matches with the values Europeans want?

Personally, I want more of my computing, in every sense, to be closer to me. Ideally in Spain, but OK within EU too, so if there are no search indexes run by EU entities, then that's something we should improve.
by pron | 2025-08-09 12:08:05+00:00
Problem is, like they say the stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions, the Rust compiler stops nine of every five memory safety issues. Put another way, while both Rust and Zig prevent memory safety issues, Zig does it with false negatives while Rust does it with false positives. This is by necessity when using the type system for that job, but it does come at a cost that disqualifies Rust for others...

Nobody knows whether Rust and/or Zig themselves are the future of low-level programming, but I think it's likely that the future of low-level programming is that programmers who prefer one approach would use a Rust-like language, while those who prefer the other approach would use a Zig-like language. It will be intesting to see whether the preferences are evenly split, though, or one of them has a clear majority support.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-09 12:08:49+00:00
You misrepresent my position. The attack you describe isn't the one being discussed here. Unless I've completely misunderstood, the algorithm itself was broken here.

As to the attack you reference. It's active and touchy to pull off. It doesn't particularly concern me but of course would be better if it weren't possible. To that end I'm not clear why there's a double transmission with two distinct and independently usable codes? What am I missing?

I thought the attacker jammed, recorded two user attempts (ie two distinct button clicks, neither being permitted through initially), then rebroadcast the first attempt while retaining the second for later.

> The rx enforces the sequence goes up.

Except that there's apparently a rolling window to support recovering from desync. Which to me sounds more complicated and error prone than a simple nonce that can only ever go up.

Really though the manufacturers ought to (IMO) accept the extra dollar or five on the BoM that it would take to get proper two way communication.
by izzydata | 2025-08-09 12:11:27+00:00
I can see usb-c being convenient for a smartwatch, but for a fitness watch they you are going to wear while hiking, swimming or any type of rugged outdoor activity it is important to not be a hole that can get a bunch of stuff stuck in it. Unlike proprietary cables for smartphones of the past the connector on high end smartwatches aren't there because they are trying to sell you a bunch of expensive cables and accessories that use that port.