MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by plst | 2025-08-26 08:49:27+00:00
> You'd be surprised at what warnings/permission boxes people will blindly accept when they think they're talking to someone from Microsoft or Google's tech support.

But I know they do, I've seen this first hand. It's lack of education (except for extreme cases of people who cannot take care of themselves. but that's not the majority)

> Agency they don't want and never use. It's taking away agency from people like us but for the average user, Google is taking away nothing they've ever cared about.

It's agency they don't know they want, until it suddenly becomes useful. I'm not expecting everyone to use side-loaded, unapproved apps every day, it's about keeping OS vendors in check, about limiting their power over devices they don't own. If they act against users, there should be a way to circumvent them. Such ideas take that away.

> I was just saying a couple of days ago that we need a service for old people where any transaction above a certain configurable threshold (for example, $500 in a day) has to be approved by an employee of this service who serves as a neutral 3rd party whose sole function is to try to prevent scams.

Enabling such a service is a choice they would have to make. The default is control. The situation with all side loading restrictions is opposite - you don't get to choose.

Unless you are suggesting that such service should be forced on people that match some vague "old" criteria. Our disagreement goes far besides technology in that case.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-26 08:49:47+00:00
Even without a GC actual strings are potentially expensive because each of them is a heap allocation, if you have a small string optimisation you avoid this for small strings (e.g. popular C++ standard library string types can have up to 22 bytes of SSO, the Rust CompactString has 24 bytes) but I wouldn't expect a GC language to have the SSO.
by ang_cire | 2025-08-26 08:51:04+00:00
Because this isn't just a "think of the children" narrative, it's also a "don't you know 4chan has lots of bad people who you personally dislike" narrative.

I would surmise that while 90%+ of guys are porn users, a nearly negligible percent are current or former channers, and most only associate chan sites with fringe groups that took them over.
Show HN: Maia – Open-source framework for testing AI systems before deployment
by radoslaw-sz | 2025-08-26 08:51:40+00:00
I've been working on Maia, an open-source testing framework specifically designed for multi-AI agent systems. With AI deployments becoming more complex and interconnected, traditional testing approaches often fall short when dealing with agent interactions, emergent behaviors, and system-wide reliability. Maia addresses this by providing: - Multi-agent interaction testing - Behavior validation across agent sessions - Assertions of messages - External tools testing - Dashboard for visualization and debugging

The framework is designed to catch issues before they reach production - things like agent coordination failures, unexpected emergent behaviors, or performance bottlenecks that only appear when multiple AI components interact. Would love to get feedback from the HN community, especially from folks dealing with similar challenges in production AI systems. Github: https://github.com/radoslaw-sz/maia
by urlwolf | 2025-08-26 08:51:55+00:00
It's not the case anymore. HN is not reflecting it, but HarmonyOS is very much a 3rd option. Huawei got banned from using Android, and they decided to start a mobile OS from scratch. They are binary compatible with Android, so most apps work straight away. Unless they use play services.

They wrote it from scratch in C++ so they could avoid some of the legacy cruft in Android. And they are getting adoption. It's a major OS in China and in many developing countries (phones with it are cheaper, and it flies on underpowered hardware!)

Before we judge the magnitude of this event (HarmonyOS existing and being successful), let's remember that last time anyone tried to disrupt the duopoly Android-iOS, it was MS, the largest company on earth by market capitalization at the time. And they failed.

Well, it very much looks like Huawei is not failing. We in the west don't see it as much, because propaganda is working well. But last tech conference I attended (GITEX Berlin, if you are wondering), had their app available to download with... 3 logos, not 2. Harmony OS was there. This is a major win for consumers all over the world.

And this being HN, I hope the inevitable comment "but China!" is slightly more informed that the average internet user.
by SideQuark | 2025-08-26 08:52:10+00:00
He confuses two different places there is energy. Light is made (this is a little bit of a cheat) of photons. Each photon has a wavelength λ, and a per photon energy E where E = hc/λ, h is Plank's constant and c is the speed of light constant. So energy and wavelength per photon completely determines each other (and the color of the light of that single photon).

These energies are very small. You can add a lot of photons per second, increasing the brightness of that color, and this now has the energy per second of all those photons. So you can have a lot of red photons which sum to some energy, or a different number of blue photons that sums to (very, very close) the total red energy.

These are the two energies he confuses in those two places.
by goku12 | 2025-08-26 08:53:00+00:00
Direct install isn't true either when you think about package managers like Fdroid, Epic store, etc. They are about as indirect as the official stores. Perhaps you should try 'user loads' for them and something like 'officially blessed loads' for the play and app stores. (I hope the latter is offensive enough to let the users know that it's the corporations in control)
by pmkary | 2025-08-26 08:53:03+00:00
Back when autocompletion and stuff were only available in Visual Studio/Xcode/Other bug IDEs, I was forced to use Ruby and fell in love with it. It didn't matter what I used as my editor was Sublime. But when VSCode came and language features became democratized, I never touched a type-less language again. Why should someone opt for a language with absolutely no features where one can have autocompletion, typechecking, deep data type exploration, jumping to definitions and implementations? I really think it's a bad choice of Ruby not to care for types. And well we now have Crystal which again makes me question why Ruby? And it’s a shame no language is as beautiful as Ruby, not in features choices, design elegance, balance, beauty of the syntax, joy of programming mindset, not even in the name and logo. I wished Matz rethinked this part.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-08-26 08:53:16+00:00
It's the never ending "end"s that bother me about Ruby.

class Mess def chaos(x) if x > 0 [1,2,3].each do |i| case i when 1 if i.odd? puts "odd" else puts "even" end when 2 begin puts "trying" rescue puts "failed" end else puts "other" end end else puts "negative" end end end

Clear away all those ends and the program logic pops out. Much fresher!

class Mess: def chaos(self, x): if x > 0: for i in [1, 2, 3]: match i: case 1: if i % 2 == 1: print("odd") else: print("even") case 2: try: print("trying") except: print("failed") case _: print("other") else: print("negative")
by strogonoff | 2025-08-26 08:53:51+00:00
Is chargeback a hassle? I’d think it’s absolutely in the interest of the developer to be responsive to refund requests because chargeback is so trivial with a credit card.

If anything, a downside of the approach I advocated for would be if too many dissatisfied users just issue a chargeback and not even request a refund. For a developer, high rate of chargebacks can presumably cause issues for billing.
by adornKey | 2025-08-26 08:55:30+00:00
The article skipped a bit on explaining the CIE-XYZ space. Although it is quite simple.

There is one axis Grayscale - that gives you the Brightess value. You can use that for black/white TV.

Now for colour you have 2 dimensions left. For these you pick one axis, where the eye is most sensitive - and perpendicular to that you have one axis, where the eye is least sensitive.

This colour space is the oldest and all axis there make sense. You can easily compare brightness, and you e.g. can assign more bandwidth to the sensitive colour axis if you want.
by account42 | 2025-08-26 08:56:27+00:00
> We already have largely decentralized speech in the US via the internet. And much like how the printing press gave everyone a voice or how radio created Hitler, the internet is the modern age vehicle of populist messaging.

Only if you ignore everything about what got Hitler elected.

"Populists" winning is ALWAYS a result of the status quo being unacceptable to the general population. If the establishment is unwilling to fix that then they deserve to be removed from government. Free flow of information isn't responsible for that.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-26 08:56:48+00:00
> It is very strange the amount of theology that comes solely from Paul's idiosyncratic writings, given that he neither met the prophet in question (Jesus), nor was taught by any of his students (apostles), nor even got along particularly well with any of his students.

It's interesting that every point of this narrative conflicts with the canonical accounts (even excluding the Pauline corpus for this purpose), in which Paul did encounter Jesus, and did at least spend time with (we aren't explicitly told it was spent in study, but presumably it was not exclusively in silent meditation) with disciples of Jesus between the encounter and conversion experience and the start of his ministry, and he got along as well with the other apostles as the other apostles they did with each other.
by omnimus | 2025-08-26 08:57:03+00:00
Macbooks are one of the heaviest laptops you can buy. I think they are doing it for the premium feel - it is extremely sturdy. I recently got some random lenovo YOGA for linux to go along side my macbook and it weighs less, is as thin and even has dedicated gpu - while having 2 user replaceable M.2 slots. It is also very sturdy but not as sturdy Macbooks.

What i am saying is that Apple could for sure fit replaceable drives without any change hit to size or weight. But their Mac strategy is price based on disk size and make repairs expensive so you buy new machine. I don't complain it is the reason why cheapest Macbook Air is the best laptop deal.

But let's stop this marketing story that it's their engineering genius not their market strategy.
by sys_64738 | 2025-08-26 08:57:12+00:00
> I'm 100% on Linux, but I seriously hate it that I can't reliably work at a coffee shop for five hours. Not even doing that much other than some music, coding, and a few compiles of golang code.

Don't you drink any coffee in the coffee shop? I hope you do. But, still, being there for /five/ hours is excessive.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-26 08:57:32+00:00
I was a full-time Rubyist for a long time. I started the UK's first dedicated Ruby on Rails consultancy in 2006 before Rails was even v1.0 (IIRC the first apps I shipped back then were 0.8.6). I stuck around through the hype chain, and then started to help one employer break up a RoR monolith into micro services and adopt Java and Go (this was a mistake - we should have crafted the monolith better). I've built 4 startups as hands-on CTO with Ruby and Rails. It fed and housed me for many years.

In the last 5-7 years I've had to go in other directions. Clojure, Python, Java, even back to C and taking a look at Rust and Zig. I'm now in a role where I don't code so much, but I can see Ruby's problems - performance, the surprises, the fact it allows idiots to do idiotic things (nobody under the age of 40 should be legally allowed to monkey patch a base class or engage in meta programming).

And yet when I want to do something for me, for fun, perhaps advent of code, or a quick mock-up of something that's rolling around in my head, I reach for Ruby. Not elixir which has better runtimes, or C or Zig or Rust which has better performance, not something statically typed which leads to fewer bugs, not Python which has a huge data science community to it...

A few weeks ago I was listening to the DHH episode of the Lex Fridman podcast [0], where DHH talks about Ruby as a "luxury programming language". This matches my own experience.

When I need something to be fast, it's either because I'm dealing with a low-latency problem (and some of my side projects are very latency sensitive - 5ms can make the difference between success and failure), or because I can't afford the luxury of Ruby and Rails and the developer ergonomics.

Ruby makes things fun for the programmer. That's the point. It's beautiful to work with, even if it doesn't do all the things that all the coding books and blogs insist I should be ashamed to not have in my language.

I was slightly embarrassed to be a Ruby and RoR advocate for a while because of the brogrammer BS that emerged around both ecosystems in the 2010s. I then became very embarrassed because it wasn't as cool as a systems language like Rust or Go, or as intellectually deep as Haskell, or as hot on the ML bandwagon as Python.

But I think I don't care anymore. I'm just going to accept it for what it is, and lean into. Life's too short for "shoulds" - I'm just going to like what I like. And I like Ruby.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ
by IshKebab | 2025-08-26 08:57:59+00:00
Blender, Godot, Audacity, Firefox, Git, Linux, ... I could name 100 projects that could not be described that way. Most couldn't. There are only a few projects that I can think of that are really just wrappers (even though they add a lot of value), e.g:

* Handbrake, wraps ffmpeg (it does more stuff but that's the main thing most people use it for)

* Ollama, wraps llama.cpp
by strogonoff | 2025-08-26 08:58:03+00:00
Sure—just as polluting the environment and our bodies with toxic waste has to do with not spending money they don’t need to spend.

Fully free market cannot sustainably exist in presence of bad faith actors. Capitalism does not imply that every company must be a bad faith actor, but many companies, including in this context particularly OpenAI, Microsoft et al., are such actors. This scenario is exactly where the regulation is supposed to come in.
by renegat0x0 | 2025-08-26 08:58:12+00:00
I use linux on nearly all my PCs / servers. I do think about moving my phone to more open platform (fairphone, or rooting phone), but I don't like phones in principle, so I do not install stuff there. I do not do things on phone.

I have my apps as web pages, so I access them from phone web browser. I do not care about phone apps that much.

I use fdroid for calendar, gallery, and music though.
by CRConrad | 2025-08-26 08:58:14+00:00
I don't think I am "confused". What's "confused" about pointing out the error -- or hypocrisy -- in accusing someone else of "moving goalposts" when it was you who did that? (NB, BTW, it wasn't me you accused; dunno if you noticed that I'm a different person.)

And I think if you won't be responding further it's because I either confused you or, more probably, just simply made you realise you were wrong. (Or maybe you knew that all along and just brazenly projected your own goalpost-moving onto someone else, Idunno.)

But if you change your mind and do respond, I'd be grateful for an explanation of how you came to the conclusion that I "seem confused", and about what exactly.
by sonyhong | 2025-08-26 08:58:34+00:00
Hey folks,

For the past 6 years I’ve been building an event management platform. One thing I always saw: clients spending hours making email templates, landing pages, guest lists, forms… all super repetitive stuff.

With AI coming in, I started thinking: what if the whole event workflow could be AI-powered? Imagine typing something like “create a Porsche team-building in NYC from Sept 10–12” and instantly getting the event site, registration, emails, the whole package. All styled in the company’s branding. Could even work for someone’s wedding or birthday.

I put together an MVP and launched it last week - envelope.so

Would love your honest thoughts: is this actually solving a big pain, or does it feel like one of those “nice idea but...” tools?
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-08-26 08:59:09+00:00
Government in EU will want it once they introduce the Chat Control legislation and observe that it is trivial to circumvent by either modifying clients to not scan or using free open source alternatives. Logical next step is to lock down all devices and thereby also ensure total and utter surrender of all our digital infrastructure to the current duopoly in the mobile device market (Apple and Google).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-26 08:59:22+00:00
The right tool, for the right job.

If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.

Every now and then, there’s a nasty accident, but most of them respect their tools, and just make a lot of money (which you’ll understand, if you’ve ever hired one).

Same goes for pretty much any vocation.

That said, manufacturers have learned that there’s a lot of money to be made, selling professional tools, to insecure fools with money.

There’s a big ego hit, in LARPing a highly-experienced engineer, when you’re not one, yourself.
by unwind | 2025-08-26 08:59:25+00:00
There is at least two bugs in the blog post, here:

Next simple task would be to fill the complete framebuffer with a solid colour:

memset(f->buf, rgb, f->width*f->height*sizeoof(uint32_t));

The first is the obvious typo around `sizeof`, which I didn't even see at first (edit: this).

The second is that code will only work for 8-bit colors, i.e. only the 8 (technically CHAR_BIT, "a byte") least-significant bits of `rgb` will be used. This is a quirk of the `memset()` standard C function, which has the prototype:

void *memset(void s[.n], int c, size_t n);

but then the man page [1] says:

The memset() function fills the first n bytes of the memory area pointed to by s with the constant byte c.

[1]: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/memset.3.html
by aurareturn | 2025-08-26 09:00:03+00:00
Here's an M4 Max running macOS running Parallels running Windows compared to AMD's very best laptop chip:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseli...

M4 Max is still faster. Note that the M4 Max is only given 14 out of 16 cores, likely reserving 2 of them for macOS.

How do you explain this when Windows has zero Apple Silicon optimizations?
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-26 09:00:14+00:00
> replace the br[ake]s with some home-grown solution

Funny you mention the brakes, because a friend of mine told me just days ago that he used to change his own brakes consumables (pads) until the new car, which "throws an error" if you replace the part - you have to go to an official service office for the computer configuration.

Now, do not forget that the need for the intervention of third parties lowers the car reliability ("far away", "too expensive", "device too old", "operation failure", "inexperienced operator" etc.).

This should show that your argument has difficult sides. Of course you should be able to act on your critical possessions. It should be within a good framework, but it should be fully, practically possible.
by schiffern | 2025-08-26 09:00:38+00:00
Yes we have studied actual rates of infection in response to interventions like air filtering, so these studies account for all that real-world complexity and messiness you worry about.

The article is complaining that every study doesn't redo the evidence collection, end-to-end, every time. That's not realistic and not necessary.

A lot of your specific questions are leading (with a nothing-we-can-do attitude underneath) or asking the wrong question (eg expecting one universal number for "hours of filtration per infection prevented").

For instance the correct answer may be air filters in classrooms and buses and workplaces, but strangely your line of questioning doesn't even consider that possibility.

This would be like someone in the 1800s questioning how handwashing avoids Cholera if they don't wash their hands at home. I think I see a solution to this one...
by concinds | 2025-08-26 09:00:40+00:00
Nobody. Apple's still doing the best by far. Apple Silicon chips. Safari having the strongest anti-tracking of any platform's browser (AAPL, GOOG, MSFT). Privacy on the Apple TV. Using 100% renewable electricity for their AI data centers (Private Cloud Compute) and not using its data for model training, unlike everyone else. They're even starting to compete on price with the $600 Walmart MacBook Air. But then there's all the bad stuff we're all familiar with.

The worst part to me is that I don't think any systemic solution (like antitrust) can ensure it remains that way, or make the others fix their shit. Apple is this way because of the decisions, personalities and whims of a handful of individuals that lead Apple. The other companies are fuckups for the same reason. Maybe the only safeguard is ideology (i.e., up-and-coming Apple employees who dogmatically believe in their marketing on privacy, energy efficiency, speed, etc). From the outside all we can do is impose a PR cost on them and their competitors when they fall short, and on the margin, that helps strengthen that internal faction of dogmatically principled employees against their colleagues who don't care.
by roenxi | 2025-08-26 09:00:44+00:00
I did. "a desire for more than one has right now"

If you want a dictionary definition, search suggests "An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth".

On their own neither of those implies any desire to rig games or to avoid competition. Some greedy people do that, but since pretty much everyone is greedy to some extent you find greedy people with every combination of human characteristics.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-26 09:01:04+00:00
I mean, that's a horrific piece of Ruby that doesn't do much, and you've not indented it properly.

Of course you can get all this down to a single line with ; demarcation.

And your `.each` could use `{ ... }` syntax, just like C or Java or... you know, everything else.

But sure, whitespace is better, or whatever it is you prefer.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-08-26 09:01:29+00:00
I've been messing around with Linux for games for over a decade. Proton was a revelation, but in addition to that the Linux desktop system stack has had Valve money pumped into it, seeing a huge amount of improvement. Video drivers, KDE, SDL2 additions to the kernel and much more.

Even Proton is technically managed by Codeweavers under contract by Valve, who are the primary contributors to Wine.
by 3form | 2025-08-26 09:01:39+00:00
The way that it works is that most of the people there are not concerned with the topic, and if they are, they will be willingly gaslit into the official excuse which is provided to us, too. It being that it will greatly improve the security for the common folk.

The mechanisms are just the same as political discourse on other topics currently in UK, just much worse, because people's livelihoods actually depend on that.
by luca020400 | 2025-08-26 09:01:53+00:00
It isn't cell networks, no one ever on that side ever blocked Android forks.

It's the implementation that OEMs used to support VoLTE isn't compatible with AOSP APIs.

If it wasn't for Google here you'd never have VoLTE on custom ROMs, if it exists in any shape or form it's thanks to them.