MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-08-12 07:23:30+00:00
> In response, Xiao pointed out that the package description can be read by any user who chooses to install the software, and it does mention the scan feature.

Wouldn't be the first (or last) time a Debian maintainer has pulled the "you should read the descriptions of all (hundreds) of your packages (most installed as dependencies)" card in response to a bug report.

If someone started reading all the package descriptions and READMEs we're meant to be thoroughly familiar with when Trixie was released a few days ago, they'd still be reading them.
by kazinator | 2025-08-12 07:23:37+00:00
I's a generational thing. I would guess that someone who expects applications to phone home, on the off chance that they are actually otherwise local, is likely someone pretty young who hasn't lived in a world of locally installed software that doesn't talk to anything.

If we search for the author's bio, that seems to check out. They are a well-credentialed CS person; obviously they know that dictionary programs such as translation pop ups can have offline dictionaries, and mentions that. But they are a person of their time with an according set of "of courses".

Today, an application being locally installed and works with offline data is like a a statement of quaint chivalry, promulgated by a few remaining Don Quixotes of computing. (It saddens me to say. So much that this analogy brings me insufficient amusement.)
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-12 07:25:59+00:00
They'd rather that than an empty seat, especially if that person is turning up 5-6 days/week.

Most coffee shops where I live (London, UK, specifically out in West London) are at best 20% full through most of the day, that's a lot of dead real estate not paying for itself.

When I tried working out of coffee shops a bit some years ago the "etiquette" seemed to be ~1 drink/hour to pay for your seat. I don't like coffee that much, so was consuming more like 0.66/hour (i.e. around 2 drinks every 3 hours), and people were fine with that, as it was effectively a rent payment of £20/day, or £100/week, which is a little under what a hotdesk would cost me in the same area but with a lot more flexibility (never pay for idle!), and of course its good margin sales for them.

Of course, they could just say "no laptops". There's a pub chain in the UK that did that (Sam Smith's - no screens, no swearing), but the rule is not widely followed or enforced and where it is the pubs are empty far more than the ones that welcome customers.
by nicbou | 2025-08-12 07:26:13+00:00
That's a tough question.

My policy was to never compete on price. The cheapest clients are also the most demanding. I priced per project because the scope was small and it let me charge much more per hour. It was fun earning 50-100 CAD per hour right out of high school. It's not greedy; not every hour is billable.

That being said, you're also learning, so there's a discount there. If you work for free or cheap, you should do it for people who deserve it. My first clients were non-profits and companies that were just getting started.

A much smarter way to work is to approach people who need websites or dev work for their clients. After pairing up with a graphic designer, work just kept coming. You only need to be trusted once, not for every project.

If it's not immediately obvious, you will learn a lot about salesmanship and customer service. These are valuable lessons.
by sturza | 2025-08-12 07:26:34+00:00
To raise is a signal of a combination - market identified as large enough to make it worth the risk, competitor analysis, go to market strategy, founder perceived capability, team, perceived ability to be better/faster at getting market share vs competitors. Clicks(upvotes, feedback etc) have no value in themselves. Founders have the job to make a sustainable business, but before they do they have to convince others they can - through some of the things i listed above. "Too niche" already implies too small market to make VCs care. Also PMF + people upvoting with their wallet or high growth could also be raising signals.

If you're looking for a general answer, i don't believe it exists.
by ontigola | 2025-08-12 07:27:22+00:00
Books by programming theorists often When they define 'complexity' as 'anything related to the structure of a software system that makes it hard to understand and modify the system,' they miss a crucial distinction: the complexity of a supermarket is not the same as that of a telecom company. The primary factor in complexity is functionality and requirements to implement, followed by non-functional requirements, the restrictions of the IT environment, and then the structure of the software itself. At this point, time becomes a crucial factor. You may end up with a creature that, after passing user testing and certification, has transformed into an unrecognizable monster despite your initial best intentions regarding length and clarity.
by rayiner | 2025-08-12 07:28:36+00:00
> Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline?

Because numerous people in this thread have been parroting the line that homicides dropped since 2023. I'm pointing out that this is cherry picking, since homicides spiked to record highs in 2023.

1991 isn't a good baseline because policing trends started reversing in the 2000s. We did mass incarceration from 1980 until the early 2000s, and homicides dropped dramatically. El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.

> Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.

That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
by erpellan | 2025-08-12 07:28:52+00:00
I can’t believe they still make processors out of sand. Talk about outdated technology.

Sarcasm aside, a great many projects started on MySQL and moved to postgres. As did projects using mongo, couchdb, firebase, oracle etc etc…

And I’m sure many projects switched away from Postgres to other technologies. Right tool for the job at hand.
by Straw | 2025-08-12 07:29:05+00:00
I broadly agree with you, but there is really a point here about land ownership.

Although developments of the land do improve the value, and thus land ownership has significant utility economically by incentivizing this, there isn't really an economic justification for the owner receiving value for the land itself- why should someone have exclusive rights to a piece of land they didn't create? They bought it, sure, but why did the previous owner have perpetual exclusive rights?

I'd advocate for a small property tax as a replacement for other taxes, because the component that does tax "land value" won't cause economic harm, but all of income tax causes deadweight loss. (Note, Land Value Tax is great in theory, but impossible to define practically- property tax good enough, much harder to game!)

Note that in practice, the biggest abuser of land hoarding is local governments with extremely restrictive zoning that stops productive development of the land- from an economic perspective they own the land, and have sold (or in reality, seized) some but not all of the rights from the 'landowner'. Although this can have advantages to help with coordination problems, in practice it's caused enormous economic damage to many cities by preventing development. At its heart, it's a problem with land hoarding.
by syllogism | 2025-08-12 07:29:11+00:00
It's interesting that there's still such a market for this sort of take.

> In a recent pre-print paper, researchers from the University of Arizona summarize this existing work as "suggest[ing] that LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text."

What does this even mean? Let's veto the word "reasoning" here and reflect.

The LLM produces a series of outputs. Each output changes the likelihood of the next output. So it's transitioning in a very large state space.

Assume there exists some states that the activations could be in that would cause the correct output to be generated. Assume also that there is some possible path of text connecting the original input to such a success state.

The reinforcement learning objective reinforces pathways that were successful during training. If there's some intermediate calculation to do or 'inference' that could be drawn, writing out a new text that makes that explicit might be a useful step. The reinforcement learning objective is supposed to encourage the model to learn such patterns.

So what does "sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text" even mean here? The mechanism that the model uses to transition towards the answer is to generate intermediate text. What's the complaint here?

It makes the same sort of sense to talk about the model "reasoning" as it does to talk about AlphaZero "valuing material" or "fighting for the center". These are shorthands for describing patterns of behaviour, but of course the model doesn't "value" anything in a strictly human way. The chess engine usually doesn't see a full line to victory, but in the games it's played, paths which transition through states with material advantage are often good -- although it depends on other factors.

So of course the chain-of-thought transition process is brittle, and it's brittle in ways that don't match human mistakes. What does it prove that there are counter-examples with irrelevant text interposed that cause the model to produce the wrong output? It shows nothing --- it's a probabilistic process. Of course some different inputs lead to different paths being taken, which may be less successful.
by rapnie | 2025-08-12 07:29:49+00:00
Also check the ActivityPub protocol extension for forge federation at https://forgefed.org which may be on the roadmap [0] of the Forgejo federation support, after they have implemented basic ActivityPub protocol support. Right now ForgeFed needs to mature a lot further, but also needs the help of the developer community to achieve that.

[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
by PeterStuer | 2025-08-12 07:29:54+00:00
Please don't tell me you were one of those marking every SO question as duplicate, more often than not missing the entire nuance in the question that made it not a duplicate at all, and the answers to the so called previously asked question utterly unusable?

This was one of those infuriating things that drove so many away from SO and jump ship the second there was an alternative.
I'm looking for a co-founder If interested
by prataydas369 | 2025-08-12 07:30:44+00:00
I'm building a fintech platform to unify global financial markets into one seamless experience. Think like Bloomberg Terminal power meets Robinhood simplicity, supercharged with AI intelligence.

I'm looking for a co-founder If interested

https://medium.com/@rudamond/im-looking-for-a-co-founder-for-a-startup-to-build-the-future-of-global-financial-markets-4575994ea412?source=friends_link&sk=2168ad1fb5542429ed6a221d82528546

In this article i have expained in little detail
by Terr_ | 2025-08-12 07:31:02+00:00
I think that's the point, really: It's a reliable and reproducible weakness, but also one where the model can be trained to elicit impressive-looking "reasoning" about what the problem is and how it "plans" to overcome it.

Then when it fails to apply the "reasoning", that's evidence the artificial expertise we humans perceived or inferred is actually some kind of illusion.

Kind of like a a Chinese Room scenario: If the other end appears to talk about algebra perfectly well, but just can't do it, that's evidence you might be talking to a language-lookup machine instead of one that can reason.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-12 07:31:20+00:00
No they aren't placing all their chips on WinUI3, only those that never went through all reboots since Windows 8, believe that.

WPF got taken out of legacy mode at BUILD 2024, exactly because hardly anyone outside Redmond cares about WinUI 3.

Anyone that has been long enough around, has seen ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Core MVC (not compatible with MVC 5 predecessor), Razor Pages, Minimal APIs, Blazor,...

So it is a mess doing consulting and depending on what .NET version the customer team is allowed to use, and existing code, what gets to be used by that portfolio.

Minimal APIs have been designed to bring in Python and JavaScript developers into .NET, which many of us see as not working at all, while having created the need now everyone creates their own controllers infractruture, as means to tame having minimal APIs all over the place, there are even MVVM like frameworks now for that purpose.

Blazor is really only usable as path forward for those still stuck in WebForms, due to the similar approach to do Web UIs, and to .NET shops without frontend teams.

In the age of distributed computing with microservices and frontend teams, it is a hard sell to make them adopt Blazor and learn C#, instead of React, Angular, Vue.

At least they have adopted TypeScript, the next language that Anders Hejlsberg decided to focus on.

Aspire is something that has been pivoted, now they try to sell it as Microsoft's Pulumi, but everyone has to write the orchestration code in C#, thus only relevant to .NET shops.

Maddy Montaquila has said in a few .NET podcast interviews that they are trying to use Aspire as means to sell .NET to UNIX shops, given the low adoption numbers outside the traditional Microsoft shops, even after almost a decade being open source.
by jagermo | 2025-08-12 07:33:15+00:00
Or switch to things like non-alcoholic gin or other tinctures. I cut down my alcohol consumption last year to lose weight, but especially at the end of the day or with friends, I am so sick of just drinking water, i want something sparkly, ideally with an umbrella.

However, the alcohol free mocktails have been getting better and better, so while you won't get the buzz, you at least have something fancy.

To be honest, my biggest surprise was the non-alcoholic captain morgan, tasted like real nice aged rum and is fantastic with some ginger beer.
by rewgs | 2025-08-12 07:33:34+00:00
Eh, I don't know. I wouldn't paint with such a broad brush here.

Regarding productivity/to-do systems: on one hand I agree -- I know a few people for whom it's clearly a form of procrastination and really just need to get on with it. On the other hand, I myself was one of those people, but in hindsight I just hadn't found the right system yet and had real, legitimate issues with the systems I had been trying. Turns out, YouTrack is damn-near perfect for me. I use it both for work and for my personal life and I really, really love it, even for basic to-do lists. The things I was missing from standard to-do lists was the concept of relationships ("depends on," "blocked by," etc) and the ability to schedule multiple projects together on a Gantt Chart. Put those two features together and what needs to be done when and in what order is pretty much inarguable, which is precisely what helps me stay productive, as looking at a huge list and feeling overwhelmed about what to do next -- especially if I'm trying to be efficient or strategic -- freezes me in my tracks.

Regarding second brains: I completely disagree that they're not useful. My Obsidian vault is genuinely one of the single most useful things I have ever done for myself. There's nothing fancy about it, I don't use most of the features, but having a massive vault full of notes is truly indispensable in knowledge work.
by yunusabd | 2025-08-12 07:33:54+00:00
Sorry, just saw this.

I absolutely agree, but it's really stubborn with the flowery language. I tried adding things like "DO NOT USE EMPTY PHRASES LIKE 'EVER-EVOLVING TECH LANDSCAPE'!!!!!" to the prompt, but it just can't resist.

I want to give the whole system an overhaul, maybe newer models are better at this. Or maybe a second LLM pass to de-flowerize (lol) the language.
by willvarfar | 2025-08-12 07:34:13+00:00
I was just at the KDD conference and the general consensus agreed with this paper. There was only one keynoter who just made the assumption that LLMs are associated with reasoning, which was jarring as the previous keynoter had just explained at length why we need a neuro-symbolic approach instead.

The thing is, I think the current companies making LLMs are _not_ trying to be correct or right. They are just trying to hide it better. In the business future for AI the coding stuff that we focus on on HN - how AI can help/impact us - is just a sideline.

The huge-money business future of LLMs is to end consumers not creators and it is product and opinion placement and their path to that is to friendship. They want their assistant to be your friend, then your best friend, then your only friend, then your lover. If the last 15 years of social media has been about discord and polarisation to get engagement, the next 15 will be about friendship and love even though that leads to isolation.

None of this needs the model to grow strong reasoning skills. That's not where the real money is. And CoT - whilst super great - is just as effective if it's hiding better that its giving you the wrong answer (by being more internally consistent) than if its giving you a better answer?
by bayindirh | 2025-08-12 07:34:32+00:00
I'll politely disagree.

First of all, "Recommends" is reserved for packages which enhance the functionality of the package you're installing. Without these the package will not break, but some very useful functionality might be disabled.

The package-class you're talking about is "suggests", IOW, "these packages might also be useful for you, wanna look?" section. These are not installed by default already.

On the other hand, apt and aptitude provides previews before doing something. You don't have to accept them. In aptitude's case, you can fine tune before the final commit, even.

There's a tension. Minimalism vs. user utility. Somebody told in Debian 13 release comments that "Debian will never be a end-user friendly distro". Now, you're saying that packages shouldn't install recommends by default.

What should Debian be? "An IKEAesque DIY distro", or "A more user friendly, yet very stable and vanilla distro". I vote for the latter, personally. Plus, as I told before, advanced users are free to use what they want to change.

If you want to change the default, the configuration files are at /etc/apt/conf.d/. If you want to disable feature for once, it's --no-install-recommends.
by Roark66 | 2025-08-12 07:35:12+00:00
And that is exactly how someone like Trump could win (there are worse people than Nigel Farage). I'm amazed people have not thrown out these two parties in the UK already. Yes, the voting system makes it hard, but not impossible. It happened before.

However, I think the key reason why Conservatives and Labour are so entrenched is that people make their voting habits a part of their identity. I had a number of face to face conversations about politics with people born and raised in the UK. Every single one agreed with me about many stupid things the back then conservative govt pushed (the idea to ban encryption and more). And every single one of them said they will continue voting Conservative. Why? Because this is who they are. It's a part of their family identity (being quite well off financially, having expensive education etc). And they only see two choices, with the other being much worse.

This is how democracies die. They even agreed with this being far from optimal, but they see no other option.
Show HN: A browser extension that decodes food labels for healthy eating
by fredwu | 2025-08-12 07:36:23+00:00
Hi HN!

For the past while I've been building FeedBun, a browser extension that gives you health ratings and research summaries for food products while you shop online or while you look for cooking recipes.

I'm building this because I wanted this product and couldn't find anything similar - most tools I found either required barcode scanning or were limited to specific stores. I wanted something that works seamlessly across all websites. I even have some big features planned for the future.

Tech stack: Elixir/Phoenix via Petal Pro framework for the backend - this is my 3rd SaaS using Petal Pro which I'm also a contributor of.

What makes it unique in my opinion:

* Science-backed analysis: Our AI researches every ingredient against scientific databases and reputable sources and gives you plain English explanations

* Works anywhere: Amazon, Walmart, any grocery site - just click our extension while viewing a product (pages with ingredient info works better with more detailed research), no barcode scanning needed

* Health warning callouts on ingredients that might appear innocent but may have hidden risks

* A suite of personalisation features, such as allergy warnings, dietary preferences, with more to come

Looking for feedback on:

* Does the landing page resonate with you?

* Does the browser extension work well? Any bugs or glitches?

* How useful would this be for your grocery shopping or recipe hunting?

* What features would make this a must-have for you?

* Would you pay for this? If so, and assume the personalisation features mentioned on the landing page (such as allergy alerts, dietary preferences, etc.) are implemented, how much would you be willing to pay per month?

Any comments or feedback are appreciated!
by linehedonist | 2025-08-12 07:36:40+00:00
I don’t think such a middle ground is really realistic. There are plenty of apps that are just thin wrappers around their backend calls and are no more capable of working offline than I am of going without food or water. But if a program is capable of being fully functional offline for 30 days, then what does it really need to call home for, other than as a confirmation of payment?
by freetime2 | 2025-08-12 07:37:08+00:00
Presumably you are talking about this case, where Meta is accused of having downloaded a bunch of having torrented a bunch of copyrighted works. [1]

Of relevance here is the fact that 1) Meta denies having seeded the content, and there looks to be no hard evidence that they distributed the content to other users, 2) the case is ongoing, so a decision has not yet been reached about whether they broke any laws, and 3) the fact that Meta is being sued for this shows that even corporations worth trillions of dollars are not immune to the consequences of breaking the law.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
by est | 2025-08-12 07:37:46+00:00
it looks like a serious "privacy violation" for English-only users. But for many ESL or non-English users out there, the "translation" is a must.

On Windoes, I remember some translation programs go extreme, they hijack all GDI calls and scan for all strings on GUIs trying to translate and replace them inline. Local dictionary were pretty limited so many of them use online services. What happens when user input something "sensitive" on the GUI?

Well they goes straight to the translation service.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-12 07:37:49+00:00
NYC had a mob problem, and Giuliani and later Bloomberg addressed this, somewhat effectively. Still, when I visited NYC in the early 2000's it still wasn't a safe city by my standards, but those were informed more by what I experienced in other countries than the USA. Washington DC currently does not have a mob problem, and isn't nearly as crime ridden as you make it out to be in your comments in this thread. Yes, homeless people exist. And they exist because of various policies, including federal ones that steer people towards homelessness if their lives get upended. Other affluent countries do not have these problems. Of course people in those other affluent countries typically pay more taxes.

If you really do not like the liberal policies that cities tend to have then maybe you should vote with your feet and move to a rural area or to a city that is run by the Republicans? Then you can be with the people who see things your way.

Oh, wait...