MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluebarbet | 2025-08-27 16:25:17+00:00
>It’s not that people don’t have critical thinking skills

It isn't? I agree that it's a fallacy to put this down to "people are dumb", but I still don't get it. These AI chatbots are statistical text generators. They generate text based on probability. It remains absolutely beyond me why someone would assume the output of a text generator to be the truth.
by cantrevealname | 2025-08-27 16:25:39+00:00
> All of this software, from the individual processes to the OS itself, were the work of a single software developer. They left AECL in 1986, and no one has ever revealed their identity.

I bet some readers are thinking that the developer that caused this tragedy retired with the millions he earned, maybe sailed his yacht to his Caribbean mansion. But the $300K FAANG salaries and multi-million stock options for senior developers represents the last decade or two. In the 1980's, developers were paid poorly and commanded little respect. The heroes in tech companies that sold expensive devices were the salesmen back then. The commission on the sale of a single Therac-25 probably exceeded the developer's salary.

All of the following would indicate that this developer, no matter how senior or capable, was still a low-paid schlub:

- It's Canada, so automatically 20% lower salaries than in the U.S. (AECL is in Canada, so it's a good bet that the developer was Canadian.)

- It's the 1980s, so pre-web, pre-smartphones, pre-Google/Amazon, and developers had little recognition and low demand.

- It's government, known to pay poorly for developers. (AECL is a government-owned corporation.)

- It's mostly embedded software. Even though embedded software can be incredibly complex and life-critical, it's the least visible, so it's among the lower paid areas of software engineering (even today).

For 1986, I would put his salary at $30-50K Canadian, or converted to U.S. dollars at that time would be $26-43K U.S., and inflation adjusted would be $78-129K U.S. today. And no stock options.
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-27 16:25:40+00:00
Yes, it boils down to a trust issue. People on both sides of the table pressing the defect button over and over.

Realistically, conference attendance is a perk, and should be understood as such and accepted. Of course to a shareholder breathing down the neck of the business admins, it's unsqueezed slack in the system that has to be better justified than that. And realistically the employee would go, attach a few extra days, maybe skip a day of the event, but still feel some kind of duty (what a quaint word) to make use of the actual conf too.

It's an arms race where both sides are saying, if you don't give a shit, we don't give a shit.
by notnullorvoid | 2025-08-27 16:25:45+00:00
The point is the scale of poor people vastly outweighs the scale of Neuralink users. It's not worth both the setup cost, nor the backlash to convert the relatively small number of Neuralink users into forced labour. Especially since they would still need the poor workforce as well.

Agreeing to data collection and sharing of your brain activity while concerning for it's own reasons, is not the same as forcing them to complete Mechanical Turk like tasks.
by fwip | 2025-08-27 16:25:56+00:00
And even after their mitigations on known attacks, the attacks were still successful 11% of the time!

To misquote the IRA - "[Scammers] only need to be lucky once, you need to be lucky every time." Even a 1% chance of getting pwned every time you get sent a malicious email is way too high. Plus the scammers aren't gonna rest on their laurels - they'll be iterating too.
by merb | 2025-08-27 16:25:58+00:00
I do not like these coverages. They always write about VSCode Extension which has basically nothing todo with the bug.

It only did run affected programs of course but it's so stupid to even talk about vscode in that case. if you used the affected nx versions you are affected no matter if you used vscode,webstorm, whatever ide of your liking. if you used a not affected nx version nothing happend no matter which vscode version you used.
Show HN: A simpler way to manage internationalization in component-based apps
by MarineCG40 | 2025-08-27 16:26:03+00:00
I built this because I was frustrated with how messy translation files get as projects scale. Most i18n solutions force you to manage big JSON dictionaries, spread across multiple files, and then manually wire everything into your UI. It quickly becomes hard to keep things organized, especially in component-heavy apps. This approach is component-first i18n: translations live close to the UI they belong to. That makes it easier to keep things organized, avoid duplication, and scale without the usual chaos of string management. It’s lightweight, works with React/Next.js, and is designed to stay simple while your app grows.
by novok | 2025-08-27 16:26:27+00:00
Yes, because flying a war jet under pressure and landing it in the desert is the same as writing software over 5 months in an office. /s

Test anxiety is real. Anxiety disorders are real in general, not to mention ADHD, autism and more where these disabilities can interact in bad ways in interviews. It does not mean that people with these issues are bad engineers. If your instrument is inaccurate, it does not mean the thing it is measuring is wrong.

One of the best and smartest engineers I have ever hired had visible anxiety and objectively did not pass the interview but we pushed for it anyway and was hired as a jr engineer. He is a staff engineer now, leads various large company library projects and is the go to expert about various systems in the entire company and will probably become a sr staff engineer. He also probably hasn't changed jobs because he knows he's bad at interviews, which is incredibly sad.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-27 16:26:30+00:00
I'd make an argument about the need for Slack to go beyond.

As you point out it's wildly successful and is the backbone of many groups internal communication. Many companies would just stop working without Slack, that's a testament to the current team's efforts, but also something that critical would merit better perfs.

I'd make the comparison with Figma, which went the extra mile to bring a level of smoothness that just wouldn't be there otherwise.
by Zak | 2025-08-27 16:26:31+00:00
I think most people concerned with sovereignty over their own devices gave up on Apple long ago.

This is the kind of conduct I expect from Apple and the reason I have no interest in using one of their devices. I think it's bad for them to do this. I think it's bad for them to have the ability to do this. I don't think ranting about it on HN will accomplish anything. It has been this way for nearly 20 years and it will only change if governments make even stricter laws against it.

Google, on the other hand is trying to lock down a previously (somewhat) open platform. That's a rug pull for those who picked Android for its openness, and it's possible that sufficient outrage from the tech community will stop that plan.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-27 16:26:34+00:00
The mission is wildly more complicated than the Apollo missions. There's a whole oddball-orbit space station that has to be placed as a way-station, for one thing, and none of that's happened yet (remember how long it took to build the ISS?). Also, landing all your return fuel instead of leaving it in orbit, so a way heavier lander (with a smaller return payload than Apollo!), which is a pain in the ass. Multiple space ships launched by different rocket systems involved. The SLS still has to be finished for it to go forward. Orbital refueling of large fuel tanks is a hard problem that remains unsolved, and this goes nowhere without fixing that. The contracts for the return vehicles are disturbingly light on parts about making sure they can reliably work, including surviving re-entry.

I'm with you. Not happening. We're more likely to come up with a totally different, simpler plan, and do that instead, before this happens.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-27 16:26:58+00:00
- Denial of climate change.

- Deletion of economic databases.

- Deletion of public health information and historical weather databases.

- Criticism of vaccine effectivness

- Defunding of health and climate research funds.

- Leaving the largest international research alliances in Climate and Health.

- Defunding of NASA

He called the administration anti-science, which is well grounded claim. But no part of the phrasing implies that "republicans" are anti science or that you are.
by hk1337 | 2025-08-27 16:27:12+00:00
> This app using Firebase Analytics and so it collects next information from your device:

I wonder how the data compares to the data Apple could send and do they respect when user's have opted to NOT send app developers data?

I know when you first sign on to the App Store it prompts you about 2 things, sending Apple data, and sending app developers data.

*EDIT* I know it's not fair and doesn't mean they're all bad but given the current circumstances in the world, I am going to be quite skeptical of developers with .ru in their email or anything else.
by throwaway-11-1 | 2025-08-27 16:27:28+00:00
when you say "size" of the government, what are you exactly talking about? The military budget? The amount spent on healthcare? The investment in research? Neoliberalism has been turning these into funnels to the private sector since Reagan. Like how does free market do anything other than create oligarchs? This language about "government too big" is too vague to be useful in discussion and I just assume it's cover for "punishing the poor and removing social services". ICE has a bigger budget than the Marines and FBI combined, and all the maga chuds clapped like circus seals. I don't know how to have an honest discussion about government policy with right wingers that isn't just a stream of weasel words for culture war.
by homebrewer | 2025-08-27 16:27:51+00:00
I also use bubblewrap to isolate npm/pnpm/yarn (and everything started by them) from the rest of the system. Let's say all your source code resides in ~/code; put this somewhere in the beginning of your $PATH and name it `npm`; create symlinks/hardlinks to it for other package managers:

#!/usr/bin/bash bin=$(basename "$0") exec bwrap \ --bind ~/.cache/nodejs ~/.cache \ --bind ~/code ~/code \ --dev /dev \ --die-with-parent \ --disable-userns \ --new-session \ --proc /proc \ --ro-bind /etc/ca-certificates /etc/ca-certificates \ --ro-bind /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf \ --ro-bind /etc/ssl /etc/ssl \ --ro-bind /usr /usr \ --setenv PATH /usr/bin \ --share-net \ --symlink /tmp /var/tmp \ --symlink /usr/bin /bin \ --symlink /usr/bin /sbin \ --symlink /usr/lib /lib \ --symlink /usr/lib /lib64 \ --tmpfs /tmp \ --unshare-all \ --unshare-user \ "/usr/bin/$bin" "$@"

The package manager started through this script won't have access to anything but ~/code + read-only access to system libraries:

bash-5.3$ ls -a ~ . .. .cache code

bubblewrap is quite well tested and reliable, it's used by Steam and (IIRC) flatpak.
by yndoendo | 2025-08-27 16:27:51+00:00
Inheritance is not needed when a composite pattern can be used.

class DefaultTask { }

class SpecialTask { }

class UsedItem {

UsedItem() { _task = new SpecialTask() } void DoIt() { _task.DoIt() }

}

Is python a OOP language? Self / this / object pointer has to be passed similar to using C style object-oriented / data abstraction.
by reorder9695 | 2025-08-27 16:27:54+00:00
We need a law saying users can run exactly what software they want on their own devices. If people are worried about malware or whatever, have the apps be optionally notarised and big warning's if they aren't. I do not want any company or government telling me what software can run on my devices that I paid for and I own. This is clearly against the spirit of the DMA.
by VohuMana | 2025-08-27 16:27:56+00:00
A lot of value is being created with some of these AI apps but are the people funding the development of these apps seeing a return on investment? (Honest question, I don't really know)

The article mentions

> This is a bubble driven by vibes not returns ...

I think this indicates some investors are seeing a return. I know AI is expensive to train and somewhat expensive to run though so I am not really sure what the reality is.
by HankStallone | 2025-08-27 16:28:06+00:00
It writes that way because almost everyone writes that way these days. It's annoying if you learned English grammar from textbooks and other materials written over 50 years ago, but it's extremely common now anyway. So a large chunk of its training data will be that way.

It's interesting, because all the older works in its training data will default to the masculine singular, and that has to be a massive number of books too. But maybe the modern writing, including lots of online sources, simply overwhelms that. Or it's one of the guardrails written into the AIs to avoid offending people.
by Jnr | 2025-08-27 16:28:21+00:00
The biggest deal breaker for me was no support for external displays (through DP alt mode/thunderbolt).

Also the infrequent random OS crashes were annoying. And sometimes WiFi would stop working after sleep (wold not show any access points) and would require a reboot.

M1 is 5 years old already and is still not fully stable and lacks features. It seems like the overall development effort started slowing down a couple years ago and while we did get the amazing audio daemon and graphics driver, development of other things seem to be stuck.

If I remember correctly, there were also some comments from Marcan (?) on social media about issues with supporting newer chips (M3/M4), hinting that M3 and M4 are vastly different and require significant effort to add Linux support.

So if M3, M4 and other future versions are too different to get supported in decent time frame, then that means that Asahi is all about supporting years old hardware. That reduces interest by Linux users looking to buy a laptop now, and thus potentially reducing available donations, developer pool, interest, etc.

I love what Marcan, Alyssa, James and others have achieved and how they have pushed Linux further. I think that their contributions will stay relevant and be useful for other hardware for many years to come.
by bryceneal | 2025-08-27 16:28:33+00:00
This is a huge issue and it's the result of many legacy decisions on the desktop that were made 30+ years ago. Newer operating systems for mobile like iOS really get this right by sandboxing each app and requiring explicit permission from the user for various privileges.

There are solutions on the desktop like Qubes (but it uses virtualization and is slow, also very complex for the average user). There are also user-space solutions like Firejail, bubblewrap, AppArmor, which all have their own quirks and varying levels of compatibility and support. You also have things like OpenSnitch which are helpful only for isolating networking capabilities of programs. One problem is that most users don't want to spend days configuring the capabilities for each program on their system. So any such solution needs profiles for common apps which are constantly maintained and updated.

I'm somewhat surprised that the current state of the world on the desktop is just _so_ bad, but I think the problem at its core is very hard and the financial incentives to solve it are not there.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-08-27 16:29:15+00:00
Having been through at least two AI hype cycles professionally, this is just another one.

Each cycle filters out people who are not actually interested in AI, they are grifters and sheisters trying to make money.

I have a private list of these starting from 2006 to today.

LLMs =/= AI and if you don’t know this then you should be worried because you are going to get left behind because you don’t actually understand the world of AI.

Those of us that are “forever AI” people are the cockroaches of the tech world and eventually we’ll be all that is left.

Every former “expert systems scientist”, “Bayesian probably engineers” “Computer vision experts” “Big Data Analysts” and “LSTM gurus” are having no trouble implementing LLMs

We’ll be fine
by nozzlegear | 2025-08-27 16:30:12+00:00
> Again, this is a tradeoff. It's not a binary issue of "doing it properly". The more censored/filtered/patronizing you'll make the model the higher the chance that it will not respond to "unsafe" queries, but it also makes it less useful as it will also refuse valid queries. [..] So where do we draw the line?

That sounds like a tough problem for OpenAI to figure out. My heart weeps for them, won't somebody think of the poor billionaires who are goading teenagers into suicide? Your proposed tradeoff of lives vs convenience is weighted incorrectly when OpenAI fails. Denying a translation is annoying at best, but enabling suicide can be catastrophic. The convenience is not morally equal to human life.

> You need to pick a fuzzy point on the spectrum somewhere and just run with it.

My fuzzy point is not fuzzy at all: don't tell people how to kill themselves, don't say "I can't help you with that but I could roleplay with you instead". Anything less than that is a moral failure on Sam Altman and OpenAI's part, regardless of how black the box is for their engineers.
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-27 16:30:13+00:00
APIs were popular when technology was a tool to empower the user. But since then technology has mostly shifted to an ad delivery vehicle. APIs get in the way of that (by allowing its user to actually accomplish something besides “engaging”) so they got deprecated pretty quickly.

I see the same thing happening with these MCPs. Currently they’re built to ride the AI bandwagon, but when people start using them for something actually useful and engagement starts going down they’ll cripple its capabilities to restore the balance.
by Finnucane | 2025-08-27 16:30:43+00:00
When you're a billionaire, sure. Like the IRS is going to call you on it.

Also, he's claiming he owed ~$5 million a year in taxes. Which is a lot, but he spent $93 million to run for governor, and basically flushed all that money down the loo. He apparently has spent hundreds of millions on various charitable projects. So clearly, the taxes are not really burdensome. He just doesn't think he should have to pay them.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-27 16:30:50+00:00
Many recent CPUs eliminate NOPs without executing them, so using NOP may work on a CPU but be ineffective on another.

A double BSWAP is equivalent with a NOP, but no existing CPU does any special optimization for it and it is very unlikely that any future CPU would do something special with it, as it is mostly obsolete (nowadays MOVBE is preferable instead of it).

NOP cannot ensure a certain slow-down factor, except on exactly the same model of CPU.
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-27 16:30:59+00:00
Even at AI research conferences the trend seems to be such (also fewer industry exhibits), though I'm not perfectly up to date on this, might have turned around very recently. The reason seems to be that they are not hiring as much right now.

I think this is a shorter-term trend in the economy though, it doesn't necessarily hold as much inertia as other factors. Unless the AI job replacement really works out the way many companies hope.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-27 16:31:03+00:00
Presumably the author is using tokio which requires the future constructed (e.g the async function) to be Send (either because of the rules of Rust or annotated as Send) since tokio is a work-stealing runtime and any thread might end up executing a given future (or even start executing and then during a pause move it for completion on another thread). std::sync::MutexGuard intentionally isn't annotated with Send because there are platforms that require the acquiring thread be the one to unlock the mutex.

One caveat though - using a normal std Mutex within an async environment is an antipattern and should not be done - you can cause all sorts of issues & I believe even deadlock your entire code. You should be using tokio sync primitives (e.g. tokio Mutex) which can yield to the reactor when it needs to block. Otherwise the thread that's running the future blocks forever waiting for that mutex and that reactor never does anything else which isn't how tokio is designed).

So the compiler is warning about 1 problem, but you also have to know to be careful to know not to call blocking functions in an async function.
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-08-27 16:31:16+00:00
> No, they are deliberately designed to mimic human communication via language, not human thought.

My opinion is that language is communicated thought. Thus, to mimic language, at least really well, you have to mimic thought. At some level.

I want to be clear here, as I do see a distinction: I don't think we can say these things are "thinking", despite marketing pushes to the contrary. But I do think that they are powerful enough to "fake it" at a rudimentary level. And I think that the way we train them forces them to develop this thought-mimicry ability.

If you look hard enough, the illusion of course vanishes. Because it is (relatively poor) mimcry, not the real thing. I'd bet we are still a research breakthrough or two away from being able to simulate "human thought" well.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-08-27 16:31:17+00:00
The author labels LLMs as "empty hype".

LLMs are inappropriately hyped. Surrounded in shady practices to make them a reality. I understand why so many people are anti-LLM.

But empty hype? I just can't disagree more.

They are generalized approximation functions that can approximate all manner of modalities, surprisingly quickly.

That's incredibly powerful.

They can be horribly abused, the failure modes unintuitive, using them can open entirely new classes of security vulnerabilities and we don't have proper observability tooling to deeply understand what's going on under the hood.

But empty hype?

Maybe we'll move away from them and adopt something closer to world models or use RL / something more like Sutton's OaK architecture, or replace back prop with something like forward-forward, but it's hard to believe Hal-style AI is going anywhere.

They are just too useful.

We have a rough draft of AI we've only seen in sci-fi. Pandora's box is open and I don't see us closing it.
by Freak_NL | 2025-08-27 16:31:19+00:00
Paper balances and visiting your local branch are mostly a thing of the past. Calling them is an exercise in extreme patience. My bank all but discontinued actually visiting them except for certain specific things.

In the Netherlands (and beyond) online payments (shops, Steam, etc.) are made via the IDEAL platform run by the Dutch banks collectively. That is a good thing, because payments are secure and easy, and no one needs a credit card. But that does mean using your bank's web service to approve those payments.

Using the bank's offline OTP hardware (where you insert your debit card and enter a PIN and the code generated by the bank's website for an OTP) is possible, but using the app is significantly less effort than that. There is very little point in resisting it. It's not a healthy situation, but it is the reality.
by godelski | 2025-08-27 16:31:34+00:00
> I was kinda sad as I was just wanted to see one good iridium flare of that magnitude.

They are absolutely beautiful! I was lucky enough to once see a meteor (presumably) bounce off the atmosphere. Was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. For an instant (and not any longer) it was almost like day and there was a green ripple that quickly dissipated. Seen nothing like it before or since.

The world is full of amazing and beautiful phenomena. Many of which also contain deep mysteries. It is a shame that people like that are so set on having answers that they prevent themselves from being part of such rewarding a rewarding journey. I guess it happens a lot even to normal people too. Even if the answer they are so set on isn't half as fantastical.