MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by charles_f | 2025-09-01 08:49:50+00:00
> Forcing Apple to change core tenets of iOS by legislative means would undermine what made the iPhone successful.

Successful for whom? If you're talking about the commercial success of apple through lock down behaviour, sure. But there is *nothing* that would prevent them from providing the exact same experience while adding a toggle in settings "allow sideloading". You want the "crisp" experience that comes from apple's strict review process, just use the official app store.

Looking at android till now, it is still possible to offer a "certified" os that is flexible enough for you to use foss stores. The argument pretending that removing sideloading is customer centric are borderline fallacious. I don't think that playing on semantics between hardware and OS changes any of that
by aw1621107 | 2025-09-01 08:49:54+00:00
> The problem with C++ modules is that they are empirically inferior to headers and separate compilation units.

I didn't think modules and separate compilation units are (completely) mutually exclusive? It's not like modules force you to use a single compilation unit for all your code; it just changes where the compilation unit boundaries/dependencies are (though to be fair I'm not entirely certain how much heavy lifting that "just" is doing)

> Want to build a >billion line of code OS? You can do that with headers and separate compilation units. Good luck doing that with any other tech

It's not immediately obvious to me why this must be the case. That's the fundamental limitation of modules systems that supposedly prevents this scaling?
by junon | 2025-09-01 08:50:04+00:00
It depends on how you quantify it, which isn't really possible and isn't even the point of the comment.

It really feels like you're being intentionally obtuse here. The point was that they seem to be impervious to many governments. That would be having, by at least some measure, more power than the government.

They weren't meaning they were literal comparisons of amounts of power.
by noirscape | 2025-09-01 08:50:09+00:00
Because "uk" isn't in ISO 3166-1 alpha 2, "gb" is, and the formal designation for The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is "gb".

It wouldn't be nonsense for northern Irish businesses to have .gb domains, because that's what the ISO convention says it would be.

The change will basically never happen though; ICANN has basically acquiesced any attempt to change it (after a weak attempt to do so in the 90s), and since it's pretty unlikely in the near future that another country gets "uk" as their alpha 2 designation, they aren't in any hurry to force the matter. "gb" is still marked as reserved though.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-01 08:51:28+00:00
I need to search for it in the FT archives, but I do remember them trying to quantify the amount of oil traded between the various rebels in syria and the syrian state.

At one point islamic state (or one of the similar groups) had either ownership of a few oil fields, or transit between them, and were actively trading petro chemicals with each other for a good while.
by szszrk | 2025-09-01 08:51:30+00:00
So? I'd say the 340 million of people that actually could verify with a bank is not a bad attempt.

1. 7 million (2020) has no proper ID [0].

2. 120 million struggle with reading [1], and you can assume at least 7 million realistically can't read.

3. Banks already do identity verification across the world, even on behalf of the governments themselves.

I see many challenges in what OP is proposing, but banking adoption across population is not one of them.

[0] https://www.voteriders.org/voter-id-research/

[1] https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-01 08:51:45+00:00
> slicing the host into tiny KVM virtual machines.

That's my other option: a bunch of Azure VM Scale Sets using the tiniest size that will run Windows Server, such as B2as_v2. A handful of closely related apps on each so that firewall rules can be restricted to something sane. Shared Azure Files for the actual app deployments so that devs never need to know the VM names. However, this feels an awful lot like reinventing Kubernetes... but worse.

My job would be sooo much simpler if Microsoft just got off their high horse and supported their own Active Directory in App Service instead of pretending it no longer exists.
by darkwater | 2025-09-01 08:52:28+00:00
IMO it's different. That's why I brought the e-bike similitude: climbing even mild mountains or hills with your own legs will actually make your legs, heart and lungs stronger in the process. So you get both the wonderful views (building the house or delivering the software) but also you get improved health (keeping your mind trained on both high level thinking and low level implementation vs high level only). We might say that using a hammer constantly will develop more your muscles, but in carpentry there are still plenty of manual work that will develop your muscles anyway. (and we still don't have bricks laying machines)
by another_twist | 2025-09-01 08:53:19+00:00
Not even "care". The result is the only thing that matters. If at a first glance the source code of a project doesnt look pretty or whatnot odds might be that the reader landed on particularly nasty chunk or that it was indeed as complicated as the code itself. In my view this test is better done after the overall functionality of the software has been proven. Honestly if libraries with fancy benchmarks don't solve the business problem, I won't care much how clean their code is or if its written in Rust.
Show HN: Replace emdashes in LLM/ChatGPT generated texts
by freakynit | 2025-09-01 08:53:26+00:00
Because nothing screams "written by an LLM" louder than emdashes.

https://emdash-replacer.com

1. https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-...

2. https://community.openai.com/t/prevent-chatgpt-from-using-da...
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-01 08:53:31+00:00
> I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.

They're graphical consumer devices, the quality bar is so high nobody can reach it except huge well funded teams. It's like asking why desktop Linux doesn't still attract OS builders, or for that matter, why the PC platform doesn't attract OS builders. Occasionally someone makes an OS that boots to a simple windowed GUI as a hobby, that's as far as it gets now.

A lot of these HN discussions dance around or ignore this point. When people demand the freedom to run whatever they want, they never give use cases that motivate this. Which OS do they want to dual boot? Some minor respin of Android with a few tweaks that doesn't disagree with Google on anything substantial (Google accepted a lot of PRs from GrapheneOS people).

Nobody is building a compelling new OS even on platforms that have fully documented drivers. There's no point. There are no new ideas, operating systems are mature, it's done, there's nothing to do there. Even Meta gave up on their XROS and that was at least for a new hardware profile. Google did bend over backwards to let people treat phones like they were PCs but it seems regular Android is in practice open enough for what people want to do.
Tell HN: Use "-f**k" to kill Google AI Overview
by camillomiller | 2025-09-01 08:54:59+00:00
Not sure this is the right way to post this, but I'm sure quite a few people are as frustrated as I am by the AI enshittification of Google search and would like to know this.

I accidentally discovered in a fit of rage against Google Search that if you add an expletive to a search term, the SERP will avoid showing ads and also an AI overview.

The good thing is that it works also with the "-" (minus) operator, so you can make sure the expletive is actually not included in the result pages.

Try it yourself: search for a fairly generic query that gives you ads and AI overview, and add "-f*k" at the end, uncensored of course.

Enjoy a much better search experience. It might be placebo, but it feels like the results are actually better sorted.

Edit: edited to avoid HN pro-expletives filter :D
by account42 | 2025-09-01 08:55:18+00:00
> Yes, identity for agents is a real problem.

I don't agree that bot identity is a problem or something that we are better off with if it is solved. I'd rather have a web where adversarial interoperability is possible than one where service operators have a say what tools you can use to access their websites.

The main problem with we are see today is bad actors that

a) completely ignore and/or side step copyright an licensing to use work of others for their own benefit without contributing anything back

b) send an unreasonable number of request

Both will not be solved with identifying bots, that will at best get rid of the small players and give Google, Meta, etc. even more power. The unsustainable parasitic theft of open content is something that needs to be dealt with legally and nothing else will solve it. DRM never works. If enough people block Gemini, Google will just feed it with Google bot crawls and no one can afford to block that. And then they will sell the data to other players. Or someone will make a browser extension to do the same.

The second issue also should be solved via legislation and enforcement thereof. It can also be solved by disconnecting and/or throttling abusive networks wholesale - whole countries if need be. You know, like we have been handling abusive network participants forever. Trying to detect "bots" is a fools errand that will only get rid of the laziest crawlers. You cannot win the bot blocking game when the bots can afford to spend more resources per request than real users are willing to.

So yes, the web must remain open. But to do that we must not have bot identity checks at all - whether that's managed by a single company that has inserted it as a gatekeeper or not.
by strken | 2025-09-01 08:56:01+00:00
Surviving something like that (a much less serious adenoma near the brain) is neat because I can mentally use the memory to alter my current state of mind.

I can't recreate the exact feeling, obviously. Just remembering waking up in the world of the living is still powerful enough to improve my mood and put problems into perspective, even after more than a decade. The old me has a new mental tool, forever.

At the same time, I'm not walking around like an enlightened monk either. Whether something counts as life-changing must depend on perspective and personality.
by Krssst | 2025-09-01 08:56:24+00:00
If that comes to pass I hope that one would be able to install a regular firmware with full DRM support / banking app support which only differs by allowing one to install apps freely. I don't think that's the case currently with firmwares that allow root. The security implications are somewhat different (root is more permissive) but I guess that the kind of person that wants to run arbitrary apps also prefer root access (maybe not at the cost of access to everyday apps with bullshit protections however).
by sunderw | 2025-09-01 08:56:40+00:00
I think the framing that "individual bad actors must be regulated for the good of the collective" is wrong here. In my opinion, what GP is saying is more along the line of "powerful actors must be regulated for the good of the collective powerless people".

When you look at it like that, then what Google and Apple is doing does not fit this point of view. They are (extremely) powerful entities imposing themselves on the whole world.
by aw1621107 | 2025-09-01 08:57:20+00:00
> Rust doesn't have computed goto (gcc/clang extension heavily used in interpreters like CPython and LuaJIT for direct threading).

On the other hand, there's the recently-added-to-nightly `become` for guaranteed tail calls, which might work better than computed gotos if CPython is a good example [0]

> When using both attributes [[[clang::musttail]] and preserve_none], Jin's new tail-call-based interpreter inherits the nice performance benefits of the computed-goto-based version, while also making it easier for the compiler to figure out optimal register allocations and other local optimizations.

To be fair I don't think Rust has a preserve_none equivalent yet, but given naked functions are a thing in Rust I'd hope it isn't too bad to support?

[0]: https://lwn.net/Articles/1010905/
by simianwords | 2025-09-01 08:58:09+00:00
>It's not (just) about a bad boss. It's about somebody being in a position of power who captures the entire value you produce (sales, IP, patents) and decided what fraction out of it you deserve.

Wrong on many levels. They don't capture your entire value. They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides.

>Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).

False, they don't all do the same work. Some people do more valuable work than others.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-01 08:58:34+00:00
I hadn't heard of this Aegospotami meteor before, I wonder what happened to it given that it was apparently intact and "the size of a wagon-load". I had to look up if that's even possible, but there's one in Namibia that's 60 tonnes and hasn't been moved from where it dropped; it was discovered in 1920. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoba_meteorite
by Jedd | 2025-09-01 08:59:18+00:00
Concur - as noted in a sibling comment, I'm using both on Nomad/docker 5-node clusters, but started with minio then ran up garage-dev to compare (I just haven't migrated data over from minio yet).

I use mine primarily for long-term stores for Grafana's Mimir and Loki products.

Anyway, minio & garage are both lightweight, and happily run in docker, so if you've got a small cluster at home it would take maybe an hour or two to install them both from scratch.
by noirscape | 2025-09-01 09:00:07+00:00
> ICANN periodically lets anyone with $1 million create random new generic TLDs like .top and .win and .google and .hiv and .amazon and .zip - it's pretty clear there aren't any real rules or standards for TLDs apart from having money.

There's actually a bunch of rules gTLDs have to follow compared to ccTLDs. The main one I know of is that they can't randomly screw you over if you've already registered a domain name with them - they're allowed to force conditions on initial signups, but they are required to respond to things like trademark disputes in the ICANN process or domain name registrar transfers (if you ever wondered why this is a relatively easy thing - it's because ICANN punishes registrars that don't cooperate).

Freenom got in a lot of trouble back in the day for not following the rules and got suspended+fined a few times by ICANN for gTLD registrations. It took a Facebook lawsuit for them to finally go under though.

> Why should ICANN break things for .io and its users, when they could instead keep things working, and extract $1M from a hedge fund, at the same time?

Because ccTLDs follow a different standard. ICANN makes no money from ccTLDs - they're given to the country that owns the territory in question (or whatever pseudo-legal authority comes closest), and the country then has the right to sublicense out the right to those TLDs under any conditions it wants to use. Some countries don't let you do top-level registrations or any registrations at all, reserving the entire space for government websites. Others make them basically open to registration by anyone. ICANN has no real financial ties for .io in specific; any money that the hedge fund pays for it goes to the British government.

This system as I understand it, is this way in part to appease countries that would otherwise have bad relationships with the US to accept ICANN as the central naming authority of the internet even though it's a US-based entity; 2 letter TLDs are given to the country in question and in exchange, they follow the other rules of ICANN.

Making an exception would basically require the UK to make a fuss about it (since that's what Russia did with .su), which seems unlikely given the UK is also changing the legal status of the British Indian Ocean Territories in such a way that they cease to exist.
by XorNot | 2025-09-01 09:01:02+00:00
Also because the gas itself went to customers outside Ukraine.

Ultimately the general public is capricious in its beliefs: cutting the gas off and causing energy prices to spike in Europe means someone will call for the head of whoever's nearest to blame.

Ukraine also was deliberately not targeting Russian oil assets earlier at the request of the US for economic reasons - though I'd say recent American political history shows what a mistake that is.
by MrJohz | 2025-09-01 09:01:09+00:00
That's true, although it's often limited in applicability. The amount of time it takes us to learn something often depends on what we already know and what analogies and comparisons we have. I can imagine Kernighan has worked with very few languages that come with their own package manager like Cargo, and so using Cargo feels very alien and slow to him. But for someone coming from a language like Java or Python, a language-specific package manager might seem really obvious and intuitive.

Also some of his comments sound surprising, like there's more context that he didn't communicate or wasn't aware of. For example, Rust code typically performs as quickly as C code (sometimes faster, sometimes slower, depending on various details, but typically they are very similar). But his impression of Rust was that the resulting code was slow, which maybe suggests he was writing quite strange code to begin with, or that he didn't know how to get Rust to compile in release mode or something like that. My hunch is that he was trying out Rust, but also wasn't especially invested in learning it (which is fair enough!) and so maybe missed some stuff that would seem obvious to other new users. Like I said, I did much the same in university when learning C, and as a result simply don't have an informed opinion there.

In the end, the guy has written one program and was completely up front about how that does not make him an expert either in how great Rust is, or how terrible it is. Which is a sensible approach to take.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-09-01 09:01:30+00:00
I believe it's in part due to the actual way the pipelines work - gas isn't simply piped into one end and out the other like fluid or switched on and off like energy systems.

Switching it off on one end would require storing it somewhere at the source and switching it off on the other could destroy the actual piping. You can't just "take" it from one and easily transfer it to another customer.

AFAIK it's the engineering but that other comment about neighhbors in Dubai is yeah
by yelow_soft01 | 2025-09-01 09:01:59+00:00
You might be offering great taxi service. Even your customers like it.

But when you check the numbers, the marketing ROI is nowhere close to what you expected.

The ride booking graph does not match the service quality. The ads don’t seem to justify the spend.

This is where most businesses realize something important: there’s a missing link between the product and the return.

That missing link is not more money on ads. It is not throwing another campaign into the mix.

The gap often lies in how you connect your service to the right customers with the right story.

And that is where a marketing suite comes in.
by primenum | 2025-09-01 09:02:37+00:00
Methylphenidate was a no-go for me too, was emotionally unstable and burnt out at the end of the day. However, this is my second month on atomoxetine and so far, I have only words of praise. There are one or two months to go for full effectiveness but I am satisfied so far. Focus is better, my mind is much more quieter, I've been able to kick some dopamine seeking behaviors and am working on new habits. I really feel positive and ready for change in life -- speaking this as an anxiety ridden person for more than ten years. The only negative is that it slightly increases heart rate, but I think this is supposed to go away too. I'd note that I am on some supplements as well and beforehand I did a simplistic dna check to see my methylation/detox profile (wanted to see why methylphenidate was a no-go).
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-01 09:02:37+00:00
Those are exactly the same framing and the most likely outcome is left politicians saying, "why do you allow this 'sideloading' at all Google? I have a constitutent who got scammed, why did you allow it? Are you one of those awful libertarians? You should be more like Apple and review all software, otherwise you clearly aren't caring about consumer protection as much as Tim Cook does, up your standards or else we'll regulate you".
by Kurtz79 | 2025-09-01 09:03:02+00:00
That makes no sense. No one sane wants to go back to a time where all mobile electronics had separate chargers, especially since the number of mobile devices we use on a daily basis is higher than ever before.

If anything, manufacturers that are able to provide working, compatible solutions should be preferred by consumers to those that don't, and the laws of economics will take care of the rest.

But some of those manufacturers have large loyal customer bases that will find ways to justify them even if they were to employ child labor, so there is that.
by anonzzzies | 2025-09-01 09:04:09+00:00
How feasible is it currently (I never tried as I don't want or need it yet) to run Android under Linux for your banking/gov apps? I can accessibility tooling to control them, so only in those cases, I could communicate with the android layer. I don't care about Netflix etc (I know many people do) but I must he able to login to banking and gov.
by deadbabe | 2025-09-01 09:04:29+00:00
If a central AC unit blows you’re staring at a $4-$5k bill, mandatory, or you have no AC.

If your attic gets some mold that will be $8k to get rid of it.

Home insurance, you must pay. Property tax, you also have to pay. Water and electricity too.

Or, you can pay a housing provider a flat monthly fee, and not worry about any of that.
by closewith | 2025-09-01 09:04:34+00:00
> So you get both the wonderful views (building the house or delivering the software) but also you get improved health (keeping your mind trained on both high level thinking and low level implementation vs high level only).

The vast majority of developers aren't summitting beautiful mountains of code, but are instead are sifting through endless corporate slop.

> We might say that using a hammer constantly will develop more your muscles, but in carpentry there are still plenty of manual work that will develop your muscles anyway.

The trades destroy human bodies over time and lead to awful health outcomes.

Most developers will and should take any opportunity to reduce cognitive load, and will instead spend their limited cognitive abilities on things that matter: family, sport, art, literature, civics.

Very few developers are vocational. If that is you and your job is your identity, then that's good for you. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that's a normal or desirable situation for others.
by lisper | 2025-09-01 09:05:36+00:00
It's not really about "steps", it's about getting the architecture right. LLMs by themselves are missing two crucial ingredients: embodiment and feedback. The reason they hallucinate is that they have no idea what the words they are saying mean. They are like children mimicking other people. They need to be able to associate the words with some kind of external reality. This could be either the real world, or a virtual world, but they need something that establishes an objective reality. And then they need to be able to interact with that world, poke at it and see what it does and how it behaves, and get feedback regarding whether their actions were appropriate or not.

If I were doing this work, I'd look at a rich virtual environment like Minecraft or simcity or something like that. But it could also be coq or a code development environment.