MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ipv6ipv4 | 2025-09-08 17:48:55+00:00
That Signal data doesn’t just transfer like any other data on iOS when upgrading phones is seriously dumb.

Wrap it in whatever security deemed necessary (or make migration/backup opt-in), but just let the blob copy over like every other app on the planet.

This cumbersome backup nonsense is a senseless no more secure bandaid for a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
by tolerance | 2025-09-08 17:49:18+00:00
It’s a pity that this is the bottom-most comment and equally it’s a shame that the slur “Karen” made its way into the White lexicon spoiling an otherwise informative remark.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but is Winer’s somewhat recent effort with FeedLandⁱ any different from Planet?

ⁱ: https://feedland.org/?username=scripting
by sfink | 2025-09-08 17:49:22+00:00
If they made it as far as being able to lose something they were working on, then it's less likely to have been a missing library problem. But I don't know what it was; people do successfully run Firefox on 32-bit Linux.

Firefox does have problems with old profiles, though. I could easily see crud building up there. I don't think Firefox is very good about clearing it out (unless you do the refresh profile thing). You could maybe diagnose it with about:memory, if you were still running that configuration.
by serf | 2025-09-08 17:49:27+00:00
it kind of reminds me of 'mudblood' from harry potter a bit, also from pop fiction -- and similarly considered harmless.

yeah it's not directly harmful -- wizards aren't real -- but it also serves as an (often first) introduction to children of the concepts of familial/genetic superiority, eugenics, and ethnic/genetic cleansing.

I can't really think of any cases where setting an example of calling something a nasty name is that great a trait to espouse, to children or adults.
by ai-christianson | 2025-09-08 17:49:44+00:00
I can run GLM 4.5 Air and gpt-oss-120b both very reasonably. GPT OSS has particularly good latency.

I'm on a 128GB M4 macbook. This is "powerful" today, but it will be old news in a few years.

These models are just about getting as good as the frontier models.
by hunglee2 | 2025-09-08 17:49:49+00:00
Thing is, nothing Korea can do about it. Converting allies into vassals seems to be what MAGA is all about, Korea is simply going to have to suck it up.

As for the Hyundai screw up, its hard to avoid the cliche comparison with Hitler Germany, where word from the mercurial leader can often contradict policy or produce edge cases which a dysfunctional bureaucracy cannot sensibly resolve. resulting in turf wars between departments each competing to deliver to their priority
by mikewarot | 2025-09-08 17:50:12+00:00
Strictly speaking, Linux, no matter what distribution, is insecure by design. Linus Torvalds's choice to ignore the lessons of Minux, and his instructor Andrew S. Tanenbaum resulted in short term gains that have cost us all in the long run.

With a microkernel system, you only have to really trust the kernel, and it's very small. You can build provably secure systems in this manner.

The last commonly available hardware/software combination that you could actually trust was an IBM PC/XT with dual floppy disks running MS-DOS. The write protection was enforced in hardware, so you could make and keep clean copies of the operating system.
by pengaru | 2025-09-08 17:50:21+00:00
TL-affinity for these issues hasn't been an accurate description of SF for several years.

We're talking about downtown SF, that's it. Part of Civic Center was converted into a skate park to drive the homeless out because what used to be kept local-ish to the TL had spread throughout downtown.

On any given night you'll now find an open air market of stolen goods at the corner of Seventh and Market, across from Civic Center. Is that in the TL? The situation is more fluid than in the past, and these people are indeed still sleeping and shitting on the sidewalks.
by antman | 2025-09-08 17:50:28+00:00
Apparently we not only lose technology we also lose history. So things that were lost and reinvented usually in a different way: The wheel, Dome building (got reinvented twice 1k years in between), printed letters (3k years), self healing concrete (not sure if has been reinvented since the romans), astronomy calculators (1.5k years? not sure is there was an antikythera mechanism in the rennaisance), steam operated opening doors (2k years, we went directly to electric).

These are of the top of my head mostly covered by HN posts. Especially the antikuthera mechanism the loss was that entire that even the memory of this mechanical calculator or even the existence of other such calculator was lost. Also lost apparently was the process of creating an H bomb that"s for good but probably it has been secretly reinvented by now.

This is a clear case of a discussion appearing as it has a tech content and in fact its historical. Statistically and given tge infinite creativity of people infinite things will have disappeared, through a process of randomness, usefulness and politics a few prevail. The wheel was forgotten because it was useless. It required working economies, trade and usable roads, even dirt roads. As for printing letters if that prevailed when it was invented 2-3k years back we could have reached the stars by now.

In the times its even easier to lose technologies, they are not intuitive anymore, they are stored in miniture formats easily forgotten and stored easily corrupted and fail media, guarded behind laws, encryptions and interests. Medical technology is our lifetime's major culprit.
by taylodl | 2025-09-08 17:50:47+00:00
Musk was a special member of the administration and with DOGE went waaaaaaaay beyond looking out for the interests of Tesla's and SpaceX's shareholders. Musk, through the smokescreen of DOGE, actively undermined federal regulatory agencies who were investigating Tesla and SpaceX. Musk attended political rallies and gestured the sig heil. Musk bankrolled the Trump campaign in a very significant way. This is not what the other tech CEOs are doing.

Musk has put himself in a position where it's very difficult for him to claim "it was just business." That's a large part of why Tesla sales are now tanking.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-08 17:50:51+00:00
Related:

Looming 'demographic cliff': Fewer college students and fewer graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42634596 - January 2025

Predicting College Closures and Financial Distress [pdf] - https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-... - December 2024
by mindslight | 2025-09-08 17:51:16+00:00
The problem isn't the general philosophy of capitalism per se, but rather the utter lack of failing to control or mitigate the problems of how it's currently implemented, including the now-entrenched legal indulgences that concentrated capital has bought for itself. That such criticism is often shouted down by straw manning it as "socialism" (previously "communism") is itself part of the problem. Even this article/study reeks of this fake duality. Its better stat to focus on is that people hate big business. And of course people hate big business. On a spectrum of individual liberty, big business is right next to authoritarian government. The main separation is how much it's possible to avoid a given one, which is increasingly less and less.

In the name of "capitalism", our government has allowed big business to grow ever larger, become ever more inescapable, and often even delegates/cedes governmental power to big business. So really if anyone is reading this, getting angry at the rise of "socialism", and wanting to save capitalism - it's really incumbent upon you to be loudly criticizing both the foundational and emergent problems of capitalism as currently conceived. Because otherwise this frustration is just going to continue building, and we are going to lose what we do have, for good.
Ask HN: Looking for Some Guidance
by rookie123 | 2025-09-08 17:51:35+00:00
Hey folks—would love some honest guidance. I’ve got ~10 years in ML/forecasting/analytics (Python, SQL, R, Java), based in my country’s finance hub, and a master’s from UC Berkeley.

I would say I am proficient on following sides: 1) Coding 7/10 2) Analytics/Modelling 8/10 3) Communication 8/10

I’m torn between doubling down on modeling/analytics, moving to backend/data SWE, jumping into Gen-AI/AI engineering, or shifting into analytics consulting. Looking for maximizing career longevity—skills that age well, solid comp, and resilience across cycles. If you were me, which path would you bet on and why?
by bilal4hmed | 2025-09-08 17:51:41+00:00
I mean it says so right in the blog post

At the core of secure backups is a 64-character recovery key that is generated on your device. This key is yours and yours alone; it is never shared with Signal’s servers. Your recovery key is the only way to “unlock” your backup when you need to restore access to your messages. Losing it means losing access to your backup permanently, and Signal cannot help you recover it. You can generate a new key if you choose. We recommend storing this key securely (writing it down in a notebook or a secure password manager, for example).
by Joker_vD | 2025-09-08 17:51:43+00:00
Mmm. But how does the package registry know which signing keys to trust from you? You can't just log in and upload a signing key because that means that anyone who stole your 2FA will log in and upload their own signing key, and then sign their payload with that.

I guess having some cool down period after some strange profile activity (e.g. you've suddenly logged from China instead of Germany) before you're allowed to add another signing key would help, but other than that?
by adrian_b | 2025-09-08 17:51:51+00:00
The range of 1 to 2 g daily of DHA+EPA has been suggested based on the daily consumption of 2 g or more that is typical for populations like the Japanese, who include a great proportion of marine food in their diet and who appear to derive health benefits from this.

I agree that for now there is no better evidence about which is the optimal daily intake.

Quantities about 10 times less than this might be sufficient to avoid any obvious signs of nutritional deficiency, but are unlikely to be optimal.

The capacity of converting ALA from vegetable oil into DHA and EPA may vary a lot between humans and it is typically lower in males than in females and also lower in older people than in young people.

The less risky choice is to ensure that you eat enough DHA+EPA. Perhaps one does not need 1 to 2 g of DHA+EPA daily, but eating it is unlikely to be harmful, while not eating it carries definite risks.
by jondwillis | 2025-09-08 17:51:57+00:00
I use, or at least try to use local models while prototyping/developing apps.

First, they control costs during development, which depending on what you're doing, can get quite expensive for low or no budget projects.

Second, they force me to have more constraints and more carefully compose things. If a local model (albeit something somewhat capable like gpt-oss or qwen3) can start to piece together this agentic workflow I am trying to model, chances are, it'll start working quite well and quite quickly if I switch to even a budget cloud model (something like gpt-5-mini.)

However, dealing with these constraints might not be worth the time if you can stuff all of the documents in your context window for the cloud models and get good results, but it will probably be cheaper and faster on an ongoing basis to have split the task up.
by close04 | 2025-09-08 17:52:04+00:00
I use Tailscale for this, always connected and Immich pointing at the TS IP. I haven’t yet made the jump to full syncing, so I have a manually curated library of photos that I access anywhere but I am planning on starting to test this feature soon (I take a lot of junk throwaway photos with the phone and don’t want to sync everything). I’ll have to see how it best works for me.

But Immich is a great app, minimal to no fuss setting it up in a container on my NAS. My only potentially unfounded concern is when I upgrade the images. They changed the different component containers images over time, sometime with breaking changes. So I always half expect that an upgrade will screw up the setup and I’ll have to start from scratch with the indexing.
by burnte | 2025-09-08 17:52:22+00:00
I totally agree but AI is such a broad category it's like asking "what can we do with electricity?" Well, that depends, what problems are you looking to solve?

You always start with the problem that needs to be solved, not the solution. I'm concerned we'll have another bubble pop like the dotcom crash. A lot of companies are spending money like mad to have any kind of AI thing they can market about without regard to "Does it work right? Does is solve a problem?"

It took my former company a year and half a million dollars to learn that what we actually needed was a completely different tool that promised to do a lot less, but did what we needed it to do quite well. Mgmt got stars in their eyes with all the things the first tool might be able to do someday, and didn't pay attention to what it could do today.

We switched to the other tool at $70/month/user and saw a retention rate over 90% at 6 months. Exact same test group, exact same type of tool, but this tool was more focused and tangible. We went from spending $450k per year at with the first company to $59k/yr with the second company.

AI isn't magic, You can't skip all the project planning steps you'd normally do just because this is AI. Don't fast track it, don't ignore testing data or feedback, etc. It's hard to push back on excitement but it's important that we do. When our emotions carry us away that's when we make worse decisions.
by toast0 | 2025-09-08 17:52:24+00:00
Android x86 devices suffer when developers include binary libraries and don't add x86. At the time of Intel's x86 for Android push, Google didn't have good apk thinning options, so app developers had to decide if they wanted to add x86 libraries for everyone so that a handful of tablets/phones would work properly... for the most part, many developers said no; even though many/most apps are tested on the android emulator that runs on x86 and probably have binary libraries available to work in that case.

IMHO, If Intel had done another year or two of trying, it probably would have worked, but they gave up. They also canceled x86 for phone like the day before the Windows Mobile Continuum demo, which would have been a potentially much more compelling product with x86, especially if Microsoft allowed running win32 apps (which they probably wouldn't, but the potential would be interesting)
by devsda | 2025-09-08 17:52:31+00:00
US with its control of social media etc can push a narrative to instigate population of friendly or unfriendly countries. There's no way to know say for sure whether the protests were organic or inorganic.

Every country has problems that atleast look worthy of an uprising. CIA has both the means and the track record of messing with countries, so its natural to be suspicious.

If Russia had control of social media narrative in US and wanted to cause trouble, nobody would know for sure if an uprising was due to their meddling or due to current political climate.

Lack of evidence doesn't prove or disprove anything.
by stathibus | 2025-09-08 17:52:38+00:00
A common refrain here seems to be that there is no good std lib, which makes sense for something like "chalk" (used for pretty printing?)

That being said, let's take color printing in terminal as an example. In any sane environment how complicated would that package have to be, and how much work would you expect it to take to maintain? To me the answer is "not much" and "basically never." There are pretty-print libraries for OS terminals written in compiled languages from 25 years ago that still work just fine.

So, what else is wrong with javascript dev where something as simple as coloring console text has 32 releases and 58 github contributors?
by zokier | 2025-09-08 17:52:43+00:00
There was recent story about f-droid running ancient x86-64 build servers and having issues due lacking isa extensions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44884709

but generally it is rare to see higher than x86-64-v3 as a requirement, and that works with almost all CPUs sold in the past 10+ years (Atoms being prominent exception).
by pessimizer | 2025-09-08 17:53:19+00:00
I've come to the conclusion that it is a normal, extremely useful, dramatic improvement over web 1.0. It's going to

1) obsolete search engines powered by marketing and SEO, and give us paid search engines whose selling points are how comprehensive they are, how predictable their queries work (I miss the "grep for the web" they were back when they were useful), and how comprehensive their information sources are.

2) Eliminate the need to call somebody in the Philippines awake in the middle of the night, just for them to read you a script telling you how they can't help you fix the thing they sold you.

3) Allow people to carry local compressed copies of all written knowledge, with 90% fidelity, but with references and access to those paid search engines.

And my favorite part, which is just a footnote I guess, is that everybody can move to a Linux desktop now. The chatbots will tell you how to fix your shit when it breaks, and in a pedagogical way that will gradually give you more control and knowledge of your system than you ever thought you were capable of having. Or you can tell it that you don't care how it works, just fix it. Now's the time to switch.

That's your free business idea for today: LLM Linux support. Train it on everything you can find, tune it to be super-clippy. Charge people $5 a month. The AI that will free you from their AI.

Now we just need to annihilate web 2.0, replace it with peer-to-peer encrypted communications, and we can leave the web to the spammers and the spies.
Ask HN: How do you track what's backed up?
by atomicnature | 2025-09-08 17:53:20+00:00
My team recently lost some production data - not because backups failed, but because some critical things weren’t tracked at all.

Postgres dumps -> backed up

GitLab repos -> backed up

Ghost configs -> backed up

Listmonk database -> NOT backed up

Snapshots exist, but they’re heavy and don’t make it clear whether everything important is included. Also, there's the overhead of managing them, policies, etc - which just feels like overkill. Backing up the entire OS and temp files and so on doesn't sit well with me.

Ad-hoc scripts give an illusion of safety -- but practically it’s easy to miss something (we had a bunch of scripts/cron for this stuff).

The hard part isn’t running backups -- it’s visibility: knowing what needs backup, what’s actually covered, and where it lives.

How do you handle this in your organization? What’s the hardest part of tracking backups in practice?
by tolerance | 2025-09-08 17:53:41+00:00
1 – I had no idea that Buttondown had an active blog.

2 – It feels like RSS is one of those topics where the same old observations and opinions are raised, but nothing new is ever tread for or against it.

I’m not sure whether these works address my interest for the former, but I think they’re cool.

* https://matklad.github.io/2025/06/26/rssssr.html

* https://github.com/rsdoiel/antenna
by Chance-Device | 2025-09-08 17:54:07+00:00
I think that all real progress in this space will come from materials science and optics, not computer science. The optical-electronic-optical path just doesn’t scale. You can use analog electronics all you like, but what silicon area and energy do they consume, and how does that compare with digital equivalents? How does the parts count scale with the network size and channels? When you put it all together, usually you’re way down on digital. I don’t think this is any different.

Show me a way to keep the network all in optics, all the way through the network - including native positive and negative weights, weights that can actually be larger than 1, and activation functions - without any digital conversion and re-emission.
by jcranmer | 2025-09-08 17:54:19+00:00
Well, for starters, it would make The Economist's recent article on "What if AI made the world's economic growth explode?" [1] look like the product of overly credulous suckers for AI hype.

[1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/07/24/what-if-ai-mad...
by pdntspa | 2025-09-08 17:54:36+00:00
I would bet a lot of those folks are running embedded linux environments. Kiosks, industrial control, signage, NUCs, etc. I know that as of about 6 years ago I was still working with brand-new 32-bit celeron systems for embedded applications. (Though those CPUs were EOL'd and we were transitioning to 64-bit)
by brokencode | 2025-09-08 17:54:49+00:00
Perhaps said software could even form an end to end encrypted tunnel from your phone to your local LLM server anywhere over the internet via a simple server intermediary.

The amount of data transferred is tiny and the latency costs are typically going to be dominated by the LLM inference anyway. Not much advantage to doing LAN only except that you don’t need a server.

Though the amount of people who care enough to buy a $3k - $10k server and set this up compared to just using ChatGPT is probably very small.
by jchw | 2025-09-08 17:54:53+00:00
Formatters breaking code is not something that happens in all language ecosystems; I think it's mostly a C++ and occasionally JS issue, but for gofmt and many other formatters just don't break code. It's also not really that common anyways.

You can solve the Git noise issue by enforcing formatting in CI and keeping formatter configuration in repo. This is what most high quality open source projects will do. The purpose of this is not about "adhering to aesthetic ideologies", it's about not bothering people with the minutiae of yet another pointless set of formatting conventions. Most developers couldn't give a shit less where you think braces should go, or whether you like tabs or spaces, or whatever else, they care about more important things like data structures and writing more correct code. Having auto formatting enables them to effortlessly follow project norms without needing to, for every single repo they work in, carefully try to adhere to the documented formatting (which usually winds up being inconsistent eventually anyways, in projects without auto formatting, because humans are fallible.)

The reason why people submit code with a huge formatting diff is usually because your project didn't ship a formatter manifest but their editor is configured to format on save. That's because probably most of the projects people work on now do actually use some form of automatic formatting, be it clang-format, gofmt, prettier, black, etc. so it winds up being necessary to special case your project to not try to run a formatter. It's still a beginner's mistake to actually commit and PR a huge reformatting, but it definitely happens by accident to even experienced devs when working on projects that have weird manual formatting.
Show HN: React AI Agent Chat SDK
by mifydev | 2025-09-08 17:55:02+00:00
Hey HN!

Over the past two weekends, I've (vibe)coded a library for creating agentic chats. It's a full-stack library - it provides React UI components for the chat, tools, and a backend endpoint implementation based on Vercel AI SDK.

The reason I've written that library is because I saw that Vercel created Chat SDK, but when I wanted to try it, I realized that it's not an SDK; it's just a website template, which is also deeply tied to Next.js. The library I've created can be used everywhere. (I hope)

Want to quickly try it out? Install it with SourceWizard: npx sourcewizard@latest install react-ai-agent-chat-sdk

Let me know if you have any questions or see any bugs!