MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 17:28:09+00:00
I have one of these running KaiOS and it works surprisingly well. It also seems to be immune to battery life degradation (it works just as well as it did when I got it) and in general has been rock solid. I think in the almost six years that I've had it, it has spontaneously rebooted once and other than that it just works. It is simple, has buttons (no touch screen), has an earphone jack and is so solid you can drop it and the chance is larger that you damage the thing it lands on that that you damage the phone. It still looks like new in spite of being in my pocket together with keys and other stuff. I'd buy another in a heartbeat if this one ever dies but I suspect it will just keep on working.
by _1tem | 2025-09-28 17:28:48+00:00
The entire premise of Apple is building highly tuned private APIs. It’s what makes things like Apple Silicon battery performance and power to watt ratio possible. This kind of super fine tuning is practically impossible over a public API boundary, or at least much more difficult task. Take Live Translation for example. It has very tight latency and performance requirements which would be hard to make work over a public API where you can’t control the other device. Many types of audio applications are literally impossible to build on non-Apple devices due to the latency requirements. There is an entire audio ecosystem that cannot exist on Android due to the realtime performance requirements.
by t-3 | 2025-09-28 17:29:14+00:00
> I assume this also puts "Alice2" before "Alice10".

It doesn't (per https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Non-Goals):

> 1.9.2 Non-Goals > > The Default Unicode Collation Element Table (DUCET) explicitly does not provide for the following features: > [ ... ] > Numeric formatting: numbers composed of a string of digits or other numerics will not necessarily sort in numerical order.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-28 17:29:39+00:00
The eBay type feedback (A++++++ would gladly trade again) or the yelp problem, where malicious feedback was being placed to attack another business.

Heck, businesses will sue you if you put bad feedback on glassdoor.

I've even been offered 2 months salary by a business to NOT disparage their (toxic) culture on social media.
by BeFlatXIII | 2025-09-28 17:30:11+00:00
> The author wants the "worse" sort, one based on ASCII/Unicode codepoints, without any intelligence for numbers that 99% of GUI users want.

I want the author's opinion on how caplital and lowercase letters should be sorted. Do they follow strict ASCII/Unicode codepoints, or do they normalize into actual alphabetical order and sort upper/lower within each letter?
by DaveZale | 2025-09-28 17:30:11+00:00
Well, try looking at the contents of shopping carts at the checkout lanes of your supermarket. A lot of folks in the bottom half buy a lot of pricey sugary drinks and ultraprocessed microwaveable frozen stuff. So they get hit in their wallets, their waistlines, even their teeth take a hit. Just saying: if they wanted to make better choices, they could. Starting with food choices. Maybe they don't know where to start.
by Lukas_Skywalker | 2025-09-28 17:30:38+00:00
I agree that it can be useful, but I fear that in the future, we will have many more online platforms that require an ID than we currently do.

In the past, things like age verification required users to upload a scan or photo, and someone had to verify it. Because that was too much work for the platform operators, they didn't do it (or only with the banner "Are you over 18?").

With the e-ID instead, this will be much simpler to implement. And I expect it to become much more widespread in the future.
by HPsquared | 2025-09-28 17:31:37+00:00
Samsung has this too (not sure about other Androids), it's called "pin app".

It also makes the app come up immediately when your turn on the screen, so it's in front of the lock screen basically (but you can only access that particular app). It's good for showing someone a specific app. I also use it for instant access to my train ticket (QR code on screen on the train company's app). The iOS version sounds better though.
by clayhacks | 2025-09-28 17:31:45+00:00
I think it’s true the American system is broken, but I think the two Americas narrative is a bit of an oversimplification. There’s definitely plenty of people (over represented on this site) that aren’t yacht wealthy, but also aren’t paycheck to paycheck broke. Well paid laborers (SWE, other engineers, consultants) that can afford most day to day good, but struggle a bit more on big purchases like housing. I think ideally we’d tax the wealthy enough to allow more people to fall into that bucket of doing well but not crazy multiple homes well.
by AaronAPU | 2025-09-28 17:32:27+00:00
There are problems to solve all over the place. But you will need to dedicate deep focused thought toward finding them.

I recommend using the concept of a “talent stack” to find areas you are uniquely suited for and uniquely interested in.

Make an ordered list of things you enjoy, things you are motivated toward, things you are talented at. Then brainstorm ways to combine as many of them as you can.

Your particular combination will be rare, this is where you are most likely to be able to find and solve problems.

Since you’re a programmer you are very well suited for that type of analysis.

Once you’ve identified those areas, dedicate deep focused thought toward identifying problems and solving them. Go for long walks or hikes or bike rides while thinking about it.
by Animats | 2025-09-28 17:32:38+00:00
> Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you

In practice, that's most of them. Privacy Badger by itself is an OK ad blocker.

Also, you can easily tell Privacy Badger to block sites.

Privacy Badger warns you that blocking certain domains, such as Google Tag Manager (otherwise known as Google Backdoor Hostile Javascript Injector) will break some sites. In practice, this seems not to be a problem. I've had Google Tag Manager blocked for years.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-28 17:33:13+00:00
>ChatGPT told me I should quit my job

That could be pretty convincing.

OTOH, sometimes if the job is halfway decent you're really better off than most, so the right move could be to keep the job and break up your engagement with the bot.

So you can look for greener pastures in either regard.

How about whichever comes first?
by tracerbulletx | 2025-09-28 17:33:23+00:00
I have no idea why you'd be surprised the skeptical community adores this book, its basically the clearest statement of the core fundamental principles, a plea to be open and empathetic is not hostile. It's just wisdom, and the majority of people who think of themselves as skeptics believe that its important. At the same time, sometimes you want to be around people who share and build community with the same ideology as you which should be perfectly ok.
by atmavatar | 2025-09-28 17:33:41+00:00
The problem with representatives happened as a result of the Reapportionment Act of 1929 [1], which capped the house at 435 members.

tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently.

The simple fix is to repeal the law and apportion seats properly, likely by significantly growing the size of the House.

However, in typical Democrat fashion, they never bothered repealing the act and re-apportioning properly once they had power to do so.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
by Nevermark | 2025-09-28 17:34:12+00:00
By physical systems, I meant systems whose purpose is to do physical work. Mechanical things. Gears. Struts.

Computer hardware is an information system. You are correct that it is has a physical component. But its power comes from its organization (information) not its mass, weight, etc.

Transistors get more powerful, not less, when made from less matter.

Information systems move from substrate to more efficient substrate. They are not their substrate.
by martin-t | 2025-09-28 17:34:24+00:00
The last paragraph feels more wrong the more I think about it.

Imagine an AI as smart as some of the smartest humans, able to do everything they intellectually do but much faster, cheaper, 24/7 and in parallel.

Why would you spend any time thinking? All you'll be doing it is the things an AI can't do - 1) feeding it input from the real world and 2) trying out its output in the real world.

1) Could be finding customers, asking them to describe their problem, arranging meetings, driving to the customer's factory to measure stuff and take photos for the AI, etc.

2) Could be assembling the prototype, soldering, driving it to the customer's factory, signing off the invoice, etc.

None of that is what I as a programmer / engineer enjoy.

If actual human-level AI arrives, it'll do everything from concept to troubleshooting, except the parts where it needs presence in the physical world and human dexterity.

If actual human-level AI arrives, we'll become interfaces.
by saghm | 2025-09-28 17:34:43+00:00
From the outside, I'd argue that the most neutral way to interpret all of this is to assume good faith and trust every statement that hasn't been explicitly disagreed with by another party. Between what I've read before this blog post and what the author says here, that would lead me to conclude that Andre had years of behaving unprofessionally to Ruby Central and at least on one occasion towards Shopify itself, and then recently when Shopify became the de facto only funding source of Ruby Central, they demanded that Ruby Central take over RubyGems and Bundler, and as part of that, Andre got removed. The lack of communication around it just makes it seem like they had every motivation to try to remove him specifically, and took quite drastic actions to do so, but for unstated reasons chose not to publicize this aspect of it. If this were actually what the stated intentions of the changes were, I might understand it, even if I felt that using financial pressure on a third-party organization to remove someone from a different organization was a bit heavy-handed. Without that, it's hard to feel like this new context changes things much; even if he deserved the outcome personally, making huge changes to infrastructure that a huge community relies on to remove him seems like something worthwhile to be transparent about, and it doesn't do much to raise the level of trust that their stewardship of the infrastructure will be handled responsibly.

My opinion on this might change if the timeline of what happened were challenged in some meaningful way, but allusions to "details that would contradict fact-checks and timelines others have pieced together and published" isn't that. The only way to steel-man an argument that isn't stated is to assume infallibility, and that's just not reasonable to ask people to do.
by vetrom | 2025-09-28 17:35:29+00:00
bios flashes are typically preflashed prior to soldering to boards -- some vendors route jtag or spi contacts, but you're more likely to need a vampire/pogo clip on for the TSOP or equivalent chip, or have fun with resoldering the bios flash if you're needing to recover from this.

It's not impossible to do in the field, but you can't really count on vendors surfacing that interface usually.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-28 17:36:03+00:00
> we are at the point where models are very close to matching human expert capabilities in many domains

This is not true because experts in these domains don't make the same routine errors LLMs do. You may point to broad benchmarks to prove your point, but actual experts in the benchmarked fields can point to numerous examples of purportedly "expert" LLMs making things up in a way no expert would ever.

Expertise is supposed to mean something -- it's supposed to describe both a level of competency and trustworthiness. Until they can be trusted, calling LLMs experts in anything degrades the meaning of expertise.
by SoftTalker | 2025-09-28 17:36:28+00:00
Been going on long before that. When I was in high school a friend worked at a camera shop where they also did photo finishing in-house. Very common for them to make extra prints of all the nudes and amateur porn and circulate them amongst themselves and their friends.

On the one hand, that's a privacy violation. On the other hand, what did people expect when they brought their film in for processing---that nobody would see the photos? My guess is that a lot of them had an exhibitionist thing going on.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-28 17:37:06+00:00
That’s a cop-out. It should be the case that even administrator access should not be abusable to implant permanent backdoors.

Anything that makes privileges escalation exploits more damaging is a real problem. I’m getting tired of how these are being dismissed as if admin access should mean that you can ignore any security issues. There are things that even admin accounts should not be able to change at the hardware level, or if they can they must be reversible in the future by another user with admin access.

> The BMC needs to be ideally on a physically isolated network, or at least a separate one that has no route from the outside nor on the machine itself.

This is good practice but it shouldn’t excuse poor security at the hardware level.

Supermicro motherboards also commonly default to having a feature that bonds the BMC network interface to one of the main NICs if you don’t plug a cable into the BMC interface. It’s common for people to be surprised that their BMC is exposed on their main network because they didn’t plug in a cable on the BMC NIC port at all.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 17:37:14+00:00
Plan 9 is amazing. I just released my own ancient little operating system (see 'Show HN') which took some of Plan 9's ideas. Plan 9 was a massive inspiration at the time that it was released, I had it running on a really small machine for the time and I love the underlying concepts. It is a real pity that it never really took off.

Plan 9 is what Unix could have been, the whole idea that 'everything is a file' is so powerful that we ended up not believing it and the resulting hacks are all so ugly in comparison. Plan 9 does this so consistently that you can test a new version of the window manager in a window on the currently running window manager.

For fun I ran the Bell-Core window manager inside a Plan 9 window at some point just to see if it could be done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR

And yes, you could do it, and fairly easily so. This kind of structural coherency is a great feature for an operating system to have.
by _1tem | 2025-09-28 17:37:15+00:00
> don't install artificial barriers to differentiate your products

Some barriers are not artificial. I’m am an engineer and many of Apple’s engineering feats are only possible due to highly controlled interfaces. See for example audio applications that have very high performance requirements, such as low latency audio. It is literally impossible to build this on Android due to the interoperability layer being too slow. Many useful features on Apple devices take advantage of the highly tuned performance that can only happen on devices in the same ecosystem. Take for example Live Translation on AirPods. It’s very hard to get the same level of performance over a public API. Lots of Apple Silicon advantages in battery usage come about due to their deep integration with all parts of the hardware stack — that level of performance would be impossible over an interoperable stack. This is not about walled gardens, this is about building better performing devices with better experiences. It is much harder, near impossible, to build Apple-quality experiences over third party hardware.

I am completely against artificial walled gardens and artificial barriers but I believe many of Apple’s strict barriers are real engineering performance advantages.
by mulmen | 2025-09-28 17:37:32+00:00
> can you even include commas in Windows filenames?

Yes.

> Use any character in the current code page for a name, including Unicode characters and characters in the extended character set (128–255), except for the following: The following reserved characters:

< (less than)

> (greater than)

: (colon)

" (double quote)

/ (forward slash)

\ (backslash)

| (vertical bar or pipe)

? (question mark)

* (asterisk)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/namin...
by lubujackson | 2025-09-28 17:38:11+00:00
The key point is "relegating the reasoning". The real way to think about interfacing with LLMs is "abstraction engineering". You still should fully understand the reasoning behind the code. If you say "make a form that captures X, Y, Z and passes it to this API" you relegate how it accomplishes that goal and everything related to it. Then you look at the code and realize it doesn't handle validation (check the reasoning), so you have it add validation and toasts. But you are now working on a narrower level of abstraction because the bigger goal of "make a user form" has been completed.

Where this gets exhausting is when you assume certain things that you know are necessary but don't want to verify - maybe it let's you submit an email form with no email, or validates password as an email field for some reason, etc. But as LLMs improve their assumptions or you manage context correctly, the scale tips towards this being a useful engineering tool, especially when what you are doing is a well-trodden path.
by teekert | 2025-09-28 17:38:53+00:00
It was indeed an nvidia GPU, I desoldered something and got the thing working pretty much 100% on the iGPU of the corei7 in there... For 3 days until some update bricked it once and for good.

I never heard of any actions to take after the second failure, shame. Was that also valid in the EU?

Whole thing did leave me a bit sour about Apple tbh, it was my last macbook.
by strogonoff | 2025-09-28 17:39:40+00:00
I never made a case against LLMs and similar ML applications in the sense that they negatively impact mental agility. The cases I made so far include, but are not limited to:

— OSS exploded on the promise that software you voluntarily contributed to remains to benefit the public, and that a large corporation cannot tomorrow simply take your work and make it part of their product, never contributing anything back. Commercially operated LLMs threaten OSS both by laundering code and by overwhelming maintainers with massive, automatically produced and sometimes never read by a human patches and merge requests.

— Being able to claim that any creative work is merely a product of an LLM (which is a reality now for any new artist, copywriter, etc.) removes a large motivator for humans to do fully original creative work and is detrimental to creativity and innovation.

— The ends don’t justify the means, as a general philosophical argument. Large-scale IP theft had been instrumental at the beginning of this new wave of applied ML—and it is essentially piracy, except done by the powerful and wealthy against the rest of us, and for profit rather than entertainment. (They certainly had the money to license swaths of original works for training, yet they chose to scrape and abuse the legal ambiguity due to requisite laws not yet existing.)

— The plain old practical “it will drive more and more people out of jobs”.

— Getting everybody used to the idea that LLMs now mediate access to information increases inequality (making those in control of this tech and their investors richer and more influential, while pushing the rest—most of whom are victims of the aforementioned reverse piracy—down the wealth scale and often out of jobs) more than it levels the playing field.

— Diluting what humanity is. Behaving like a human is how we manifest our humanness to others, and how we deserve humane treatment from them; after entities that walk and talk exactly like a human would, yet which we can be completely inhumane to, become commonplace, I expect over time this treatment will carry over to how humans treat each other—the differentiator has been eliminated.

— It is becoming infeasible to operate open online communities due to bot traffic that now dwarves human traffic. (Like much of the above, this is not a point against LLMs as technology, but rather the way they have been trained and operated by large corporate/national entities—if an ordinary person wanted to self-host their own, they would simply not have the technical capability to cause disruption at this scale.)

This is just what I could recall off the top of my head.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-28 17:39:46+00:00
Pulling a physical chip to upgrade the firmware would generate so many returns or RMAs that it would be dropped as a feature immediately.

These days it’s common to do firmware updates to address small issues or even support the new CPU that was launched after the motherboard was manufactured.

I could see manufacturers adding a write-protect physical switch for those who want it. Make it opt-in and toggleable.
by OutOfHere | 2025-09-28 17:39:57+00:00
In the US, if you actually care about fixing a problem, it really helps to do tests yourself privately and quickly if the doctor or specialist is unwilling. Let's say there are 30-50 blood tests that are relevant for a set of symptoms. I would do up to $500 worth of tests at a time, then repeat the loop, continuing with the next batch until an answer is found or until all applicable tests are exhausted. Each normal result helps refine the next batch.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-28 17:40:12+00:00
> You just need to be making those decisions and gaining experience from them.

The important part that everyone glosses over is the "gaining experience" part.

The experience you gained writing code lead to you being tech lead / team lead /architect.

The experience you get from those roles, including "helping people get unstuck", makes you valuable because there are people involved, not just technology. IOW, that is different to the experience you get from prompting.

We have yet to see how valuable the experience from prompting will be. At this point the prompters are just guessing that their skills won't atrophy, and that their new experience won't be at the same level as vibe-coders who can't spell "Python".

As a fairly senior person myself, and an occasional user of LLMs, and someone who has tried CC in recent months, the experience I got from LLMs, while not nothing, was not recognised by me as valuable in any way - it basically put me at the same skill level as a vibe-coder.

OTOH, the experience I got mentoring very junior engineers the month before that I recognised as instantly valuable; at the end of it I had learned new strategies for dealing with people, growing them, etc.

The only "experience" you get with LLM is "put another coin into the slot and pull the lever again".
by ctvo | 2025-09-28 17:40:21+00:00
> top of a regular API

What is the regular API? How do you express all the integrations needed in this API? Who provides the integrations? Answering these questions lead you back to something like an MCP, which is an API contract that can be as generic or as specific as needed. Wasting context window to understand and re-implement each integration is why MCPs exist.

All the security issues are orthogonal, and occur regardless if invoking this API occurs via code or natural language.
by califool | 2025-09-28 17:40:34+00:00
You get it. A couple phrases I live by (taught to me by the haggling parents generation); "you never know unless you ask" and "the worst they can say is, NO" These don't need to just apply to goods and services either. They have lead to very interesting and life altering experiences that wouldn't have happened if I didn't ask a one sentence question.