MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freefaler | 2025-09-01 07:18:39+00:00
13 years ago, Cory Doctorow warned us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI

So basically market forces and profit optimization is at work here as always.

However, if we can still unlock the boot loader and install Lineage OS or something like that and have a way to pay for developers to release their apps on stores like f-droid we can use the hardware.

The biggest problem with having freedom to use our devices is that the model is broken for the developers who support them. You "can donate", but from the numbers I've seen it's like 1 in 1000 donate. No pay == developers can't invest their time to improve the software.

So if there is "really" a substantial number of enthusiasts that are ready to pay for the freedom they crave, then companies like Librem will have enough customers to create decent and usable products for this audience. Want digital freedom - prepare to support the people who provide it.

Yes, that might mean that we'll need to have 2 devices, 1 for "banking/government services" that is "certified" and one for our own usage. Shitty but we'll be forced to do that sooner on later. The efficiencies for the government to enforce the policies is so strong that they can't helps themselves. And corporations like to have more data to squeeze every cent from the customer.

So if there is a working business model for "freedom" we might have a partial freedom. If there isn't we'd be just a digital farm animals to be optimized for max profits and max compliance.
by atoav | 2025-09-01 07:19:10+00:00
Of course there is no single best road to mathematics, mainly because the way humans are able to think isn't uniform.

There are people with more or less Aphantasia, so people who can't or have a hard time forming mental images. Then there are others who can rotate 3 bezier curves in their head and plot the intersections.

For students of the latter category relying on mental images is a great way to teach them, for the former it is catastrophical.

Anybody who has thought anything mathematical should be aware of the fact that different people prefer different ways of learning.
by maltelandwehr | 2025-09-01 07:20:25+00:00
> Google lives off ads that direct users to websites, websites they are doing their damnedest to make unnecessary.

People will still spend the same amount of money to purchase goods and services. Advertisers will be willing to spend money to capture that demand.

Having their own websites is an optional part. It can also happen via Google Merchant Center, APIs, AI Agents, MCP servers, or other platforms.

I believe there will be fewer clicks going to the open web. But Google can simply charger a higher CPC for each click since the conversion rate is higher if a users clicks to buy after a 20 minute chat vs if a user clicks on an ad during every second or third Google search.
by mgh95 | 2025-09-01 07:21:04+00:00
> Because if part of my tests involve calling an OpenAI endpoint, I don't want to pay .01 cent every time I run my tests.

This is a good time to think to yourself: do I need these dependencies? Can I replace them with something that doesn't expose vendor risk?

These are very real questions that large enterprises grapple with. In general (but not always), orgs that view technology as the product (or product under test) will view the costs of either testing or inhousing technology as acceptable, and cost centers will not.

> But in general I'm going to mock out things that I want to simulate failure states for, and since I'm paranoid, I generally want to simulate failure states for everything.

This can be achieved with an instrumented version of the service itself.
by keepamovin | 2025-09-01 07:24:22+00:00
This song was just in my head. Good. 90s. Posted. Just because I like it.

How did I find it? I hummed the melody into Google app on iPhone.

When I went to the YouTube page, the top comment was something I thought some HN folks may value:

Fun fact, The very first song to become an MP3 was Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner." A German engineer played the song over and over again as he tried to squeeze the song into a smaller size without changing its sound too much. The rhythm helped the encoding of the file.
by simgt | 2025-09-01 07:24:34+00:00
What I find fascinating in the whole process is how the lefts in mainland are broadly supporting the FLNK, as if any ethnic minority could only be on the right side. Even when said group is advocating to rid "their" land of a population that was born on the same soil as them, over multiple generations too. Yes the Kanak's ancestors were robbed of their land, but the left is also arguing for massively reducing inheritance and giving more rights to immigrants on other fronts.
by fragmede | 2025-09-01 07:24:43+00:00
How do you draw the conclusion that the writer doesn't care about their craft though? If someone uses an emdash, but spent three hours and a ton of effort on a three paragraph comment and some of that time was spent running it through ChatGPT to hone their point so it comes across better, does that invalidate the point they're trying to make? Should we start documenting how long it took to write something, regardless of if an LLM was used in some capacity to help write something instead?
by superfa | 2025-09-01 07:24:58+00:00
I used to spend a lot of time on TikTok unconsciously every day—around 2 to 3 hours. By the time I realized it, the time had already passed! I don’t know how many people have the same problem as me. When I became aware of it, I started reading. Now I spend about half an hour to an hour every day reading. Reading helps me start thinking and brings me a sense of calm.

Also, here’s a small tip: I like to read the text out loud while reading. This makes it easier for me to get into the reading state (sometimes speaking the words is a way to let my inner self really “see” them).

Later, I often wondered how many people might have the same problem as me. That gave me an idea—to create a video aggregation website that mainly shares good-quality videos beneficial for personal growth. Now, I’d love to hear how many friends might have a similar need!
by anupshinde | 2025-09-01 07:25:12+00:00
Exactly what I have experienced, I have tried with "thinking set" and saw varying results. An analogy - Each prompt in a conversation felt like I was talking to a different support representative, who missed one or the other part of the overall context, and I had to repeat myself many times. But it's also an inherent human part of me that forgets I'm talking to an AI.

However, I never explicitly told it to "think hard" - I will start doing that. I believe that is the key to making it work consistently.

Thanks!
by wisdomseaker | 2025-09-01 07:26:31+00:00
Myself and friends use dog poo bags, I'm unsure of their techniques but I tear one open and place on ground to give a decent target, pop used paper on my feces then pickup by the corners to drop it all in another bag. Tie it up then drop it inside a empty large foil crisp packet to help avoid piercing. It can then easily be carried out with any other rubbish
by fooker | 2025-09-01 07:27:40+00:00
It would be pretty ugly to make this more introspective in C++.

For example, if you had to match patterns to distinguish between these three possibilities when looking at a tree: (val), (val (tree left) (tree right)), (val (tree subtree)). Here, the possibilities are not really separate types, but rather different ways of constructing a type. This sort of pattern shows up in general purpose programming (even meat and potato imperative programming) pretty often.

There was a proposal for this championed by Stroustrup over ten years ago, but it went nowhere IIRC. https://www.stroustrup.com/pattern-matching-November-2014.pd...
Ask HN: Did Developers Undermine Their Own Profession?
by rayanboulares | 2025-09-01 07:28:00+00:00
We sold it all to “fun” and “accessibility”.

Unlike doctors, lawyers, or skilled tradespeople, we glorify bootcamps that promise anyone can become a developer in weeks. We worship open source, working nights and weekends “to help the community,” while the market treats it as baseline.

The result? A flood of underqualified competitors, stagnant or declining wages, and a profession that has become disposable. We brag about how easy coding is, all while normalizing mediocrity and eroding the value of our own craft.

We didn’t just create software, as a matter of fact we cheapened ourselves. And now, the industry we built depends on our own overwork, generosity, and naivety.
by pointlessone | 2025-09-01 07:28:06+00:00
If you’re seriously considering monetization I suggest you not choose a FLOSS license.

You don’t have to use a FLOSS license to get most of the things that come with a typical FLOSS project.

I suggest you consider BTPL [1] or a PolyForm license [2].

[1]: https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.2 [2]: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/
by spwa4 | 2025-09-01 07:28:08+00:00
I think the real question here, aside from how to displace Android and IOS, is: how do the developers get paid for the upgrades, new features, security analysis and fixes, developing new boards and coming up with bsp (board support packages, essentially a "distribution" for hardware manufacturers that works on whatever new boards they relase) and infrastructure of such an OS.

Let's just assume this is about the amount of effort Mozilla puts in. So they'd need to collect ~500 million per year.

Where does that money come from? Presumably the answer can't be Google.
by fsargent | 2025-09-01 07:28:48+00:00
This is the sixth ever election in the United States using Approval Voting, and the first ever approval voting election where we have the Cast Vote Records from the election. These records reveal fascinating details on St. Louis voters’ preferences.

AMA

For the data itself see https://approval.vote/report/us/mo/st_louis/2025/03/mayor
by crote | 2025-09-01 07:28:54+00:00
It works surprisingly well in practice. The key thing to remember is that you rarely connect identical devices together.

A laptop and a power bank both support both modes, but the laptop will have a "prefer sink" policy and the power bank will have a "prefer source" policy. As long as you don't connect two laptops or two power banks, it'll work out just fine.

Moreover, it has an override mechanism in case you do connect two identical devices. If you do connect two laptops together for data transferring, the OS should be able to let the user override the power flow direction - or even disable charging altogether.
by HacklesRaised | 2025-09-01 07:29:24+00:00
This seems counter intuitive.

All nflix da should require is the interfaces outer needs.

Network stack CODECS CRYPTO stack (DRM)

The OS seems irrelevant.

I mean sure you worked be limited to whatever interface a browser could provide.

It's not as if certification of a certain operating system means anything other than the certificate.

Netflix used play4sure beck in my days at Apple, and literally t out was a tick box for them to assure the content owners they had DRM.

Nobody certified apple's netflix app for ATV back then, I know, Ben Lee and I wrote it...

We desperately need OS research, exokernels should be a thing by now, at least then the question becomes moot.

Windows, (alphabet)OS, Linux and BSD all provide operating systems that enable productive work but there's a lot of cruft
by AIPedant | 2025-09-01 07:29:32+00:00
I don't think "so isolated he turned to a chatbot for validation" describes this, or why people get unhealthily attached to chatbots.

1) The man became severely mentally ill in middle age, and he lived with his mother because he couldn't take care of himself. Describing him as merely "isolated" makes me wonder if you read the article: meeting new friends was not going to help him very much because he was not capable of maintaining those friendships.

2) Saying people turn to chatbots because of isolation is like saying they turn to drugs because of depression. In many cases that's how it started. But people get addicted to chatbots because they are to social interaction what narcotics are to happiness: in the short term you get all of the pleasure without doing any of the work. Human friends insist on give-and-take, chatbots are all give-give-give.

This man didn't talk to chatbots because he was lonely. He did so because he was totally disconnected from reality, and actual human beings don't indulge delusions with endless patience and encouragement the way ChatGPT does. His case is extreme but "people tell me I'm stupid or crazy, ChatGPT says I'm right" is becoming a common theme on social media. It is precisely why LLMs are so addictive and so dangerous.
by extraisland | 2025-09-01 07:29:34+00:00
> I think a lot of it is "nobody has bothered building it yet" vs security.

All of this takes considerable time, money to build and after that you need to get people to buy into it anyway. Large billion dollar software companies have difficulty doing this. If you think it is so easy, go away and build a proof of concept.

BTW They have implementing sand-boxing in most desktop operating system. It is often a PITA. Phone like permissions model already exist in Windows, Linux and I suspect MacOS in various guises.

For development there are various solutions that already exist.

e.g.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

So these things already exist and often people don't use them. The reason for that is that there is usually reduces usability by introducing annoyances.

> Eg Qubes runs everything in Xen isolates - which is a wildly complex, performance limiting way to do sandboxing on modern computers.

It exists though today. If I care about security enough, I am willing to sacrifice performance. That is a trade off that some people are willing to make.

> There are much better ways to implement sandboxing that don't limit performance or communication between applications. For example SeL4's OS level capability model. SeL4 still allows arbitrary IPC / shared memory between processes. Or Solaris / Illumos's Zones. But that route would unfortunately require rewriting / changing most modern software.

If you solution starts with "rewriting most modern software". Then it isn't really a solution.

BTW what you are suggesting is a trade off. You have to trade resources (time and money typically) to build the thing and then you will need to spend more resources to get people to buy into using your tech.
by sdesol | 2025-09-01 07:29:55+00:00
Joking aside, if he is one of the top developers in the company and if he is "actually" a good developer, when compared to others outside of the company, then I can see this bill.

The current feature that I'm working on, required 100 messages to finalize things and I would say the context window was around 35k - 50k per "chat completion". My model of choice is Gemini 2.5 Flash which has an input cost of $0.30/1M. Compare this to Sonnet which is $3.00/1M.

If the person was properly designing and instructing the LLM to build something advanced correctly, I can see the bill being quite high. I personally don't think you need to use Sonnet 99% of the time, but if somebody else is willing to pay the bill, why not.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-01 07:30:00+00:00
>> If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?

> That's easy: consciousness piggybacks on memory, which is what really creates persistence over time.

One could just as easily say memory is a component of consciousness, be it short or long term versions.

> But an amnesiac can be conscious in the moment and not "learn from one situation to the next".

Amnesia is not the inability to "learn from one situation to the next." It is instead a condition affecting the ability of memory recall. Furthermore, I am unaware of any credible research claiming there exists amnesia such that all memory is blocked.

It is apparent to me you have a firm belief in your position regarding consciousness. I disagree with this position while respecting your right to have it.
by Aachen | 2025-09-01 07:30:03+00:00
Because I used to have a choice. Since dipping my toes in Android, I remember distinctly in 2012 or maybe 2013 the feeling when I got Xorg and Wireshark running on a Galaxy Note device within the first days. Dead simple! Heck, VirtualBox let me emulate Windows. I could play Rollercoaster Tycoon by attaching a USB keyboard and mouse over this little OTG dongle! Coming from Symbian and having recently started to run Linux on my desktop, and now all that being compatible on my phone, it felt like a miracle

Ahem, where was I

Ah yes: ever since dipping my toes in Android, I've always said I'd never buy an Apple device where I can't run my own software or control what proprietary software does. Now that the freedom is being taken away, the world is changing and I care about it. Until now, it was just a matter of buying any brand except one closed one. Not that hard to avoid
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-01 07:30:15+00:00
This is the thing.

LLM assisted coding ("vibe coding") is just project management.

You ask it to do things, then you check the work to a sufficient degree.

The better the specifications and documentation you give it, the better the result will be. Keeping tasks short and verifiable also helps a lot.

I've written SO many small tools for myself during the last year it's not even funny. Upgraded some shitty late night Python scripts to proper Go applications with unit tests and all, while catching up on my TV shows.

Converted my whole rat's nest of Docker compose files to a single Opentofu declarative setup.

None of this would've gotten done without an LLM assistant.
by nialse | 2025-09-01 07:30:29+00:00
Sorry for the terrible formatting. Tried to fix it but the last edit seems to have borked it completely.

www.realbusinessrescue.co.uk/advice-hub/companies-worth-more-than-countries

techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/so-who-watches-the-watchmen

www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/23/amazon-tesla-meta-climate-change-democracy

EDIT: Now in plain text since the last URL does not show up otherwise. And why is it rendering with --, its only - in the URL?
by jajko | 2025-09-01 07:30:31+00:00
A strange position, to require to experience something to believe in it. Yet in the same time, reverting back by default to superstitions and supernatural beliefs, which in the most logical sense were never truly experienced by anybody. But I guess they soothe some highly illogical emotional core from our distant past which made fight-or-flight and similar reactions possible.

You do you (or let your 'heart' do you), happy to not feel member of such group in any way nor sharing such concerns. Life is too short and there are properly amazing things to experience each day, that's a better focus of experiencing this world IMHO.
by bzzzt | 2025-09-01 07:32:49+00:00
Nintendo was and is primarily a toy company. The deal is if you buy their stuff you get entertainment. You're pretending it's a general purpose computer to make a point about interoperability, but it's neither. What kind of 'shit' do they pull with Switch 2 they already didn't with Switch 1? Both are expensive DRM locked game devices, Switch 2 is just a bit faster.
by vusaldev | 2025-09-01 07:33:31+00:00
i kept procrastinating and losing track of my study time, so i made a simple tracker that visualizes every session on a github-style heatmap. once i saw the gaps, it became way harder to skip.

free version → unlimited local timer + heatmap + session log with notes/images. pro version → cloud sync, analytics, pomodoro, blurting (write what you learned after a session), goal setting, flashcards with spaced repetition, and a leaderboard.

i launched studo.space yesterday and even made my first sale on day one, which blew my mind. would love feedback from the ph community on what to improve next (ui/ux, features, or growth ideas).

what do you think is the #1 feature a study tracker must have?
by hbogert | 2025-09-01 07:34:28+00:00
i understand why OP did it. But wouldn't it be nice if we took it all the way and just let the OS figure this out? [1]

This is a radical departure from the abstraction-on-abstraction that is implicated by BIOS/UEFI but it feels like it would make the whole architecture not feel like a fossil once it's out of the vendor's hands.

This would mean that every OS would need to make an implementation and feels like wasted effort, however, looking at all the BIOS bugs that i encountered which were OS specific, I have to say I'd rather see OS specific implementations than having to convince your vendor that you hit a bug which happens to be on a OS other than Windows or an ancient redhat patched Linux kernel.

[1]: https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...
by socalgal2 | 2025-09-01 07:34:39+00:00
Can you be specific about what you're asking it to write?

I'm pretty confidient that I couldn't get it to implement a element in a web browser. I'm talking about C++ in WebKit or Chromium, not a custom element in HTML/JS. Let's say browsers wanted a new data-table element that natively implemented a scrolling window such that you registered events to supply elements and it asked for only the portion that were visible. I feel like those code bases are too complex for LLMs to add this (could certainly be wrong).

In any case, more concrete examples would help these discussions.

I can give a concrete example: I just asked ChatGPT (should have asked something more integrated into my editor), to give me JavaScript to directly parse meta data out of an MP4 file in JS in the browser. It gave my typescript but told me I should look at mp4box.

I spent 15-20 minutes getting a mp4box example setup (probably should have asked for that too). Only to find that I think mp4box does not get me the data I wanted.

So I went back to ChatGPT and asked for JavaScript because I was hacking in something like jsfiddle. It gave me that and it worked!

I then said I wanted the title and comments meta data as that was missing from what it gave me. That worked too, first try.
by CorrectHorseBat | 2025-09-01 07:35:21+00:00
>If you think the UK gov’t was in any position to piss China off then (or now!) without it costing them and anyone else involved far more than it’s worth, I don’t know what to say.

Oh no, I definitely don't think that.

>It’s honestly amazing that China didn’t apply more ‘direct’ pressure to get HK bad sooner. There is nothing the UK likely would have done about it. Bad for business I guess? Macau transferred over around the same time.

The 80-90's were a bit too early to take such a risk I think, now they wouldn't take such a deal. The British likely got the best deal they could get.

>The Qing dynasty ‘remnants’ in Taiwan would have just been steamrolled if they’d gone anywhere near it. And not like there was any real cultural reason why HK’ers would accept them anyway, or that the Qing were well loved. CCP steamrolled them in mainland China like they did because they were, by all accounts, terrible.

The Republic of China government is no more (or less) a Qing dynasty remnant than the CCP is. They were indeed terrible, but that's a long time a go, most people involved are dead by now and the country has changed a lot. The CCP on the other hand is going back to the Mao era.

The civil war took two decades, in which the Kuomintang nearly defeated the Communists and had to fight off the Japanese while the Communists got bankrolled by the Soviets. I'd hardly call that steamrolled.
by greatgib | 2025-09-01 07:35:44+00:00
Nothing prevents that the device is locked by you instead of the "store" or even that the device has a "safe" mode that has to be explicitly disabled by the user in a non obvious way like connecting the device to a computer and running a command or so.

The only important thing is for the bank, Netflix and co to not be able to discriminate. But again nothing would provide the bank to offer a setting for the user to restrict where it can use it's banking app if it was not discriminatory. But we know well where this goes, in the end if you don't enable it