MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Would a self-hosted update server for desktop apps be useful?
by ku9n | 2025-09-05 12:15:59+00:00
Most Electron and desktop apps today rely on GitHub Releases + Squirrel or a SaaS service for auto-updates. I’ve been working on a project called faynoSync that lets you self-host an update API instead.

Some features it supports right now:

Channel-based releases (stable, nightly, beta)

Platform/architecture-aware updates

Critical update enforcement

Basic telemetry aggregation

Intermediate build support

Team-based management and authorization

Support for multiple updaters (Squirrel, Electron Builder, etc.)

Public and private apps

I know this is a pretty niche problem — not every project needs it. But I’m curious what you think:

Would you stick with SaaS/GitHub Releases, or actually self-host an updater?

What pain points do you see in the standard flow that something like this could solve?

Repo if you want to take a look: https://github.com/ku9nov/faynoSync

Would love to hear your perspective
by Bender | 2025-09-05 12:16:27+00:00
an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN).

Or learning one of the many non-http ways that people share porn and other things or people sharing among friends on small private or semi-private forums, chat servers or sharing porn in video games as many teens do. Beyond that is paying the slowness tax of tor hidden .onion sites which can be sped up by disabling 3 hops.
by kdumont | 2025-09-05 12:18:23+00:00
Both podman and docker have pretty poor error handling in my experience. It depends on the error, but for me it often comes down to a docker compose misconfiguration, resource, permissions, etc. In docker always find the errors quite difficult to trace back to root cause. In podman you get a python a stack trace. I wish both projects would assert different assumptions/requirements at runtime and report errors/warnings in a human-readable way.
by tim333 | 2025-09-05 12:19:13+00:00
>If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant

I'm not sure if there's anything else out there that's better at giving a fairly neutral summary of political controversies?

It reminds me of the Churchill quote "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
by boxed | 2025-09-05 12:19:13+00:00
> This is just a dedicated RF emitter combined with a dedicated receiver. The fact that is it uses WiFi hardware is probably just because that's the cheapest and most available hardware for the researcher to work with.

Ok.

> There is no indication in the article that the WiFi can actually be used for transmitting real data at the same time

So? No one said it was.

> Therefore the ideas that this might apply to real-world situations and use existing WiFi infrastructure, are a stretch given the information that's been shared.

What? First you say it's trivial/obvious, and now it's impossible? Decide on your critique.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-09-05 12:19:44+00:00
I would love to love Podman, but the fact that it regularly just fails to work on my Windows laptop (the WSL2 instance seems fine, but can't be connected to, the UI just says 'starting', and none of the menu options do anything) and that I can't figure out how to make IPv6 networking work on any platform means that Docker isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future, I'm afraid...
by gtsop | 2025-09-05 12:20:24+00:00
Your response is an exact proof of what I said in my comment. Thanks

Edit: Ok elaboration for the well intended. There is a HUGE overlap of LSP and ACP. LSP solves the problem of "oh we have many IDEs and many language integration plugins, we have an NxM problem, let's make it a N+M". ACP goes to do exactly that but for agents (which is an implementation detail), which means they could very well piggy back on top of LSP
by jmye | 2025-09-05 12:21:00+00:00
I want to get this straight, given you

> dont even really believe in that much

If I write a book, let’s say it’s a really good book, and self-publish it, you’re saying you think it’s totally kosher for Amazon to take that book, make a copy, and then make it a best seller (because they have vastly better marketing and sales tools), while putting their own name in as author?

That seems, to you, like a totally fine and desirable thing? That literally all content should only ever be monetized by the biggest corporations who can throw their weight around and shut everyone else out?

Or is this maybe a completely half-baked load of nonsense that sounded better around the metaphorical bong circle?

Come on, now.
by cauliflower99 | 2025-09-05 12:21:44+00:00
From a teacher's perspective, I'm sure the craft is a mess of bad school policies vs. so-called "best practices" vs. real learning science vs. government policies vs. ancient bad advice (eg. learning styles and tablets in classrooms) vs. personal opinion.

It's not like there is a senior engineer who's got mountains of expertise to defer to (like a software team would have). Teachers are likely given directives from their schools and get dumped a bunch of tablets and are told this is "modern" education and to just roll it out.

Anyway, to your point - top-down directives are what change schools. There has been success such as banning smartphones in Ireland & UK recently. Schools taking on the problems and then solving it themselves could go a long way, rather than waiting for government to mandate things.
by Saline9515 | 2025-09-05 12:21:57+00:00
SEPA allows this in theory; in practice, for amounts >10k€, most banks will require you to provide proofs for the transaction due to the maximalist AML laws in the EU.

My bank requires me to download a PDF on their website, print it, fill it out by hand, scan it, and then send it by mail. After a few days, someone will decide to allow it (or not). If it is refused, I don't get any reason why and have to call the client service for clues.
by gethly | 2025-09-05 12:22:26+00:00
I am using event sourcing with cqrs and that means i also utilise projections, which the db itself can replicate less efficiently as a "view" or virtual table.

So one can technically create a projection/view that is tailor-made for a query that needs to display some data. Of course it is no often possible to retrieve all the data with a single select command.

So joins and multiple queries are simply inherent to complexity of data we store nowadays.

Anyway, years ago, i have moved to a db model where every entity is stored as a blob in a dedicated column and every additional column, beside id, is indexed. So there is no wasted space and a ton of columns that only hold data but are not used for filtering. I can run data-efficient queries that yield a list of ids of blobs to load or the blobs themselves and then i extract any necessary data out of those blobs(entities) on the application level. So the database us purely a blob store + few fast indices.
by Tajnymag | 2025-09-05 12:23:31+00:00
I've wanted to migrate multiple times. Unfortunately, it failed on multiple places.

Firstly, podman had a much worse performance compared to docker on my small cloud vps. Can't really go into details though.

Secondly, the development ecosystem isn't really fully there yet. Many tools utilizing Docker via its socket, fail to work reliably with podman. Either because the API differs or because of permission limitations. Sure, the tools could probably work around those limitations, but they haven't and podman isn't a direct 1:1 drop in replacement.
by weego | 2025-09-05 12:23:57+00:00
I have a related question I guess, it relates to how I can visualise the foundations of this beyond just a code implementation.

Where does this come from in abstract/math? Did we not have it before, or did we just not consider it an avenue to go into? Or is it just simply the idea of scraping the entirety of human knowledge was just not considered until someone said "well, we could just scrape everything?"

Were there recent breakthroughs from what we've understood about ML that have lead to this current explosion of research and pattern discovery and refinement?
by jasonlotito | 2025-09-05 12:25:15+00:00
> The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one.

From the talk page:

"This is inaccurate, as the linked Wikitionary page defines rectus as straight, not right"

From the Wiktionary page referenced: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rectus

- led straight along, drawn in a straight line, straight, upright. - (in general) right, correct, proper, appropriate, befitting. - (in particular) morally right, correct, lawful, just, virtuous, noble, good, proper, honest.

The rest of talk page comment: "I was told during my education that the rectus-right definition was used by Robert Sidney Cahn as an excuse to use his own initials, although I cannot find a source to back that up."

So, the wiktionary page literally defines it as right, and we see that it's not about direction but about being correct or incorrect. And then the follow up has literally no source to back it up.

So... "I think we can reasonably expect more."

The first claim is debunked. The second claim has nothing to back it up.

Is your proposal then to accept lies and claims without evidence?
by DaveZale | 2025-09-05 12:25:23+00:00
I have personally seen a couple family members go more than a little nuts on fb, and I've been stalked there. It is poison for some.

Reminescent of cigarette smoking a few decades ago. "Everyone" was smoking so it was okay. Now they walk around with portable oxygen generators. If they can still walk.

Repulsive addictive product.
by fusslo | 2025-09-05 12:25:33+00:00
is there a term like 'charge anxiety'?

I was debating an electric vehicle in 2023. There are maybe 10 people (out of about 200) at work that have electric cars. My teammate is one of the ten. He wakes up early to get a charger. He tracks down the other owners to ask them to use the charger after lunch. They started a group chat about the chargers.

My local grocery store has a bank of superchargers right in the middle of the parkinglot next to the main road. Some days the bank is full and teslas hang out waiting, but they have to wait half in the road to make sure they're close enough to be next in line.

My apartment complex has 2 chargers, and we get people coming in who don't live in the complex to use them. People wait next to the strangers to be sure to get the charger before walking home for the night.

This kind of social interaction and situations gives me huge anxiety.

I get gas once a week, dont wait in line, always works, don't talk to anyone, and I'm gone in less than 5 minutes.
by xrd | 2025-09-05 12:25:37+00:00
I love podman, and, like others have said here, it does not always work with every container.

I often try to run something using podman, then find strange errors, then switch back to docker. Typically this is with some large container, like gitlab, which probably relies on the entirety of the history of docker and its quirks. When I build something myself, most of the time I can get it working under podman.

This situation where any random container does not work has forced me to spin up a VM under incus and run certain troublesome containers inside that. This isn't optimal, but keeps my sanity. I know incus now permits running docker containers and I wonder if you can swap in podman as a replacement. If I could run both at the same time, that would be magical and solve a lot of problems.

There definitely is no consistency regarding GPU access in the podman and docker commands and that is frustrating.

But, all in all, I would say I do prefer podman over docker and this article is worth reading. Rootless is a big deal.
by ath3nd | 2025-09-05 12:26:10+00:00
> I almost miss my middle managers running around with stupid blockchain ideas. reply

I tend to agree with you, I miss the blockhain times.

LLMs allow the generation of symbols and characters (calling it "articles", "essays" or "source code" is an exaggeration) too quickly for us to edit and almost too quickly for us to have a second thought and assess what we are reading. When your eyes have seen so much slop in such quick succession, your brain starts normalizing it and you are more likely to stop noticing.

There goes your good taste, there goes your critical thinking.

And of course, you get into these discussions now: "I pasted this prompt in Claude and my feature was done in 5 min, why did it take you two days?". I shudder thinking what further enshittification the future holds.
by utyop22 | 2025-09-05 12:26:13+00:00
"In these matters, I always try to keep in mind that technologies aren't themselves disruptive;"

That is NOT TRUE! Technologies that are disruptive are those that intrinsically possess features that present benefits that exceed the switching costs of existing technologies. Therefore they are inherently disruptive. The timeline of product adoption is decided by consumers yes. Which is actually preceded by (and accelerated by) visionary leaders who can figure out what the benefits of said technology are, where to best use it and then tell people about it (market the technology).

Here's a simple example: graphical user interface. Anyone who saw it early on at Xerox knew it was so obvious. But the timing of its mass appeal, adoption and who would produce the preferred interface was questionable.

This comment alone makes me incredibly skeptical about the way you think.
by torginus | 2025-09-05 12:26:50+00:00
I toyed with the idea of allowing this, in bitmaps, it's pretty easy and efficient to find contiguous areas with bit twiddling hacks, for example

//assume free map is the bitmap where 1 means free

uint32_t free_map;

uint32_t free_map_2 = (free_map & (free_map >> 1)); // so on and so forth

I haven't really done anything like this yet, it has certain disadvantages, but you can pack multiple size classes into the same bitmap, you do a bit more work during alloc and resolving interior pointers is a bit more costly (if you have those), in exchange for having less size classes.
by joenot443 | 2025-09-05 12:27:23+00:00
A very simple example are ongoing cases where the identity of a perpetrator has been released by smaller or local agencies but not by larger ones. There are countless, countless other examples too, I can walk you through some others if it’ll be helpful.

Wikipedia doesn’t treat all sources as being equal, so even in cases where there’s no reasonable doubt towards a claim’s veracity, if the correct source hasn’t already claimed it, editors are liable to revert your edit.

Obviously this is a phenomenon that occurs much more often in ongoing or politically sensitive stories. That said, it’s important for people to understand the flaws in Wikipedias method of epistemology.
by rwmj | 2025-09-05 12:28:04+00:00
(I think this advice applies to most large open source projects)

Make sure you have installed and are using the software. Ideally you'd have an ongoing interest in it because it's something you use regularly (whether personally or for work).

Read first, especially the documentation, guidelines to contributing, mailing lists / Github issues / however else the upstream maintainers engage with each other.

Start small. Actually a great place is just to go and fix spelling mistakes and typos in documentation, code, comments, etc. Follow the guidelines for contributing to the letter, even if they appear over-complicated at first.

After you've engaged with small patches, build up. Look through their issues and (since you're using the software every day) find something that is an "itch" that you want to "scratch", and attempt to fix that.

I don't really need to go further because either at some point in this process you'll have become discouraged (for good or bad reasons), or you'll have found your community and will want to contribute more and more.
by westurner | 2025-09-05 12:28:27+00:00
IDK what the error rate of gestural recognition with Wifi is. FWIU the market for e.g. the Magic Leap gestural peripheral just wasn't there. That paper says 2013.

Marsrocky/Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing#gesture-recognition: https://github.com/Marsrocky/Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing#gestur... :

> "Real-time Cross-Domain Gesture and User Identification via COTS WiFi" (2025)

> "One is Enough: Enabling One-shot Device-free Gesture Recognition with COTS WiFi" (2024) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10621091 .. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5141488558554953622...
by bjrosen23 | 2025-09-05 12:29:13+00:00
Anyone who claims that FSD doesn't work is flat out lying. I've used FSD 13 for almost all of my driving since it came out last Dec. I've used in in cities like Boston and I've used it on dirt roads in Vermont and Maine. I've used it on highways and on mountain roads. It's worked in the rain, snow and fog. I drive up Cadillac Mountain Maine in the fog. It's stopped for deer, twice, it's stopped for a e-scooter rider who shot out into the street without looking, I would have hit him had I been driving but FSD has faster reactions than a human and more and better sensors so it stopped. It does make mistakes but none have been dangerous. There are some anomalies, for example it swerved around a squished animal but not a pothole. At this point I feel much safer with FSD driving than by hand driving. Humans only have two eyes, FSD has cameras on the fenders, the B pillars and the rear as well as the cameras on the windshield and it's looking at all of them all the time, that's impossible for a human. The cameras also see better at night than human eyes.
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-05 12:29:20+00:00
It is applied to the living human (or other being), when it is born.

Applying the process to already old people would be the abomination of desolation and turn this planet into a hellish dimension of unimaginable proportions, and it would of course exterminate humanity. You have to remember that when humanity is exterminated, that means forever.
by geekamongus | 2025-09-05 12:29:47+00:00
I make 90'S-ish indie rock. I play all the instruments (drums, guitar, bass, keys) and sing.

Having to self-promote is the main struggle, and that's the only way to "make it" anymore. Similar with the book publishing industry. My wife spent a year writing an amazing book, paying an editor, but when shopping it around to publishers, none of them would bite because she didn't already have a social media following. They expect you to have 20k followers knowing that X percent of those will buy the product.
by brianmcc | 2025-09-05 12:30:03+00:00
As something of an AI skeptic the thing that bothers me most is the wholesale gullibility and credulity of leaders. Incredible claims IMO require incredible levels of evidence, not just "tech bros with vested interests tell us this, it must be so!".

A level of general experimentation by companies and other organizations is clearly warranted, and it should be marked accordingly. This just isn't happening in a lot of places: "become 10x more productive or bye-bye" is just totally ludicrous stance to take.

So it's good to see some reports coming out where some attempt at actual measurement and assessment of efficacy has been made.
by bjrosen23 | 2025-09-05 12:30:12+00:00
Anyone who claims that FSD doesn't work is flat out lying. I've used FSD 13 for almost all of my driving since it came out last Dec. I've used in in cities like Boston and I've used it on dirt roads in Vermont and Maine. I've used it on highways and on mountain roads. It's worked in the rain, snow and fog. I drove up Cadillac Mountain Maine in the fog. It's stopped for deer, twice, it's stopped for a e-scooter rider who shot out into the street without looking, I would have hit him had I been driving but FSD has faster reactions than a human and more and better sensors so it stopped. It does make mistakes but none have been dangerous. There are some anomalies, for example it swerved around a squished animal but not a pothole. At this point I feel much safer with FSD driving than by hand driving. Humans only have two eyes, FSD has cameras on the fenders, the B pillars and the rear as well as the cameras on the windshield and it's looking at all of them all the time, that's impossible for a human. The cameras also see better at night than human eyes.
by diggan | 2025-09-05 12:30:27+00:00
> Why do these decisions always have to be black and white.

This decision seems to be very different than that. Those companies were asked to "provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation", otherwise be blocked.

It really isn't surprising that someone asks them to follow the laws of their country, and if the companies are ignoring them, block them since they're unable to follow the local laws.

The companies really forced Nepal's hand here by repeatedly ignoring their requests.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-09-05 12:30:33+00:00
We need a new metric to complement system uptime: "link lifetime"

I have an email, old enough to vote, that I received from an engineer. They wrote "Wikipedia is a good site for learning how our new RAID array works. People need to change their mind about Wikipedia. Just because anyone can make a page doesn't mean the information is wrong."

If they had sent me any other link, all this info would be behind a paywall, login, or would simply 404 today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
by spiffytech | 2025-09-05 12:30:35+00:00
The magnitude of person-to-person variation makes it tough to get signal out of averages.

I read a blogger say a 40-mile trip is exceptionally log for him, so why worry about EV range?

Meanwhile we put 160 miles on our EV yesterday doing ordinary errands that all got stacked on the same day. 100+ mile days happen a few times a month for us¹.

That 160 miles is 65% of our 0–100 range, or 108% of the 20–80 range. And we have a level 1 charger, so it'll take 26 hours in the driveway to recoup that charge.

¹ In my area a normal daily commute is 30–40 miles round-trip. Throw in some extra errands, or two people sharing a car, and you don't have to be an outlier to routinely have 100+ mile days.
by alganet | 2025-09-05 12:30:37+00:00
I'm puzzled by this part then:

> The key thing is to develop an intuition for questions it can usefully answer vs questions that are at a level of detail where the lossiness matters.

If that intuition is not explained, it's no different than "works for me, you're using it wrong", which is definitely an argument, but not the best one.

I mean, I'm confident lots of people can use LLMs well, but I don't understand how the analogy is supposed to teach anything about it.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-09-05 12:31:21+00:00
Would this not become a bit simpler if you populate the sql schema like this?

+-------------------+ | | | |

+------------------+ | Genere | | | | | | | +-------------------+ | Movies | | | | | +-------------------+ | | | | | | | Actors | +------------------+ | | | | +-------------------+

+
by lazide | 2025-09-05 12:31:30+00:00
Empathy is probably part of it, but I guess what matters to me is someone able to think outside of the box at least a little, and try to solve an actual problem - since the problem is likely caused by the shape of the box.

The biggest issue with these systems is they are designed to handle the common case. But if I had a common case, I literally wouldn’t be having an issue!

Humans usually recognize it pretty quickly if you explain it to them, ‘AI’ usually just keeps steering you to the same box.

Though recently I did hit a system that immediately sent me to a human when I described the problem, which was refreshing!
by rsynnott | 2025-09-05 12:31:52+00:00
The problems with this car are all around the battery pack (though honestly these problems are a little exaggerated). The battery pack is, for practical purposes, a 15 year old design. This car is no longer made. When it was being made, it was the only electric car you could buy with such an old battery pack design.

Buying a 2nd-gen Leaf in 2025 would be a bit silly, unless you were getting a major discount.