MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codedokode | 2025-09-21 14:08:21+00:00
Another expensive phone... sorry but the price is 3x of my phone which has 6Gb RAM (compared to 8 Gb here) and the same number of cores, maybe less performant but who cares, I am not planning to do machine learning on a phone anyway. Also mine has better screen resolution despite lower price.

Yes the firmware is non-free, but I have kernel sources so I can either try to port a open-source OS on it, or simply reverse-engineer and patch the existing firmware.

Also I am not sure if Linux desktop environment (Wayland, Pipewire and friends) is a good choice. Why not use AOSP, which is free, has everything, is optimized, has lot of f-droid apps and is tested on millions of devices? It has modern languages like Kotlin, and GUI frameworks like Flutter. And are there mobile apps for standard Linux desktop?

> Whether used for coding, ... designing, or multitasking with everyday apps, our device delivers the performance

Sorry, I don't think small screen with tiny keyboard is any good for coding or design. Smartphone is only good for taking/watching photos, reading or chatting.
by jlokier | 2025-09-21 14:08:48+00:00
There's still a market, but when I looked into COBOL work out of curiosity (I've never been anywhere near it in real life), the salaries I found were surprisingly low, compared with common modern languages.

Perhaps the old adage "it's getting hard to find X employees [at the price we are willing to pay]" applies.

That surprised me because I've seen articles and heard podcasts for years where they've said COBOL programmers are well paid due to scarcity, though never quoting amounts.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-21 14:08:48+00:00
So, I have been complaining about how Rust projects have over hundreds and often thousands of dependencies. I gave this random Rust project a try.

The results:

Building [ ] 5/338: libc(build), proc-macro2(build)

No thank you.

Can you Rust people stop doing this? Hundreds of dependencies is the norm in Rust culture. I swear humans will never learn.
by stickfigure | 2025-09-21 14:09:11+00:00
Buy one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/ChefsChoice-EdgeSelect-Professional-S...

But you have to let go of the "ruining it" fear. Sharpening a knife does ruin it, you're taking off a tiny amount of material each time. Since your knife is full bolster, you'll eventually notice a small difference in height of the blade at the bolster.

Yes you will ruin the knife over decades of sharpening. In the mean time you have a wicked sharp knife that's a joy to use (not just look at). It's a tool not an art piece.
by daurentius523 | 2025-09-21 14:10:07+00:00
It gives rust hate from many people. And once someone hates language it sticks. Also add to that the rust zealots who behave like sometimes like political preachers. "We are future, you are backwards" - says every ideologue. But conveniently does not say "in direction I want". When rust started political fight instead of language one they should expect that every rust porting will become political quagmire.

Also you are incorrect - because you are already making wrong assumption:

> crates are not libraries

"never provided a shared library interface" - it doesn't need to, it just need to USE library - distros will convert static one to shared one if that what is reasonable.

Now we have to have C library connected by C headers to (in future) rust application. Sure this somehow works - at cost of memory safety. So someone WILL suggest using rust crate instead of C library, and the problem will inevitably pop up.

You could only say it works correctly as platform stipulates if you did not use any rust crate, or used ones that only your app/lib uses, or trivial finished ones - and I do not see people use rust like that. Even then it is from most linux distributions perspective the distribution job to decide if it should be static or shared linked NOT app-developer.

SSL is something that is prime example of would it best to be written in memory safe language, with safe headers, provided that language makes stable ABI connections, so we can update 0-day not waiting for app developer.

Rust fails spectacularly at last point unless library uses C headers.

But at least it seems that OpenSSL is dynamically loaded after start so they are not changing that too soon.

When I decide to patch some library for my use case I may want to use such library in every instance in every program on the system. Rust crate makes this impossible - now I need to rebuild everything even if I could not reasonably touch ABI boundary in same C code.

Ultimately I think many of linux rust critics see it correctly as company-first/app-centered/containerized/not developement-aware user language (i.e user who can patch software for their specific needs who actively want to inspect every dependency in ONE way), and they prefer the known pro-community/pro-distro/pro-user-developer C/C++ paradigm instead. (At least fact that many criticism start immediately when GPL project get BSD rust rewrite does point it to free-software/open-source i.e pro-community/pro-company schism)

Many linux users especially developement-aware users just have enough of pip, cargo and every 'modern' stuff - they just want old good apt or pacman.

Then you have people that think slow development and no revolutionary changes should be IT priority in modern times.

Then you have people that do believe that any alternative should be better, easier and simpler than old stuff before it should be treated as even a alternative way.

And then you have contrarians.
by ethical_source | 2025-09-21 14:10:31+00:00
> Universities (especially private ones) are allowed to have ideological biases

Universities as private associations can have whatever biases they want. What they can't do is take public money earmarked for promoting debate and discovery and use it to promulgate a particular ideology, discriminate on the basis of immutable protected characteristics, or do other things contrary to public policy.

If they want the money from the public, they need to serve the public --- the whole public, not the part that agrees with administrators who mandate diversity statements for hiring.

> At least in the US, the health institutions merely flagged low-quality information to social media companies

There are public records of highly placed government officials emailing social media company leadership and demanding that specific posts be taken down. Not only is this state censorship in all but name, it's also unconstitutional under Vullo and other precedents.

Yes, the UK is worse. That doesn't make the behavior of the previous administration acceptable or consistent with American values.
Ask HN: What's stopping you from starting your side project?
by ednite | 2025-09-21 14:11:11+00:00
I used to hear that question, from friends or my own inner voice, and it stung. Why hadn’t I built that app, finished that novel, or launched that YouTube idea?

Recently I tried something simple, I think I might have read this in a book somewhere: I dumped every “someday” idea onto paper.

Then I split them:

Still excited about it = keep

Not anymore = trash

From the keep pile, I broke each dream into the tiniest first step, then scheduled it into my actual week.

The result? I’ve made some progress, but more importantly, I feel lighter. No more carrying the guilt of dozens of unfinished projects in my head.

So I’m curious:

What's the primary thing that stops you from starting? And what’s been the most effective way you’ve found to actually start?
by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS | 2025-09-21 14:11:41+00:00
I would also remind the short of memory that during covid, the states with the most draconian restrictions were mostly left-leaning, and many were loathe to give up that control.

Control of the people comes from all sides. The end result is the same, but the methods are different, intended to make people happy to be controlled.
by chrsw | 2025-09-21 14:11:50+00:00
I see a big issue with these tools and services we call "AI".

On one hand you hear things like "AI is as smart as college student", "AI won a math competition", "AI will replace white collar workers". And so on. I'm not going to bother looking up actual references of people saying these exact things. But unless I'm completely delusional, this is the gist of what some people have been saying about AI over the past few years.

To the layperson, this sounds like a good deal. Use a free (for now) tool or pay for an advanced version to get stuff done. Simple.

But then you start scratching beneath the surface and you start hearing different stories. "No, you didn't ask it right", "No, that's a bad question because they tokenize your input", "Well, you still have to check the results", "You didn't use the right model".

Huh? How is a normal person supposed to take this stuff seriously? Now me personally, I don't have much of an issue with this stuff. I've been a developer for many, many years and I've been aware of the various developments in the field of machine learning for over 15 years. I have kind of an intuition about what I should use these systems for.

But I think the general public is misinformed about what exactly these systems are and why they're not actually intelligent. That's a problem.
by arn3n | 2025-09-21 14:12:04+00:00
I am always astonished by the range of people who claim their college degree was useless, citing rote memorization and bad classes. I had an entirely different experience and so did most people I know. University gave me the opportunity to talk to world-class researchers during office hours, to discuss ideas with my peers and have them either validated or critiqued by experts. Sure, all the information is available online (which is a miracle into itself) but without frequent contact with professors and mentors I wouldn’t have even known where to look or what existed in the field. University, for me, was a place where I was apprenticing full-time under highly experienced people, surrounded by people my age who also were doing the same. Years of self-teaching didn’t get me anywhere close to what a few semesters of expert mentorship got me. I never felt I had to memorize anything: exams consisted of system design or long programming projects or optimization challenges. I loved it, and I’m not sure if people went to different universities or just didn’t take advantage of the opportunities presented to them.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-09-21 14:12:33+00:00
We're branching pretty far from the original point but the above is true because the people paying the taxes tend to want what is best for the country (It's more complicated than this but if there is some unifying characteristic that defines the country it is more likely to be true because that unifying characteristic makes the guys who are competent care more about everyone else. That characteristic can be racial (I.E Japanese or Korean) or it can be ideological in some instances (I.E. what has held America together in the past). You basically benefit if you have nationalism but not too much nationalism. It's all a complex mess with many, many feedback loops operating. The only thing that is certain is the socialists are wrong about how the world works and so lead to ruin, while having good intentions. The basics of the correct model of reality that leads to good outcomes is around reinforcing mechanism to encourage individuals to care about their community in a way that defines community large enough to reasonably avoid local tribal community violence. The reason why it works is it encourages the 5-15% of the population that is highly capable and can actually get stuff done to get stuff done in a way that enriches the community and themselves rather than just themselves. This often leads to strong checks and balances across competent institutions enforcing the rules and providing services that the competent people determine are both cheapest to provide via government and in their interest to provide because of network effects (I.e. some level of healthcare makes sure workers can work in their factories because they are healthier more, some level of transport does the same, etc.)

The other crap doesn't work because it tends to devolve into dictatorship of the few and/or paralyzed committees if the dictatorship of the few isn't casting its gaze on that aspect of the government. This happens because the model of good and evil in each of these ideologies isn't internal, it's the competent people who made it are bad and everyone else is good and would be better if they just had some of the bad guys money. They tend to build hierarchies instead of intermixed/interregulating groups and they are always surprised when they are usurped and turned into a dictatorship of the one/few by someone operating in their own interest because good and evil are not external, it's an internal battle within all of us (good and evil is convenient, could be framed as selflessness/selfishness or any number of other dichotomies.)
by croes | 2025-09-21 14:13:43+00:00
The site also lists the factors and beside 1,2 and 1966 they are all wrong.

Google harvests its result from the same page

> The factors of 1966 are 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 17, 22, 33, 34, 51, 66, 102, 187, 374, 589, 1178, and 1966. These are the whole numbers that divide 1966 evenly, leaving no remainder.
by DevDesmond | 2025-09-21 14:13:59+00:00
I like to keep a personal recipe book of prompt modifiers. For bash scripting I often write my prompt and then copy-paste the following to prompt:

``` When making edits to the script, ensure the script remains

- Idempotent - Functional after a fresh install of a virtual machine

Additionally, keep things stupid simple and avoid:

- Unnecessary error checks - Defining colors and custom logging functions - Bells and wistles - Backups - Branching Paths - Script Arguments ```

I find it helps cull back the LLM 's overenthusiasm for abstractions.
by lostintheweeds | 2025-09-21 14:14:13+00:00
It's a code/text generator not a pair programmer - not that different from past code generators which were always designed by seniors who knew what the end results should look like, and used by juniors to make them more productive and less error prone. Sure a junior can vibe code... something... but do they know what they want at the outset or do they know when things are going off the rails and a step back is needed? It's easy to get lost way out in the weeds if you can't check your (experience) compass every now and then.
by grafmax | 2025-09-21 14:14:14+00:00
I thought we were talking about the role of colonization in violence in China over the past 250 years. Most events you listed (Taiping rebellion, Boxer rebellion, CCP-KMT civil war) were the result of weakening of the Qing dynasty by foreign powers, its downfall, the chaos this produced during the Warlord era. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (again I’m not exonerating them) were themselves in large part reactions to the legacy of imperialism on China.
by shredprez | 2025-09-21 14:14:27+00:00
The outcome is not the same: allegedly repressive liberal administrations, internet businesses, and tv networks allowed openly authoritarian media to continually build momentum for a decade until that media delivered an authoritarian regime willing to actively dismantle the open system that allowed it to come to power. Contrast that with less than one year of the authoritarian regime, where the full force of the government apparatus is being used to crush political opponents by: defunding educational institutions, ending international soft-power programs, militarizing cities, threatening to de-license broadcasters, and classifying rights-based activist organizations as terrorists.

The liberal era was marked largely by criticism without consequence, where "deplatforming" was a social phenomenon that meant hopping to one of many other open networks, not the dogged federal punishment of institutions and individuals promoting inconvenient narratives. I'll join you in criticizing the liberal order any day, but it's beyond bad-faith to pretend the current administration is just more of the same.
by heelix | 2025-09-21 14:14:31+00:00
The trick to lighter packs for many was weighing everything. Not uncommon to break everything down by grams - which tells you what could be improved. No point in spending $50 on a .5oz spoon, if your pack is coming in at 4lbs. Does help optimize where things could be cut and where the faf is. Lets you focus on what you really want to bring in when you have a breakdown of everything you bring. I really like lighterpack.com for my trip planning.

Very easy to bring crap you don't need as well. Always surprised me how much an extra hoodie or something would add to what was on my back. Also there is a 'stupid' light, where shaving grams is silly. Was shrinking down my hammock tarp and discovered my setup was not great when the wind shifted direction.

When it comes to power bricks, smaller things like this is great for the normal laptop bag or purse. This is cheap enough that I'd send it off to be black holed with all the other bricks I lend my kid.
by altspace | 2025-09-21 14:14:38+00:00
What I took away from the article was that being good at code review makes the person better at guiding the agent to do the job, giving the right context and constraints at the right time… and not that the code reviewer has to fix whatever agent generated… this is also pretty close to my personal experience… LLM models are a bull which can be guided and definitely not a complete idiot…

In a strange kind of analogy, flowing water can cause a lot of damage.. but a dam built to the right specification and turbines can harness that for something very useful… the art is to learn how to build that dam
by nathan_compton | 2025-09-21 14:15:07+00:00
One thing about AI that I did not anticipate is how useful it is for refactoring though. Like if I have walked down (with the help of an AI or not) a bad path, I can refactor the entire codebase to use a better strategy in much less time than before because refactoring is uniquely suited to AI - if you provide the framework, the design, the abstractions, AI can rewrite a bunch of code to use that new design. I'm frankly not sure if its faster than doing a refactor by hand, but its certainly less boring.

If you have good tests and a good sense for design and you know how to constrain and direct the AI, you can avoid a lot of boring work. That is something.
by twodave | 2025-09-21 14:15:08+00:00
I have come to conclude that there are both reasonable and unbalanced individuals on the extreme ends of both sides. When Obama was elected I had paranoid relatives telling me he was going to pilfer their 401k and bankrupt the country. Well, that never happened. When Trump was re-elected it was, “He is going to tear down democracy! He’s going to put gay people in concentration camps!” Last I checked we still have free elections, and nobody cares whether you’re gay. And we see political violence targeting both major parties. This also is not new. So I think this isn’t a result of anyone’s politics, but rather individual temperance; the voices we choose to amplify and listen to.
by lightedman | 2025-09-21 14:15:36+00:00
Phosphoric acid detergents will pit your blade. If the knife is not a stainless steel, the wash and dry cycle will cause accelerated rusting. In wooden-handled knives with a rat tail tang construction, you can start destroying the handle from the inside out due to gaps in the construction allowing water seepage and degradation. In non-stainless knives, that same construction becomes the point where rust tends to build up.

Then you also have the action of the dishwasher water jets bouncing the knife around, dulling and destroying the edge.

Only the shittiest cheapest plastic-handled knives I own touch the dishwasher. Everything else gets cleaned and wiped by hand and put straight to the knife block or its respective scabbard.
by nickthegreek | 2025-09-21 14:15:38+00:00
you say it doesn’t set precedent, but federal judges got admonished for not following the precedent from one of these shadow docket outcomes set like a month ago.

> Joined by fellow conservative justice and Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh, Gorsuch wrote that all Supreme Court orders carry the weight of precedent, regardless of whether or not they were issued in a shadow docket ruling.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/judges-vexed-by-sup...
by dylan604 | 2025-09-21 14:16:08+00:00
What does it feel like to put it all on again to go down? That is the absolute worst for me. I’ve had lug all sorts of heavy gear to some crazy uphill locations for photo/video shoots, and none of that is designed to wear comforatably on your back. Downhill back to the truck after going up hill and then doing the shoot has on more than one occasion made me think “I’m too old for this”
by zdragnar | 2025-09-21 14:17:13+00:00
My last attempt had passing tests. It even exercised the code that it wrote! But, upon careful inspection, the test assertions were essentially checking that true equalled true, and the errors in the code didn't fail the tests at all.

Attempting to guide it to fixing the errors just introduced novel errors that it didn't make the first time around.

This is not what I signed up for.
by haswell | 2025-09-21 14:18:24+00:00
I’m unfamiliar with German basic law, but considering the lawlessness we’re seeing play out in the US right now, I’m curious how/why modern constitutions are less vulnerable?

By this I mean: it’s not as if the things we see playing out are lawful. Is there a structural difference that somehow prevents the same kind of lawlessness?

Put another way, what stops a movement that decides to ignore Germany’s constitution from ignoring it should they somehow gain power?
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-09-21 14:18:57+00:00
I had a phone where the top half of the touch screen broke, so I installed "quick cursor" to be able to access it. I still use it on my new phone since it enables me to control everything using only about 1/3 of the touch screen. This should really come built in to the OS, especially since the app requires some pretty aggressive permissions to work.
by simonw | 2025-09-21 14:18:58+00:00
Here are some from the last few months:

AI coding assistant trial: UK public sector findings report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-coding-assista... - UK government. "GDS ran a trial of AI coding assistants (AICAs) across government from November 2024 to February 2025. [...] Trial participants saved an average of 56 minutes a working day when using AICAs"

Human + AI in Accounting: Early Evidence from the Field: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5240924 - "We document significant productivity gains among AI adopters, including a 55% increase in weekly client support and a reallocation of approximately 8.5% of accountant time from routine data entry toward high-value tasks such as business communication and quality assurance."

OECD: The effects of generative AI on productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-effects-of-generati... - "Generative AI has proven particularly effective in automating tasks that are well-defined and have clear objectives, notably including some writing and coding tasks. It can also play a critical role for skill development and business model transformation, where it can serve as a catalyst for personalised learning and organisational efficiency gains, respectively [...] However, these potential gains are not without challenges. Trust in AI-generated outputs and a deep understanding of its limitations are crucial to leverage the potential of the technology. The reviewed experiments highlight the ongoing need for human expertise and oversight to ensure that generative AI remains a valuable tool in creative, operational and technical processes rather than a substitute for authentic human creativity and knowledge, especially in the longer term.".