MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-09-23 20:09:09+00:00
Great solution but until then I think the gp's point still stands.

We as humans need to ensure our actions are done with care are forethought. You can't control others but you can control yourself and influence others (like this comment attempts to do)

Plus, it's a lot cheaper for all of us if we don't need to constantly redesign once someone figures out how to "beat the game" (see Goodhart's Law). We're social creatures and the Tragedy of the Commons is a much more common occurrence than people think, especially in large cities.

Our actions affect others.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-23 20:09:10+00:00
Have you released the project? I am somewhat curious!

Also I just went from a somewhat (niche?) languages rabbit hole and I refound crystal / crystal is in my mind currently..

So what are your thoughts on using something like crystal instead of ruby because they are similar in what I know and crystal can create a static binary while being (faster?) than ruby

I am just somewhat curious to know!
by kelnos | 2025-09-23 20:10:01+00:00
It is absolutely possible, reasonable, and normal to be unhappy with US foreign policy in the Middle East dating from before I was born, but also believe I have no power to change course there.

I'm not the "both sides are the same" kinda guy, but we realistically only have choices between Democrats and Republicans here, and I'm not convinced things would be meaningfully different in the ME if some US elections over the past 50+ years had gone the other way.

As a personal example: I was eligible to vote in my first US presidential election at age 19, in 2000. I did not vote for Bush. He still won, and still started a war with Iraq under false pretenses. I was utterly powerless to change those events.

So I'm not sure what nerve was hit here, because, "I'm going to attack regular folks in another country because I don't like what their government is doing" is still just as cruel, cold, and ineffective, regardless of the targeted country. Ultimately bin Laden failed: US foreign policy in the Middle East has not changed in ways that I expect he'd be happy with. Perhaps his consolation prize is that, due to the reaction to his attacks, the US is a lot less freer than it was before; not only did the government use it as an excuse to curtail freedoms, but the actual citizenry started prioritizing some higher measure of safety and security over freedom. But I don't think that makes the world a better place, even if bin Laden might have considered that particular aspect of things a success.
Show HN: A simple open-source privacy tool
by Gravyt1 | 2025-09-23 20:10:07+00:00
Over the past few weeks, I've been working on releasing the open source version of my project: RemoveMD.

RemoveMD is a tool that removes sensitive metadata from files (images, documents, PDFs, audio, and video). This hidden information—such as the GPS coordinates of a photo, the name of a document's author, or a device's model—is often overlooked by users, but it can be exploited for tracking, OSINT, or even identity theft.

The new version is now available as a Python library and can be used directly from the command line or integrated into other projects. The idea is to provide a free, transparent, and accessible solution. All processing is done locally, with no permanent storage: the files are simply cleaned and then restored.

The source code is published on GitHub: https://github.com/Gravyt1/removemd

I've also created a hosted version using this same code for non-coding experts. So you can support me on this site by using it for free (there are some free limitations, if you would like to use it completely, use the open source version). https://www.removemd.com/

I would love to hear feedback from the community, whether it's about the code architecture, security best practices, or simply ideas for improvement. I'm still learning the open source ecosystem, so any advice or contributions are welcome.
by electric_muse | 2025-09-23 20:10:08+00:00
MCP is like the "app store" for LLMs. LLMs can only do so much by themselves. They need connectivity to pull in context or take actions. Just like how your phone without apps is pretty limited in how useful it is.

Sure, teams could build their own connectors via function calling if they're running agents, but that only gets you so far. MCPs promise universal interoperability.

Some teams, like Block, are using MCP as a protocol but generally building their own servers.

But the vast majority are just sifting through the varying quality of published servers out there.

Those who are getting MCP to work are in the minority right now. Most just aren't doing it or aren't doing it well.

But there are plenty of companies racing into this space to make this work for enterprises / solve the problems you rightfully bring up.

As others have said here, the cat is out of the bag, and it is not going back in. MCP has enough buy-in from the community that it's likely to just get better vs. go away.

Source/Bias disclaimer: I pivoted my company to work on an MCP platform to smooth out those rough edges. We had been building integration technology for years. When a technology came along that promised "documentation + invocation" in-band over the protocol, I quickly saw that this could solve the pain of integration we had suffered for years. No more reading documentation and building integrations. The capability negotiation is built into the protocol.

Edit: a comma.
by evolve2k | 2025-09-23 20:10:15+00:00
It would seem that HSBT being a maintainer owner AND shopify employee faced a significant conflict of interest. Also I don’t think it’s a stretch given the context and clear direction coming from shopify for the actions of others to assume that HSBT themselves were directed by their employer to add Marty as an owner.

I sense there’s legal grounds here but can’t fully articulate what the legal case would be.
by dayvster | 2025-09-23 20:11:31+00:00
> The Rust community should be upfront about this tradeoff - it's a universal tradeoff, that is: Safety is less ergonomic. It's true when you ride a skateboard with a helmet on, it's true when you program, it's true for sex.

Well put! And this should not be contentious issue, it simply is annoying to deal with Rust's very strict compiler. It's not a matter of opinion it simply is more annoying than if you were to use any other language that does not put that much burden on you the developer.

Not all memory safety bugs are critical issues either. We like to pretend like they are but specifically in `coreutils` there were 2 memory safety bugs found recently.

However is it really a big concern? if someone has gotten access to your system where they can run `coreutil` commands you probably have bigger problems than them running a couple of commands that leak.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-23 20:12:06+00:00
Mitchell and bellard and to somewhat degree fwsgonzo (you might not know him but I absolutely like his work on libriscv, the game he's working and the kvm sandbox which he's working on too) are my definitions of literal coding chads.

People should really measure coding proficiency as being 10% of these guys or some fraction instead of whatever metric they are using now (slightly kidding ofc)

They are the 10x developers and I feel like this sentiment is echoed all across the industry
by IlikeMadison | 2025-09-23 20:12:19+00:00
>Now Paris “on the whole” agrees with the draft. France welcomes both mandatory chat control and client-side scanning.

A few months ago, a broad security law was passed by the National Assembly in France. Initially, this law contained provisions, including the scanning of private messages, which were removed from the main text by a large majority of lawmakers, as it was deemed too intrusive.

The few officials (including Macron) who now claim that "France is OK with chat control" represent a minority that currently holds power in a country whose government was ousted less than two weeks ago.

Crooks.
by tambourine_man | 2025-09-23 20:12:30+00:00
By the rollercoaster of points this post is experiencing, I may have expressed myself poorly. To be clear, the concept of a modern, cross-platform Terminal core with native GUI implementations for each major vendor is amazing and I'm very glad it exists. It's just not quite there yet for me and I don't know if it ever will be. But I'm very excited by it and hopeful.
by db48x | 2025-09-23 20:12:35+00:00
8. Senion Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies. While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content. … 10. It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation. … 23. The Company terminated channels for repeatedly violating its Community Guidelines on elections integrity content through 2023 and COVID-19 content through 2024. Today, YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding COVID-19 and elections integrity. Reflecting the Community’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.

They’re finally acknowledging that they allowed Biden to censor Americans by calling their viewpoints “misinformation”. Viewpoints that later became widely accepted as truth, or as likely to be true.

Fun times. How do we prevent it from happening again?
by ruszki | 2025-09-23 20:12:59+00:00
> is never a code smell

/* This changes the sorting of the original list based on the result, when you use a pipeline <- you have an architectural problem - this happens for example in Splunk */

map()

/* You need to call these in this exact order, one after another <- your architecture is terrible */

processFirst()

processSecond()

processThird()

/* We did this unusual thing because we hate encapsulation <- obvious paraphrase, and lie, you were just lazy, or you didn't have time */

class A {

public static String x

}

In unrelated code: A.x = "something";

/* We merged these two classes because they looked similar, in the code we have a lot of switches and ifs to differentiate between them, we explained them one-by-one <- do I need to explain this? */

class TwoCompletelyUnrelatedThingsInOne

> that's part of my point

> The gigantic prompt

It was clearly not.*
by benob | 2025-09-23 20:13:23+00:00
There was a time when people would estimate n-gram probabilities with feed-forward neural networks [1,2]. We just improved that with the (multilayer) attention mechanism which allows for better factoring over individual tokens. It also allowed for much larger n.

[1] https://jmlr.org/papers/volume3/bengio03a/bengio03a.pdf

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08852...
by minraws | 2025-09-23 20:13:49+00:00
That RFC and Polonius, which Rust folks have been working on for the last 5-6 years is proof that there has been much effort made in related directions.

Rust being sub par for so long just shows how much people won't want to fund these problems and how hard they are to solve during program compile.

I ofc like Zig quite a bit but I find Rust to suit my tastes better. Zig feels too much like C with extra steps. And the lack of good tooling and stability around Zig hurts large scale adoption.

But I think in 10 years Zig will be the de facto better-ish C.

And Rust will be the low level language for any large project where safety is amongst the top 3 priorities.
by hansvm | 2025-09-23 20:14:09+00:00
The constraint algorithm looks something like:

1. Choose the first token. If well-trained you have a 75% chance of choosing "a" and a 25% chance of choosing "b". Both are valid for that grammar.

2. Choose the second token. Regardless of your first token there is exactly once choice of grammar-adhering completion. You're now at a 75% chance of "ab" and a 25% chance of "ba" (mirroring the first-token chance).

For a toy example like this you obviously wouldn't use an LLM, but techniques like you're suggesting don't work because it's infeasible to enumerate all the valid outputs and re-weight and because greedy and semi-greedy strategies aren't anywhere near sufficient to side-step the issue. At the point in time you select the "a" token at a 75% probability it's game-over unless you re-run the LLM. You can't beam search either (doing so just changes which token you'll mis-predict, and even then only for very local grammar mistakes).

Looking at my JSON example from earlier, a beam search to avoid that re-weighting requires a depth of at least 4 (going as far as the ellipsis plus the stop token), and it won't suffice to just consider locally high-weight paths (you can probably hack something together for that one issue in particular which searches high weight paths and backtracks if they're found to be low-weight due to grammar mismatches, but that has its own bias unless you fan out to all 1e19 length-4 paths, and it won't solve the general problem regardless).

Phrased slightly differently, you don't have a compute_future_grammar_adhering_weight(token) function which is tractably computable, so you can't actually redistribute the 8.3% probability from the "a" branch to the "b" branch.
by scottbez1 | 2025-09-23 20:14:28+00:00
In some ways, yes, though not in many cities like SF, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc.

But it's also a chicken and egg problem: often transit is not viable or is too slow precisely because everything is devoted to cars. The SF Van Ness BRT is an excellent example - I used to routinely get off the 49 bus and walk faster than it stuck in car traffic, but after the BRT the bus is a much better and faster experience than driving could ever be.

One of the most common reasons for watering down or canceling pedestrian, transit, and biking infra projects is a refusal to negatively impact driving in any way, even if the net societal benefit (especially to lower income households who take transit at much higher rates) is far greater.

Good governance requires sometimes unpopular choices (see Paris's recent bicycle transformation, or SF's recent recall election over the creation of a new public park in place of a redundant street)
by cassepipe | 2025-09-23 20:15:13+00:00
I remember researching if air purifiers helped with viral load. From what I remember viruses themselves are too thin but depending on the humidity, they might get stuck in water microscopic droplets and those could be blocked. On the other hand I think the problem with viruses is that they travel more when the air is drier.

I can't wait for a dynomight article about this :D
by fivestones | 2025-09-23 20:15:14+00:00
One more update: it’s a UZ801, with the Qualcomm MSM8916 chipset (according to `adb shell getprop ro.product.model` etc, and the fact that openstick works). I got it running Debian without much trouble, and it’s working great. I followed the tutorial for openstick at https://wthoog.nl/openstick/ (which seems to be down for me now).

I got the one that’s white with a bit of red near/under the cap.

One other thing that took me a bit to figure out: after removing the cap, the entire back of the device slides off (kind of like a battery cover in a remote) and there is a spot to put a SIM card beneath. Supposedly this does GPS too but I haven’t figured out how yet.
by solumos | 2025-09-23 20:15:24+00:00
> What's the easiest way to do this with a stablecoin?

You give a crypto wallet to an AI agent, and make sure it has some USDC.

> What's the point of I need a bunch of other coins and it's so complicated?

The point is that the CDP team built something that fits one of Coinbase's narratives du jour — agentic payments. It's simply a protocol for agentic payments. The team that built it doesn't even really know how it _should_ work or what the actual use cases are — but wouldn't it be cool if your AI agent had a crypto wallet, and instead of the agent getting pay-walled, they could just pay for stuff?

> This complexity and required tinkering seems like the kind of thing cryptocurrency nerds love, but is too complicated for someone just trying to make a payment.

I think that's a fair criticism. The Bridge/Privy/Stripe approach is wildly different, and focuses more on current problems.
by thehamkercat | 2025-09-23 20:15:41+00:00
> A single Hetzner server should never be the only place hosting a copy of all your photos

Hetzner (or any vps provider) should not be a place at all to store ANY copy of your photos, unencrypted.

I agree that they respect privacy a lot, they're probably the best of all the service providers when it comes to your data and that there are data protection laws in place etc etc

but in the end, it's your personal photos, I wouldn't be willing to upload it to any provider unencrypted, good that you're encrypting

Also, check this out (not my project): https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs
by ethmarks | 2025-09-23 20:15:55+00:00
Of course they don't. But if even a small percentage of their userbase uses this on even a small percentage of their photos, that amounts to a massive amount of storage. It doesn't cost Google very much to store all those images, but those users will have to pay for more storage. Even thought it isn't significant to Google when a single person does it, it becomes highly significant when millions of people do it.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-23 20:17:05+00:00
It’s pretty galling to see someone who’s never lived in London talk mad shit about it. London is my home, not DHH’s. He knows fuck all, which is why he repeats tired, overcooked falsehoods.

What he’s saying is that he only considers white British to be legitimately British. He would look at former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and current Mayor Sadiq Khan and dismiss them as insufficiently British. Too much melanin I guess.

He’s even excluded white people from elsewhere who were born in Britain if they have a non-British ancestor. So according to DHH and his ilk Nigel Farage’s children wouldn’t be counted as white British despite having white mothers (Irish and German), being born to a British father in Britain and living all their lives in Britain.

What the fuck is the point of dividing people like this? “Just an opinion” my ass. DHH and people like him are dehumanising my fellow Londoners.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-09-23 20:17:22+00:00
I don't know what the racial origins are, but I have grown skeptical of many racial explanations, because they're often simplistic, speculative, and often lack a comprehension and awareness of the greater social context and events occurring around the middle of the century, like the intentional weaponization of "racism" against ethnic neighborhoods that were not assimilating into the ever-nebulous category of "whiteness". (Mass migration is one classic instrument, as are highways and bad urban planning. In the first case, mass migration from the South was used to break up ethnic neighborhoods in the North, causing their scattering across the suburbs to hasten assimilation. You could have used practically any outside group, but the convenience here was that it exploited the moral high ground of the civil rights movement, allowing opposition to mass migration to be cast as an expression of racism.)

However, ascribing opposition to "fear of the unknown" as a motivator is likewise lazy. It works from the assumption that a) the nuclear family is arbitrary and thus have no presumption in their favor, and b) that there is no tolerance for substitutes for the nuclear family, in the strict sense. It's not like most people are clamoring to live in a polyamorist sex commune, so it's not a good explanation.
by bunderbunder | 2025-09-23 20:18:22+00:00
It's gently reminding medical researchers not to forget about participation bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_bias).

Another favorite of mine along these lines is "Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training". (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/) This one might actually be quite pertinent in this case, because the FDA's decision appears to rely heavily on exactly the kind of reasoning that this article satirizes.
by fair_enough | 2025-09-23 20:18:35+00:00
There is no dearth of midwittery in the non-STEM fields. I admit this is elitist and downright snobbish, but I am disgusted that somebody else can get a degree from the same university as me in a non-STEM major and piggyback off of prestige they didn't create.

In my opinion, it's stolen valor.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-23 20:18:37+00:00
> Living in shared flats is very common in Germany presumably most of Europe.

It's common in the United States, too.

This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced.

Any college town will have houses full of college students. In my experience, the only enforcement actions were when landlords were renting out houses to more people than they had rooms, so they had situations where one person was living in a closet or an attic or other space that doesn't have proper fire egress. They don't mess around with that once it's discovered.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-09-23 20:18:54+00:00
I buy that Zig would fit the risk/reward envelope for some projects. My only issue was with using a breakdown of amalgamated CVEs where most of the software would never actually be written in Zig or Rust regardless to demonstrate that. Perhaps that misunderstanding about my claims is most of the source of our disagreement.

To your point about V8 and CPython: that calculus makes sense if I’m Microsoft and I could spend time/money on memory safety in CPython or on making CSRF in whatever Python library I use harder. My understanding is that the proportions of the budget for different areas of vulnerability research at any tech giant would in fact vindicate this logic.

However, if I’m on the V8 team or a CPython contributor and I’m trying to reduce vulnerabilities, I don’t have any levers to pull for CSRF or SQL injection without just instead working on a totally different project that happens to be built on the relevant language. If my day job is to reduce vulnerabilities in V8 itself, those would be totally out of scope and everybody would look at my like I’m crazy if I brought it up in a meeting.

Similarly, if I’m choosing a language to (re)write my software in and Zig is on the table, I am probably not super worried about CSRF and SQL injection - most likely I’m not writing an API accessed by a browser or interfacing with a SQL database at all! Also I have faith that almost all developers who know what Zig is in the first place would not write code with a SQL injection vulnerability in any language. That those are still on the top ten list is a condemnation of our entire species, in my book.
by ghm2199 | 2025-09-23 20:19:30+00:00
This article is like a bookmark in time of where I exactly gave up (in July) managing context in Claude code.

I made specs for every part of the code in a separate folder and that had in it logs on every feature I worked on. It was an API server in python with many services like accounts, notifications, subscriptions etc.

It got to the point where managing context became extremely challenging. Claude would not be able to determine business logic properly and it can get complex. e.g. if you want to do a simple RBAC system with an account and profile with a junction table for roles joining an account with profile. In the end what kind of worked was I had to give it UML diagrams of the relationship with examples to make it understand and behave better.