MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saurik | 2025-09-08 04:27:17+00:00
If you have access to my laptop long and deep enough to replace the hinge sensor with a fake one that prevents the lid from closing as a way to turn it into a recording device -- which of course would also require installing software on it -- instead of just putting a tiny microphone into it (or my bag), you are simultaneously a genius and dumb. And if you really are going to that level of effort, hoping that I don't notice my laptop failing to go to sleep when I close it so you might be able to steal it is crazy when you can 100% just modify the hardware in the keyboard to log my password.

Hell: what you really should do is swap my entire laptop with a fake one that merely shows me my login screen (which you can trivially clone off of mine as it happily shows it to you when you open it ;P) and asks for my password, at which point you use a cellular modem to ship it back to you. That would be infinitely easier to pull off and is effectively game over for me because, when the laptop unlocks and I don't have any of my data (bonus points if I am left staring at a gif of Nedry laughing, though if you showed an Apple logo of death you'd buy yourself multiple days of me assuming it simply broke), it will be too late: you'll have my password and can unlock my laptop legitimately.

> There are good security reasons for a lot of what Apple does.

So, no: these are clearly just excuses, sometimes used to ply users externally (such as yourself) and sometimes used to ply their own engineers internally (such as wherever you heard this), but these mitigations are simply so ridiculously besides the point of what they are supposedly actually securing that you simply can't take them seriously if you put more than a few minutes of thought into how they work... either the people peddling them are incompetent or malicious, and, even if you choose to believe the former over the latter, it doesn't make the shitty end result for the owner feel any better.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-09-08 04:27:30+00:00
with 48 GB of vram you could run a 20b model at fp16. It won't be a better GPU for everything, but it definitely beats a 5090 for some use case. It's also a generation old, and the newer rx9070 seems like it should be pretty competitive with a 5090 from a flops perspective, so a workstation model with 32 gb of vram and a less cut back core would be interesting.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-09-08 04:28:21+00:00
There is another way that's a compromise: give corner cases a home.

In accountancy there is the "General Journal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_journal) - a place to correct of accounting errors, enter adjustments, etc.

The General Journal really only works because accounting entries are immutable: corrections are always new entries. So it's not clear if "give corner cases a home" works everywhere.

But if the principle does work for your use case, it lets the rest of the system be as strict as you like!
by waltwalther | 2025-09-08 04:29:27+00:00
The author lists everything his phone has replaced, and the two items his phone cannot replace yet. One of those is a radar detector. To that I offer the Waze app. While it is not exactly a radar detector, it still serves the same purpose.

Funny story. I first heard of the Waze app while reading a Car & Driver magazine in my doctor's office nearly 15 years ago (possibly before 2010). There was an article on illegal cross-country car racing. One of the drivers said something like, "I use a combination of radar detector and Waze to avoid the police."

I had no idea what Waze was, and researched it as soon as I got home. It has always been crowd-sourced, and there were not many users back in those days (at least in my area), but I used it and spread the word anyway,
by rcleveng | 2025-09-08 04:29:27+00:00
:shocked_pikachu_face:

In all seriousness, I was using a different LLM with vscode, and it still kept popping up dialogs about copilot. This is after I had uninstalled the copilot extensions (or at least I tried to uninstall it all).

I'd love for the IDE's like cursor to be able to be an extension on vscode and such, but this type of thing makes it super hard for that to be a reality.
by RossBencina | 2025-09-08 04:31:13+00:00
> Mathematical rigor is also not comparable to whatever sense of rigor might apply to those concepts.

The two senses of rigor at hand are comparable at the level of frameworks of human knowledge. Comparable (not equivalent!), for example, in the sense of what these ways of knowing are seeking to know, and how they are seeking to know it. We are discussing software development practice here, so what is it exactly that these two ways of knowing are seeking to know?

The way I see it, in the context of software development, the commonality between Monads and a specific design pattern, say MVC, is that they are both tools in the developer's toolkit. Specifically, tools for structuring software abstractions. A bonafide concrete Monad gives guaranteed well defined compositional behavior for a particular class of operations on a particular class of objects. The Monad definition gives an abstraction for composable software abstractions. A design pattern describes a configuration of abstract software elements and/or roles, and a schema for composing these elements and the communications (protocols) between them. A single design pattern often describes a family of potential realisations. A design pattern, when documented properly (as in the PLoPD books), and applied appropriately, can be reduced to a practical solution that is no less robust (in practice) than the employment or definition of an object with a monadic interface. From a practical software development perspective they are of the same kind.

From a formal methods point of view the two are different. Monad has a settled mathematical definition, well understood properties, an exists within an established branch of mathematics. Application of the Monad definition to computer programming is supported by a body of established computer science that confers various mathematically proven properties. By contrast, a design pattern does not have a mathematical definition at all, and importantly for this conversation it does not claim to have a definition. A design pattern documents a way of doing things that is known to have worked for multiple past systems. It is literally an abstraction of a common pattern of practice, together with context, recommendations for use, contraindicated scenarios and so on (see my "context" comment elsewhere on this post). This is no more handwavy, and no less apposite, than the guidance given to an apprentice craftsman. Of course there is nothing to prevent someone from reducing a design pattern to a formal definition and attempting to verify properties of interest on it (I imagine this has been done).

Most developers today are not equipped to formally define and verify a Monad, or to reduce a design pattern to a formal definition and prove properties on it. Most software systems do not automatically check and enforce the Monad laws. In software practice, there is little between them. They are both tools for organising abstract software structure.
by sema4hacker | 2025-09-08 04:32:11+00:00
I wish the "introduction" section of papers like this one wouldn't immediately use jargon that has me guessing what they're talking about.

What is "organic user activity"? A "lambda model combining batch and streaming paradigms"? Does "persisting messages" mean resending messages? What does "treat inputs as the company's golden source of truth" mean? "Expose the abstraction of independent data streams"? "Mask out heterogeneity"? "Deserialization tax"? "Heterogeneous use cases"?

I can uncomfortably guess what they're trying to say, but I'd much rather they used the vocabulary of a six-year-old to hook me in the introduction.
by lambda | 2025-09-08 04:32:55+00:00
I guess the part where I'm still skeptical are: Google is also still pretty good at search (especially if I avoid the AI summary with udm=14).

I'll take one of your examples: Britannica to seed Wikipedia. I searched for "wikipedia encyclopedia brtannica". In less than 1 second, I got search results back.

I spend maybe 30 seconds scanning the page; past the Wikipedia article on Encyclopedia Britannica, past the Encyclopedia article about Wikipedia, past a Reddit thread comparing them, past the Simple English Wikipedia article on Britannica, and past the Britannica article on Wiki. OK, there it is, the link to "Wikipedia:WikiProject Encyclopaedia Britannica", that answers your question.

Then to answer your follow up, I spend a couple more seconds to search Wikipedia for Wikipedia, and find in the first paragraph that it was founded in 2001.

So, let's say a grand total of 60 seconds of me searching, skimming, and reading the results. The actual searching was maybe 2 or 3 seconds of time total, once on Google, and once on Wikipedia.

Compared to nearly 3 minutes for ChatGPT to grind through all of that, plus the time for you to read it, and hopefully verify by checking its references because it can still hallucinate.

And what did you pay for the privilege of doing that? How much extra energy did you burn for this less efficient response? I wish that when linking to chat transcripts like you do, ChatGPT would show you the token cost of that particular chat

So yeah, it's possible to do search with ChatGPT. But it seems like it's slower and less efficient than searching and skimming yourself, at least for this query.

That's generally been my impression of LLMs; it's impressive that they can do X. But when you add up all the overhead of asking them to do X, having them reason about it, checking their results, following up, and dealing with the consequences of any mistakes, the alternative of just relying on plain old search and your own skimming seems much more efficient.
by michaelmrose | 2025-09-08 04:33:30+00:00
It sounded to me like she paid her US fine and thus ceased to be a scofflaw. After further reading it looks like convicted criminals can apply for a temporary residence permit for CAN $239.75.

This may not be needed if 5+ years have passed without further misdeeds and may apply to be deemed rehabilitated.

This covers individual evaluation of your case and may be denied. It probably also serves to keep the riff raff put especially Americans who otherwise may take a day trip to share their further drunken driving adventures with their least lucky Canadian friends.

It is hard to contextualize this as a bribe with poster as a victim when the very reasonable alternative is simple denial.

You have no right to visit Canada and they can charge you as much as they please and its your responsability to do your own homework as far as travel requirements.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-08 04:33:33+00:00
My first thought was like OP - disappointingly off-brand from a purebred silicon lithography keystone.

Your scenario seems like a bit of a stretch, but maybe it could be distilled a bit. It could be an anchor of outright vertical integration. You have Open AI spending billions in Capex... and remember, they even tried to secure funding for fabs. NVIDIA has also done quite a bit of synergistic vertical integration to get to their trillion dollar status (one has to look within the data center and within the software stacks. It goes way back, back to things like the Infiniband acquisition). Taking all that into account, it's arguably not that absurd for ASML to push outside of the castle walls a bit with at least some feeler tentacles. Maybe someday ASML cutting edge equipment will be supplying a mega- European AI factory, where in an alternate reality they use slightly more economical single pattern EUV machines instead of double patterning, and ASML's stakeholder status helped make it so.

That almost seems distasteful to consider, but it almost seems like the way the world is going, with corporate interests quite obviously at the forefront of decision making. One would think ASML might even have some insight into this, considering their position in the world...
by classichasclass | 2025-09-08 04:34:24+00:00
ITYM "caffeinate"

DESCRIPTION caffeinate creates assertions to alter system sleep behavior. If no assertion flags are specified, caffeinate creates an assertion to prevent idle sleep. If a utility is specified, caffeinate creates the assertions on the utility's behalf, and those assertions will persist for the duration of the utility's execution. Otherwise, caffeinate creates the assertions directly, and those assertions will persist until caffeinate exits.
by owenversteeg | 2025-09-08 04:34:30+00:00
It's not just banned in the US; it's also banned in France, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Iran, and Canada among others. It is legal OTC in India, the former USSR, China, Mexico, and most of South and Central America. It is the most popular prescribed pain reliever in Germany and the most popular OTC drug in Brazil. It is popular in Spain as well.

Metamizole is actually a very interesting case, to me, as the associated risk is quite strange. It is legal and popular OTC for the majority of the world population; in the countries where it is legal, there are few deaths from the native population. Among tourists who consume it, however, mortality is unusually high. The Spanish health ministry declared in 2018 that it should not be used in the "floating population", including tourists. There may be a genetic component involving Anglo-Saxons. See: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/26/painkiller-b...

Here's a map of its availability: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Metamizole_(Dipyrone...
by ogurechny | 2025-09-08 04:35:37+00:00
Extending the user shell was always for the benefit of Microsoft first, and for the rest of us second. Companies who tried to add serious advanced functionality through that found out that they were not really welcome, even though in theory everything was object-oriented, loosely coupled, language-agnostic, yada yada. It probably was mainly a solution to decrease the amount of territory wars over code inside Microsoft, and let teams work independently without demanding synchronous fixes.

We shouldn't forget that half of the documentation on how everything should work was only released after anti-trust investigation and pressure from courts.

https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/shell/index.ht...

By that time, Windows had already switched to shiny fresh undocumented technologies.

You should remember that a lot of software around the Millennium simply re-implemented latest fashion trends (Office controls, XP styles, etc.) on their own in not quite exact ways, not just because programmers back then wore skins, and ate raw meat, and feared nothing, and because such third party toolkits were available commercially, but also because official interfaces to do the same were not offered until later releases (or sometimes ever). I vaguely recall discussions of teams within Microsoft sometimes doing the same, resulting in Office controls sharing no code with common controls used by the rest of the system which look exactly the same.

The irony is that web browsers, being the most popular kind of application, and interfaces built on top of their technology simply ignore the native interface toolkits, and do everything independently, which is even more extreme than some old school custom paint handlers. A lot of work has been spent on re-implementing native look and behaviour there, multiple times.

One of the examples of actively supported applications interfacing with shell object hierarchy without using system dialogs I can name is Tixati, which needs to have file picker(s) at hand inside its own dialogs. It's not open source, but it has been using GTK, custom controls, and probably some sauce on top. Given the user complains about its performance or missing items, and regular appearance in change log over the years, I'd say it's a wrestling game for the author. At the moment the tree is lazily populated at the first appearance, which is fine, but not unnoticeable.

It is a bit hilarious that showing a list of file names in some directory is a trivial example on using system-provided iterators for the novice programmers, but adding icons matching those that Explorer shows (handling links and other special files, special directories, non-filesystem-based locations which still have files user might want to choose in them, etc) to that list suddenly becomes a nightmare.
by hysan | 2025-09-08 04:36:57+00:00
I mostly agree with the author but I think there's a very important distinction to make. It's important to think about this in two layers - the domain and the UI (whether that be a CLI, an API, a full blown GUI, etc). The author very clearly is talking about the domain layer, but the area where I see "Make invalid states unrepresentable" having the greatest benefit is in the UI layer. That is where you want fine grain control over what capabilities of your domain layer that you expose and is where you have a lot to gain by architecting your types/system/etc to be strict. It makes for easier to reason about code and reduces the amount of edge cases you need to QA. The constraints you put in the UI layer are product constraints, not technical ones. In my opinion, when you think about it that way, that adage isn't harmful but rather a very useful guide for technical folks to use when trying to mental model what product is asking you to build.
by NotAnOtter | 2025-09-08 04:37:51+00:00
> I think Stack Overflow went dead because of AI specifically

This doesn't hold up when looking at usage charts. There is a clear peak around ~2015 with a steady decline through to now. LLM's came to market in their current form in the last couple years, and took a couple years to be broadly adopted. There was a clear and obvious market fall off way before AI / LLM.

> Reddit isn't comparable

I agree with that in isolation; but since I don't agree with the AI premise this isn't especially relevant. I don't think AI will replace Reddit, I think one of the other major platforms will absorb it's users like Reddit / Hackerrank / better documentation / back searching absorbed SO's users through 2015-2021
Ask HN: In what situations would you want your phone to call you?
by chetansorted | 2025-09-08 04:37:57+00:00
I’ve always faked phone calls to get out of awkward moments — waiting alone at a café, stuck in small talk, or even a meeting that’s going nowhere. Pretending worked sometimes, but honestly it often felt more awkward than the situation itself.

So I started tinkering with a small project called ComfortCall: an app that actually calls your phone from a real number with short, natural scenarios (like a friendly check-in, a colleague reminder, or a safety call).

I’ve been testing this idea with a small waitlist and people have already suggested really interesting use cases I hadn’t thought of — things like: Needing a “mom call” to gracefully leave a friend’s house Having an out when strangers stop you with uncomfortable questions Feeling safer on a late-night walk Escaping a family gathering without guilt

My question to HN: What other scenarios come to mind where a real, believable call could give you a graceful exit?

Curious to see what this community thinks — it’ll help me shape what to prioritize for the MVP.

Thanks
by defrost | 2025-09-08 04:38:38+00:00
Growing up in the 1970s in high school I met few people into math or computers, although there were a few.

Hardly surprising, perhaps, given it was the Kimberley.

Once I hit university nearly half the math stream was female, as were the staff in the computing services and early CS courses. Many had come across to Australia from Dartmouth (UK).

As PC's became more and more popular at home items purchased for boys to play games on the number of women in the mechanics of CS started to decline, veering more into law, medicine, and sociology.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-09-08 04:38:42+00:00
I’ll go a step further.

I’ve never understood why people care so much about the linter. Just let people write code and don’t worry about the linter. I don’t need to fight a linter which makes my code worse when I could just write it in a way that doesn’t suck. I promise it’ll be fine. I’m too busy doing actual software engineering to care if code is not perfectly formatted to some arbitrary style specification.

I feel like style lingers are horseshoe theory. Use them enough and eventually you wrap back around to just living without them.
by squigz | 2025-09-08 04:39:43+00:00
I think there's some truth to what you're saying - personal growth is work, and you have to be willing to put in that work. But I don't really see any reason why the medium has anything to do with it; plenty of people refuse to grow IRL too, just as some do online as well.

> Whereas in-person or 1:1s force us to maintain empathy and listen

How I wish this were true!
by foogazi | 2025-09-08 04:39:57+00:00
> This was already the case for almost every other country.

The US started of as a “zero to one” - a “sui-generis” state - unlike any other

Over time the people that gave in to the temptation to copy others, to be imperialistic, to be a colonizer, to be a slaver, to be expansionist all managed to damage the soul of the country- and still they keep trying

Why the insistence of being like almost every other country ?

> Most embassies required you to be resident or a national of the country you are applying in.

Were not like other countries

> So oddly, the US was far more permissive than other locales in this one aspect. All this change does is bring it in line with security practices that other nations already had in place.

We won two world wars and put a man on the moon - and you want to bring the US in line ?

The greatest experiment in state-building and you want to make it average?
by qwerpy | 2025-09-08 04:40:22+00:00
> installing airconditioning is frowned upon

Seattle was like this a couple of decades ago when I moved there. People sneered at me when I talked about having air conditioning installed at my house. Having moved from a warmer part of the country, I ignored their smug comments and did it anyway. The next few years I basked in the comfort of my climate-controlled home while my coworkers complained about not being able to sleep due to the heat.
by panick21_ | 2025-09-08 04:40:26+00:00
The landline only work if you are standstill. As soon as you have open war, even just over 50m no-mans land, you were out of reach, you lose the connection and it takes a while to catch up.

Specially as artillery shells destroyed wires. So pulling a phone over a few 100m of no-mans land was not that hard, these places would be shelled when the counter-attack happens.

So yeah, in pure trench war-fare they had comms, but coordinating an ongoing attack is really what you can't do.
by danpalmer | 2025-09-08 04:40:39+00:00
The devil is, as always, in the details. I think "make invalid states unrepresentable" is a good thing to teach in order to push back against spaghetti code. State management is hard, and untangling bad state management is near impossible.

But of course, some flexibility is often (not always) needed in the long run, and knowing where to keep the flexibility and where to push for strictness is an important part of skills development as an engineer.
by efortis | 2025-09-08 04:40:41+00:00
Given that post, this is what ChatGPT-5 said: "… But achieving AGI purely by scaling current architectures might not happen. The field may need conceptual shifts—new structures or paradigms—rather than just bigger models."

I don’t know AI, but I’m of the few that’s grateful for what it is at the moment. I'm coding with the free mini model and it has saved me a ton of time and I’ve learned a lot.