MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noisy_boy | 2025-09-29 09:09:52+00:00
The days of two phones are here. Use the more "secure" no nonsense low spec device (e.g. the cheapest iPhone) for banking/govt stuff and a main phone (e.g. grapheneOS or lineageOS) for daily driver. Definitely inconvenient but maybe a blessing in disguise considering the malware/phishing risks.
by mrkeen | 2025-09-29 09:10:07+00:00
> Even the best actionable principles can be incorrect given a certain set of circumstances.

If they are principles, the discussion around whether to apply them can at least be fruitful. "Taste" is bound to devolve into "I like this" vs "I like that".

I don't buy into the "everything has its upsides and its downsides" advice given in the article for the same reason. It's a useless truism. It's a taste:-

I have 1 new feature ticket in my backlog, 3 support tickets, 2 failing tests, and 2 performance regressions. "Premature optimisation is the root of all evil" informs me about the feature work, as does "Make it work, make it right, make it fast". "Reproduce locally" will be my north star for the support, the test failures, and the performance work. Add "Find and measure the bottleneck(s)" for the performance work, as well as "make sure the new code is actually faster than the old code" before checking it in.

I don't need to invoke the maturity of any particular coder for any of this.

Another problem with letting "taste" into the discussion is that you can cheapen principles: you think this code needs tests? "Well, there are upsides and downsides with that", "You're just being inflexible, which is immature". Neither tasteful reply will help you answer whether the code needs tests, and it stirs up shit in the team because it makes it about people, not work, so egos will get inflamed.

>> Personally, I feel like code that uses map and filter looks nicer than using a for loop

I'm not going to argue the person, I'm going to argue the principle. I use map and filter in my business logic because I can do so without mutability. My business logic should reflect the requirements and customer expectations - deterministically. The principle of making the source code pretty is a distant second to the principle of making the code deterministic. If the requirements change from "apply the correct tax rules" to "apply the correct tax rules, if the system is in the right state", then I might well bring in a bunch of mutations to make that happen.

>> is more straightforward to extend to other iteration strategies (like taking two items at a time).

Nope, items.pairs.map((x,y) => ..). Didn't need to discuss maturity.
by closewith | 2025-09-29 09:10:59+00:00
I am a former knowledgeable CBRN person and sat on advisory panels for my own countries energy, food, and medical security policies, so while certainly not a food security expert, I probably have more exposure than most to the food security challenges of island nations in the East Atlantic.

Great Britain, which excludes NI, has a roughly 60% calorie self-sufficiency ratio and quite literally cannot feed itself without imports.

Ireland and Northern Ireland can many times over, in principle even if spare parts and fuel were blockaded, although it would be an uninspiring diet.

I am certainly open to further education as this area interests me and my country is woefully unprepared for any interruption to global supply chains, especially in relation to fuel and medical supplies, so I continue to make policy submissions in this area.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-29 09:11:17+00:00
It seems like you're missing the most important part.

If you had to rank app stores by probability of malware, the lowest probability would be F-Droid. After that it might reasonably be Apple followed by Google Play.

But F-Droid isn't available on iOS, so if you want to use the app store with the lowest probability of malware, it's only available on Android. And more to the point, the safest app store is available on Android only because Android has third party app stores.

To have a single store to the exclusion of all others, that store has to be a big tent, and big tents get full of clowns.
by voidUpdate | 2025-09-29 09:12:01+00:00
> "student athletes were each assigned a bag, and a selection of commonly purchased groceries weighing 10 kilograms. To simulate a typical trip to the grocery store, students would unpack and repack the bags with groceries every 53 metres."

Am I doing shopping wrong? I usually don't unpack and repack 10kg of shopping every 53 meters, I usually walk the full mile home before I unpack it again
by citrin_ru | 2025-09-29 09:12:15+00:00
BMC software quality is low but what's the alternative? Without BMC it is more expensive to manage a fleet of servers. In a better word hardware vendors will publish specs to allow open-source BMC firmware but for some reason they resist this idea. Having only insecure BMC available a semi-separate management network (connected via a bastion host or a VPN) provides balance between cost and security.
by serbuvlad | 2025-09-29 09:13:16+00:00
Ok, but there's nothing stopping from writing a "discoverable" GUI or TUI or CLI for this interaction.

To the user it doesn't matter.

To the developer, it makes a difference.

/proc/<pid>/ctl is not any more or less simple or discoverable for the end user than TerminateProcess or kill(2). It's all opaque esoteric stuff.

But for the developer /proc/<pid>/ctl is MORE discoverable than TerminateProcess or kill(2), since it's a file you can list, so you know it exists. Yeah, you still have to read the man page (you always have to read the docs as a developer), but you know there's a ctl file that probably controls some stuff about the process there. And you already know how to interact with it (the same IO interface as everything else).
by gartdavis | 2025-09-29 09:14:00+00:00
I've always loved being confounded by unexpected stories like this. 20 years ago, I was working to build a self-publishing company - lulu.com - that would open up the world of book publishing. It was not an easy journey. In 2005 a book was published on the site that told the story of this welsh-patagonian exclave. It sold hundreds of copies in Wales and Argentina. In its narrow space, it was as much a 'bestseller' as anything in the NYTimes, and it was clear that it would never have been published or reached this audience any other way. It was a benediction on our labors.

"William Casnodyn Rhys, a young theology student, dreamed of establishing a Welsh colony where the Welsh language and culture could be preserved...."

https://www.lulu.com/shop/william-casnodyn-rhys/a-welsh-song...
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-29 09:14:04+00:00
But writing a story like this is akin to writing a book with an ink pen.

Are you so good that you can just one-shot a book from start to finish without any mistakes?

For me commits to a PR are more like me going "ok, this step is stable enough" and continuing with the next one. The code might not compile or be valid or even clean, but it lets me focus on the next step without having 42 staged files cluttering up my brain.
by closewith | 2025-09-29 09:14:06+00:00
I think you made a flippant comment not realising how seriously a threat that food insecurity poses to Singaporean independence and now feel you can't back down, but you're just wrong on this one.

30X30 aims to supply 30% of nutritional needs by 2030 using only 1% of the land precisely to make progress towards 100% calorie self-sufficiency.
by brunorro | 2025-09-29 09:15:22+00:00
I have bad taste. So I will say suckless.org

- software should do one thing and do it well - code should be understandable, easy to build, easy to port - dependencies should not be a problem - the chosen language must not be a burden - resources are scarce: if you say "unused memory is wasted memory" you are part of the problem

(I know, I'm a horrible person)
by t43562 | 2025-09-29 09:16:06+00:00
> In other words, immature engineers are too inflexible about their taste. They know what they like, but they mistake that liking for a principled engineering position.

I have come across this although I think quite experienced engineers can suffer from this kind of immaturity.

Aeons ago I used to help friends with their Computer Science assignments. I remember the temptation to rewrite their code because I didn't like the way it worked. I would start to do so and then, eventually, think that it was going to take ages and be unrecognisable to them. How could I help them by rejecting everything they thought?

I'd think about it again and realise that they weren't idiots - their approach probably could work with a couple of adjustments. I helped them make those adjustments and they were happy because they could understand the result.

After that I would find that my own way of thinking about the problem had changed and my own code would get much better from having seen the problem from a different angle. I should really have been the one thanking them.

I am still like this - still prejudiced - but in the back of my mind I know it and when I'm being sensible I remember to try to give the other viewpoint a proper chance and be happy when it really turns out to have more merit.

Principles are a bit subjective and if you lean on them all the time without thought it's a sort of laziness - you're not really examining the situation and what it merits.
by aniviacat | 2025-09-29 09:16:29+00:00
Doesn't this issue get solved by reproducible builds?

Using reproducible builds allows developers to publish apps on F-Droid using their own signing keys [1]. Those signing keys can then be verified by Google.

In 2023 already, 2 out of 3 new apps used this approach [2].

With this in mind, F-Droid should be able to continue functioning after this change by mandating reproducible builds.

[1] https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds/

[2] https://f-droid.org/2023/09/03/reproducible-builds-signing-k...
by XorNot | 2025-09-29 09:16:54+00:00
Again, just super weird to say "the deliberately provoked proxy war" and not "the Russian invasion of Ukraine".

Just weirdly weirdly exactly the same themes and even the same words as the actual declaration of war by the aggressor nation - Russia[1].

But you know. No agency whatsoever or something. Just straight up impossible for the 2nd largest nuclear power on the planet not to invade a neighboring sovereign state in a war of conquest.

[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-putin-s-declar...
by blehn | 2025-09-29 09:17:31+00:00
> There's a divide between people who enjoy the physical experience of the work and people who enjoy the mental experience of the work

Eh, physical and mental isn't the divide — it's more like people who enjoy code itself as a craft and people who simply see it as a means to an end (the application). Much like a writer might labor over their prose (the code) while telling a story (the application). Writing code is far more than the physical act of typing to those people.
by elsjaako | 2025-09-29 09:17:37+00:00
When you release something as open source, a third party grabbing it and releasing it is explicitly something that can be done.

I can't speak for them, so I'm not sure, but I feel like new FPGA suppliers coming around having open source tooling being the default is something that the authors of Yosys would like.

Zero ASIC even credited the original authors in the press release and released the source code, which they didn't need to do. If you release your code under a permissive license, like Yosys did, a company taking it and selling a closed source version of it is something you are allowing. If that's not something you want, choose a different license.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-29 09:17:57+00:00
Welcome to modern development lol. Try to refactor it and get an answer of "no money for testing".

On top of that, the "agile" mindset all too often also means there is no coherent vision where the project should go, which can and does lead to bad fundamental architecture decisions that need extensive and expensive workarounds later on.

And yes, there have been people describing exactly that in ASML [1], although the situation seems to have improved [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363938

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465412
by rhdunn | 2025-09-29 09:18:21+00:00
Yes, that's what it is doing.

If you have a block of code a compiler will compile a language expression or statement into a particular set of assembly/bytecode instructions. For example converting `a + b` to `ADD a b`.

A reversing decompiler will look at the `ADD a b` and produce `a + b` as the output. This is the simplest approach as it is effectively just a collection of these types of mapping. While this works, it can be harder to read and noisier than the actual code. This is because:

1. it does not handle annotations like @NotNull correctly -- these are shown as `if (arg == null) throw ...` instead of the annotation because the if/throw is what the compiler generated for that annotation;

2. it doesn't make complex expressions readable;

3. it doesn't detect optimizations like unrolling loops, reordering expressions, etc.

For (1) an analytical decompiler can recognize the `if (arg == null) throw` expression at the start of the function and map that to a @NotNull annotation.

Likewise, it could detect other optimizations like loop unrolling and produce better code for that.
by Anis_FA | 2025-09-29 09:19:53+00:00
We recently came across a python opensource package (https://pypi.org/project/th2analytics/) that is truly revolutionary in the time series forecasting space.

In our benchmarks, it consistently outperformed Nixtla’s libraries and even AWS Chronos, both in terms of accuracy and scalability. The framework feels like a real step change — not just an incremental improvement — making it one of the most promising tools for production-grade forecasting we’ve tested so far.
by kryptiskt | 2025-09-29 09:20:13+00:00
I think progress per dollar spent has actually slowed dramatically over the last three years. The models are better, but AI spending has increased by several orders of magnitude during the same time, from hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions. You can only paper over the lack of fundamental progress by spending on more compute for so long. And even if you manage to keep up the current capex, there certainly isn't enough capital in the world to accelerate spending for very long.
by cyxxon | 2025-09-29 09:20:29+00:00
I was with you until this point, but 1.2 is bigger than 1.10, because 1.2 is a shortened version of writing 1.20 _unless_ you explicitely want these to be version numbers or something like that. The normal expectation would be to treat numbers as, well, mathematical numbers, and not SemVer, especially if we only have one decimal point, don't you think?
by dmazin | 2025-09-29 09:21:04+00:00
You're right. Another positive note is Miliband's stuff with energy -- my understanding is that they are doing mostly the right things and succeeding in the political battles they need to win.

But there's also the issue of selling this to the public. The stuff you and I are talking about is quiet, probably because it's not sexy. The digital ID thing is loud and prominent.

This is why "green new deal" is a good idea -- it's a loud, good way to sell the public on something they'd otherwise fail to understand.
by epolanski | 2025-09-29 09:23:08+00:00
> Eh, I'm not swayed by arguments from authority. Jon's opinion is as valid as mine or yours.

John has spent his entire life to learning and teaching general principles of good software design and their limits.

His opinion definitely has a different weight than ours.

https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs190-winter21/inde...
by William_BB | 2025-09-29 09:24:11+00:00
NeurIPS scoring system is inherently subjective. People will have wildly different interpretations of, say, 3 vs 4, or 4 vs 5. You can get lucky and draw only reviewers that, on average, "overrate" papers in their batch. The opposite can happen too, obviously. 4444 vs 3444 is just noise.
by rowanG077 | 2025-09-29 09:24:40+00:00
There is obviously a difference between legality and what I would consider good behavior. I didn't say what they are doing is illegal. I just said it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

In essence this is something like 99% yosys + 1% their own sauce. Yet they market it as 99% their own sauce + 1% yosys.
by dmazin | 2025-09-29 09:25:09+00:00
I completely agree with you.

I feel like there are two things... one, do Reform voters even understand that Digital ID is a response to immigration? It's not clear to me that they even do.

Two, obviously immigration is not the issue. As I understand, Starmer is going to attempt to mount a serious counter-narrative to Farage. I really hope that his answer will not be "look, we hate immigrants too!" They tried that a few months ago, didn't they? The whole "island of strangers" Enoch Powell thing. I hope that that was as bad as it gets.
by jks | 2025-09-29 09:27:04+00:00
Finda <https://keminglabs.com/finda/> is the best file search I've seen for macOS. (Incidentally, it has an Electron UI.)

Doesn't seem to be updated for Tahoe yet, and even the Sequoia version isn't notarized, so it's not really clear if it has a future.
by OutOfHere | 2025-09-29 09:27:05+00:00
Have you put all the symptoms and the patient's relevant history into GPT-5 (paid plan) to get possible diagnoses? Also, it may be an opportunity to do a lot of blood tests privately to see what they lead to. Sometimes it could be a viral or worm infection. Doctors generally miss out on a lot of tests, so it could be up to you to get them done. For the brain sometimes CSF tests are needed too. You really need to be prepared when you go to the doc, telling them which tests you want.

If you are truly convinced it's a bacterial infection, then you can use a broad spectrum antibiotic, e.g. amox+clav, which you can get on your own, but I would simultaneously take a probiotic twice daily to prevent the gut from getting colonized by bad microbiota, e.g. C diff. Even so, sometimes a different antibiotic is needed, e.g. doxycycline.

During the early months of Covid I had to take chloroquine. The point again is that no one medicine really is broad enough.
by imtringued | 2025-09-29 09:27:53+00:00
This is the classic hero complex in action.

You claim to be against X, but there is no X around, so you condition or bring someone to the breaking point to make X appealing to them, then you can claim that you were righteous all along. You create a problem and then "solve" it. In reality you did nothing, except wreck someone else's life, for the sake of your own grandiosity.

Based on what I've read, the bullies wanted the school shooting more than the supposed school shooter. Like, they genuinely wanted him to shoot them.
by jackstraw42 | 2025-09-29 09:28:42+00:00
Sorry, Google and Apple are American companies so "here" was the USA in my comment.

I agree completely with you about the Android forks. That does allow for people do things right more than the way Apple does it. But it also allows people to do things wrong, and how many predatory mobile phone companies would see an opportunity to spy on customers if they won't notice? Just like none of us would buy a computer and use it without formatting and reinstalling the OS first, there are tons of people who didn't reinstall the OS and kept installing shitty malware. That's the case that I'm worried is much more prevalent among the American population than we realized. Tons of factors go into it, but I think the fact that we distilled all of our information received regularly down to something that's processed thru two operating systems before reaching human eyes and ears is something worth looking more into. Or at least I think it's a damn good reason to start over and begin with doing things the right way, given everything that we know now.
by fuglede_ | 2025-09-29 09:28:44+00:00
Heh, nice catch, I think you'll find that with a bit of work, you can make row reduction/Gaussian elimination work here as well. But that the resulting sequences of operations can get very long! One thing I personally like about the puzzle is that once you've played it for a few days, you start gaining some intuition about sequences of moves that are useful, but coming up with a good general algorithm (that also works for larger than 4x4 boards) is still a challenge.
by lxgr | 2025-09-29 09:28:44+00:00
That might work for Ethernet, but how would you do that for any unidirectional USB-C alternate mode without protocol-level feedback such as analog audio or DisplayPort video?

If you want to allow all of

- Reversible connectors

- Passive (except for marking), and as such relatively cheap, adapters and cables

- Not wasting 50% of all pins on a completely symmetric design connected together in the cable or socket

there's no way around having an asymmetrical cable design that lets the host know which signal to output on which pins.
by moffkalast | 2025-09-29 09:29:09+00:00
Sure, there are incompetent people at every company, but if there was ever a solid reason for draconian linter and unit test rules besides middle management power tripping, it's to catch their mistakes. If it still makes it to prod, the CI/CD is not set up properly or operated by some that don't care, in which case the results are the same with AI or without.
by deafpolygon | 2025-09-29 09:30:56+00:00
At this point, I have no confidence that digital ID cards won’t be plagued by fraud, exploited by malicious actors, or misused in ways we can’t yet foresee. And beyond that, there’s the very real risk of government employees abusing the system for personal gain.

Until there are stronger guarantees protecting individual freedom and privacy, I can’t see a system like this as trustworthy.
by jackstraw42 | 2025-09-29 09:33:05+00:00
No, I feel like rather you are misunderstanding my main point.

I do understand that I am stuck with the Apple equivalent of the Google Play Store. Android is more like a completely open ecosystem, Apple's is much more closed filled with walled gardens. Still, walls provide protection if the ones building them know what they're doing.

So, I feel like Apple has the edge with what we have, over Google's stance of "do nothing" rather than trying to give users a good sense of privacy. If Apple were fully open and allowed such a thing as F-Droid to exist on their OS, you would have a point.

edit: and both OSes are not perfect. That was also part of my main point, not that Apple's is clearly far superior. All I said was I'm glad I trusted my instincts and explained why.

last edit: I've read back the comments to try and see where the misunderstandings are coming from and hopefully have addressed them. While the most secure App Store does exist on Android, it's taken us a while to get there (I know F-Droid has been around a while as well). I am talking about the time period since very early Android and iOS up until now. If I had been using Android, no doubt I would have tried to do it the proper way, but knowing what I like to do freely on my mobile device instead of feeling like I need to worry about privacy with every. single. app. I pick iOS for my mobile OS from 2008-2025 again and I am glad that I did. None of the exploits, vulnerabilities, etc have affected me and I have to give Apple the credit for at least giving me my money's worth on that.