MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxbond | 2025-09-20 14:04:26+00:00
Goals don't need to be fully realized to be useful. Ambitious goals are never fully realized. This is like saying a compass is only useful if you travel all the way to the north pole.

To offer a concrete example, mathematicians failed to unify mathematics. They discovered it was impossible. But that's an important result, and there were other valuable intermediate results (like set theory).

There was an article here the other day about how the Sagrada Familia is nearly finished. Gaudi's original vision would have involved bulldozing a bunch of surrounding homes and businesses. That's unlikely to happen. Regardless, the project is considered a huge achievement in architecture.
by brap | 2025-09-20 14:04:29+00:00
>writing programs is not hard. Specifying what a program should do is hard.

But these two things are kinda the same thing. Writing a program is mostly just specifying what it should do in a very specific, unambiguous way. That’s why we have programming languages and don’t use English.

A PRD, a design doc and the code itself are kind of all the same thing, but with increasing levels of specification.

If you’ve ever played with formal specifications at some point you probably had the realization “wait a minute, I’m just writing another implementation of the program!” and in a way you are.
by bbor | 2025-09-20 14:04:50+00:00
Thanks for the specifics, really fascinating list! I'm sure I'm being a bit flippant, but it's pretty funny that a list including the Playstation 1, N64, and Apple Watches is in the same conversation as systems that need to compile git from source.

Anyone know of anything on that list with more than a thousand SWE-coded users? Presumably there's at least one or two for those in the know?
by mindslight | 2025-09-20 14:05:14+00:00
Cold war Reagan who stood up to Russia/China, generally represented American interests, and led - regardless of many disagreeing with him politically? No, this is that party having gone insane from stewing in reactionary talk radio for decades in a cycle of getting angrier while being repeatedly suckered into supporting more specious policies that leave them worse off.

The Republican party had been farming this hate in its talk radio cage, and only extracting its energy to support the status quo. Social media came along and opened the door to the cage, while Trump led it out with open arms. The spiral of harmful policy <-> more blind anger is now moving faster and faster.

Notice how these policies are focused on making pain for the individual visa holders, not the companies employing them. This $100k/H1B thing was the very first bit I've seen from this Trump term that I thought sounded halfway reasonable. But then rather than an announcement ahead of time with a clear implementation date, allowances for current H1B residents to either find amenable companies or prepare to leave, etc - it's just pure immediate pain for the individuals. Including making them more indentured as I'm sure many employers will tell employees that they're not going to pay the $100k fee so their employment effectively ends if they leave the country for any reason. (and also at this point who doesn't expect the policy to be relaxed in 3-12 months for politically-favored bigcos?)

It's just like the LG factory raid - attacking the individual workers in a show of performative cruelty, rather than focusing on the company. Trump has already been talking about creating programs to allow illegal labor to continue in "critical" industries such as landscaping, construction, farming, etc. Because when the rubber meets the road those are his own interests, even if his primary business has moved on to taking bribes in shitcoins.
by inglor_cz | 2025-09-20 14:05:38+00:00
I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved.

(I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)
by Hamcha | 2025-09-20 14:06:16+00:00
My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all, something that is hard to figure out from the marketing but their GitHub repos does have hybris-related stuff. That makes it a non-Linux device to me. Hybris breaks a lot of linux stuff that should just work like flatpak, something I found out incredibly quickly when using SailfishOS.

I don't think depending on Android drivers and having to run a small android just to access said hardware makes it a "linux phone". Especially when the linux experience is compromised because of it.

postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers (in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else) so there isn't a "flagship" device.

If I were to overspend on a linux device I want it to actually run Linux, not a handicapped version of it.

And even then, why stop at the OS? Why is this overpriced "linux" phone not boast having user-friendly and sustainable things like a replaceable battery (probably because it doesn't?). People in this niche don't want just a Linux phone, they want a phone that respects them.
by simjnd | 2025-09-20 14:06:36+00:00
This is not on me.

You chose to interpret that me pointing out the hardware is 8 years old meant I expected cutting edge technology, as if there wasn't 8 years oh hardware innovations in-between the hardware used and "cutting-edge technology". (The A720 and A510 are 4 years old, not exactly cutting-edge but would be a dramatic improvement)

There was nothing to extrapolate. I made a remark on the hardware, and you chose to view the world as black and white ("if he mentions the old age of the hardware he must necessarily expect the brand new cutting edge hardware and must not realize that small indie FOSS projects don't have the same resources as Apple").

You lacked nuance, it is not on me.
by leakycap | 2025-09-20 14:06:39+00:00
It is nice to see positive feedback on Tor & to understand the workings via the great diagrams. I usually just see articles about how Tor has failed to protect someone's privacy and it's backfired on them.

Tor and iCloud Private Relay seem to have a lot in common if I have a correct understanding of the two? Except iCloud Private Relay is extremely easy to setup and use on Apple devices compared to Tor.
by geye1234 | 2025-09-20 14:07:05+00:00
> It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.

Propaganda is very effective, and Americans are the most skillful propagandists in the world. Immigration is as pro-capital and anti-labor as you can get, yet somehow the left has been convinced to support it.
by timonoko | 2025-09-20 14:08:08+00:00
Most of these are short/long vowel markings, except last one which is (probably) implosion. And rest are frontal/back and wide/narrow A.

But Swedish "Å" is just stupidity "O", because they started pronouncing "O" as "U" and "U" as "Y".

-- Can you pronounce these screams?
by ericmay | 2025-09-20 14:08:43+00:00
Can you elaborate more on hiring and immigration in the United Kingdom and Australia with respect to similar skilled visa work?

When you say South Asia could you expand on what specific countries you mean? I think South Asia could mean a few things to a few different people which is why I ask.

> It means less focus in the US which eventually will just become sales and marketing only with perhaps some smaller department sized tech jobs.

As an American I'm curious about this, can you expand on how this will happen or how you think it might happen? If I recall correctly the figure for active H1B visa holders in the United States is under 1 million, so are you asserting that those visa holders all or mostly leave the United States and then the tech jobs that remain will be small in number are most folks working at companies like Google or Microsoft will just be working in sales and marketing? If that's not what you meant to say could you expand?
by inglor_cz | 2025-09-20 14:08:47+00:00
During the rule of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia, not working was a crime, so "nobody is unemployed, nobody is homeless" was trivially ensured by chucking such people into prison.

OTOH you had a lot of state-sponsored jobs where you just had to show up, but not necessarily work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)

The Czech offence was called "Příživnictví", which is just "Parasitism".

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C5%99%C3%AD%C5%BEivnictv%C3%...
by Ericson2314 | 2025-09-20 14:09:38+00:00
Where in an equilibrium where gig wages are too low, because the precarity means the gig worker is desperate.

With enough welfare state, the gig worker wouldn't be so desperate, and gig rates would go up. Of course they would push some employers back to permenant employment, but this is fine. It would be like spot market vs longer term deals for everything else.

I'm convinced the length of the workweek is totally exogenous. I don't think there is a feedback mechanism within capitalism to adjust it. This is actually a bummer.
by dasil003 | 2025-09-20 14:10:17+00:00
Simon Sinek is far from the worst of the genre, but these aphorisms are much easier to say than they are to exemplify in practice. I’ve worked with more than one LinkedIn influencer with millions of followers, and their primary talent turned out to be saying inspiring things. They had enough experience and the sheen of big tech credibility to be taken seriously by aspirational juniors, but when you actually had hard stuff to solve they are not who you’d want to be in the trenches with.
by simonw | 2025-09-20 14:10:20+00:00
"Get me all public github issues on this repo, summarise and store in this DB."

Yes, this can be done safely.

If you think of it through the "lethal trifecta" framing, to stay safe from data stealing attacks you need to avoid having all three of exposure to untrusted content, exposure to private data and an exfiltration vector.

Here you're actually avoiding two out of them: - there's no private data (just public issue access) and no mechanism that can exfiltrate, so the worst a malicious instruction can do is cause incorrect data to rewritten to your database.

You have to be careful when designing that sandboxed database tool but that's not too hard too get right.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-09-20 14:10:38+00:00
Point 1 H-1B is a horrible program that has to go, the manner in which this is done is unfortunate. Like many things it should have been done nicer and sooner but apparently that wasn’t an option.

Point 2 I’m certain exemptions will be granted that will mean in reality the H-1B gets to continue being a horrible problem for everyday Americans and the software industry in general. I don’t want to work in a lemon market and that’s what it has become. And I see this as more of an attack on free speech than an attack on H-1Bs but that shoe has yet to drop. In the meantime they need people to believe the threat is real so the companies will yield to power. The chaos is part of making it believable. If I was on a H-1B and I was too far away to make it in time I probably wouldn’t be too stressed about it but I’d understand why other people are.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-20 14:10:59+00:00
Yes. It benefits them to have ubiquitous tools supported on their system. The vendors should put in the work to make that possible.

I don’t maintain any tools as popular as git or you’d know me by name, but darned if I’m going to put in more than about 2 minutes per year supporting non-Unix.

(This said as someone who was once paid to improve Ansible’s AIX support for an employer. Life’s too short to do that nonsense for free.)
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-20 14:10:59+00:00
They also have the hukou system, and migrant workers often do not have the same benefits as native residents.

I think that much of the misunderstanding comes from the perception that China has a highly centralized authoritarian government which is all powerful within the state, which is true to some degree, but the regional governments are what effectively "run" most of the state, including things like infrastructure initiatives that most people would assume are state controlled. The big bold State planning also is in fact implemented in different ways by different provinces.

Then people put that framework into a western context of states and national government, which isn't right either. There is a lot of power balancing and interplay between the provincial and national governments, and the binding force is the CCP itself which doesn't have a clear western parallel either.
by firesteelrain | 2025-09-20 14:11:11+00:00
Quote: “ One of the most pressing challenges facing the use of hydrogen is its storage, which typically requires extremely low temperatures (−252.8 °C) and high pressures (350 to 700 bar). ”

I know I am just an amateur

In the PicoBalloon hobbyist world, we are generating our own hydrogen. You can buy the equipment for cheap from China and generate it from water. It doesn’t require extreme temperatures to store. Are we generating dirty hydrogen?

Why does this paper suggest storing at extreme temperatures and pressure?
by delusional | 2025-09-20 14:11:56+00:00
> In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.

I think it's at least a little interesting that "Intellectual property", like property in general, isn't a natural phenomenon. The very concept of property is a social construct we enforce on each other, supposedly for our shared benefit. This also means its existence has to live within the governmental system, and therefore be subject to sovereignty claims. "Intellectual Property" can therefore only be said to be "stolen" within a nation, by that nations own laws, or between nations following bilateral sovereign nation agreements.

What I'm basically saying is that I'm not sure China has agreed to uphold American style "Intellectual Property", and as such, I'm not sure you can actually claim them to have "stolen" any "Intellectual Property".
by sevensor | 2025-09-20 14:12:19+00:00
I canceled my subscription to the local daily over this. Not only were they presenting advertisement as if they were editorial content, they weren’t even reading it themselves. If they were, they would have noticed that they’d printed, on actual paper, an unreadable article full of broken html fragments. That was the last straw for me. Stunning disrespect for the people who pay for the paper.
by kllrnohj | 2025-09-20 14:12:26+00:00
> Companies like Rosewill sell ATX cases that can scratch that itch.

Have you looked at what they cost? Those cases alone cost as much as a used server. Which comes with a case.

> What about PCI Express card? Regular ATX computers are expandable.

As mentioned higher up, they run out of lane count in a hurry. Especially when you're using things like used Connect-X cards
by Der_Einzige | 2025-09-20 14:12:47+00:00
All intellectual property is stolen because all ideas are related.

Similar principal to "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers" - (That quote is from a french archbishop, not a communist)

A "bleeding heart" world that took such statements seriously would be infinitely better than what we have today. But we can't have that because book-burners, luddites and related ilk hate the fact that "information wants to be free"
by smrtinsert | 2025-09-20 14:12:54+00:00
Realistically even a 100 line csv will get hallucinated on after a few tool calls. The state/context must 100% be offloaded to the MCP server if you expect the LLM to have any reliability about it at all.

Sadly even with a 100% stateful MCP I've noticed that even Claude sometimes just hallucinates.
by legacynl | 2025-09-20 14:14:10+00:00
> Double-blind experiments on this are probably impossible, but it's not like large population studies are totally worthless.

Large population studies in itself are fine, it's just the quoted study is worthless. Socially there's just so many differences between the two groups that it becomes almost impossible to validly compare these two.

A better study design would be to treat each region separately. And compare 'time spent outside' with health outcomes in each region. That would give a much more reliable and useful insight in if time spent outside equals better/less health. Bonus points if you also ask them if they regularly use sunscreen.

That data would actually be useful. That way you could compare if spending time outside is healthy in itself, or if it has to do with the sun. For example if the sun would be a net negative, you would find relatively more skin cancer in the groups in sunnier climates that spend a lot of time outside versus those in greyer regions. If the sun would be a net-benefit, you would see less skin cancer instead. And quite likely you would see that people who spend more time outside have better health outcomes no matter which region you are in, although the size of those groups may differ greatly depending on the climate.
by jmyeet | 2025-09-20 14:14:15+00:00
Gig work is a warning sign but I honestly think China is far better equipped to deal with this than the West.

In the West, gig work is a symptom that people don't have a livable wage. They either have a day job and have to do gig work to survive. Or they can't find stable work so gig work is the best they can get. And there is an adversarial relationship with the likes of Uber who want to increase profits by stealing money from the drivers, basically.

Literally no government in the West is doing anything to tackle inequality. At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.

China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is.

Likewise, China doesn't allow a private company to operate like Uber at just rent-seek from the economy.

China has thus far avoided creating a social safety net, particularly with retirement, forcing people to save for that. That's in direct opposition to create a consumption economy so they rely on exports. And exports are at risk as inequality in the West is a threat to demand and China just can't create new markets fast enough.

The real warning here is that rising inequality is a massive, unaddressed, global problem at the same time as we will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes. War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution and blaming random marginalized groups for declining material conditions will only get you so far before the guillotines come out.
by omarqureshi | 2025-09-20 14:14:56+00:00
> Can you elaborate more on hiring and immigration in the United Kingdom and Australia with respect to similar skilled visa work? > When you say South Asia could you expand on what specific countries you mean? I think South Asia could mean a few things to a few different people which is why I ask.

I was in the process of moving one engineer from Dubai to Manchester, probably all in the process is £20,000-£30,000 overall, spread over several years.

South Asia is India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Predominantly this is India and Pakistan though.

> As an American I'm curious about this, can you expand on how this will happen or how you think it might happen?

Best guess, those software engineering departments with predominantly South Asian engineers will cease to exist, they'll buy real estate in London/Sydney which is a much better long term investment because London prices always go up.

Severance is also REALLY easy in the US compared to countries where actual labour laws exist.

Sales and Marketing will stay, they probably need that American presence, they don't need that in software engineering because the Internet exists.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-09-20 14:15:12+00:00
It's often said that formal verification moves bugs from the implementation to the specification, and there's also the problem of proving equality between the formally proven specification and the implementation.

The first problem is just hard, the second can be approached by using a language like F* or Dafny that compiles to executable code. IIRC Amazon has had some success by using Lean for the specification and using fuzzing to test that the implementation matches.
by tdeck | 2025-09-20 14:15:26+00:00
The sentiment reminds me of this old 19th century labor movement song "The Dollar Alarm Clock" (although in that song, they were making fun of it)

What a blessing it was when the thing was invented; It beats the slave-driver who came with a stick; It rests on the shelf in the shack that I rented; It never gets hungry; it never gets sick.

https://politicalfolkmusic.org/blog/john-healy/dollar-alarm-...
by xilong88 | 2025-09-20 14:15:39+00:00
Hello everyone! I’m a developer currently working on LogAI, an AI-powered super memory agent.

Like many of you, I’ve always had the habit of taking notes — but existing tools are fragmented, overwhelming, and often frustrating to use. Here are the main pain points I’ve encountered:

The Problems

1. Fragmented and redundant tools

If your notes are diverse, you end up downloading multiple apps, paying for multiple subscriptions, and dealing with unnecessary features.

2. Lack of intelligence and insight

Your data lives in silos, making it hard to search or connect.

Most tools only present your data in a different format — they don’t generate meaningful insights or guidance.

3. High cost of recording

You have to learn how to use each app separately.

In my personal experience, 70% of apps still don’t support AI-based input.

I wanted a single app to quantify myself, but I couldn’t find anything that truly worked. Then it hit me — in the era of AI, why not let AI be the second brain that records, manages, and analyzes everything for us? That’s why I created LogAI.

What LogAI Can Do

LogAI helps you record anything, in the simplest way possible, with the least time spent. Just send a quick message:

“Jogged 50 minutes at 8 a.m.”

“Studied programming for 2 hours this morning.”

“Took an antibiotic at 4 p.m.”

No matter the topic — fitness, meals, finances, medication, ideas, dreams — LogAI handles it. Whether it’s text, images, or audio, it can even process them intelligently (e.g., extract calories from a food photo, recognize data from a health report).

Then, LogAI aggregates and analyzes your records to create real value — emotional, practical, and actionable insights that can improve your life. For example:

“Analyze my exercise habits and give me advice.”

“Did I take my medicine today?”

“Evaluate my study progress.”

The Journey So Far

This project is still in active development. For the past few months, we’ve been iterating almost daily — debugging late at night, rewriting features, and rethinking designs. Why?

1. We want this product to be more than just “usable” — we want it to be delightful.

2. Building something that’s universal, intelligent, and easy to use is no small task.

Join the Waitlist

I’d love for you to be part of this journey. Join the LogAI waitlist to become one of our very first users — you’ll receive a special badge and exclusive perks. And please feel free to share feedback or ask questions. I’ll do my best to answer them and address any concerns.

We’re aiming to launch version 1.0 in October. Waitlist link: https://logai.chat?wait_list=1&source=1

Looking forward to having you on board — and hearing your thoughts!