MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jnr | 2025-09-29 13:32:46+00:00
Once you have worked with the large cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), you start to realize that solutions built on those platforms frequently differ a lot from what can realistically be self hosted. Especially when it comes to large SaaS platforms. They probably could not provide it even if they wanted to. Or it would be only viable to large enterprises being direct competitors, but not viable to a homelab.

I think it makes no sense for them to put much focus on developing a separate small open source version of their server. So it is good that they actually support its development.
by codedokode | 2025-09-29 13:32:48+00:00
> Ubuntu has a vibrant ecosystem of software (commonly known as the Debian repositories, with some attempts at launching their on on top like PPA and Snap)

Yes but the most of the packages are either CLI tools (not really usable on a phone) or tools with desktop GUI (with tiny elements, not usable on a phone). And probably there is a way to port Wayland/Pipewire to Android, which seems an easier task that writing full OS.

For example, take GIMP, or Qucs (electric circuit simulator), or Kdenlive (video editor), or LMMS (audio editor), in their current form they would be unusable due to tiny UI elements. One needs completely new UI for small screens.

> There's so much you can do when you have a Linux distribution in your pocket!)

Maybe but I am not really interested in compiling anything, I have a laptop for that, I am interested in having an open source OS without restrictions, telemetry and backdoors.
by latexr | 2025-09-29 13:33:05+00:00
It is precisely because the video exists that you have the opportunity to correct the misconception, which is exactly what happened with the discussion in your example. Had it been a photograph, that context would have been lost and no one could refute it.

The compression artefacts help there, because they make it very clear this was taken from a video, meaning one should look up the source because it probably exists.

That is a perfect example of how a photograph could be worse than a video.
Show HN: Snmpy – A Pure Python SNMP Library with Zero Dependencies
by justvugg | 2025-09-29 13:33:09+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the creator of snmpy – a lightweight, pure Python library for SNMP v1/v2c/v3. It supports GET, SET, WALK, traps, and SNMPv3 authentication and encryption. There's even built-in support for UPS monitoring (battery, voltage, etc.).

It’s built from scratch with zero dependencies (not even PySNMP or net-snmp), and is meant for developers who want to integrate SNMP monitoring into their tools or scripts without relying on native libraries or C extensions.

Just `pip install snmpy` and you're ready. The CLI is also included for quick usage.

The code is clean, readable, and fully open-source under the MIT license. I'd love your feedback — feature requests, use cases, missing things, or even tough critiques.

GitHub: https://github.com/snmpware/snmpy

Thanks!
by dataflow | 2025-09-29 13:33:24+00:00
> If you don't do C++ on a daily basis, you will silently introduce problems

Even if you do, you still will. Just less often.

> I actually have no idea how big teams work on large C++ codebases... You can change one part of the code, and it will introduce bugs in the whole project because of how the memory is handled

Part of it is lots of tests, sanitizers, assertions, etc.

Part of it is keeping things modular and avoiding spooky action at a distance to the extent possible.

Part of it is unavoidable, and that's why people are moving to safer languages.
by lisper | 2025-09-29 13:33:28+00:00
"Numbers. A customization may be desired to allow sorting numbers in numeric order. If strings including numbers are merely sorted alphabetically, the string “A-10” comes before the string “A-2”, which is often not desired. This behavior can be customized, but it is complicated by ambiguities in recognizing numbers within strings (because they may be formatted according to different language conventions). Once each number is recognized, it can be preprocessed to convert it into a format that allows for correct numeric sorting, such as a textual version of the IEEE numeric format."
by y0eswddl | 2025-09-29 13:33:47+00:00
Maybe not government, but much public resource was not driven by profit.

The entire software industry relies on a foundation of free and open source software. The profit model wouldn't even exist without the work of people who do it purely for passion.

Penicillin was university research and given away freely.

The Wright brothers weren't trying to start an airline, that just wanted to fly.

ironically, tho not recently government, the majority of your examples were not discovered/created in the pursuit of profits.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-29 13:34:02+00:00
Seems a lot more an indictment. Maybe you might consider phrasing it differently.

I'm a recovering drug addict. I have quite an appreciation for privacy and anonymity. I have a lot more skin in the game than most.

However, there's the fantasy world in our heads, and the reality of the truth. These don't always overlap.

It's my job to work with yucchy reality. It doesn't give a damn what I think it should be. It's my responsibility to modify my approach to be most effective, given the context.

"When the map and the terrain disagree; believe the terrain." - Swiss Army aphorism
by libridev | 2025-09-29 13:34:06+00:00
Custom development (contracting) your already guarantee the sale since they are paying you for what you already want so in that case I guess you could perfect your craft. On the open market there is the trade off of no wanting to waste your time on what people don't already need. In the case of the windows app you had validated your idea so at that point polishing it wouldn't have been that bad of an investment.

I guess the hardest part about these stories is as they say "hindsight is 20/20"
by jmull | 2025-09-29 13:34:34+00:00
They do list specific reasons in the article...

One, C/C++ interop is a priority since they will interoperate with a large variety of C/C++ APIs (sounds like one of the main points of their project is to integrate things that are largely implemented in C/C++).

Two, they say their aim is "building a lasting system that will support decades of continued improvements." You want confidence that 99.9% of the code you write today remains just as good 20, 30, 50 years from now. I don't think rust is quite there yet (or maybe it is but hasn't yet proven it).
by jodrellblank | 2025-09-29 13:34:46+00:00
GP's claim is that UK is massively surveilled and the UK is unsafe, therefore surveillance does not improve safety. However the UK is a long way above the USA; if one wants to argue that the surveillance isn't the cause of the safety, they can, but they can't take that for granted by snarkily saying the UK isn't safe.

If I was trying to say that the UK is safe because it's #30 on the Peace Index when the USA was higher, then my comment wouldn't carry much weight. Or if the USA was a place or two behind then my comment wouldn't be strong.

Larry Ellison is in the USA and presumably his "Citizens will be on their best behaviour" is mostly aimed at USA citizens, and HN and the internet are USA-centric so USA makes a big obvious comparison.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-29 13:34:52+00:00
My gripe is even more meta than that. It's an unwillingness to mentally grapple with what they're advocating for and if they do understand it then

Like if we want to run society with summary execution for petty thieves or inequality under the law or whatever then fine, but have the balls to say that, because without an understanding of the goals and acceptable tradeoffs we can't effectively pursue the goals without hitting unacceptable tradeoffs.

But people don't come out and say these things because if you reason about the implications it's pretty clear they're shit ideas so what people do instead is lie and misdirect and whatnot in order to advocate for "bad in principal, arguably positive in result" things on their pet issue. But when you multiply by everyone's pet issues we get the current garbage and current trajectory.

I think part of the problem is that as material plenty increases the number of people partaking in discourse because they have existential problems that need solving goes down so discourse is increasingly dominated by "fake problems". This is also why you're seeing a pendulum shift away from "feel good" policies toward more "tough decision" policies as it gets harder for people in the lower majority of society (70%, 80%, idk) to make ends meet. So basically I'm hopeful that things get more honest and more sane as we get poorer, which sucks, I guess, but hey, silver linings.
by mooreds | 2025-09-29 13:35:00+00:00
Ah, the "market for lemons" argument: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1879431

> Because the cost of a bad hire is so consequential,

This is stated all the time and I feel it is true. But is there any way to make it less consequential? That was my main argument for contract-to-hire (though I know there are downsides to that approach).

Are there any other ways to make hiring less risky?
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-29 13:35:05+00:00
The article is unclear, but seems to convey this isn't a "US government" idea, but rather a Trump or Trump admin idea. The headline should be clearer, since it's almost 100% certain this isn't a Congressional, constitutional tariff, but rather an "emergency" office of the president idea. Don't smear responsibility out over "the government", it isn't accurate.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-29 13:35:19+00:00
Like many in the AI space, Farid said that those who use breakthrough technologies will outlast those who don't.

"AI" professor tells everyone to use "AI". With the usual fatalism that nothing can ever be done about anything.

One option for example would be to fire all "AI" professors. Another one would be to outlaw "AI", just as nuclear energy was outlawed in Germany and DDT was banned worldwide.
by atoav | 2025-09-29 13:36:00+00:00
A pretty niche application for these kind of shaker systems is monitoring for live musicians. As of now there are products for drummers and bass players that help them experience the bass response when they use in-ear minitoring systems, e.g. vibrating floor boards for bass players and shaking drum stools for drummers.

Having this more mobile would certainly help.
by osigurdson | 2025-09-29 13:36:28+00:00
>> Languages like Golang don’t contain map and filter at all, for principled reasons.

Go is nice when working with other languages at the same time as there are few language specific things to remember. However, they really should add common things that exist in almost every other language (I'd argue map / filter would be good to have for instance). It isn't really easier if it is "simple" but unique to the language.
by sleepyguy | 2025-09-29 13:36:41+00:00
The elephant in the room: the H1B visa and the influx of Indian workers into the U.S. labor market. Many of them are willing to work for lower wages, demand less, and have fewer rights—essentially becoming exploited labor for Corporate America. Why would a corporation hire an American graduate who won’t tolerate these conditions when an H1B worker will?

Instead of confronting the issue directly, people often sidestep it with other excuses. The reality is, if we eliminated all H1B workers, every American in the IT industry, including recent graduates, would have a job. And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
by zdragnar | 2025-09-29 13:37:04+00:00
Back when I started, I think maybe half of the people I worked with had a relevant degree at most. Even that might be an overestimate.

Back then, CS degree programs didn't even teach higher level languages than C/++ as they were thought to change too quickly. Whatever you learned during your four years wouldn't apply after you graduated. Instead, the programs focused on the low level implementation details with the theory that was where the engineering and science were.

Now, the same school I went to has courses and tracks for web technologies, so who knows.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-29 13:37:26+00:00
The point is this comes down to a foreign policy disagreement that isn’t germane to Ellison’s comments on surveillance. (I can come with a litany of policy disagreements with anyone of Ellison’s stature, some of which I probably feel about strongly.)

Read in good faith, it’s overzealous advocacy. In bad faith, which I don’t assume here, it serves to get this discussion flagged off the front page.
by mooreds | 2025-09-29 13:37:29+00:00
> Our best hires are nearly always coming from the network of a team member or people we contracted with and decided to hire full time.

I love this approach.

However, at least in the USA, there are substantial costs to candidates for this approach:

- no health care while contracting (unless the candidate pays for it)

- being a contractor is a different level of risk than moving from FTE to FTE

- if the employer decides it isn't a fit, candidate has to find another contractor

Do you have any great candidates who approach you and then, finding out your approach, pass?
by Rooster61 | 2025-09-29 13:37:37+00:00
Although I'm not optimistic, there's a small chance this might shake up the sorry state of EA Sports. The incessant focus on microtransactions and features that are essentially just sports themed slot machines over actual solid gameplay has kept me far away from those games for a long time.

EDIT: I think I might have worded that poorly. I do NOT think a change is going to happen, at least not one for the better, especially considering the actors involved in the buyout. I think it's optimistic to think that it will.
by Mistletoe | 2025-09-29 13:37:42+00:00
I didn’t think EA could get more evil but here we are.

I remember when they were the good guys. I’d see that EA logo on my Commodore 64 load up and I knew I was in for something amazing like Archon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark
by kragen | 2025-09-29 13:38:12+00:00
I'm sorry my comment was so unclear. I'll try to explain in more detail.

1. Cellphones are a kind of personal computer.

2. Numerical computation is something that computers, personal or otherwise, are very good at. Conservatively, your cellphone is ten orders of magnitude faster (ten billion times faster) than you are at tasks like averaging a set of numbers.

3. The spreadsheet user interface is expressive enough for many numerical computations† that are impractical to carry out with more limited user interfaces such as pocket calculators, but it is simple enough to understand that large masses of people can take advantage of that expressivity. (The popularity of VisiCalc on early personal computers such as the Apple ][ is one piece of evidence for this.) It is the "low-code development platform" that inspired all the current no-code and low-code platforms.

4. Such numerical computations are so commonplace in many people's lives that they do them on their cellphones, despite the small display and lack of a keyboard; one reason is that many people have cellphones as their only programmable computers. When they do such complex numerical calculations on their cellphones, they often use spreadsheets to do them.

5. Therefore, we should regard the availability of spreadsheets as a central indicator for the viability of a computer software ecosystem, even on cellphones.

I think all of these claims are obviously correct, stipulating the ones before them, except for #4. As evidence for #4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCpJ441g-Y4 shows that the Google Sheets app for Android was at the time #7 in their "productivity" category with 793000 ratings and 4.8 stars. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... says that it has been downloaded more than a billion times and has 1.27 million ratings. The fact that people exist who do not use their cellphones for spreadsheets does not constitute evidence against this claim.

What I believe is happening, to elaborate a bit more, is that F-Droid users who need numerical computation that goes beyond what calculator apps can do are mostly just using the Google Sheets app. The radical fringe of F-Droid users like me who do not have Google accounts often make do with Termux programs such as Python, LuaJIT, PARI/GP, bc, Racket, or the C compiler, even though for many purposes a spreadsheet would be much more convenient.

______

† Spreadsheets are also used as simple databases, in fact more frequently than they are used for numerical calculations, but numerical calculations alone are a strong enough argument for my purposes here, and F-Droid does have a number of adequate simple database apps.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-29 13:38:31+00:00
It is for us in the cybersecurity space and the fabless design space (eg. RISC-V SoC). My portfolio companies have moved all hiring to Israel, CEE, and India as a result.

The only people we might consider hiring in the US are veterans from cyber related MOSes because they come with the right learning mindset and have enough practical skills to ramp up if there are skill deficiencies.
by lumost | 2025-09-29 13:38:48+00:00
Im on an academic foray to an R1 right now. One of the big items the PIs are drilling is the one paper per year mantra.

Many papers today are representing what would have happened via open source repos in yesteryear. Meaning that there is a lot of work which is useful to someone and having peer reviewed benchmarks etc. is useful to understand whether those people should care. The weakness is that some of this work is the equivalent of shovelware.
by reedf1 | 2025-09-29 13:39:09+00:00
I mean this is certainly an effect, but largely outdated reasoning. Every tech company you can think of copied verbatim a Google-style interview process out of complete reflex without understanding largely why. Now you discover that your candidate, who can invert a tree just fine, and can regurgitate quicksort, is totally useless at delivering software, managing stakeholders, or understanding the business logic.
by jmclnx | 2025-09-29 13:39:12+00:00
I would like to know what is meant by "Computer science jobs".

To me, Computer Science would be like research type jobs. I know nothing about this field, but I expect it has always been and always will be very hard to get into this field.

Then you have these programming jobs:

IT would be working on Internal Applications for a Business. These days would usually mean supporting or in-house custom developing for things like SAP or Oracle. This is what I did, in the 70s/80s/90s it was all in-house systems. Starting early 2000s, systems like SAP. I have since retired but I know where I last worked, that company was moving these jobs outside the US. From friends still there, those moves have increased quite a bit. Maybe work could be still available in small companies.

Then there are working at startups, which is rare but gets all the press, I know nothing about this area.

Then there is working a a company that develops software for sale (like SAP), I tend to think this is starting to go the way of IT work mentioned above.
by ActionHank | 2025-09-29 13:39:41+00:00
As someone interviewing for the first time in a long time I can tell you most assuredly that there are a disproportionate number of awful interviewers too.

Of the interviews I've had I would say about 3/4 have tried to catch you out with some inane gotcha that you would never see in the wild or have a very specific solution in mind without exploring or discussing. Sometimes both.
by SUPERCILEX | 2025-09-29 13:39:41+00:00
As noted by other commenters, the point I was trying to get across is that the way we implement lockless channels is suboptimal and could be made faster from a theoretical standpoint.

In my benchmarks[1], the average processing time for an element is 250ns with 4 producers and 4 consumers contending heavily. That's terrible! Even if your numbers are correct, 100ns is a bit faster than two round trips to RAM while 33ns is about three round trips to L3 and ~100x slower than spamming a core with add operations. That's slow.

[1]: https://github.com/SUPERCILEX/lockness/blob/master/bags/benc... $ cargo bench -- 8_threads/std_mpmc
by Aurornis | 2025-09-29 13:40:09+00:00
There must be more to this story given that the political ad archive is still available for many other non-EU countries:

> Now when you try to click on "political ads" you get re-directed to a page asking you to select from a small number of countries - the US, of course, UK, India, Australia, Brazil, Israel - but not one EU country (see below):

Is there some sort of EU data retention law at play here?
by qsort | 2025-09-29 13:40:10+00:00
This works very well for contractors, less so for full-time employees. You can't just fire somebody on a whim, at least not for free, not even in the US, let alone in most of Europe.

To be clear, I'm not saying worker protections are bad, just that if firing is much more expensive than hiring, you can't really afford to hire any warm body that walks through the door. These days everyone and their mother is in CS, there are many more talented people than ever, but also more duds than ever.
by jgeada | 2025-09-29 13:40:10+00:00
I know it is hearsay, but it seems many times interviews try to get free work from candidates. Here, have a look at this real problem, see if you can solve it in whatever the interview time frame is.

When there are too many candidates and not so many jobs, and absolutely no regulation, employers are free to exploit applicants without consequences. Employers will do this even when there is no actual job being offered, so they can use the availability of applicants to apply downward pressure on the salaries of the workers they already have.
by thepryz | 2025-09-29 13:40:12+00:00
Billionaires are out of touch because their money, their power, and their social circle insulates them from the challenges everyday people experience. Their goals are to find ways to protect and expand their wealth and their power. You don’t become a billionaire by looking out for other people.

Their goals and their perspectives should mean that they have absolutely no business making policy decisions for society but unfortunately people are naive and easily influenced.
Show HN: CLI to build voice agents with STT/TTS/LLM in one command
by aidanhornsby | 2025-09-29 13:40:19+00:00
We just released a CLI to help quickly build, test, and deploy voice AI agents straight from your development environment:

npx @layercode/cli init

Here’s a short video showing the flow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMFNQ5RC954

We’d love feedback from developers building agents — especially if you’re experimenting with voice.

What feels smooth? What doesn't? What’s missing for your projects?
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-29 13:40:38+00:00
> And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.

Everyone defending H1Bs forgets why we even have an economy. America never signed up to be some hegemon that needs to compete with the entire world. America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. We can help other people after that point. You get revolutions and revolutionary acts when it feels that the opportunity for foreigners and the aristocratic is exceeding opportunity for the normal everyday people born here, and that is a legitimate injustice.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-09-29 13:40:39+00:00
I'm not a fan of my out-of-the-home activities all being stored in an online database accessible to billions of people and automatically scanned by several different governments (including a list of foreign countries extensive enough to include at least one you wish it didn't, regardless of who you are) to build a profile of every person, from hobbies to schedule to gait recognition to psychographic profile.

But of course, that ship has sailed in much of the world, with the ubiquity of surveillance and the dearth of opposition.