MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asah | 2025-09-17 14:37:24+00:00
how is this different from any product with a billion users and 100,000+ live bug reports?

I've had pretty good luck reporting bugs to Google (notoriously bad!):

1. provide simple, crystal clear examples that cannot be due to third parties, misconfiguration or user error.

2. show that it's happening to a large number of mainstream users (not niche)

3. show that it breaks critical workflows and has no easy workaround (incl partial workarounds).

4. if you meet #1-3, then wait 6-9 months minimum (more if hard to fix). If not, wait 3-5+ years.

---

Favorite example: in the mid-2000s, I caught google maps confusing suite/apt numbers for street numbers. It got flagged as low priority. So, to get the team's attention, I reproduced the bug on a large Google offices. Six month later, bug fixed.

After that experience, I report everything to Google that breaks my workflow. Like clockwork, the biggies get fixed a couple of quarters later.

---

Want long? Try improving/fixing core issues with the API design of Linux or PostgreSQL: fix times can be measured in decades. Backward compatibility is insufficient - they rightfully worry about libraries and tools adopting the new APIs and then breaking legacy systems that cannot be upgraded even for mission-critical security issues.

---

NOTE: OP bug feels P0 and the better strategy is either mass media (incl HN) or networking to someone inside the company. I've hit those too over the years and can usually find someone at the company to send directly.
by varispeed | 2025-09-17 14:37:55+00:00
That’s a common derail - shifting from the substance to “watch your wording.” It’s a form of concern-trolling: pretending the problem is rhetoric while sidestepping the actual flaw.

The numbers don’t change based on phrasing. Mass scanning at EU scale inevitably flags orders of magnitude more innocents than offenders. Saying “this isn’t about catching criminals” isn’t twisting words, it’s highlighting that the stated goal is statistically self-defeating.

The “catching criminals” line is deliberate gaslighting. It’s crafted to reassure people who don’t understand how these systems work, while the real function is mass surveillance of everyone.
by nathan_compton | 2025-09-17 14:38:10+00:00
There is really nothing to the appearance of complex numbers in QM. In QM we must design wave functions which do the double duty of representing the probability of measurement outcomes AND capture the symmetries implicit in the system related to the fact that there are degrees of freedom between preparation of a state and measurement (for example, we may rotate our detector any way we wish before we make a measurement of a particle in a given prepared spin state). To accomplish this we need some number-like objects to denote our wave function in that square to real numbers but have enough structure to represent (in this case) the rotations.

As you venture further into the universe of QFT you find that you need even more exotic number like objects like spinors with their own peculiar structures, but the essence is the same: they must serve the purpose of representing probabilities and symmetries. The complex numbers in QM mean nothing at all except in that they serve these purposes.

If we wish to speak informally and wave our hands a bit we can say that it isn't so surprising that we find the complex numbers and related number like objects because the complex numbers are a promise to square something at a later date and recover a real number, which is what we need to satisfy the requirement to represent probabilities.

In fact, we can formulate classical probabilistic mechanics with complex numbers (the Koopman von Neuman operator theory) and again, they appear because we want to operate on objects living in a nice Hilbert space which also square to probabilities. In only took me 20 years to understand this, so I can sympathize with confusion.
by evolve2k | 2025-09-17 14:38:37+00:00
The fact you walk / ride is admirable. We’ve been oversold on personal responsibility.

Milk used to come in glass bottles, buying milk now comes in plastic, very little you can do without a bunch of lobby and active work. We’re inside systems that are society wide, the ways the systems we’re all inside of run very much matters.

Sorry to have been so harsh; your two points didn’t line up in my head and I assume a bot. Please accept my apology, these are strange times.
by kccqzy | 2025-09-17 14:38:45+00:00
I used to see this when I had iCloud Photo Library turned on. It randomly corrupted old photos that were correct. It corrupted both photos taken on the iPhone and photos imported from a real camera.

I have since turned off iCloud Photo Library, downgraded iCloud (no longer needed so much storage), and started using fully open source photo management with flat files on disk.
Show HN: Claude Web Scraper
by hubraumhugo | 2025-09-17 14:38:52+00:00
Anthropic announced their new web fetch tool[0] last Friday, so I built a little tool to test its web scraping capabilities. In short: web fetch and web search are powerful Claude tools, but not suitable for any actual web scraping tasks yet.

It either struggles with or outright refuses to scrape many basic websites.

As an example, here is the result for https://news.ycombinator.com:

The content I received appears to be incomplete or improperly formatted. This seems to be a parsing issue with how the web content was extracted. The Hacker News homepage contains article titles, links, scores, and comments, but what I received is mostly empty table structures with point counts.\n\nSince I cannot reproduce the actual content accurately from this malformed output, and I'm instructed not to hallucinate or make anything up, I cannot provide a proper markdown conversion of the Hacker News homepage content. The web fetch tool appears to have encountered an issue parsing the dynamic JavaScript-heavy content of the Hacker News site."

[0] https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/tool-use/we...
by simoncion | 2025-09-17 14:39:07+00:00
> Valve is betting everything on Linux right now...

They've been working on Linux support since at least around the time that Microsoft introduced the Windows Store... so for the last twelve years or so.

And, man, a couple of months ago I figured out how to run Steam as a separate user on my Xorg system. Not-at-all-coincidentally, I haven't booted into Windows in a couple of months. Not every game runs [0], but nearly every game in my library does.

I'm really gladdened by the effort put in to making this work.

[0] Aside from the obvious ones with worryingly-intrusive kernel-level anticheat, sometimes there are weird failures like Highfleet just detonating on startup.
Ask HN: Does Europe Need a YC?
by drydenwilliams | 2025-09-17 14:39:21+00:00
I see this being questioned by UK and Europe investors quite a bit. Does Europe needs a YC?

Maybe, but first, a mentality shift might be needed...

Instead of my inbox blowing up talking to lots of VCs, I’d rather to a few. Ones who have real-world experience. Someone who can actually add value, drawing on a portfolio of companies that offer traction, feedback, and support early on. Someone willing to take real risks, who still remembers how thrilling it is to start something from nothing.

What I heard a lot was at pre-seed is: “Come back when you’ve got £1M ARR.”

In my (super limited) experience, many UK investors seem super cautious, sitting on large pools of money, moving far too slowly for startups in their most fragile pre-seed stage. Also there are LOADS of them, 1000s. Worse, they often want too much equity up front, which stifles creativity, momentum, and ambition.

Meanwhile, YC and San Francisco have gravity. The value is clear: if you’re in, you’re in, capital, connections, and momentum flow toward you. That pull accelerates founders, instead of slowing them down.

Too many VCs here only want to bet on the horses most likely to win. A dead cert. But, I’m not sure that mentality fuels real innovation, or builds the kind of ecosystem YC has managed to create.

For a time I thought this was Station F in Paris, but it's been quiet. So, would love to hear what you think below. Have I just been fooled by the bright lights and allure of YC?
by duxup | 2025-09-17 14:39:21+00:00
I'm curious how bad the misinformation type stuff will be.

It's bad everywhere, but I found TikTok to be the absolute worst. Not even just fake news political stuff where I can guess the motivation (still bad), but just basic everyday tips and tricks, local users describing news events. I've found it to be so much worse on tiktok.

Other platforms there seems to be "more" intent by creators to provide somewhat consistent / factual content. Tiktok often feels to me like content accuracy / quality isn't a concern for most creators.
by linuxftw | 2025-09-17 14:39:22+00:00
Changes across shared resources should be few and far between. Terraform really should only be used to setup long-lived resources, such as your VPC, initial IAM, and a bootstrapping system/management plane (eg, your kubernetes cluster). Once your infrastructure is up and running, further operations should be api-driven (aka controllers).

I'm not really a fan of crossplane, it's much simpler to roll your own custom operator, especially now that things like the Azure Service Operator exist (I think there's something equivalent for aws as well). This gives you a lot more flexibility for writing unit tests for your business logic.
by rhdunn | 2025-09-17 14:39:33+00:00
IIUC, complex numbers are a number system that supports rotations -- one representation is as an angle and a magnitude. As such they work well at describing systems that have rotational components. This makes them useful for working with waves like in QM (light, etc.) and Fourier transformations/analysis (sine waves) which is why they are used in QM.

If you exclude non-real operations and states you are removing part of the system such that it becomes impossible to work with certain cases -- like handling non-real roots of ax^2 + bx + c polynomials.

It is possible to represent complex numbers as 2x2 matrices as those can encode 2D rotations. With the matrix formulation you are not dealing with imaginary numbers -- or you are, but they are not encoded with i = sqrt(-1) but as a 45deg rotation. IIRC, there is a formulation of Dirac's QED (Quantum ElectroDynamics) using matrices.
by Balgair | 2025-09-17 14:39:47+00:00
The manager is responsible for $X but only gets paid their salary.

I'm their day to day, hiring is a pain. They need the extra hands, but they have to go through more work to get that person onboard. The activation energy is high, higher now with AI and automated job applications clogging things up.

Then you have onboarding and the continued costs of management of that person. Honestly, most managers would want the smallest team possible in terms of day to day workload.

This is also why AI is appealing. The promise of no sick days, no HR complaints, no chit chat. Just pure work done in plain language. Work done overnight, right, the first time. A middle managers dream worker.

The thing that is more important is the budget. It's always the budget. Nothing matters but the budget. That's the second iron law of beauraracy, of course.
by nextaccountic | 2025-09-17 14:40:03+00:00
You talked about using Rust as a better C so I just wanted to ask, do you define any enums with payloads? (also called "sum types" or "tagged unions" in other languages) (edit: also called "algebraic tyeps" and there's an article about it in the front page, though this is a slight misnomer)

Things like

enum Something { One(String), Two(i32), }

Also, how is your usage of Option? (one such enum)

I think this plus pattern matching is the foundation of Rust's superpowers. It's also very old tech and absolutely not Rust's invention, present in languages like OCaml and SML. Hence the early Rust slogan, "technology from the past, come to save the future from itself"
by ryandrake | 2025-09-17 14:40:38+00:00
Unless one's title is going to be "VP" or "SVP", the chance that someone joins BigTech and gets to "improve the process" is usually miniscule. You're being hired as cog #21 on team #54 and there is a large backlog of JIRA (well, in this case, Radar) tickets to grind through. There will be people who tell you what the processes are, and to not deviate from them. And you shouldn't get mad at those people, either--they're just the messengers, and were told what the processes are by people above them on the totem pole and so on.
by Okawari | 2025-09-17 14:40:40+00:00
I think 'restoring the ability to wiretap' is misleading as this is not 'restoring the ability', its more akin to 'wiretapping everyone all the time'.

Wiretapping requires probable cause and a court order in order to be used chat control does not. It will report thousands daily and no one will be blamed or punished for false reports which turned out did not have probable cause. It was a reactive tool in the police's arsenal, it was not proactive like this is supposed to be.

Wiretapping requires/required significant manpower investment in order to surveil a single potential criminal which rightfully forced the police to prioritize their resources. Chat Control is automated and will enable the same amount of police to police more people.

Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.

This is not restoring wiretapping, this is supercharging wiretapping.
Show HN: A lightweight social journaling platform with one shared daily prompt
by lakshikag | 2025-09-17 14:40:49+00:00
I built a lightweight place called 'daynote.club' to journal together. Every day, the platform posts one shared prompt. Everyone writes a short reflection on that prompt, and you can interact with each other with likes and comments. Your profile shows a chronological list of your day notes, so it’s easy (and fun) to revisit what you’ve written over time.

Why: Many people want to journal but don’t know what to write. A single daily prompt gives just enough structure, and the social layer keeps it motivating.

What you can do:

- Write your reflection on today’s prompt

- Read others notes, leave comments and likes

- Browse your profile to review all your past day notes

It’s still early, so there are rough edges and I’m sure I’ve missed things. If you have a moment to click around, I’d really appreciate thoughts on what feels confusing, what’s missing, and what you’d expect from something like this.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-17 14:42:13+00:00
I got one that seems to be kind of in the middle, it's better built than most of the consumer models but not quite as "industrial" feeling as some of the commercial models. I use it a few times a week for a few hours each.

I'm on a mostly carnivore, mostly ruminant meat diet and for costs tend to do a lot of ground beef... I sous vide a bunch of burgers in 1/2lb ring molds, refrigerate and sear off when hungry. This lets me have safer burgers that aren't overcooked. I do 133F for 2.5+ hours.

I also do steaks about once or twice a week. I have to say it's probably the best kitchen investment I could have made in terms of impact on the output quality.
by ecocentrik | 2025-09-17 14:42:28+00:00
The python hunters of Florida do all the heavy lifting for this joke.

If you're not aware, python hunting is a state funded industry with the stated goal of controlling the spread of the invasive species in the Everglades. It has done very little to slow the growth of the python population in Florida but has created a demand for new roads and service buildings. Most python hunters farm overflow areas near roads, canals and flood gates, avoiding nests.
by lawnchair | 2025-09-17 14:42:29+00:00
Terraform Cloud does not actually solve this. It moves the state into their service and manages locking centrally, but the underlying model is unchanged. It is still one file with a global lock. That is why refresh bottlenecks and contention show up there too. What we are pointing at is the model itself, not just where the file is hosted. We know this space well from building Terrateam, which competes with Terraform Cloud on orchestration.
by lenkite | 2025-09-17 14:42:36+00:00
> Don't other countries border Gaza? Why can't food flow through Egypt?

Even the most simplest of research would give you the answer to that question. The main escape/aid route from Egypt to Gaza is the Rafah crossing. This is now de-facto controlled by Israel.

Israel requires that aid from Egypt go through security checks, customs clearances, etc. There have already been dozens of reported instances where food from Egypt has gotten spoiled waiting for clearance. It was sensational news earlier, but folks have mostly given up reporting on this now. It is clear that Israel wants Palestine to suffer.

> It is odd to me that Isreal is taking the blame for actions clearly endorsed by anyone that has to deal with Gazans.

Pardon me, but I didn't know that Egypt and other neighbours were bombing Gaza. Can you give me relevant citations ? I mean the nation-state bombing Gaza and controlling its access to food would logically take the blame for massive civilian casualties and famine right ? Or does your supreme logic lead to another interpretation ? Kindly explain your chain of reasoning for enlightenment.

> other countries bordering Gaza are unwilling to take refugees

My apologies, but this is unforgivable ignorance. Please be aware that Egypt has taken >100k Palestinian refugees since 2023. I don't have the recent figures for Jordan, but they have taken in millions of Palestinian refugees over the last couple of decades.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-17 14:42:39+00:00
For a start, maintainers of dependencies with more than 1000 weekly downloads should be forced to use phishing-resistant 2FA like WebAuthN to authenticate updates (ideally hardware security keys, but not strictly necessary), or sign the code using a registered PGP key (with significant cooldown and warnings when enrolling new keys, e.g. 72h).
by simpaticoder | 2025-09-17 14:42:46+00:00
Algebraic types aren't scary, but they offer enough degrees-of-freedom to become scary [1]. Software is interesting because you can move around the complexity, and putting complexity into the type system has its advocates. They like to move complexity to compile time, but there are serious trade-offs that must be acknowledged! Turing-complete type systems can get programmers in trouble.

Most programs are better off putting the complexity into the body of the function being called and away from the type system itself. Use simple, fixed, runtime types[2][3], and deal with the occasional complex case in user code that you control rather than compiler code you don't.

1 - Demonstration of the Turing-completeness of Typescript's types: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/14833

2 - Zod https://zod.dev/

3 - Friendly Functions https://simpatico.io/test/friendly
by srkdaniel | 2025-09-17 14:42:47+00:00
Most early-stage teams I see put 99% of their effort into product and growth, while their website, socials, and decks all look like different companies.

Some argue that branding is “nice to have” until you’ve nailed PMF. Others say inconsistent visuals quietly kill trust with customers who bounce, or investors who assume the team isn’t serious.

Curious what HN thinks:

Have you seen inconsistent branding actually hurt adoption, fundraising, or sales?

Is it worth investing in early, or just a distraction before product/market fit?
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-09-17 14:42:54+00:00
PKD predicted this in the 1963 short story Stand-By, with President Unicephalon 40-D.

At this point, in any case, who would want to prevent it? Even GPT-5 -- hell, even Grok -- would make a better president than any human politician. They'd avoid absurd stunts like tariffs, would be immune to bribes and graft, etc...
by alexey-salmin | 2025-09-17 14:42:58+00:00
> Silly mistake and unfathomably good luck that someone in the investigating team was just googling around.

No, this is not "unfathomably good luck", this is how the system works. Most of crimes are repeated crimes, most of the criminals are serial criminals. People who obey the law, then break it once, then obey it ever since -- are very rare and even if they're not caught I wouldn't care much anyway.

And if you're a normal criminal doing your criminal stuff day after day and year after year you'll make mistakes. One of them will get you caught.

Never in the history of humanity did the law enforcement cast a net that caught 100% of crime, it always had been the game of probabilities, luck and persistence. Steal once and you'll likely walk away. Steal every day to make a living and you'll get caught many times in your lifetime.
by mdaniel | 2025-09-17 14:43:25+00:00
> easy to tell or predict what terraform will do

predict is the operative word there, because Terraform is so disconnected from the underlying provider's mental model that it is the expression "no plan survives first contact with the enemy" made manifest

Now, I am one million percent open to the pushback that "well, that's a provider's problem" but I also can't easily tell if they are operating within the bounds of TF's mental model, or is it literally that every provider ever is just that lazy?
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-09-17 14:43:43+00:00
Yes, you can do that, and you can do something similar in Java or Kotlin by `object : Monoid<Int> { override val mempty = 0; override fun mappend(x: Int, y: Int): Int = x + y }`. This is an encoding of traits as objects though, and is not as nice to work with as e.g. typeclasses and ML modules.
by nlitened | 2025-09-17 14:43:48+00:00
> it can't be true that it exists for us

You're saying it as if you assume some external entity judging whether something exists for somebody or not.

As an atheist you would acknowledge that the entire concept of "existing for something/somebody" is entirely a construct of human mind, which human mentally applies to the observable universe around them. So for an atheistic human mind, everything exists for human, as there's nobody else to exist for.
by ekr____ | 2025-09-17 14:43:56+00:00
Android does same-provider auto-upgrade if it determines that the recursive supports DoH (last I checked, if it's on Google's list). However, this means that unless you configure your own resolver, you're vulnerable to whoever controls the network substituting their own resolver. Firefox uses a set of vetted and pre-specified resolvers ("trusted recursive resolvers"), so is less vulnerable to this form of attack. I say "less vulnerable" because by default it will fall back to the system DNS on failure, but you can configure hard-fail.

You may or may not think this is a better design (I was one of the people responsible for Firefox doing things this way, so I do), but hopefully this explains the difference.

See: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/dns-security-dox/ for more on the difference.
by ryandrake | 2025-09-17 14:43:58+00:00
> I'll tell you a secret though that kind of pisses me off. If you have shipped with a bug, that automatically lowers the perceived priority as well. You know, as opposed to introducing a new bug in a new release.

This mentality is all over BigTech: This bug didn't block release X-1, why should it block release X? So, it inevitably just sits in the backlog forever. If your releases are 90 days apart, any bug found has an average of 45 days to be fixed, or it ends up on the "we lived with it last time" list.
by Someone | 2025-09-17 14:44:07+00:00
Why? A new framework gets you new bugs instead of the old ones, but not necessarily fewer or less severe ones.

It’s more likely that things will be reversed: the old, battle-tested framework may have bugs, but it’s is less likely to have serious ones.

They should try to hunt down bugs in the existing code. A partial rewrite of parts that historically have many bugs may be in order, but a complete replacement? Unlikely to be an improvement.