MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mosselman | 2025-09-28 16:15:38+00:00
When you open a random content website, such as someone's blog or The New York Times, it could theoretically have code to detect the non-loading of several trackers. However, most likely, nobody has gone through the trouble of doing this.

Those trackers, such as Facebook and Google, aren't loaded at all, so they are unaware of the request that was not tracked.

What you are advocating is loading those libraries, etc., anyway and allowing them to have their way with your browser session. This will always be less private than not doing it. Even Tor Browser has all sorts of protections from these types of things in place, which you would need far less of if you just blocked these tracking libraries to begin with.

Yes, theoretically, my blog or The New York Times could start profiling the missing requests and send them over to Facebook through the back-end, which is what is referred to as 'server-side tracking' in the industry, as far as I know. However, the chances of most websites doing this are slim, as it requires at least some effort on the server side. The way these websites usually do this is by passing along the account information they have on you, such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc. Even if you signed in on some site with Tor, they'd still send those things along if they had gone through this trouble.

Ironically, even Tor relies on clearing cookies, disabling JavaScript, and blocking specific requests to protect your identity, not just the origin obfuscation. So, the thing you are claiming makes it easier to track you, and suggesting that Tor is the solution is somewhat at odds.
by ivanjermakov | 2025-09-28 16:15:53+00:00
> What I really struggle with are commit messages. I type fast, make typos, and usually leave junk like “ui update.” At the end of the day I want to log what I did for each client or project, but my commits are useless. I end up digging through git diffs just to remember what I worked on. With a memory like a goldfish, that’s exhausting.

Sounds like a better solution is discipline, not another tool.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-28 16:15:53+00:00
I don’t have compelling evidence either way. But, I’d be a little skeptical of the data collected by the ad company. They are specifically and organization who’s entire skill-set includes convincing people to pay more, and that they might need some new service. I mean it isn’t some dirty secret, it is exactly what their value proposition is.

The internal data you were viewing and the metrics they track are, in part, to show people and convince them to buy the ad service. That’s like pure uncut ad-guy ad-material.
by danmaz74 | 2025-09-28 16:16:00+00:00
LLM coding agents can't learn from experience on our code, but we can learn from using them on our code, and in the context of our team and processes. I started creating some harnesses to help get more of what we want from these tools, and less of what we need to work too much on - eg, creating specialized agents to refactor code and test after it's been generated, and make it more in line with our standards, removing bogus tests, etc. The learning is embedded in the prompts for these agents.

I think that this approach can already get us pretty far. One thing I'm missing is tooling to make it easier to build automation on top of, eg, Claude Code, but I'm sure it's going to come (and I'm tempted to try vibe coding it; if only I had the time).
by oofbey | 2025-09-28 16:16:08+00:00
I would. Certainly if somebody asked me which way dice have a preference to land, over two or not, I’d say “over two” and not say “that’s a stupid question because dice don’t have opinions”. But to each their own.

Try explaining ionic bonds to a high schooler without anthropomorphising atoms and their desires for electrons. And then ask yourself why you’re doing that? It’s easier to say and understand with the analogy.
by chrisloy | 2025-09-28 16:16:16+00:00
Author here - I agree and have written about this before, though focusing a bit more on how far down the stack they might go, rather than up: https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/03/23/will-ai-replace-softwar...

Article being discussed in this thread isn't intended to be a luddite rejection of AI. It's just a mistake I see people keep making (and have made myself) and some thoughts on how to avoid it with the tools we have today.
by theptip | 2025-09-28 16:16:47+00:00
Sorry, to be clear I was making the stronger claim:

I would consider it very foolish to use pure induction to bet on _exponential_ growth stopping within 1 year.

I think you can easily find plenty of other long-lasting exponential curves. A good starting point would be:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_studies

With perhaps the optimistic case as

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change

This is where I’d really like to be able to point to our respective Manifold predictions on the subject; we could circle back in a year’s time and review who was in fact correct. I wager internet points it will be me :)

Concretely, https://manifold.markets/JoshYou/best-ai-time-horizon-by-aug...
by pembrook | 2025-09-28 16:16:59+00:00
I think you would be surprised to learn China has far less regulation than the EU.

Part of this is China being a far more dynamic, high risk, Wild West-style capitalist system that’s communist only in very specific areas.

The other part being, you don’t really have to write stuff down as much when you can just manipulate subjects of your authoritarian regime at will.
by nbadg | 2025-09-28 16:17:01+00:00
Indeed.

IMO, the trick to really enjoying python typing is to understand it on its own terms and really get comfortable with generics and protocols.

That being said, especially for library developers, the not-yet-existant intersection type [1] can prove particularly frustrating. For example, a very frequent pattern for me is writing a decorator that adds an attribute to a function or class, and then returns the original function or class. This is impossible to type hint correctly, and as a result, anywhere I need to access the attribute I end up writing a separate "intersectable" class and writing either a typeguard or calling cast to temporarily transform the decorated object to the intersectable type.

Also, the second you start to try and implement a library that uses runtime types, you've come to the part of the map where someone should have written HERE BE DRAGONS in big scary letters. So there's that too.

So it's not without its rough edges, and protocols and overloads can be a bit verbose, but by and large once you really learn it and get used to it, I personally find that even just the value of the annotations as documentation is useful enough to justify the added work adding them.

[1] https://github.com/python/typing/issues/213
by MisterTea | 2025-09-28 16:17:02+00:00
There is likely some history there. Plan 9 is the only OS I know of that bakes in all of the documentation and there is a heavily ingrained culture of 'RTFM!' in the community.

The interesting part is the two references to a person who has long since passed, Uriel. The make file and configure files both print "read the README file." I am sure he complained that most people would blindly unpack the source and immediately run make or configure without ever reading anything. It could be a way to force people to RTFM. But that is just my opinion. If you really want an answer, drop an email to the 9fans mailing list and ask. It's still active.
by dahauns | 2025-09-28 16:17:02+00:00
I think Java was the main one. C/C++ are (relatively) close to the metal, system-level languages with explicit memory management - and were tacitly accepted to be the "complicated" ones, with dynamic typing not really applicable at that level.

But Java was the high-level, GCed, application development language - and more importantly, it was the one dominating many university CS studies as an education language before python took that role. (Yeah, I'm grossly oversimplifying - sincere apologies to the functional crowd! :) )

The height of the "static typing sucks!" craze was more like a "The Java type system sucks!" craze...
by maccard | 2025-09-28 16:17:06+00:00
I used to repair iPhone screens and can answer this. It was the easiest way to check the device worked after the repair and that the screen didn’t have any dead spots. We told people to wipe the phones before they brought them in, and gave people the option of either giving us the PIN code or accepting the device back without us validating the fix.

I don’t think I ever had a single person say no to the pin but we did have plenty of people wipe the device before they brought it in.
by rmunn | 2025-09-28 16:17:32+00:00
Better algorithms is one of the things I meant by "better ways to tweak the models to make better use of the available training data". But that produces slower growth than the jaw-droppingly rapid growth you can get by slurping pretty much the whole Internet. That produced the sharp part of the S curve, but that part is behind us now, which is why I assert we're approaching the slower-growth part at the top of the curve.
by krona | 2025-09-28 16:17:52+00:00
> Apples EU revenue is larger than China and Japan combined.

I think you've confused 'Europe' in Apple's reporting (which actually includes all of the middle east) for the EU (which notably excludes the UK, Norway, Russia, etc.)

Apple doesn't report it's EU revenue (and there's confusion about numbers reported on an analyst call in 2024.)
by specproc | 2025-09-28 16:18:03+00:00
My anti AI take is that it's no fun.

I'm on a small personal project with it intentionally off, and I honestly feel I'm moving through it faster and certainly having a better time. I also have a much better feel for the code.

These are all just vibes, in the parlance of our times, but it's making me question why I'm bothering with LLM assisted coding.

Velocity is rarely the thing in my niche, and I'm not convinced babysitting an agent is all in all faster. It's certainly a lot less enjoyable, and that matters, right?
by josho | 2025-09-28 16:18:58+00:00
The EU should go even farther. Force hardware vendors to decouple from services.

Eg. AirPods work better with iPhones than Bluetooth. Why? Because of software integration. Apple Photos works better than third party photo management apps because of the OS to application integration.

The EU should require hardware makers to define compatibility tests and anyone that passes the compatibility test can become a drop in replacement for the vendor’s own apps.

This would increase consumer choice, competition, and reduce ecosystem lock-in. All of which will make things better for consumers.
by CafeRacer | 2025-09-28 16:19:04+00:00
This is weird. On one side, why would you give your passcode to a device that contains a lot of stuff, usually financial apps, message history, in a lot of cases access to corporate information... and eventually nudes.

On other side, as a technician, how retarded you must be to have access to all this data and to take nudes and post them online. Like whats the end game? What sort of outcome do you expect?

This is just like the story that happened few weeks ago, when someone gained access to a popular npm packages and uploaded the most obviously visible crypto stealer.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 16:19:44+00:00
You seem to enjoy making nonsense comparisons. But I wonder why you do this, is there something in it for you to make it seem as though the USA is doing fine when the EU is - according to you - not?

I've actually lived on both sides of the Atlantic. And there is wealth on both sides and there is poverty on both sides. But the gap between rich and poor is much more pronounced on the US side than in the EU. Energy costs are a small fraction of the total expenses. Mississippi is not a good comparison to Germany (last I checked half of Mississippi was not living under the russian boot for 50 years) and if you just stare at the GDP you will miss a lot of quality-of-life indicators that would make me choose to live in Germany long before I would want to live in a backwater state in the USA. And that's assuming the USA will survive the current onslaught on its institutions.

So stop bullshitting and start thinking about what the real world differences are between countries and then strive to improve the one you can have an effect on rather than just seeing this as a numerical game of put-downs that make absolutely no sense at all.
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-28 16:19:49+00:00
Not at all, that piece described a supply chain attack replacing a component with a look-alike part analyzing tens to hundreds of gigabits if data, in a form factor so small that it wouldn't be physically possible without semiconducting fabricating processes years in advance of what existed at the time.

What this article is describing is something far more likely— a firmware attack that doesn't require specialized hardware.
by wtallis | 2025-09-28 16:20:32+00:00
The headline currently reads: "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU".

The blog post cites an article from The Guardian, with the headline "Apple calls for changes to anti-monopoly laws and says it may stop shipping to the EU". In that article, nothing is mentioned about ceasing iPhone sales. It does say: "warning that unless it is amended the company could stop shipping some products and services to the 27-country bloc" and elsewhere: "It did not specify which products could in future be prevented from being distributed in the EU, but said that the Apple Watch, first released a decade ago, might not be released today in the EU"

The actual press release from Apple seems to be https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/the-digital-markets-a... and if there's anything in there that supports the headline of this HN submission, it's too subtle for me to find. I think this submission is unreasonably sensationalized, with the predictable effect that the comments here are mostly knee-jerk reactions to the (false) headline instead of discussion of the validity or lack thereof of any specific complaints from Apple.

What's news to me is apparently the European Commission is required to conduct a review of the DMA every three years, including collecting feedback from the public (both users and businesses). So Apple's complaints aren't coming out of the blue; they're part of that feedback process.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-09-28 16:20:47+00:00
I think this has happened at times to all groups as well. Right now the conservatives are 'stuck' at least partially because of the cognitive dissonance required to elect and support the current admin.

I think people on the left arguably did the same with various social justice initiatives. Things got crazier by the month for a while until people were genuinely afraid to speak, people were being cancelled for dubious reasons, etc. I recall long periods of needing to be very careful about how (not just what) I said to peers and even some friends. This was a very left-driven phenomenon. While it was started with arguably good intentions, it got weird.

The right has adopted this, ironically, though in a different way and for different reasons. In both cases it's about ideological purity and power, though
by licebmi__at__ | 2025-09-28 16:20:49+00:00
I'll be honest, these, like the equivalent "cancel culture" statements, can only come from the politically naive or from someone accessory to the oppressive systems. "Normalizing removing services because the tenant does something disagreeable"? What the hell do you mean?, that is already normal. The only difference is that is usually the disadvantaged side that gets hit; when it's the regularly protected entity, and then and only then, we get these statements about "What if it happens to someone you support?".
by zerof1l | 2025-09-28 16:20:52+00:00
> This case shows how, even when Apple tightly controls its repair infrastructure, it cannot prevent disastrous cases like this

Customers should be able to choose where to repair their device, or even be able to repair it themselves. Just because it's an "official" repair shop doesn't mean its the best and the safest. Louis Rossmann has been saying this for years.
by npteljes | 2025-09-28 16:21:13+00:00
Not much is "wrong" with targeted ads from an advertiser perspective - the ROI is more than 2× times higher, compared to non-targeted ads: https://thenai.org/press/study-finds-behaviorally-targeted-a...

And this number is produced even with the edge case you brought up! Targeting is just that good.

Advertising is also not just product advertising, as in, "we would like to purchase this exact product". Advertising spaces are also contested, so, if one brand doesn't buy it, maybe a competitor will. Advertising also increases mindshare - you might not buy another new car of course, but people are still influenced by what they see. Brands are also bolstering their image with ads, regardless if you particularly buy or not. They are associating situations, lifestyles, emotions with their brand.

What I'm trying to get at is incentive. The incentive is huge, and measurable, from the advertiser standpoint. And so, we will never get rid of targeted ads, unless we legislate, and enforce.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-09-28 16:21:19+00:00
I see a lot of comments like this and it reflects strongly negatively on the engineers who write it imho. As in I've been a staff level engineer at both Meta and Google and a lead at various startups in my time. I post open source projects here on HN from time to time that are appreciated. I know my shit. If someone tells me that LLMs aren't useful i think to myself "wow this person is so unable to learn new tools they can't find value in one of the biggest changes happening today".

That's not to say that LLMs as good as some of the more outrageous claims. You do still need to do a lot of work to implement code. But if you're not finding value at all it honestly reflects badly on you and your ability to use tools.

The craziest thing is i see the above type of comment on linked in regularly. Which is jaw dropping. Prospective hiring managers will read it and think "Wow you think advertising a lack of knowledge is helpful to your career?" Big tech co's are literally firing people with attitudes like the above. There's no room for people who refuse to adapt.

I put absolute LLM negativity right up there with comments like "i never use a debugger and just use printf statements". To me it just screams you never learnt the tool.
by amluto | 2025-09-28 16:21:27+00:00
Can you please explain how Secure Boot helps at all to mitigate this type of attack? I don’t see how it makes it harder to execute the attack, and I don’t see how it has any particular effect on the capabilities of the attack once executed. To the contrary, a BMC compromise of this sort seems like it should be able to arbitrarily override secure boot settings.

It seems to me that, in this situation, secure boot’s only role is to provide a false sense of security, which could make recovery from the attack less likely.

In contrast, verified boot might somewhat mitigate the damage from being able to use the BMC to write arbitrary data to the SPI flash chip. Emphasis on might — at best I expect that it would require an attacker to be a bit more creative in how they design their exploit payload.
by Canada | 2025-09-28 16:21:43+00:00
I'm imagining a future where the software is local first and does a lot of operations peer to peer rather than trying to host large scale centralized web apps that dominate today.

We really don't need huge data centers hosting our notes and discussion forms and spreadsheets in order to make these things collaborative.

It would be A LOT easier to make that work if the internet was end to end by default again.
by rectang | 2025-09-28 16:22:04+00:00
Adding up the 1780 numbers on that page, the numbers appear to be almost identical. But there's a catch: those numbers include enslaved people. who numbered at least 500,000 (see [1]).

* Free states: 1,390,067

* Slave states: 1,390,302 - 500,000 = 890,302

> Still not that massive in relative terms

I don't know why you persist in saying this.

[1] https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-28 16:22:28+00:00
It's not entirely impossible that a broadly compatible tissue could be engineered - in a more through version of the same process that yielded those "somewhat human-compatible" pig organs.

That's a part of the reason why this tech is so promising. If we can already target immune incompatibilities to make "elongated pigs" with organs that fit human bodies somewhat, then what are the limits?
by rmunn | 2025-09-28 16:22:36+00:00
I am extremely confident that AGI, if it is achievable at all (which is a different argument and one I'm not getting into right now), requires a world model / fact model / whatever terminology you prefer, and is therefore not achievable by models that simply chain words together without having any kind of understanding baked into the model. In other words, LLMs cannot lead to AGI.
by kketch | 2025-09-28 16:22:52+00:00
You can make it change the behaviour at runtime is different than it changes the behaviour at runtime I think?

Lots of very useful tooling such as dataclasses and framework like FastAPI rely on this and you're opinion is that it's a bad thing why?

In typescript the absence of type annotations reflection at runtime make it harder to implement things that people obviously want, example, interop between typescript and zod schemas. Zod resorts instead to have to hook in ts compiler to do these things.

I'm honestly not convinced Typescript is better in that particular area. What python has opted for is to add first class support for type annotations in the language (which Javascript might end up doing as well, there are proposals for this, but without the metadata at runtime). Having this metadata at runtime makes it possible to implement things like validation at runtime rather than having to write your types in two systems with or without codegen (if Python would have to resort to codegen to do this, like its necessary in typescript, I would personally find this less pythonic).

I think on the contrary it allows for building intuitive abstractions where typescript makes them harder to build?
by todd3834 | 2025-09-28 16:23:07+00:00
This is super helpful. Not only does it help people understand how the system works but also this is invaluable for comparing offers. I always end up with a bunch of pencil scratch notes or if I’m really trying an excel sheet to compare offers.

I know sometimes we might only get one offer and you’re stoked about anything you get. However, I highly encourage everyone on the market to do what they can to have more than one offer. This has been the only way to truly have leverage while negotiating. I’ve also been surprised and joined a company that I thought was just going to give me leverage. Their offer was so much better and the team was a way better match for my skills and personality.

Feature Request: Add the ability to compare multiple offers and show a side by side comparison. Or maybe the ability to export to a CSV so people can do this themself.

Another feature request: add ability to compare their offer to offers on levels.fyi so they can know if they have room to negotiate.