MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iterance | 2025-09-21 15:57:18+00:00
Five essential questions of democracy (Tony Benn):

“What power have you got?” “Where did you get it from?” “In whose interests do you use it?” “To whom are you accountable?” “How do we get rid of you?”

His observation is that the last question fundamentally defines a democracy - not the ability for the people to give someone power, but to dispose of that power via accepted protocols. It is also the reason people with power so commonly hate democracy: properly answered, these questions limit their use of that power, and threaten to remove their access to it completely.
by egorfine | 2025-09-21 15:58:55+00:00
> in the days of structured logging and

Are those days in the same room we are? Because last I have checked, logging is generally implemented as a stream of text messages with a very few bits of structured metadata. Like, almost in every piece of software in existence.

> log levels.

Those exist for decades and were invented long before anything that could be considered "structured logging".
by bheadmaster | 2025-09-21 15:59:33+00:00
I've never worked with Zig in my life, and I don't have an opinion on it either. I've heard it's neat. Despite that, this post was intuitively clear to me.

Zig's *std.Io.Reader and Writer seem to be abstractions over many types, like Java's interface class, Go's interfaces, C++'s concepts or Rust's traits. However, it seems that abstraction itself is leaky - in that the length of the buffer is an implicit dependency which cannot be known from the type alone.

Admittedly, we don't know if there's a good explanation for the behavior - but then again, HN comments are as good a place to learn as any. Maybe someone will come up and explain.
by flustercan | 2025-09-21 16:00:51+00:00
I've never worked anywhere where the role of a Sr was to glue together a bunch of small pieces written by a team of Jr devs.

I've only worked places where Jr's were given roughly the same scope of work as a mid-level dev but on non-critical projects where they could take as much time as necessary and where mistakes would have a very small blast radius.

That type of Jr work has not been made redundant - although I suppose now its possible for a PM or designer to do that work instead (but if your PMs are providing more value by vibe coding non-critical features than by doing their PM work maybe you don't really need a PM?)
by dillutedfixer | 2025-09-21 16:00:58+00:00
A few years back I found a bug that would make deleted photos show up in the Photos app on iPhone simply by putting transparent PNGs into the photo library. I reported it to Apple via web, no response. I called their support and talked to a very nice guy who had an in-depth conversation with me about it and even watched a video I made showing the bug. He said he was taking the issue "up the chain." About 6 months and two .x.x releases later and the bug still existed. I reported it again, no response.

So I emailed AppleInsider who did a short article about it and within two weeks another .x.x release came out and the bug was fixed.

Sadly I think this is one of the only ways to get big tech companies to take action these days. Cant tell you how many times I have read about Comcast, Verizon, etc screwing someone over and being unreasonable about it until theres an article on ArsTechnica or some similar site about it.
by parineum | 2025-09-21 16:02:03+00:00
> I don’t think it’s party willingness to deal with government efficiency, I think it is more accurate to say that neither party thinks that government efficiency is a significant problem.

That wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making was that Bill Clinton was able to balance the budget _and_ keep the programs he wanted to not because it was something he originally wanted to do.

He did it because the Democrats lost power in the midterms to Republicans who ran on balancing the budget.

He was looking at either not being able to do anything he wanted and possibly vetoing a Republican agenda that the American people just voted for or changing his own agenda to more closely align with that and work with the Republicans to make sure programs that Democrats really wanted weren't cut but still balancing the budget. He did the latter and it's largely used as a point of pride for the democratic party but they ignore the fact that it was only achieved through compromise.

A more modern opportunity/example for this would have been if Biden, after the midterms, chose to work with yhe Republican congress on immigration reform and get something done that everyone could live with.

Instead he doubled down and made the situation worse, supercharging the issue in the next election leading to the election of Trump on largely that platform.

I'm not blaming just the Democrats for this, neither party would do it, it's just the example that came to mind.

> In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.

There's not really a good example of this in practice. Healthy social programs in other countries are typically funded largely through pretty substantial middle class taxes.

There simply aren't enough rich people and corporations to yax to fund the rest of the country.

The desire to tax the other to fund my benefits is the problem. Instead of looking at poverty and wanted to do something about it, we look to other people and tell them they should do something about it.
by microtonal | 2025-09-21 16:02:45+00:00
They certainly can. Since Android 8.0, apps can check if a key is stored in a hardware-backed store:

https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/security-...

This works by signing an attestation using a hardware-backed key (which is in turn signed by Google). So, there is no way to emulate this in software, because your ROM simply does not have the private key to do so. Part of the attestation is information on whether the booted operating system was signed:

https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/keystore/a...

Again, since this is all hardware-signed, you could only fake this information if you were somehow able to extract the private key from the secure element. The primary weakness is that you could try to patch out the part of the application that asks for this attestation. But they found a solution to that, remote attestation. Instead of the app asking for the attestation, e.g. Google's servers or your bankcan ask for the attestation and for the reasons outlined above, your custom firmware is not able to fake this. If your bank, etc. implemented remote attestation, you can simply do not do banking on your phone anymore.
by yinznaughty | 2025-09-21 16:02:54+00:00
I would recommend 'Adapt! On a New Political Imperative' by Barbara Stiegler. The movement away from classical liberalism has been going on for far longer and was by design. It is very important to explicitly separate traditional or classical liberalism from neoliberalism when discussing these things. And just to be pedantic the term liberal should also absolutely be avoided when discussing anything involve impacts from the "new left" movement.

>Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens

IMO they didn't - at least not explicitly. Individualism has been somewhat illusionary since the progressive era it is just finally coming home to roost. What happened is that the internet finally out ran the ability of the traditional media consensus methods at the national level as the internet generation aged in. So we are sort of in unknown territory where it is not clear any "expert" can play the designated role to drive the consensus required in the neoliberal system.

Where to go from there is an open question but her thesis is that the neoliberal system needs to be adapted in someway. Anyway that is largely the picture of the problem she paints. I'm not doing it justice but it is worth a read to at least place a lot of the problems people are observing in a mental and historical framework.

I think a good step is moving towards federating into smaller communities. The best of those ideas will get adopted by other communities. Basically the fediverse model applied to society. People already have this feeling intuitively and it is playing out with the push back against globalization.
by rixed | 2025-09-21 16:02:54+00:00
It doesn't matter if Trump is Hitler or not (what does that even mean?)

Stop paying that much attention to people, they mostly do not matter. Think instead about the circumstances.

What matter is that the USA in 2025 is not Germany of 100 years ago, today economics is not the same as the great depression, there is no threatening civil unrest due to a massive neighboring country which just went through a social revolution, nor due to decomposing colonial empires.
by panick21_ | 2025-09-21 16:02:55+00:00
Exept that in reality the US bulldosed cities as agrssivly as China and still does many idiotic projects. The reason it doesnt happen as often today is that less is invest and the lesser amount that is invested doesnt go as far as it did before.

The differnece today in the US is not that they dont bulldoze its that before they bulldoze there is years of political battle.

I follow various groups around the US that try to fight highway expansions and the almost always lose in the end.

So there really isnt much moral high ground here.
by dimal | 2025-09-21 16:03:00+00:00
> reminiscent of the end of the Roman Empire

Are you sure he didn’t mean the end of the Roman Republic, which was the beginning of the Principate? The Western Empire would last about another 400 years.

We definitely are tracking the end of the Roman Republic. At that point, all constitutional norms had been violated so many times that they were mere suggestions, and political infighting by oligarchs was tearing the republic apart, to the point that people were relieved when Augustus took power. They still had a senate. They still had all the old offices and structures. But everyone knew who was in power.

Much like today in the US. We don’t have one Princeps, but we all know that the oligarchs and corporations own the entire political and economic process. They write the rules to suit themselves.

And they have common people fighting each other over cultural issues instead of fighting them for the stuff that matters — economic and political power. It’s a fantastic divide and conquer strategy. Unless common people start waking up to who their real enemies are, the American Republic is effectively over.
Ask HN: Production deployed full AI generated applications
by indianmouse | 2025-09-21 16:03:08+00:00
AI has been in the main limelight ever since the "Vibe Coding" term gets spoken by everyone.

I know and have used it across. With the recent business uprising of fixing the vibe coding issues, has anyone created any full blown end-to-end AI coded applications that is deployed to somewhat production ready requirements?

Would like to know the experiences unlike what is available in the market and on the internet about the issues and how to use it, where it can be useful etc., etc., but more from the actual usage based honest feedback on the whole end-to-end perspective.

I know it might take the discussion across multiple viewpoints, but ....
by libraryofbabel | 2025-09-21 16:03:24+00:00
This should be the top-voted comment of the whole thread. I used to teach history; it makes me roll my eyes when I hear comparisons between Nazi Germany and the current moment. It reflects both a lack of historical familiarity with the unique circumstances of Germany in the 1920s and 30s (including recently losing a world war), and also, as you say, a lack of knowledge of other more relevant historical examples — of which I’d also put Erdoğan at the top. It’s just a conversation-stopper and a rhetorical cudgel rather than a serious attempt at historical contextualization.
by saltcured | 2025-09-21 16:04:19+00:00
I think a big part of it, historically, is that this control scheme provides negative feedback, which may help stabilize the controls.

Think about the inertia of the pilot and their limbs inside the plane, acting on the controls. A sudden acceleration/jerk in the direction of the control signal will bias the operator's body to input the opposite control signal unless they are tensed up and prepared to maintain it in spite of the forces they experience.

If the nose pitches up suddenly, you're likely to push the yoke forward. If it pitches down suddenly, you're likely to pull back a bit. Similarly, if the plane (or boat) jerks forward, you are more likely to pull back on the throttle than push it forward. A sudden airplane roll will bias you to input the opposite aileron signal.

Even in a car, if you are holding the top half of the wheel as in the classic 10-and-2 grip, a sudden turn will cause you to counter steer a bit as you experience the centripetal force effect pulling you towards the outside of the turn.

If the controls were inverted, all these default inputs would instead cause positive feedback and seem more likely to send a vehicle out of control.
by fluidcruft | 2025-09-21 16:04:51+00:00
I don't think that's correct. That could be true if I were primarily a programmer, but I am not. I'm mostly a certified medical physicist working in a hospital. Programming is a skill that is helpful and I have spent my programming time building other tools that I need. But that list is gigantic, the software that is available for purchase is all complete crap, the market is too small for investment, etc. That's all to say the things I am building are desperately needed but my time for programming is limited and it's not what brings home the bacon and there's no money to be made (beyond consulting, essentially these things might possibly work as tools for consultants). I don't have resources for professional programming staff but I have worked with them in the past and (no offense to most of HN) but the lack of domain knowledge tends to waste even more of my time.
by rglullis | 2025-09-21 16:05:27+00:00
No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
by sevensor | 2025-09-21 16:05:42+00:00
That’s far from accurate. Augustus positioned himself as the restorer of the Republic after a horrific period of civil war, and cobbled together his authority from existing Republican magistracies, especially the Tribune of the Plebs. The Julio-Claudians at least attempted to maintain the fiction that the Republic was still functioning. Explicitly dictatorial it wasn’t, although actually dictatorial it certainly was.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-09-21 16:05:49+00:00
My biggest fear about cars is that one might kill my kid. This leads to impossing all sorts of play and travel restrictions on her that I wouldn't have to if there were fewer cars and more bikes. (Bikes which kids can ride independently to their friends' houses from a single-digit age, by the way, which I would allow her to do if she weren't sharing the streets with cars.)

Maybe the problem is that the leafy suburb you moved to is car-dependent? It doesn't have to be built that way, that's a design choice. It's possible to build a low density suburb that kids can bike through safely, for example: https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-21 16:06:58+00:00
Because I have a million other things I want to do after I get off work than spend more time at my computer…

Spend time with my wife (kids are grown), travel, hang out with friends, exercise, learn Spanish since we will be a spending a couple of months every year in a Spanish speaking country for the next few years (staying in US time zones).

Even when I was younger from the time I was 22-36, I had a working hobby (the money was only $25 per class 8-10 hours a week) teaching fitness classes as a forced commitment device and it was part of my social life.

Nothing about spending extra time at my computer where I’m not exchanging labor for money improves my quality of life.
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-21 16:07:09+00:00
Let's see... military drones; satellite surveillance; comms surveillance; giant network of flock cameras vacuuming up facial, descriptive vehicular, and license plate movement data; small-scale tactical nuclear weapons; a huge fleet of hypersonic aircraft and extremely maneuverable helicopters; decades of urban combat experience; militarized law enforcement; the largest military in the world by orders of magnitude fighting on its own turf; complete control of utilities infrastructure, centralized resource creation for food, fuel and weapons; large stockpiles of modern chemical weapons that they wouldn't hesitate to use for a second if it was an existential threat... the world is a very very different place than it was in the 40s, and the modern US military is very very very very very different than any military was back then. Even if you can argue that our power has grown linearly with more access to guns or whatever, the US military's power has grown at a much much faster rate.
by guyomes | 2025-09-21 16:08:01+00:00
I wonder if it works better if we ask the LLM to produce a script that extract the resulting list, and then we run the script on the two input lists.

There is also the question of the two input lists: it's not clear if it is better to ask the LLM to extract the two input lists directly, or again to ask the LLM to write a script that extract the two input lists from the raw text data.
by astrobe_ | 2025-09-21 16:08:15+00:00
Beyond the satire, one is supposed to write code which is readable, and like often with written works, one has to think about the "audience", the readers. When you write technical documentation, you have to decide ahead of time the expected skill level of the reader - often that decision is written too in the intro as "prerequisite(s)".

When writing code you have the motto "don't make me think" in mind, but how to know what's the maximum level of trickiness for readers? There are familiar techniques and idioms when it is your main programming language, but they are not for someone using this language on the side.

In any case, neither code nor comments should be tutorials. To a reasonable extent, it is up to the reviewer to do their homework or just ask. Then based on that interaction you can add a comment or a parenthesis, or uncompress a bit the code. But not to the point that it means to "dumb down" things, because it is a downward spiral.
by cowLamp | 2025-09-21 16:08:45+00:00
i think it is due to the reverse utility curve; most products have some sort of gaussian utilty fuction for utility vs. expertise level. a complete newb will have trouble using the camera and a professional photographer will be limited by it, but most people in-between will get a lot of use out of it.

with llm’s it is opposite; a complete newb can learn some stuff, and an expert will be able to detect when it is bullshitting, but most people will be at a point where they have more knowledge about the subject the llm is talking about than the newb, but not enough to detect the bs.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-21 16:09:28+00:00
Tasks usually come from the top down. Seniors design the architecture, mid-levels figure out ancillary tasks, and they generate "tedious" tasks that they hand off to juniors. With the aid of LLMs, many of those tasks don't make it to lower levels. So they run out of simple tasks for juniors, and end up giving them more advanced projects, making them de facto midrangers.
by saltcured | 2025-09-21 16:09:31+00:00
You mostly understand my comment, but not my graybeard perspective.

The modern disaster is exactly that developer culture has forgotten how to do this for the most part.

But, you're focusing on Rust compiling when I don't think it is relevant. If those weird financial platform developers were aware of cross-compiling, they wouldn't think that a developer tool like Git has to be built to run on the target financial server platform. They would be capable of cross-compiling or otherwise staging their build into that platform while still using Git on a supported workstation platform to manage the sources.
by amai | 2025-09-21 16:09:33+00:00
"when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

Remember that, then they attack the immigrants, the woke people, the trans gender and the leftist...
by watwut | 2025-09-21 16:09:34+00:00
> I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, `oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!` No one outisde seems to understand how [attractive Nazi ideology] was.' "

It pays off to point out that actual Jews and opposition left completely different writings and opinions. They did not felt free, in fact. By the 1938, they were thoroughly victimized and fully aware of it.

There was a lot of fear in Germany itself.

The above are opinions and feelings of Nazi, basically. It make sense to write and analyze those, but they dont speak for non-nazi germans, they dont know former opposition, Jews or minorities actually felt and thought.
by fpoling | 2025-09-21 16:09:42+00:00
The article has not mentioned memory compression as an alternative to swap which many Linux distributions enable by default.

On the other hand these days latest SSD are way faster than memory compression even with LUKS encryption on and even when compression uses LZ4 compression. Plus modern SSDs do not suffer from frequent writes as before so on my laptop I disabled the memory compression and then all reasoning from the article applies again.

Then on a development laptop running compilations/containers/VMs/browser vm.swappines does not seems matter that much if one has enough memory. So I no longer tune it to 100 or more and leave at the default 60%.
by thedanbob | 2025-09-21 16:10:08+00:00
File systems seem to be a particular weakness of Apple. HFS+ is pretty terrible. APFS is better, until something goes wrong and then it's just as terrible. Add "network" and the situation is 10x worse. I recently gave up on Time Machine (via Samba) entirely because it would regularly corrupt itself and destroy all my existing backups.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-21 16:10:18+00:00
The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there.

What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development.

Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.