MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nasmorn | 2025-10-14 13:18:42+00:00
This seems weird. I have a lot of experience with rails which is considered super slow. But the scenario you describe is trivial. Just get a bigger VPS and change a single env var. even if you fucked up everything else like file storage etc you can still to that. If you build your whole application in way where you can’t scale anything you should be fired. That is not even that easy
by benjaminoakes | 2025-10-14 13:18:53+00:00
LineageOS? /e/OS? ArrowOS? Android has so much momentum that seems like it would be difficult to avoid a fork. I know Waydroid exists, but I'm not sure that's good enough. Ubuntu Touch sounds really cool too, but I've put effort into it with a used Google Pixel 3A and it's not an easy, cheap thing to try out right now. And it's still dependent on binary blobs for drivers, as far as I know. Not a great situation.

Regarding banking apps and things like that, I don't run into to any issues except for not being able to scan checks for deposit on the mobile website. And also I have to have physical credit cards. If you can't do what you need, consider changing to a local credit union which has your interests in mind far more than a for-profit bank.

I've never run into a need for apps for a government purpose, but perhaps I will someday.

I'm sure my situation where I live may be different than your situation where you live.

I don't use an open source fork of Android daily and from what I can tell the best option that exists today.

The only hardware that I know will continue to be open enough for this to be viable in the future is Fairphone. I hope there are others. I would definitely would NOT trust Google Pixel to remain open for the foreseeable future.

Personally, I'm trying to get out of the habit of using my phone anyway, so I might as well have laptop or desktop hardware that can fulfill my needs.
by rdsubhas | 2025-10-14 13:19:14+00:00
I used cgroups, lxc, chroots, self-extracting executables. I built rugged, portable applications for UNICEF laptops and camps before docker was a thing.

And I think this whole point about "virtualization", "security", making the most use of hardware, reducing costs, and so on, while true, it's an "Enterprise pitch" targeted at heads of tech and security. Nice side effects, but I couldn't care less.

There are real, fundamental benefits to containers for a solo developer running a solo app on a solo server.

Why? My application needs 2 or 3 other folders to write or read files into, maybe 2 or 3 other runtime executables (jvm, node, convert, think of the dozens of OSS CLI tools, not compile-time libraries), maybe apt-get install or download a few other dependencies.

Now I, as a indie developer, can "mkdir" a few files from a shell script. But that "mkdir" will work the first time. It will fail the second time saying "directory already exists". I can "apt-get install" a few things, but upgrading and versioning is a different story altogether. It's a matter of time before I realize I need atleast some barebones ansible or state management. I can tell you many times how I've reinvented "smallish" ansible in shell scripts before docker.

Now if I'm in an enterprise, I need to communicate this entire State of my app – to the sysadmin teams. Forget security and virtualization and all that. I need to explain every single part of the state, versions of java and tomcat, the directories, and all those are moving targets.

Containers reduce state management. A LOT. I can always "mkdir". I can always "apt-get install". It's an ephemeral image. I don't need to write half-broken shell scripts or use ansible or create mini-shell-ansible.

If you use a Dockerfile with docker-compose, you've solved 95% of state management. The only 5% left is to docker-compose the right source.

Skip the enterprisey parts. A normal field engineer or solo developer, like me, who's deploying a service on the field, even on my raspberry pi, would still use containers. It boils down to one word: "State management" which most people completely underestimate as "scripting". Containers grant a large control on state management to me, the developer, and simplify it by making it ephemeral. That's a big thing.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-14 13:19:43+00:00
It (export controls) is absolutely unheard of in International Trade, and a moral disgrace in dealing with other Nations.

--- Donald Trump, Oct 10th, 2025

It takes a special breed of sociopath to make this claim *after* doing the same exact thing for the last 7 years; since 2018.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/24/trump-china-export...

Bottom Line: The USA can't win a trade war with China. China knows this but our "leadership" is a little slow and requires proof. And it appears China is now prepared to provide it.
by simmonmt | 2025-10-14 13:20:30+00:00
It depends on the item. Let's take this screw pitch gage: https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155

Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again.

There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.
by sgarland | 2025-10-14 13:20:41+00:00
Legitimately asking, how? The only bottleneck should be the DB, and if you can saturate a 128-core DB, I want to see your queries and working set size. Not saying it can’t happen, but it’s rare that someone has actually maxed out MySQL or Postgres without there being some serious schema and query flaws, or just poor / absent tuning.
by bangaroo | 2025-10-14 13:20:44+00:00
you didn't provide an anecdote. you just said "it's better." an anecdote would be "claude 4 failed in x way, and claude 4.5 succeeds consistently." "it is better" is a statement of fact with literally no support.

the entire thrust of my statement was "i only hear nonspecific, vague vibes that it's better with literally no information to support that concept" and you replied with two nonspecific, vague vibes. sorry i don't find that compelling.

"troubling" is a wild word to use in this scenario.
Show HN: Blocking Sensitive Data Leaks to GenAI Tools – A Browser Extension
by xeonproc | 2025-10-14 13:20:51+00:00
I’m an infosec engineer who noticed a gap in our data loss prevention (DLP) stack: nothing stopped employees from pasting sensitive data—PII, PHI, API keys, passwords—into GenAI tools like ChatGPT. With AI adoption skyrocketing, this felt like a growing risk for compliance and security breaches.

I built a browser extension called PromptShield to tackle this. It scans inputs in real-time and blocks 150+ sensitive data types (e.g., credit card numbers, SSNs, credentials) before they reach AI platforms. It runs locally on Chrome/Edge, with regex-based detection and minimal latency. No data leaves the client, addressing privacy concerns. Comptetes with other DLP solutions but is lightweight, easy to install and purposefully made for GenAI.

https://promptshield.cloud/

The backend is a Python Flask API that uses regex and DLP APIs for data analysis. The browser extension interfaces with the DOM, intercepts inputs, and queries the API. Based on sensitivity settings, it either blocks, warns, or allows the input to proceed.

After months of grinding, we just landed our first enterprise customer, which validated the problem for me. But I’m curious about the broader landscape:

Have others seen GenAI-related data leaks in their orgs? What’s the scale of this issue? How are you approaching shadow AI at least at the browser level?

For those building security tools, how do you balance usability vs. strict enforcement in enterprise settings (prevent vs detect)?

Any lessons on going from 1 to 10 customers? Our first took ages, but trials are picking up.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-14 13:21:26+00:00
It also inherits the unfortunate attitude of Pyright that it will warn against idiomatic Python (EAFP) in favour of non-idiomatic Python (LBYL):

https://github.com/microsoft/pyright/issues/1739

https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-EAFP

https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-LBYL
by sarchertech | 2025-10-14 13:21:27+00:00
>step on each others toes

Which leads us to a huge problem I’ve seen over the past few decades.

Too many developers for the task at hand. It’s easier for large companies to hire 100 developers with a lower bar that may or may not be a great fit than it is to hire 5 experts.

Then you have a 100 developers that you need to keep busy and not all of them can be busy 100% of the time because most people aren’t good at making their own impactful work. Then instead of trying to actually find naturally separate projects for some of them to do, you attempt to artificially break up your existing project in a way that 100 developers can work on together (and enforce those boundaries at through a network).

This artificial separation fixes some issues (merge conflicts, some deployment issues), but it causes others (everything is a distributed system now, multi stage and multi system deployments required for the smallest changes, massive infrastructure, added network latency everywhere).

That’s not to say that some problems aren’t really so big that you need a huge number of devs, but the vast majority aren’t.

> they don’t have to reinvent the wheel

Everything is a trade off, but we shouldn’t discount the cost of using generic solutions in place of bespoke ones.

Generic solutions are never going to be as good of a fit as something designed to do exactly what you need. Sometimes the tradeoff is worth it. Sometimes it’s isn’t. Like when you need to horizontally scale just to handle the overhead. Or when you have to maintain a fork of a complex system that does way more than you need.

It’s the same problem as hiring 100 generic devs instead of 5 experts. Sometimes worth it. Sometimes not.

There’s another issue here too. If not enough people are reinventing the wheel we get stuck in local optima.

The worst part is that not enough people spend enough time even thinking about these issues to make informed decisions regarding the tradeoffs they are making.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-10-14 13:22:19+00:00
> From my friends, working in small startups and large megacorps, no one is working on anything other than gluing existing packages together,

And all my friends aren't doing that. So there's some anecdotal evidence to contradict yours.

And I think you're missing the point.

The point is the field is way bigger than either of us could imagine. You could have decades of experience and still only touch a small subset of the different technologies and problems.

> Well I know for a fact there are more code monkeys than rocket scientists working on advanced technologies

I don't know what this means as it doesn't disprove that fact that the field is enormous. Of course not everyone is working on rockets. But that is irrelevant.

> 50% of their job consist of bullshitting the n+1 to get a raise and some other variant of office politics

Again, this doesn't mean we aren't working on different things.

I actually totally agree with this point made in your previous post:

> "developers" is such a broad term that it basically is meaningless in this discussion

But your follow-up feels antogonistic to that point.
by williamdclt | 2025-10-14 13:22:47+00:00
You're not missing something, but you're assuming that it's easy to know ahead of time where the module boundaries should be and what the interfaces should look like. This is very far from easy, if possible at all (eg google "abstraction boundaries are optimization boundaries").

Also, most of these interfaces you'll likely never need. It's a cost of initial development, and the indirection is a cost on maintainability of your code. It's probably (although not certainly) cheaper to refactor to introduce interfaces as needed, rather than always anticipate a need that might never come.
by nkurz | 2025-10-14 13:23:15+00:00
In the US, the valedictorian of a high school is typically the person with highest academic grade point average. I've never heard of it considering sports participation, although Wikipedia does suggest that sometimes extra-curriculars are now being considered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valedictorian. But given his age and absent outside information, I think the fair assumption is that he won because he had the best grades in his courses.
by saghm | 2025-10-14 13:23:17+00:00
> I didn't claim that usability features were "important to the successes of languages designed like Ada".

This kind of seems like it's focusing too much on my exact word choice and less the actual intent of my question behind it. The question I have is why following established principles should matter; I don't think it should be particularly surprising that someone might assume that making a language more usable for humans would be related to the number of humans who end up deciding to use it, and if that's not the case, I wanted to understand why my intuition is wrong.

> there are still industries where it is important to reduce the human tendency to make mistakes by taking appropriate measures. Ada was created for such an industry from the very beginning

This is a good point that I hadn't considered; it definitely makes sense to me that some domains might be less tolerant to human errors than others, and those domains would better reflect how well-designed a language is for humans.

> The "level of suffering" experienced by most people is probably simply not great enough to systematically take such aspects into account. But there are still industries where it is important to reduce the human tendency to make mistakes by taking appropriate measures.

Reading this part a couple of times, I think this might be where the nuance lies. My colloquial understanding of what it means for something to be ergonomic (and even by the idea of what"level of suffering" would mean) isn't quite the same as the measurement of how likely it is for something to induce human error. This might just be a case where the common use of the term isn't the same as how it's used inside the field of study, but I would have expected that the ergonomics of a language and measurement of the "level of suffering" would be with respect to the programmer, not the one experiencing the use of the software that's developed as a result. That isn't to say I disagree with the idea that the end-user experience should ultimately be more important, but I think that might account for the disconnect between what you're describing here and what I would have expected from a discussion around "programming language ergonomics" (which also might explain the difference between Ada and the other languages mentioned in this thread).
by kaoD | 2025-10-14 13:23:37+00:00
Storing your food in the fridge requires an entire fridge (and power, and...)

Your particular circumstances might not require it (maybe you're just temporarily camping or you only store non-perishable food) but that doesn't mean that fridges, in general, are unnecessary or less convenient than just storing food in a cupboard. Even if you only eat in restaurants and you don't need a fridge, the restaurant does.

This being packaged won't prevent it from being delivered from a CDN. It will actually make it easier to automatically deploy all versions to CDNs as they are published, like in https://www.jsdelivr.com/, while being CDN-only is less convenient when you actually need the many affordances that a package manager provides.

If I already have a package manager and do:

yarn add css-extras

And then in my code:

import 'css-extras';

...and I get it versioned in my package.json, cached, available offline, not subject to link rot, automatically inserted in my bundle, processed, minified and with its dead code eliminated... that's surely more convenient than vendoring from a CDN and manually doing all that process (or worse, not doing it at all and just dropping a raw <link> to the CDN in my HTML, with all its drawbacks).
by bediger4000 | 2025-10-14 13:23:42+00:00
This is a noteworthy rebellion. Generally pro-Trump outlets like NYT, WaPo, starting to get more Trump friendly CNN, Reuters and NewsMax are all doing this. What's the real reason? Do they figure that they can stand up to Hegseth? Do they all have some DoD stories in the pipeline that wouldn't be publishable under Hegseth's news regime? Do they think this will be temporary and disappear shortly?
by munksbeer | 2025-10-14 13:24:03+00:00
We don't have "true democracy" in the UK. There are two main issues:

- Votes are not equal. You need to win constituencies to get "a point". If you get enough points, you can form the government. But that means huge parts of sparsely populated areas have votes which count for more than the densely populated parts, where people's votes count for less. - You don't need an overall majority to win "a point". You just need more than every other candidate in that constituency. That means a government can gain absolute majority power with a very low overall vote share. The current government got 34% of the overall votes, yet won the largest government majority in history.

And we're trapped with this system, because the main parties won't let us change it. When it was tried, and we had a national referendum on it, they rigged the vote in their favour by only offering a complicated and relatively crap alternative and spent our money on propaganda like this:

https://politicaladvertising.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...

I love the UK in so many ways, but sometimes it makes it very hard to love.
by lproven | 2025-10-14 13:24:12+00:00
> a way to contain the “splatter” style of installing applications

Darwin is one way of looking at it, true. I just referred to the first publicly released version. NeXTstep became Mac OS X Server became OS X became macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, etc. Same code, many generations later.

So, yes, you're right, little presence on servers, but still, the problems aren't limited to servers.

On DOS, classic MacOS, on RISC OS, on DR GEM, on AmigaOS, on OS/2, and later on, on 16-bit Windows, the way that you install an app is that you make a directory, put the app and its dependencies in it, and maybe amend the system path to include that directory.

All single-user OSes, of course, so do what you want with %PATH% or its equivalent.

Unix was a multi-user OS for minicomputers, so the assumption is that the app will be shared. So, break it up into bits, and store those component files into the OS's existing filesystem hierarchy (FSH). Binaries in `/bin`, libraries in `/lib`, config in `/etc`, logs and state in `/var`, and so on -- and you can leave $PATH alone.

Make sense in 1970. By 1980 it was on big shared departmental computers. Still made sense. By 1990 it was on single-user workstations, but they cost as much as minicomputers, so why change?

The thing is, the industry evolved underneath. Unix ended up running on a hundred million times more single-user machines (and VMs and containers) than multiuser shared hosts.

The assumptions of the machine being shared turned out to be wrong. That's the exception, not the rule.

NeXT's insight was to only keep the essential bits of the shared FSH layout, and to embed all the dependencies in a folder tree for each app -- and then to provide OS mechanisms to recognise and manipulate those directory trees as individual entities. That was the key insight.

Plan 9 virtualised the whole FSH. Clever but hard to wrap one's head around. It's all containers all the way down. No "real" FSH.

Docker virtualises it using containers. Also clever but in a cunning-engineer's-hacky-kludge kind of way, IMHO.

I think GoboLinux maybe made the smartest call. Do the NeXT thing, junk the existing hierarchy -- but make a new more-readable one, with the filesystem as the isolation mechanism, and apply it to the OS and its components as well. Then you have much less need for containers.
by ben_w | 2025-10-14 13:24:13+00:00
Each element was about, oh I can't remember exactly, perhaps 50 bytes? It wasn't a constant value, there could in theory be a string in there, but those needed to be added manually and when you have 20,000 of them, nobody would.

Also, it was overwhelmingly likely that none of the elements were duplicates in the first place, and the few exceptions were probably exactly one duplicate.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-14 13:24:17+00:00
I really, really hate this. Not only do I generally dislike Christmas as this "Santa Worship", it is cheap plastic, pay to use and generative AI slop. It also could have been just an App. It also is profoundly anti-social. I understand that all toys are in some economic sense "useless", but even the child in me hates this. As an additional thought, how do you protect the privacy of the children using this? I personally have a guess.
by _flux | 2025-10-14 13:24:39+00:00
Surely there are algorithms to more effectively solve Wordles, and many other word puzzles, than LLMs? LLMs could stil be in the loop for generating words: LLM proposes words, deterministic algorithm tell the score according to the rules of the puzzle, or even augment the list by searching adjacent word space; then at some point LLM submits the guess.

Given wordle words are real words, I think this kind of loop could fare pretty well.
by pigcat | 2025-10-14 13:25:06+00:00
My friend is the first dev hire at a startup where they prematurely overengineered for scalability. The technical founders had recently exited a previous startup and their rationale was that it makes a future acquisition easier, since a potential acquirer will weigh scalability in their evaluation of the code (and maybe even conflate it with quality). In fact it was a regret from their first startup that they hadn't baked in scalability earlier. I remain skeptical of the decision, but curious if there's any truth to the fact that acquirers weigh scalability in their scorecard?
by andsoitis | 2025-10-14 13:25:09+00:00
> Volkswagen is a cherry picked example, look at Tesla, which isn't a joint venture. BMW still uses a JV but now holds 75% of BMW Brilliance etc.

No cherry picking. Purely random. FWIW, according to my quick research there are only 3 vehicle manufacturers that operate and manufacture in China while retaining 100% ownership as a foreign company. They are Tesla (Gigafactory in Shanghai), Lexus (EV plant in Shanghai), and Scania (truck manuf. in Rugao). If this list is comprehensive, then it is very very short, and my original point stands which is that technically the market might be open (barring the exceptions I mentioned), but in practice it is pretty closed because it is so hard to enter due to all the barriers that are put up.

I think it is fair to say, and I think you would agree, that on a spectrum of free trade, China doesn't rank very high.
by nusl | 2025-10-14 13:25:30+00:00
Strange. The article says that he made the fire, called first responders, who put the fire out. The fire continued to smolder before reigniting in later winds.

If you cause a problem, report it, then the authorities responsible for dealing with those problems take care of it and go home, what does it mean?

Are the authorities then partially responsible for not ensuring the fire was put out properly before leaving the area?

Is he even guilty at all given that he filled his duty and reported the problem after unintentionally causing it?