MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KingMob | 2025-10-31 06:38:19+00:00
> You're making the appeal to authority fallacy

Funny, I thought he was adjusting his Bayesian priors based on available evidence.

From a classical logic perspective, it's correct that authority does not imply truth.

But from a pragmatic Bayesian perspective, when verifying the truth of a matter is difficult-to-impossible for a layperson, we all try to figure out the truth based on what authorities say and our assessment of their trustworthiness.

----

HNers really need to grok that high-school debate club doesn't help you with reality.
by mamonoleechi | 2025-10-31 06:38:44+00:00
Color correction has been there for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbU8FqTI-A4 but it was destructive (on the video it is gimp 2.10, but it was there before)

They added non-destructive adjustment layers in gimp version 3.0 that can do the same
by monerozcash | 2025-10-31 06:39:55+00:00
>Why bother with python and open source then?

Because you can easily make changes to the software, not because it's way less likely to be backdoored.

>The idea behind most package managers including apt and pip is that they help you build the software and try to make it easier for you without actually downloading and trusting binaries.

I'm so deeply confused
by hinkley | 2025-10-31 06:40:20+00:00
I used to have a separate account on my box for doing code for other people, one for myself and another for surfing the web. Since I have an Apple TV hooked up to one of my monitors I don’t have a ton of reasons for hopping credentials between accounts so I think I’ll be going back to at least that.

The fact I use nvm means a global install won’t cross accounts.
by palata | 2025-10-31 06:40:26+00:00
> Look, we aren't going to go back to a setting where we don't patch software.

And I never said we should. I was just describing the situation.

> Look at the Y2K bug [...] We also had similar success in big problems like fixing the ozone layer

That's an optimistic point of view :-). I would argue that both of those were infinitely easier to solve than, say, the current mass extinction, energy problem and climate change. We've past what, 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries? We've pretty much lost the Amazon, we've pretty much lost coral reefs, we've definitely failed at the 1.5C goal and are now moving forward to failing the 2C goal. With the inertia in that system, once you fail there is no coming back in the next thousand years (unlike the ozone, BTW).

Those are real problems that we are not only not solving: we're making them worse. All of them.

> All I ask is that you speak up and question when the teams you work for are trying to push unfinished products.

Most software is part of the problem. The problem is that we do too much in general. Doing requires energy. The more we do, the more energy we use. The more energy we use, the more we screw up the planet. You want to help? Do less. But at the end of the day, you still need to get paid, right? And for that you need your company to be profitable, right?
by deaux | 2025-10-31 06:41:37+00:00
You sell it. And users are happy to pay because they're getting time and value in return. I also sell a product - not something database related but it doesn't matter. The users get value out of our product. To get the same thing elsewhere it would either cost them much more, be a lot less flexibly available, or be of lower quality.

If you were a gardener would you also find it hard to make people pay for you going to their house and taking care of their garden? They're paying for it because they feel it's worth it.

Of course, it depends on what you're selling, but I'm assuming you're not asking about selling gambling products or crack cocaine. As for those, the answer is "be a psychopath".
by csomar | 2025-10-31 06:43:19+00:00
It is GitHub mess. See the discussion: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/37117

To keep it short, GitHub has oauth App and "GitHub Apps". GitHub Apps are the new model and they can be installed to particular repos instead of having wide access to your account. GitHub recommends you use them. There is one catch however: GitHub did architecture these apps so that they can "act on the user behalf". Even if your app only asks for "an email address", they will still have that "permission" even though it is against nothing.

Thus, the scary popup. I've found the only solution to this is to "complicate" your flow. If you go to https://codeinput.com (my app), and click login with GitHub, you'll be taken to a less scarier popup that only asks for your email (it's an oauth app!). This, however, is at the expense of you having to do the "authenticate + install" dance again after you login! So I had to create an onboarding step, kind of to explain to the user the different steps he has to take.
by mping | 2025-10-31 06:43:44+00:00
Jesus dude,just say it was a mistake to call it free forever. How can you be a founder or whatever, have a product and not expect people to judge the words your website had, or the words you say? You should know it comes with the territory.

Doesn't matter how hard you guys worked to be profitable, it's about building trust and relationship with your audience.
by frm88 | 2025-10-31 06:44:47+00:00
In 2024 there was a study with regards to cyber crime per country [1]. The US comes in 4th place which is still a lot, but doesn't qualify for most. The UK is 8th.

Live streaming Gaza: I could not find a reliable source. As of today there are several webcam etc. claiming to live stream. I don't have the time to watch to verify this. However, there was a news block I place until recently and except for the occasional TikTok nothing on video, let alone 'live'.

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
by shaunaks | 2025-10-31 06:45:21+00:00
Some of the use cases we showcase are RAG agents, Youtube or any URL summarizer, imagegen tools, email summarizers, etc.

Any use case where you might want to run an LLM+tool in a loop for a multi-step but single-trigger task - but without persistence. It works similar to the ai-sdk but you get the entire agent as a hosted, shareable endpoint.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-10-31 06:47:20+00:00
Avoiding traffic controls is no solution to reckless driving. Like surveilance cameras, they only move the crime elsewhere.

What you need is a gapless panopticon so that every suspect feels like being at the verge of getting caught, to enforce eg. traffic laws.

ICE does not target criminal behavior though. They literally disappear people based on appearance and any criminal record. Such a panopticon is an entirely different beast.
by indemnity | 2025-10-31 06:48:13+00:00
As someone who started doing SwiftUI recently, it absolutely boggles my mind that (1) this is even a thing and (2) Apple seem ok to treat it as an unsolvable problem. When you finally solve it is some stupid wrong type passed in somewhere. I agree with the other poster. This is so pathetic it makes me question the competence of the engineers working on Swift.

Smells like “we made a poor architectural / design choice and ain’t walking it back”.
by gorgoiler | 2025-10-31 06:48:54+00:00
Of interest on the topic of determining chirality: How would you teach left from right to an alien civilization:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936682

Odd that it this paradox isn’t mentioned in the RSC article but it is probably assumed that everyone with a degree in Chemistry has come across the puzzle before. How do you explain to an alien, or some person with whom you share no cultural background, what “left” and “right” are solely by talking to them over the phone? You’d better get it right — not only would a handshake be awkward if you got it wrong, they might also turn out to be made of antimatter!

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_52.html
by deaux | 2025-10-31 06:49:16+00:00
There was a long period even upto early 2024, which I pointed out at the time, where simply destroying ASML, TSMC and much of NVIDIA would've been more than enough to give at least a decade of breathing room. This was something a group of determined people willing to self-sacrifice could've accomplished. It didn't happen, but it was anything but impossible.

Now, of course, the horse has long bolted, and there is indeed no stop left.
by eskibars | 2025-10-31 06:49:21+00:00
So as some of my own feelings/thoughts on this: I've also sat on the "receiving side" of a "free forever" campaign now 2 times in my career. The first time driven by the CEO and the second time driven by the marketing team (and supported by the CEO). In both cases, I knew the truth (sitting on the product management side) that there was no sustainable way to have a "free forever" campaign: that there was finite end in both cases on the 2-5 year horizon before we needed to change plans. I advocated against adding the "forever" verbiage knowing this. The first time, I didn't push strongly: it was my mistake.

The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.

But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
by anonzzzies | 2025-10-31 06:49:42+00:00
What we do have, for whatever reason (usually money related: either making money or getting more funding) many companies/people focused on making AI. It might take another winter (I believe it will unless we find a way to retrain the NNs on the fly instead of storing new knowledge in RAG: and many other things we currently don't have, but this would he a step) or not, people will keep pushing toward that goal.

I mean, we went from worthless chatbots which basically pattern matched to me waiting for a plane and seeing a fairly large amount of people charting to chatgpt, not insta, whatsapp etc. Or sitting in a plane next to a person who is using local ollama in cursor to code and brainstorm. This took us about 10 years to go from some ideas that no one but scientists could use to stuff everyone uses. And many people already find human enough. What in 100 years?
by vanviegen | 2025-10-31 06:50:14+00:00
Yeah, it resembles what you'd get when using gpt 4o for image editing. Of the parts that should have been unaltered, the broad lines are correct, but the exact details are made up. A modern white chair is replaced by some other white chair. A book is replaced by some other book. Etc, etc.

Both brains and gpt appear to be doing lossy compression based on preexisting world knowledge.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-10-31 06:50:53+00:00
The actual rule is more refined than that and doesn't prevent you from using constructors in the body or recursing without deconstructing any input, it just needs to prove the new inputs are "smaller" according to a fixed well-ordered relation. This is most often related to the structure of the input but is not required. For example I can have f(5) recurse into f(6) if that's "smaller" according to my custom relation, but no relation will allow me to continue increasing the argument forever.
by tdeck | 2025-10-31 06:52:15+00:00
> It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers.

You missed the first step, which is to burn though tons of cash offering your services below cost, driving all competitors out of business. Then once you've done that, where else are they going to go?
by Frieren | 2025-10-31 06:53:12+00:00
> There's no such thing as "moral" in nature, that's purely human-made concept.

Morality is 100% an evolutionary trait that rises from a clear advantage for animals that posses it. It comes from natural processes.

The far-right is trying to convince the world that "morality" does not exist, that only egoism and selfishness are valid. And that is why we have to fight them. Morality is a key part of nature and humanity.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-10-31 06:53:42+00:00
Russian government officials said many bizarre things in the past which never materialized. This is one of them. This guy lost his government job in 2018 after drinking champagne on a private jet and making toast to agricultural lobby. If you still insist this thing is real, you should prove it with specific parameters of this project. Construction start, volume, length of pipe etc.
by leir | 2025-10-31 06:54:07+00:00
It lacks a systematic theoretical framework to support it, as there is no guarantee regarding the detection rate of vulnerabilities. However, its practical effectiveness is undeniable—it can definitely identify vulnerabilities and achieve a relatively low false positive rate. In a nutshell, it is a "nice-to-have" tool. It would be valuable if someone could conduct a capability and ROI comparison between this tool and traditional security detection tools.
by hvb2 | 2025-10-31 06:54:22+00:00
I think if you were to look at how often a government is rebuffed by the courts, that's a pretty good indicator of how much they're trying to bend the rules or outright ignore them.

Also, "come and enforce it" is not undermining democracy. A law is only a piece of paper until a court upholds it. Even the federal government can write whatever it wants, if it's then ruled unconstitutional that's the end of that.

The problem going on right now is that so much is being broken that the already slow court system just cannot keep up.
by jabl | 2025-10-31 06:55:53+00:00
> "ARM or x86? ISA Doesn’t Matter"

> * https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

Some people, for some strange reason, want to endlessly relitigate the old 1980'ies RISC vs CISC flamewars. Jim Kellers interview above is a good antidote for that. Yes, RISC vs CISC matters for something like a simple in-order core you might see in embedded systems. For a big OoO core, much less so.

That doesn't mean you'd end up with x86 if you'd design a clean sheet 'best practices' ISA today. Probably it would indeed look something like aarch64 or RISC-V. So certainly in that sense RISC won. But the win isn't so overwhelming that it overcomes the value of the x86 software ecosystem in the markets where x86 plays.
by Agingcoder | 2025-10-31 06:56:18+00:00
This is exactly what I meant. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Branches-in-a-N...

The book says that ‘ To really understand the way Git does branching, we need to take a step back and examine how Git stores its data’ then it starts talking about trees and blobs.

At that point you’ve lost almost everyone. If you have a strong interest in vcs implementation then fine, otherwise it’s typically the kind of details you don’t want to hear about. Most people won’t read an entire book just to use a vcs, when what they actually want to hear is ‘this is a commit graph with pointers’.

I agree with you : the information is there. However I don’t think you can in good faith tell most people to rtfm this, and that was my point.
by doganugurlu | 2025-10-31 06:57:33+00:00
I don’t think this contract would be enforceable. Google/Amazon had no incentive to say no, other than self-respect. Also, how would Israel even know if Google/Amazon failed to “wink”? If they have a way of knowing that, then they don’t need the “wink.”

Google/Amazon could just say yes until the contract is signed, and then just not comply. Israeli government would have no recourse since they can’t go to a US court, and file charges for a US company NOT breaking the law or for complying with a court order. Israel also would not want this to come to light.

It’s like a criminal’s promise. The only recourse is taking your business elsewhere, which Israel would do when they’re tipped off anyways. But at least if Google/Amazon fail to wink, contract lasts a little longer.
by BoorishBears | 2025-10-31 06:57:53+00:00
You're grouping wildly unlike things.

Backend for Frontend is one thing, frameworks that hoist frontend state to the server (LiveView, Blazor, etc.) are another.

And none of the benefits you're describing are tied to RSC or anything that OP was banging their head into. React Router offers loaders that run on the frontend and have largely the same ergonomics.

tRPC/oRPC also remove most of the ceremony around building an API while also skipping the downside of implicitly creating a loosely typed API for your frontend.

But then again, this isn't really that fruitful of a conversation. I think even by the tone of this comment I can tell you're bought in, and I'm not. People who aren't bought in are just looking for reasons to complain, people who are are busy building. Right?
by klabb3 | 2025-10-31 06:58:15+00:00
> It's no different anywhere else.

But it is. Both C/C++ and Go are not at all like this.

I don’t know about Python but Rust ecosystem tends attract enthusiasts who make good single purpose packages but that are abandoned because maintainers move on, or sometimes forked due to minor disagreements similar to how Linux/unix is fragmented with tribal feuds.
by jraph | 2025-10-31 06:58:57+00:00
Dependency management is work. And almost nobody does this work seriously because it has become unrealistic to do, which is the big concern here.

You now have to audit the hundreds of dependencies. Each time you upgrade them.

Rust is compiled and source code doesn't weigh that much, you could have the compiler remove dead code.

And sometimes it's just better to review and then copy paste small utility functions once.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-10-31 07:01:54+00:00
Is your daughter feasibly going to make “real money” in the future? I personally look back on working a job in college as a waste of time and attempting to save money then as a waste of effort. Should have just taken more debt, the amount I did take turned out to be trivial to pay off and double or triple wouldn’t have been that bad. I feel like there are two worlds employment wise, and some advice leaks between them which ends up being maladaptive in its new environment.
by Matterless | 2025-10-31 07:03:09+00:00
You pretty well describe my experience as well. So much of recall for me is "just knowing" and already having the mental "thing" at hand in the moment (rather than starting with any perceptible intention) and I do wonder if our kind of thinker might end up more devastatingly affected by age/illness-related memory issues because we simply take for granted /just knowing/.
by michidk | 2025-10-31 07:03:12+00:00
fk lese(&selbst, schlsl: Zeichenkette) -> Ergebnis<Möglichkeit<&Zeichenkette>, Zeichenkette> { wenn lass Etwas(wöbu) = gefährlich { WÖRTERBUCH.als_ref() } { Gut(wöbu.hole(&schlsl)) } anderenfalls { Fehler("Holt das Wörterbuch".hinein()) } }

https://github.com/michidk/rost
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-10-31 07:04:39+00:00
Brilliant. Love it! Say your family member or other person you support needs some free software functionality but not the whole UI..

Grab an LLM and make a nice single button app they can use.

LLMs writing code, plus free software, a match made in heaven.

It’s also a new take on Unix “do one thing well” philosophy.
by timc3 | 2025-10-31 07:06:26+00:00
I used Quark XPress, and it really felt like it had a monopoly on the professional market in the UK at the time. It didn't really innovate, it was slow and clunky. Then InDesign came along and it was a breath of fresh air.

Took many years for the transition to happen, but a lot of people in my circle wanted to see the back of Quark.
by gmokki | 2025-10-31 07:07:01+00:00
Don't you always need a database after reading events from Kafka to deduplication?

So the competing solutions are: PostgreSQL or Kafka+PostgreSQL

Kafka does provide some extrs there, handling load spikes, more clients that PG can handle natively and resilience to some DB downtime. But is it worth the complexity, in most cases no.
by doganugurlu | 2025-10-31 07:07:03+00:00
You can test the logic of your argument by imagining it being exploited by malicious actors. If it can be exploited, it’s probably a bad argument.

By your logic, false flag attacks can be used to legitimize genocide. I am not saying those attacks were false flags. But, malicious actors aware of your logic can plan false attacks, “sacrifice few for greater good” and you will then support a genocide because it satisfied your conditions.
by majoe | 2025-10-31 07:08:26+00:00
Counterintuitively Julia recommends the use of immutable data types for performance reasons, because immutability enables more flexible compiler optimisations

An immutable variable can be savely shared across functions or even threads without copying. It can be created on the stack, heap or in a register, whatever the compiler deems most efficient.

In the case, where you want to change a field of an immutable variable (the use case of lenses), immutable types may still be more efficient, because the variable was stack allocated and copying it is cheap or the compiler can correctly infer, that the original object is not in use anymore and thus reuses the data of the old variable for the new one.

Coming from the C++ world, I think immutability by default is pretty need, because it enables many of the optimisations you would get from C++'s move semantics (or Rust's borrow checker) without the hassle.
by nirava | 2025-10-31 07:09:44+00:00
it says, "the new free version gets widely requested features like image trace" and "the v2 won't get updates anymore".

I can't read it any way other than "throw your paid-for v2, download this fremium thing, make account: to get access to image trace which is the one thing everyone has requested ever since affinity was a thing"

I could be wrong ofc, but this just looks like classic misdirection where they're pointing to the free thing but in reality it's not really free and just a distraction.
by zahlman | 2025-10-31 07:10:28+00:00
I'm planning to distribute PAPER as a zipapp where the bootstrap script does some initial unpacking to put wheels in a temporary directory, then delegates to the contained code (similar to how the standard library `ensurepip` works). The code that creates the zipapp is in the repository and I'm thinking of genericizing that and making it separately available, too.

Although several variations on this theme already exist, I'm sure. https://github.com/pex-tool/pex/ is arguably one of them, but it's quite a bit bulkier than what I'm looking for.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-10-31 07:12:43+00:00
> relatively small demonstration projects.

California has got really good at building giant batteries - At peak times they provide 30% of the state’s electricity (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/05/22/californi...) - The Economist.

California is the 4th largest economy in the world by the way. A bit larger than a “small demonstration”.
by geysersam | 2025-10-31 07:13:57+00:00
> Every function with an IO interface cannot be reasoned about locally because of unexpected interactions with the io parameter input. This is particularly nasty when IO objects are shared across library boundaries.

Isn't this just as true of any function using io in any other language?

> As a library author, how do I handle an io object that doesn't behave as I expect?

But isn't that the point of having an interface? To specify how the io object can and can't behave.
by Fnoord | 2025-10-31 07:16:35+00:00
Yes, the equivalent of a warning canary would be that Google pays the Israeli government a set of payment every month such as 3100 shekels (for +31, NL) and then suddenly November 2025 they stop issuing it. That would mean there's a legal investigation targeting Google by the Dutch prosecutor (OM) involving Israeli data.

I suspect they didn't go for this route as it is too slow.