MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by riedel | 2025-10-12 08:31:24+00:00
The bad thing in general is the dependence on Google policy for all AOSP distros. Joining those programs might long term worsen the situation.

IMHO, it could be worth the fight if GrapheneOS could win their (rather legal/lobbying) battle to obtain play integrity certification by following security closely (which is a joke IMHO because EOL phones with not updates for years also get integrity). Google releasing easily diffable security only bytecode sets, seems like a security nightmare for everyone else.

All of those distros suffer from the reliance of Google to release anything, so they in one way or the other they play the game. Particularly Lineage heavily does 'self-censoring' to comply without much benefit IMHO. We really would need e.g. does not even include the keys for providing alternative web views or the ability to switch the location provider. While google has those capabilities, they only support services sending data to their own servers.

I used lineage as my daily driver since the CyanogenMod days and the HTC desire, but switched to a Google Pixel a few month back, because I felt I had lost the play integrity fight and although my great Redmi Note 10 Pro was running other like a charm thanks to lineage and the device maintainers (Daniel and Aryan), I personally could not invest time and cognitive capacity anymore.

More and more device manufacturers are locking down their bootloaders again. I hope someone can break the momentum and finds a way to break the OS duopoly.
by hardwarepirate | 2025-10-12 08:33:22+00:00
https://www.kite.com for python i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python. it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
by hardwarepirate | 2025-10-12 08:33:54+00:00
https://www.kite.com for python

i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python. it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
by senko | 2025-10-12 08:35:00+00:00
Oracle, Microsoft: Fortune 500, governments and big cos everywhere in the west.

Apple: their loyal fanbase everywhere.

Google, Meta: advertisers everywhere.

Tesla, Xai: not sure, but definitely not just startups.

Implying these will go under and therefore NVIDIA is in trouble is a stretch. Far more likely they wean off its hw and use inhouse, or OpenAI and Anthropic go under, or AMD catches up, or there is WW3.
by strogonoff | 2025-10-12 08:35:15+00:00
The idea of local maximum means to get from one local peak to another, even if it is a higher one, you need to first go through a valley.

Somebody comes up with an acceptable solution to a design problem, people get used to it, then when somebody comes up with an otherwise theoretically better solution it is in practical terms worse at first because the user has an intuition for another one already. Having to relearn is worse than if there was no preexisting intuition yet.

This is why it is possible to say it is both not very intuitive but good.
by smokel | 2025-10-12 08:35:32+00:00
> I certainly didn't judge them because they are just playing the game.

Please do judge them for being parasitical. They might seem successful by certain measures, like the amount of money they make, but I for one simply dislike it when people only think about themselves.

As a society, we should be more cautious about narcissism and similar behaviors. Also, in the long run, this kind of behaviour makes them an annoying person at parties.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-10-12 08:35:37+00:00
This will just stop people from talking to journos, like many have done. This whole rhetoric of the journalist being an "adversary" that is "outing" things is extremely problematic. You should be able to retract statements. If it's live, it's practically not possible so it's fine, but for articles I think that journos should respect retractions, regardless of whether it is post-hoc or pre-decided.

Now, the "victim" here is NSO, so not expecting any sympathy, but journos do this to everyone, even normal people.

> Puff pieces

But with the aforementioned rhetoric in vogue these days, every piece of journo is a forced "scoop", leading to most of modern media(social and mainstream, the incentives are the same) being misconstrued non-factual brain damage. Even press conferences, most questions are just loaded and very bad-faith, basically trying to get you to say something they can quote out of context, or use for a misconstrued "non-truth", or a false equivalence. Or sometimes they just make things up! Retarded scoop-bait headlines as well.

The root cause for all this is that adversarial rhetoric.

Before you say "but the press is an adversary against the government", they do this to sportspersons, and a variety of other normal people too. If they only did this to the designated government spokesperson, it would be OK.

Now, this rhetoric itself is a result of "news"[1] companies competing for audiences. A fairly obvious incentive there. On socials too. Engagement is rewarded, leading to the same thing.

Furthermore, LLMs if used for content generation, will compete for audience, and even inference-time feedback driven optimisation leads to it giving the same reality-bending outputs. It's been simulated and shown in this stanford paper already: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06105

[1] they really deserve the quotes these days
by andersmurphy | 2025-10-12 08:35:47+00:00
Yeah so that was how I used to think about these things. Now, I'm. less into the fine grain user updates too.

Partly, because the minute you have a shared widget across users 50%+ of your connected users are going to get an update when anything changes. So the overhead of tracking who should update when you are under high load is just that, overhead.

Being able to make those updates corse grain and homogeneous makes them easy to throttle so changes are effectively batched and you can easily set a max rate at which you push changes.

Same with diffing, the minute you need to update most of the page the work of diffing is pure overhead.

So in my mind a simpler corse grain system will actually perform better under heavy load in that worst case scenario somewhat counter intuitively. At least that's my current reasoning.
by spankibalt | 2025-10-12 08:36:05+00:00
> "The money obviously makes it easier, but [...]"

But, but, but.

> "[...] it's not completely disingenuous of the people who work there to believe they're doing good."

Given how well and widely NSO and their merchandise were reported on, including the dissection of various associated scandals in the mainstream media, I beg to differ. These people are not dumb, they know exactly what they do, and who their clients are. Your good-faith assumptions with regards to these players come across as extremely naive, to put it mildly.
by cube00 | 2025-10-12 08:37:41+00:00
Yes, even using C# couldn't save them.

> A remote code execution vulnerability exists when Microsoft Silverlight decodes strings using a malicious decoder that can return negative offsets that cause Silverlight to replace unsafe object headers with contents provided by an attacker. In a web-browsing scenario, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could obtain the same permissions as the currently logged-on user. If a user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securityb...
by jiggawatts | 2025-10-12 08:38:57+00:00
I just want to remind people that the alternative to authority is anarchy. No, not the utopian kind, Star Trek style. Think: Mad Max.

I’m trying to communicate with relatives of my partner while on holiday. We have iPhones, they all have Androids. We asked them to install “ChatGPT” because its voice mode is shockingly good at near-real-time translation.

When I type “ChatGPT” into the Apple App Store, the top hit is… drumroll… the very same, by OpenAI.

My uncle in law was struggling a bit on his phone and showed me what came up: a wall of fakes. Scam app after scam app, all with similar icons and similar names “GPT Talk”, “Chatty GTP”, and garbage like that.

Why would anyone want this?

Why would I prefer this?

Why would you… unless you’re an “app developer” working for… not the company that ought to be getting the first and only search result.

The problem here — specifically here on Hacker News — is that a lot of you work for those companies. Startups faking till they make it, engaging in guerrilla marketing, less then perfectly legal practices… hoping to be the next Uber or AirBnB by emulating them.

Politely, and with all due respect: Bugger off.

Your arguments come from unclean hands.

Most of the world likes the authority of the App Store.

If you don’t, if you’re vocal about “rules are bad!” it says volumes about you, not the rules and the people that enforce them.
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-10-12 08:38:59+00:00
> Surely you don’t want your fellow citizens to fall for Russian, Chinese, Another State Actor propaganda?

Centralized Appstore monopolies are best friends of the authoritarian governments. Both Google and Apple readily removed any app the local government points them to, saying that they are committed to working in accordance with the legislation of countries where they provide their services.

"....but added that it complies with the local laws of each particular country." [0]

[0]: https://www.techspot.com/news/67701-russia-tells-apple-googl...
by hdgvhicv | 2025-10-12 08:39:05+00:00
2% discount on ticket prices is hardly going to make a difference to people views, yet thanks to competition I can travel to London cheaper today than I could in 1990.

And your laughable claim about British railways being later than DB, shows that yes, you are an idiot Brit.

Of course it’s been moot for 5 years since Boris started the nationalisation at scale during Covid, simply moving to a standard outsourced operation.
by troupo | 2025-10-12 08:40:01+00:00
> It's something we create organically inside communities of shared democratic commitments (e.g., Blink)

Blink is bot a "shared democratic community". As evidenced by the amount of Chrome-only APIs pushed into it.

And you were very okay and completely silent about it while you worked there, and likely pushed quite a few of your own.

Well, you're still fine with it as you call it "a community of democratic commitments".
by znpy | 2025-10-12 08:40:16+00:00
I think their main failure points were the following:

- not lowering prices as time went off. They probably kept a super-huger margin profit, but they’re largely irrelevant today

- not building their own datacenters and staying in aws. That would have allowed them to lower prices and gain even more market share. Everyone that has been in amazon/aws likely has seen the internal market rate for ec2 instances and know there’s a HUGE profit margin deriving by building datacenters. Add the recent incredible improvements to compute density (you can easily get 256c/512t and literally terabytes of memory in a 2u box) and you get basically an infinite money glitch.
by d_tr | 2025-10-12 08:40:52+00:00
Functions map members of a set A to members of a set B. These can simply be Cartesian products whose members are tuples. In my dream PL syntax a function call would be a function name followed by a tuple, and that tuple would be no different than the tuples you would use in any other part of the program (and so you could use all the tuple manipulation library goodies). If the function preserves any other structure of the type, like an identity element, that could be stated so you could have morphisms. And that identity element or other properties could be declared just as other stuff like 'const' are declared, and since the compiler can't verify all these stated properties, it's on the user to provide correct info, just like it's on the user to write a correct program, so nothing lost here, and anything more, like verification by the compiler, would be a bonus.

Mathematicians have been packing all this stuff nicely for a couple of centuries now, maybe we could use more of their work on mainstream computing, and it could also be a nice opportunity to get more people to appreciate math and structure.

Something that has side effects all over the place should just not be called a function, but something else, maybe "procedure" would be an appropriate, clear term.
by brap | 2025-10-12 08:43:26+00:00
Google Wave had awesome tech but if you look at the demo in hindsight you can tell it’s just not a very good product. They tried making an all-in-one kind of product which just doesn’t work.

In a sense Wave still exists but was split into multiple products, so I wouldn’t say it’s “dead”. The tech that powered it is still used today in many of Google’s popular products. It turns out that having separate interfaces for separate purposes is just more user friendly than an all-in-one.
by clutter55561 | 2025-10-12 08:43:27+00:00
Well written, but its starting point seems to be “Apple used to be force for good”. — It is a corporation. It wants your money. This is not new. This is not any different from Lilly (Mounjaro), or Google, or any other, er… corporation.

The idea that a CEO will stand up to his democratically elected dictator is absurd. Why should he, when the dictator is merely implementing the policies he said he would during the campaign and still got elected? Why should he make himself and his company and his shareholders martyrs?

Because many people hold Apple to higher standards, that is why.
by strogonoff | 2025-10-12 08:44:10+00:00
I can assure you that “ISO noise” is not a real term. I would take the word of whoever uses it with a grain of salt, movie set or not. Words have meanings.

> it's obvious to everyone in this thread that I'm referring to digital

It was blindingly obvious that you meant digital. That’s why I pointed this out. Without mentioning that it is only a concern with digital photography, your points become factually incorrect on more than one level; because the thread wasn’t talking specifically about digital photography, some of your points about noise don’t apply even if they were correct—which they aren’t, by your own admission that photography is subjective. Producing a noise-free image is not the highest priority for film crews (for camera manufacturers it is, but that’s because it means more flexibility in different conditions; it does not mean film crews will always prioritize whatever settings give them the lowest noise, there are plenty of higher priorities), and in some cases they choose to produce image with some noise despite the capability to avoid it.

Sorry, with your googling suggestions it just reads like a newbie’s take on subject matter.
by dewey | 2025-10-12 08:44:19+00:00
I get that point as a person who frequents HN, but for many regular people that’s probably a net positive. People would install random apps or browser extensions just to gain an advantage in some Facebook click came.

Having some kind of hidden “I know what I’m doing” mode would make sense, but would probably defeated the same way as “I’ll teach you how to open browser console” to paste some command exploits.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-10-12 08:45:09+00:00
As an academic I would expect the same as you, and no, to my knowledge "first paper" is meaningless, at least in academia. Most people's first paper is some small contribution to what their PhD supervisor is doing at the time, where the student tries their best at writing but it ends up so heavily edited that probably 90% of the final text comes from the supervisor :) So typically first papers don't define or represent a researcher. When you start you just don't have the experience to have a great idea and carry it through to a good paper.

Of course here we are talking about a lab, not an individual person, but still I haven't heard of first papers being considered special in any way, even for labs.
by ajrouvoet | 2025-10-12 08:45:42+00:00
Meta just lost a court case against bits of freedom in the Netherlands, because their instagram setting to turn off the attention grabbing feed would reset every month or so. The court ruled that this infringed on the user’s freedom.

Source: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/10/court-tells-meta-to-give-du...
by schoen | 2025-10-12 08:46:09+00:00
The "software is speech" idea was popularized partly by being used (successfully) as an argument in litigation about U.S. software export controls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech

(It was later partly rejected by other courts in the DMCA anticircumvention context.)

This argument doesn't imply that companies have to help you publish your software, because they might be entitled to some kind of editorial control over which speech they do or don't distribute. But it does at least imply that the stakes of such control are very high and that free speech norms may be implicated by them!
by codesnik | 2025-10-12 08:46:25+00:00
activerecord in Rails has async mode, which allows you to queue several requests and read results later. But those will go through the connection pool, and will be executed in separate connections, separate transactions, and separate PostgreSQL server processes. I wonder if using pipelining instead, on a driver level (app code would be the same), would be a better approach in general, or at least easier on db instance.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-10-12 08:47:20+00:00
Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software.

The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of.

Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.
by russellbeattie | 2025-10-12 08:47:58+00:00
I was thinking more about how he was banging his partner's adopted daughter who was 25 years younger than him while she was still in school (though over 18), then later marrying her. It screwed up the entire family.

All the rancor and accusations (true or false) stem from what a selfish horny creepy cheating idiot Allen was at the time. It's all on him.

So I stand by my subtle criticism of Allen.
by samus | 2025-10-12 08:48:33+00:00
When you use lambdas you lose control over when and how often your code gets executed. Since checked exceptions are very often thrown by code that has side effects, I'd consider the friction to be a feature.

> collecting all the thrown exceptions in a separate loop

It's really not comfortable to do so in Java since there is no standard `Either` type, but this is also doable with a custom collector.
by charcircuit | 2025-10-12 08:51:37+00:00
Addicts are a sacrifice I'm willing to make for the greater good of the populace. For how much heroine can ruin people's lives I do not think it is oppressive or cruel to punish people with the loss of a life in perpetuating such a life ruining substance. But it is still helping those people due to the benefits of addicts no longer existing.
by panstromek | 2025-10-12 08:51:58+00:00
I partially agree that the authority has its use and that restricting the freedom to publish apps in some way is reasonable to prevent problems.

The problem with Apple (and to a lesser extent Google) is that it goes way further than that. It dictates what technologies you can use, it dictates a ton of specific rules for how your app should behave, it gatekeeps your bug fixes, it takes an absolutely obnoxious share of your revenue while providing just bare minimum service, with decades old bugs you have to workaround. Many of those things also makes the service worse for their users - it really feels like as a developer for their platform, you're in a hostile relationship with them, and pay for it.
by reify | 2025-10-12 08:52:37+00:00
That's my grandad sitting in his armchair

We call him milky way because he loves Milky way chocolate bars.

Milky way for him is like the old baked beans ditty.

beans beans warms his heart, the more he eats the more he farts.

When we accuse grandad of farting he too says; May have!
by TrackerFF | 2025-10-12 08:52:48+00:00
I grew up in rural nowhere, and so, so many of my HS peers ended up as addicts. From my observation, I'd usually group the addicts in two types: Those predisposition to addiction, often combined with deeply traumatic events in life, and those that get addicted by accident or just with time.

The first group were the visible ones. The kids that came from broken homes, and had experienced abuse or similar traumatic events. They'd start acting out young, be introduced to alcohol, weed, and pills at age 12-15. By the time they were 18, they'd be full-blown addicts to anything the could get their hands on. Since they had no income, they'd supply their drug use by crime. Burglaries, robberies, theft, scams, everything. Eventually they'd move away, and become homeless junkies in a larger town - or extremely rarely, they'd become sober.

The other group of people, those that became addicts by accident or just over time, would be "stealth" addicts - at least until it all boiled over. Some of these people would become addicts after injuries/operations and serious painkillers. Others would escalate their weekend drinking to trying various drugs, and then become weekend users. Until it spilled over to their weekdays. Some could quit/become sober. Others could stick to weekend usage, and many would just slowly circle their drain.

How "functional" one can be, really depends on whether you have the means to support your habit, and how it affects your work + private life. You only need to be caught once, really.

With heroin, your biggest risk is that there's really not many dealers that are pushing heroin. And if you're a full-blown addict, you likely won't say no to whatever replacement they're selling. That's the time old slipper slope:

Become addicted to oxys after surgery or injury -> purchase oxy from dealers when your prescription is used up -> start shooting whatever junk the dealers are selling -> OD
by cm2187 | 2025-10-12 08:53:02+00:00
Agree on SSD for cold storage, that's not a good idea. But you would be surprised by how little used are typical used enterprise SSDs on ebay. This article matches my experience:

https://www.servethehome.com/we-bought-1347-used-data-center...

I bought over 200 over the last year, and the average wear level was 96%, and 95% had a wear above 88%.
by kgwgk | 2025-10-12 08:53:03+00:00
> I know of approximately 0 people who have had the thought “I’d try heroin if it were legal”.

How many people do you approximately know of that have had the thought “I’d try heroin”?

> I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.

How many people do you approximately know of that have had the thought “I’d try heroin but only because I cannot buy regulated heroin”?