MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jraph | 2025-10-16 13:10:44+00:00
> MIT gives less freedom to the user.

No. Someone can use some MIT licensed software for any purpose and can strictly do anything with it that the GPL would allow.

Just as free.

However, I do agree that permissive licenses like the MIT allows someone to build proprietary software with the code, and the users won't enjoy software freedom with that result. That would be the reason why I wouldn't license my software under permissive license except for specific cases.

One could argue the MIT actually gives more freedom to the user: they can, with a MIT source code, build and distribute a proprietary derivative. Of course, this doesn't mean this additional freedom is desirable.

> Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.

Yeah, just like laws limit your freedom to run free software for any purpose. You, for instance, can't legally take /bin/ls with you to go kill someone even if its license itself doesn't explicitly forbid it. I'm pretty fine with this.

I have some feeling we do agree that freedom is never absolute and kinda argue past each others.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-16 13:10:55+00:00
I first noticed this weakness when I was caught in a "password breach", which was really a fishing site for passwords.

I checked the list of passwords, and a significant amount had values like "uRFcWEBSITENAME".

I reasoned first they would try USERNAME, PASSWORD, and then try USERNAME with passwords updated for the other websites they were hacking.

Even the section of passwords beginning with just the first letter of WEBSITENAME was unusually large. Then I scanned for passwords containing the first few letters of WEBSITENAME... yup, a conspicuous lot of them. Those people at least tried to be smart about their password uniqueness, but it didn't really work.
by bluGill | 2025-10-16 13:10:59+00:00
There are a lot less loop holes than in the past. In the 1950s taxes on the rich were 90% - but there were so many loopholes the rich in reality paid a similar tax rate to their peers today where the tax rates are lower, but there are also less loopholes.

In the 1950s the common person couldn't take advantage of most loopholes (I'm not old enough to remember, but I'd guess mortgage interest was the only useful one, the rest where $100 here and there but it never added up to much for the common person)
by bell-cot | 2025-10-16 13:11:00+00:00
Actually, it's from HN's Second Chance Pool:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

Vs. you can click on the "(consumerreports.org)" link in the title, to quickly see if something is an actual duplicate submission.

Also notice how the "X [hours|days] ago" text changes, depending on context. Vs. the mouseover timestamp for that is always the original submission time.
by Tangurena2 | 2025-10-16 13:12:00+00:00
The Biosphere 2 project was an attempt to see what the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem (that would feed humans and recycle air/water) would be. For a crew of 8 people, the area of plants, crops & wetland covered 3.14 acres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Ask HN: Building a Personal AI Avatar. What Technical Are Essential?
by peefy | 2025-10-16 13:12:18+00:00
Technical: How to reliably structure/unify unstructured cross-channel data (chat texts, call transcripts, email threads) into a consistent "single source of truth"—without losing context like timelines or speaker intent? Scenario: Can it avoid dropping critical details (e.g., a client’s verbal budget limit from a call vs. written feature requests in email)?

Technical: What’s a pragmatic way to balance personalization (needing access to private data) with security (preventing leaks of family chats, work contracts)? Scenario: Is end-to-end encryption + local data processing feasible for a non-enterprise user, or will it kill usability?

Technical: How to make the avatar’s "memory" actionable (not just a archive)—e.g., linking past interactions to current tasks? Scenario: Can it auto-pull a 6-month-old chat about a friend’s allergy when I’m planning a dinner, instead of me manually searching?
by dbspin | 2025-10-16 13:12:30+00:00
This is a ridiculous attitude, exactly equivalent to 'if you've nothing to fear you've nothing to hide'. In practice different geographic localities (e.g.: EU, California) have far different (and improving) limits on the personal information that can be stored by companies and how it is used.

Various forms of online hygiene, from ad blocking to VPNs, to anonymous email accounts are likely utilised by the hacker news audience. Because we're all well aware of the value of our privacy, the value of our personal data, and the aggressive and often illegal efforts by major tech firms and data brokers to acquire both.

It's incredibly important to continue progress in the area, both in terms of informing the public (and politicians) of how our behaviour is observed and shaped by social networks and big tech: and by taking all obvious and easily available measures to reduce and remove the information they have and continue to gather.

One obvious way is by not sharing private sexual data with a major corporation, where not absolutely necessary.

Edit: Oh, and since a reference to the Luddites is a regular thought terminating cliche on HN - https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-wer...
by ArcHound | 2025-10-16 13:12:42+00:00
I am so happy I am no longer responsible for these. We had a solid monitor and an analysis script that was quite good at dealing with the attacks.

Then the fun thing was that some lawyers concluded this is still a breach on success and that we should be responsible and report/mitigate these.

How? How do you stop your users from making dumb decisions? The only solution seems to be to "give up" and go passwordless, putting the credentials to the big boys in town.
by vilhelm_s | 2025-10-16 13:12:46+00:00
The Rust compiler always produces quite large binaries compared to other programming language. I notice there's a (closed) issue on the Zed github [https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/34376],

> At this time, we prioritize performance and out-of-the-box functionality over minimal binary size. As is, this issue isn't very actionable, but if you have concrete optimization ideas that don't compromise these priorities, we'd be happy to consider them in a new issue.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-16 13:12:49+00:00
I've seen way, way, way too much cases where the key clauses or details that someone who does not deal in the subject on behalf of others for money will need to know because it tells them of some "less crappy" path that they can go through to do a regulated thing, or know exactly what they need to know to dial back their thing so they don't have to put up with all the BS that getting .gov permission entails are conveniently omitted from the text they present to the general public.

Like if you follow their instructions in good faith you'll wind up going through 80% of the permitting you'd need to open a restaurant just to have some boy scouts sell baked goods at your strip mall. In the best possible case the secretary is over-worked and doesn't wanna do the bullshit and whispers to you "why don't you just <tweak some unimportant particulars> and then you wouldn't even need a permit". Ditto for just about every other thing that the government regulates on the high end but the casual or incidental user is less subject to.

IDK if it's ass covering or malice because the distinction doesn't matter. It's hostile to the public these agencies are supposed to serve.
by choffee | 2025-10-16 13:13:09+00:00
My understading is that the hackers had a copy of the source code for their app so they had to patch all their outstanding CVE that they where sitting on so the DOJ let them hold back until that was ready. It's not ideal but I suppose there is at least something people can do right now. Feels like they could have been a bit quicker with some of the information though.
by Hendrikto | 2025-10-16 13:13:13+00:00
In this context, it is also interesting to think about alignment.

Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth? Will the goal we set even be relevant or make sense at all?

Would you still follow through on a mission Ferdinand II of Aragon sent your grand grand grand grand grand grandfather on in 1498? I probably wouldn’t. These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.
by michalpleban | 2025-10-16 13:14:32+00:00
It's a myth. Amstrad computers were already using 3 inch drives in 1984, way before 3.5 inch ones became popular. The drives were chosen due to their similarity to 5.25 drives, so that existing controller chips could be reused. Due to the huge volume of ordered drives, Amstrad did get huge discounts on them, but that had nothing to with the drives becoming obsolete.
by XorNot | 2025-10-16 13:14:46+00:00
Did you inspect the build code of all the nixpkgs you imported? Did you inspect the code of the tarballs they depend on? Sure, the SHA256 is right there...did you look at it?

People copy and paste nix code all the damn time because it's downright unparseable and inscrutable to the majority of users. Just import <module>, set some attrs and hit build. #yolo
by Measter | 2025-10-16 13:14:48+00:00
A few years ago I did some testing with a quick Arduino-based setup I cobbled together and got some interesting results.

The first test was the simple one-light-one-button test. I found that I had reaction time somewhere in the 220-270ms range. Pretty much what you'd expect.

The second test was a sound reaction test: it makes a noise, and I press the button. I don't remember the exact times, but my reaction times for audio were comfortably under 200ms. I was surprised at how much faster I was responding to sound compared to sight.

The last test was two lights, and two buttons. When the left light came on I press the left button; right light, right button. My reaction times were awful and I was super inaccurate, frequently pressing the wrong button. Again, I don't remember the times (I think near 400ms), but I was shocked at how much just adding a simple decision slowed me down.
by josefritzishere | 2025-10-16 13:15:10+00:00
Over 20 years ago I saw this cable access TV show that was very absurd called Midget Master Blaster Television Spectacular. At the time it just had no context for me, and made no sense. But for every cultural movement there are always precedents like in this casae German dada movement, Russian absurdists like Daniil Kharms...
by sarchertech | 2025-10-16 13:15:25+00:00
My entire point is that “Source available” is a term frequently used in a derogatory way to make software that doesn’t follow the principles and hey espouse sound dirty.

My entire point is how big tech has captured the zeitgeist, so the common use of that term is irrelevant.

>No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control".

You are 100% incorrect. Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.

>So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?

The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.
by bluGill | 2025-10-16 13:15:51+00:00
I used to do that every year. It wasn't hard. However one year I forgot to copy line 12b from form 9876 to line 34c of form 5432 and when the IRS caught that I had a big mess to clean up (since state taxes copy federal taxes so I had to refile state with the corrected numbers...). Now I just pay a small fee to FreeTaxUSA (I figure they deserve some money for their efforts in creating software).

One thing I can say for sure: doing taxes with a computer takes me longer than filling out the paper forms by hand! There are so many delays while "calculated" (as if a ghz computer can't add numbers fast), and loading question pages that I can obviously skip (I never worked for the rail road, I'm not blind...) but take extra time because of how they setup the UI.
by ryukoposting | 2025-10-16 13:16:15+00:00
Wow, you just unlocked an incredibly dusty memories.

Maybe it's not the same as it's always been, but it's the same as it's been for 20-something years at a very minimum.

I think the comparison with Charlie the Unicorn is spot-on. Yes, there's a narrative, but any attempt to analyze that narrative automatically misses the point.
by 0xEF | 2025-10-16 13:16:15+00:00
> I take the view that government already knows full well who I am especially given that it once employed me to do surveillance work.

I have to imagine you have some stories or lessons worth sharing, for sure.

There was a point where I said the same thing; I didn't really care if the government knew my activities and whatnot because I was not hiding anything, and well, part of participating as a tax-payer in a functioning society involves records and information. That I get.

However, regardless of where you or anyone reading this stands on the political spectrum, particularly in the US, you'd have to admit that there's some trepidation regarding that massive amount of information about each of us that is out there and how it can be used against you, even if you have done nothing wrong. To use a pointed example, I would rather not be labeled and treated as a dissenter because I played Dungeons & Dragons online with a person who identifies as queer or trans, even if I may or may not have been completely unaware of that fact. That's just one such extreme example, but it does not seem so extreme anymore, and with each passing week, it seems like using information against people in that exact way is getting more and more normalized.

My biggest fear about the US and Big Tech collaboratively heading in that direction is being actively realized, and that is ultimately what had caused me to...not "give up," but more akin to "stop fighting." Don't have the energy anymore, barely enough to sweep up some of my own footprints, let alone those of people I care about that DO have that social media addiction you and I lack.

Appreciate the discussion and your perspective, given that it is a little more "insider" than most. I wish I had more to add, but I can see my cynicism creeping back into my replies.

note: since my example is a hot-button, I want to ensure that I am clear about my own stance, here. I do not care how anyone identifies, that's up to them and not for me to decide for them. All I care about is whether or not they're a good person, treating others with the same kindness, respect and support that they would like to receive. Bottom line.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-10-16 13:16:19+00:00
Right on, for code examples for my writing and my own ‘gentleman scientist’ experiments I stick with gemini-cli and codex.

For play time, I literally love experimenting with small local models. I am an old man, and I have always liked tools that ‘make me happy’ while programming like Emacs, Lisp languages, and using open source because I like to read other people’s code. But, for getting stuff done, for now gemini-cli and codex hit a sweet spot for me.
by gorwell | 2025-10-16 13:16:21+00:00
You can do taxes for free most of the time. Millions of us do every year, and the IRS estimates that 70% of tax payers could file for free.

> Why must every service and thing in the US must be a private profit making thing?

It isn't. There are roughly 2 million nonprofits. "Nonprofit organizations play a significant role in the US economy. In 2022, there were 1.97 million nonprofits operating in the US"

And there are endless government programs and millions of government employees. The federal government alone spends over $6 trillion of our money, and money we don't have, per year, and most of it is on mandatory social programs.

"About 60% of all federal spending is categorized as mandatory spending — which amounted to $3.8 trillion last year. This spending is essentially on autopilot because it funds programs whose eligibility rules and benefit formulas are set in law. This consists mostly of programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Veterans care."

https://usafacts.org/just-the-facts/budget/
by buzzovich | 2025-10-16 13:16:27+00:00
You're right about substrate. But you're missing the point about utility.

I'm not debating the term is wrong. It IS wrong. I agree. THat's kind of my point. I'm saying a wrong term is yielding measurably positive results and it's being dismissed because it's not right.

For whatever reason, the term works. When "Cognition" is paired with Plato's modes and a single line of guidance, there's a big point improvement.

Measurable.

Replicable across models.

It seems, from what I can tell, to give the LLM the right lens to look through from the outset and therefore sends it down the right path early on.

If it's wax fruit, prove it. I am totally up for being proved wrong and someone showing me that those few words don't make a big difference.
by andrewl-hn | 2025-10-16 13:16:35+00:00
Cargo does the de-duplication, but only up to a point. If two packages request the same dependency with semver ranges that have a common overlap (say, `1.4` and `1.6`) then it will use a single package for both (say, `1.7.12`). But if they request semver-incompatible versions (`2.1` and `1.6`) then cargo will use both.
by erichocean | 2025-10-16 13:17:24+00:00
How are you mapping from "click this element" (presumably obtained via a VLM) to the actual DOM locator that refers to it?

I guess Playwright can do it in "record" mode; I'm curious how you do it from a Chrome extension.

Spitballing here, you inject an event filter on the page and when the click happens, grab the element and run some code to synthesize a selector that just refers to that element? (Presumably you could just reuse Playwright's element-to-locator code at this point.)
by newsclues | 2025-10-16 13:17:31+00:00
Your right it’s different, but the problem is that I want a fair and consistent standard.

Shouldn’t telling the truth and apologize when you “accidentally” misinform the public be the standard?

They collectively have proven themselves to be untrustworthy and now they can’t be trusted anymore but some people continue to pretend they are authoritative sources of truth despite the facts that they help lie America into a war that kill many and caused massive financial damage to the economy.

I’m saying that people and corporations should be held accountable and responsible for their actions?
by p0w3n3d | 2025-10-16 13:17:38+00:00
bit rot... What about good filesystems? Like ZFS which has checksums. Or maybe a zip with additional recovery data... I wonder if there is a ready-made solution that allows this to not require me scripting (and losing those scripts later or failing to run them because Bash was upgraded from 4 to 5 and Python from 3 to 4)
by Tangurena2 | 2025-10-16 13:17:44+00:00
Most fraud about car sales is to claim a lower price in order to skip on sales taxes collected by the states' motor vehicle agencies. Not all states charge a sales tax on individual-to-individual sales. Here in Kentucky, the state constitution says that taxes have to be charged on the assessed value, so part of the annual registration is based on the assessed value (min $100 for boats or $200 for cars/trucks). I used to work for KY's Transportation Cabinet (combo DMV + highway dept).
by Qwuke | 2025-10-16 13:17:50+00:00
Is Amazon Linux a common Linux distro? If so, it's often distributed with AGPL licensed code, I can think of a few pieces of software it has that are AGPL. They haven't been able to do internal forks of Ghostscript, if they were ever to do so, because of AGPL.

Debian is also the other more common one distros with AGPL software included with it.

Other things like forks of BerkleyDB by hyperscalers have all ended up as FOSS because of AGPL. Presumably this is a better example of where non-AGPL code would have not actually seen the light of day.
by robenkleene | 2025-10-16 13:17:50+00:00
Yeah, I understand this perspective.

But just once, I'd love to hear someone reply to this and say they really love something like OneNote, and list out why they think it's a "higher quality" piece of software than Apple Notes. Personally, while I observe a lot of bugs in Apple's software, really that's true of all the (GUI in particular) software I use. If I go across all the software I use, Apple's offerings are almost universally on the top end by the metrics I'd measure for quality compared to similar offerings (e.g., something like OneNote is directly comparable to Apple Notes, whereas a custom built notes app that doesn't sync across devices most certainly is not). Apple's apps are usually well-designed, performant, bug free (relatively speaking, there are always bugs in software, but if I put, say, OmniFocus and Reminders next to each other [two apps that have the same purpose that I use every day, Reminders overall has less bugs than OmniFocus]), and they're mostly consistent with each other.

Putting all that together, the breadth of Apple's software offerings, and they're consistent high quality relative to similar offerings from other companies, makes Apple seem to me like the best company in the world today at making GUI software! Which doesn't mean they're perfect, and doesn't mean they can't do better, but is still super impressive.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-16 13:18:15+00:00
I just decided to pull mine up... I live in Florida, and I had no idea of the following:

* Air conditioning: In 1851, Dr. John Gorrie invented a machine to cool air, which laid the groundwork for modern air conditioning and refrigeration

* Gatorade: The sports drink was developed at the University of Florida to help the football team rehydrate.

* Sunscreen: Benjamin Green invented the first commercial sunscreen in 1944.

* IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC): A team in Boca Raton developed the first IBM PC in 1981.

* Supercapacitor: A new type of supercapacitor was invented in Florida. (2013)

There's a bunch more, seems like a number of them have to do with the weather ;) I knew about Gatorade, but had no idea about the rest.

This makes me kind of wish I had this when I was in public school as part of one of our courses, it's kind of nice to learn about the innovation around you, especially when you don't exactly live in a place known for it. I think its inspiring to a younger mind to know you can be creative and innovative living just about anywhere.
by ciscow | 2025-10-16 13:18:16+00:00
Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback this is super helpful You’re exactly right: a lot of users are doing “vibe redlining” with AI tools, which saves time but definitely adds risk. I’ll make sure the site messaging calls that out more directly that ContractAnalize helps people save money on lawyers and reduce risk by offering a more reliable first pass.

Great point too about credibility. I’m planning to add a clear About section to highlight the team’s background and experience in both law and AI so visitors know this isn’t just a hobby project but built with real legal and product expertise behind it.

Appreciate you taking the time to share this it’s exactly the kind of feedback that helps make the product stronger.
by churchill | 2025-10-16 13:18:55+00:00
>Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth?

How could you not? At whatever point a crew member become disillusioned, it'll likely be too late to turnaround. There'll be a high incidences of interplanetary depression/psychosis as people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc. But, nothing counselling won't be able to take care of.

Right now, state propaganda is powerful enough to make young people line up to kill and be killed. So, a little interplanetary panic can be taken care of. In extreme cases, you can have protocols for any crew members who attempts to munity to euthanatized to guarantee the success of the mission.

My .02.