MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by undecisive | 2025-10-17 14:49:54+00:00
Yeah, certainly tickles a few neurons.

I feel like BDFLs are akin to the concept of village elders; they're not immune to corruption or scandal, but they often have this beloved status that can paper over a lot of cracks. That's probably dependant on their leadership style - the hard headed (Linus, DHH) vs the grandfatherly (Matz, Van Rossum).

Which, going back to your note on geopolitics, leads me to wonder: Is it just that more power corrupts more, or is it that (modern-day definitions of) democracy require a desire for power? I guess as the "FL" part of "BDFL" comes to bite more of the communities, we'll see better how different succession styles have different effects. I also wonder if the analytical nature of the individuals within the "populations", and inability to police defectors will mean uprisings will be more successful, either in causing BDFL attitude adjustments, or just overturning the community completely (for example, there's already a lot of momentum for a complete fork of Rails)

(Edit: having submitted this, I now see others have had very similar thoughts! Definitely an excellent conversation topic)
Show HN: Arete – AI text actions from any browser selection
by olek | 2025-10-17 14:49:59+00:00
Hey!

I built Arete (https://getarete.app) because I kept wanting to ask questions about random text I found online. A word I didn't know, a paragraph I wanted simplified, a quote I wanted fact-checked. Each time I'd copy it, open a new tab, paste it, and come back. It got tedious.

Arete lets you select any text on any webpage and instantly send it somewhere useful. Translate it, explain it like you're 5, fact-check it with sources, or search for it on Wikipedia, YouTube, Stack Overflow—whatever makes sense for that text.

You set up the actions you want. Some people use it for research (Perplexity), others for code help (Stack Overflow), translation, shopping on Amazon, finding music on Spotify. It's just a lightweight tooltip that appears on text selection.

It's a side project. The extension works and is ready to try. Happy to answer questions and get feedback on whether this solves a real problem for people.

https://getarete.app
by GuB-42 | 2025-10-17 14:50:08+00:00
And even then, beware of scams, even in France. "Real small bakeries" is not a guarantee. Simple "croissants" don't have to use butter, and they often don't. "Croissants au beurre" have butter in it, but it may be only a small quantity, the rest being a mix of vegetable fats. They are usually better than the ones with margarine, but you still don't have the real thing. You need to make sure to get "croissants pur beurre", or even better "croissants pur beurre AOP".

Many bakeries have both, the "pur beurre" are more expensive, obviously.

When you look at the raw ingredient price, it makes a lot of sense that they want to use alternatives to butter. Margarine is about 4€/kg, fake butter 8€/kg, real butter 12€/kg, there is about 25g of it in a croissant. Considering that a croissant is about 1€ (outside of big cities / tourist places), that's a significant fraction of the cost.

Also, most bakeries in France don't make their own croissants, pur beurre or not. Even for those that make their own bread. It is quite a complicated process and most bakeries just buy them frozen from a factory and only do the baking. Now, it doesn't mean they are bad, I prefer it when croissants are fully made on site, but I can make do with industrial dough, "pur beurre" however is non negotiable.
by LinXitoW | 2025-10-17 14:51:03+00:00
If people are only worth 10/hr, but they need 15/hr to not die, the state has to step in to subsidize the exploitative business. Alternatively, the employees turn to crime, which is again a costly externality the company causes, or they die and the companies back to not having employees (or customers).

I absolutely agree that some of the regulations are bad, and in general building more is the main solution to these problems. Zoning and parking space requirements are especially egregious in the USA.

The example in this thread, of "co-locating" everyday commercial with residential, is another part of the solution. I can move further away from the city if the daily necessities are easier to reach. This would also help with traffic, which would then help people needing to commute.
by shevy-java | 2025-10-17 14:51:26+00:00
There was - see old systemd discussions. For instance, how devuan was started.

It is not 1:1 comparable though. Ruby, python etc... have a much more varied community. People contribute code. Only few contribute to the linux kernel directly. There are many more who write "apps", so this could be comparable. Still it feels different to me, since a language community is different to a community that uses different programming languages.

> Perhaps the Ruby community is suffering the curse of having lived with reliable Internet for so long they never had to solve the problem of building up automatic package mirrors?

No, I think it is more that people never anticipated that corporations could take over projects. This has become more of a problem in the last years. Who controls github, for instance?

> This just feels like a lot of words and energy burned on a problem that ought to be as simple as "Here's the package, here's its checksum, go to town."

This is the issue of decentralized hosting versus top-down control. Ruby didn't have that problem in the past. It became more of an issue in the last some years. See DHH having an old tweet where he pointed out that he wants more control; I think this was from 2018. I don't remember it fully but it is on the ruby reddit.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-10-17 14:51:28+00:00
It’s clear a lot of good fundamental innovation is still happening in the EV space (as opposed to IMO negative innovation in digital features in ICE cars). This is why I leased my electric car; my family’s pattern is to keep a car forever (ICE car is circa 2009) and I don’t want to be stuck with something. I think resale value partially captures this problem.
by infecto | 2025-10-17 14:52:30+00:00
This smells like “Dropbox is just rsync”. No skin in the game I think there are pros and cons to each but a Postgres cluster can be as easy as a couple clicks or an entry into a provisioning script. I don’t believe you would be able to architect the same setup with a simple single server ssh and a simple bash script. Unless you already wrote a bash script that magically provisions the cluster across various machines.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-17 14:52:38+00:00
> Zorin Connect is also awesome if you use your PC to watch TV on your TV

Zorin Connect is a fork of KDE Connect. If you're on KDE, you can use the standard KDE connect app to the same effect. I haven't tested it recently, but I'm pretty sure the Zorin Connect app will work with normal KDE Connect computers as well.

If you're on Gnome (like default Ubuntu) you could use plain KDE Connect but I find its UI integration rather lacking, as with all KDE applications on Gnome. However, there are re-implementations like good old GSConnect (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/) or Valent (made by the same person who made GSConnect, https://valent.andyholmes.ca/) will replicate most of the Zorin Connect functionality as well.

If you're on something else, pick whatever KDE Connect implementation works best for your desktop, there are plenty of options and most of them work seamlessly!
by busterarm | 2025-10-17 14:52:40+00:00
Even if you're not an old-timer and don't remember what Ruby Together was like, the AWS root password changing shenanigans, presumably done by Arko, is enough of a red flag that nothing he's associated with has any credibility.

No serious business with real (business) customers will accept that kind of risk and gem.coop will never be a thing outside of hobbyists.
by nickysielicki | 2025-10-17 14:52:52+00:00
The military carve outs for this need to be considered. I realize the desire to prevent accidents like the one that is motivating this, but I live near Fort McCoy and I run an adsb feeder. I hear jets training every day over my head, but they never have their transponders on. This is a good thing as far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to ever be accused of providing our enemies with data on the flight maneuvers they are practicing. I just like seeing the crop dusters do their thing on the map.
by gsahu | 2025-10-17 14:53:02+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m building Cyphora, a decentralized cloud that stores encrypted file fragments across multiple nodes, but without using blockchain or tokens.

The idea is simple: privacy and control without complexity.

• Demo (2:30): [YouTube link] • Landing page: cyphora.tech

I’d love feedback on: – What makes you trust or distrust a decentralized system like this? – Is the onboarding experience clear enough?

Thanks for taking a look — happy to answer questions!
by hereaiham | 2025-10-17 14:53:05+00:00
In 2017, the United States Department of Education accused Frank of potentially misleading customers. In 2018, Javice was sued by Adi Omesy, a co-founder of Frank, over wage theft in Israel. And much more.

How did the bank ignore all those red flags? and how do serial criminals and fraudulent 'founders' like her kept getting praise in the media and funding for their scams? Seems more like a flaw in the system that rewards sociopaths.
by groestl | 2025-10-17 14:53:38+00:00
Deploying to bare metal Hetzner for years, very happy with the service. Smart hands work fast and reliable. As soon as you got your stack worked out (which admittedly takes a while), maintaining bare metal is not much different from maintaining cloud, apart from swapping disks sometimes. And the cost is so low, in comparison, it's ridiculous.
by shevy-java | 2025-10-17 14:53:44+00:00
I don't think BDFLs are a problem. Nobody questioned, say, guido design of python or matz' design of ruby as such. The issue here is primarily about who controls the ruby ecosystem. Interestingly python also had a somewhat similar discussion in the past; you can see this indirectly if you look at pypi:

https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2023-05-25-securing-pypi-with-2f...

See that question asked:

"Isn't supply chain security a corporate concern?"

He tries to bring arguments to invalidate that. And failed in an epic manner. Now people are more suspicious than before. Kind of strange to see, too.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-17 14:53:59+00:00
It depends on the docs and what they're documenting. Sometimes I read them in their entirety, sometimes I ignore them.

Most of the time, I skim them to familiarize myself with what they're covering and where they're covering it. Then when I need to clear something up or learn something, I have a clue about where in the docs to look (or to look elsewhere).
by mamcx | 2025-10-17 14:54:10+00:00
A LOT of websites don't need a "front end" framework (apart of the one that is already there: html, css).

Could need some js library and that is a maybe.

In general:

If is like a eCommerce site, blog, wikipedia, forum? Not need

If is like a Game, Paint app, form builder? Need.

And how you learn it? Not use a framework, and try to stay with things more minimal, like tailwindcss.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-17 14:54:15+00:00
Disagreement alone should not result in downvotes but I guess that's what happens when you do it among jerks lol. As for being condescending, I really like reductio ad absurdum and I think that rubs people wrong. Also somehow, the downvotes seem to pile up the more I reply, as a quirk of how they are calculated...
by rich_kilmer | 2025-10-17 14:54:17+00:00
Ruby Central started in 2001. I was one of the early Board members, along with Chad Fowler and David Alan Black. We put on every Ruby conference until Ruby became more popular to support multiple conferences. We started coding RubyGems (although the name originated in 2001 at the first RubyConf in Florida) in 2003 at the RubyConf in Austin TX. We sat around a table the first night with a CVS repo on a USB drive and passed it around and committed code until we had a functioning gem command. I demoed it in my talk the next day with the first "gem install". Gem versioning, gemspec, gem command, gem server were all built that first night. Obviously tons of changes since then!
by api | 2025-10-17 14:54:56+00:00
How do you deprogram your devs and ops people from the learned helplessness of cloud native ideology?

I've found that it's almost impossible to even hire people who aren't terrified of the idea of self-hosting. This is deeply bizarre for someone who installed Linux from floppy disks in 1994, but most modern devs have fully swallowed the idea that cloud handles things for them that mere mortals cannot handle.

This, in turn, is a big reason why companies use cloud in spite of the insane markup: it's hard to staff for anything else. Cloud has utterly dominated the developer and IT mindset.
by shevy-java | 2025-10-17 14:55:08+00:00
The supply chain attack is not the only argument here, though.

For instance, who effectively controls the ruby ecosystem? See ad-hoc restrictions such as 100.000 downloads - past that point you are disowned from your own gem. I always felt that was a direct attack on independent developers. They could have forked those gems just fine (the licence permits this for most gems after all), but nope, they forbid you to remove your own (!!!) code.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-10-17 14:55:13+00:00
It is exceptionally rare for a human to care about the epistemological roots of any claim

I would go so far as to say that the median human with a 100IQ doesn’t even understand the concept of what constitutes a “fact” or how you would dicriminate fact from opinion or has even heard the word “epistemology”

Expecting anything close to that in the context of celebrity gossip… well at that point the author needs to manage his own expectations of humanity
by addicted | 2025-10-17 14:55:14+00:00
Yeah, your local friendly police officer isn't gonna do that.

They're gonna pay Anduril, Palantir, and a whole host of other business or consulting firms a ton of your money to do that.

The criticism that "it's technically too challenging for the police department therefore its sci-fi" is extremely silly given that the current article literally is about private companies that are building surveillance networks that they will then sell to the police.

Which makes the entire situation a lot worse.
by pear01 | 2025-10-17 14:55:20+00:00
Funny to accuse someone of "spreading misinformation" while agreeing there are instances where they are correct, then asserting there are some instances where they are incorrect while giving no concrete examples yourself.

So saying something that is correct but not for all cases (which ones would those be) is now "spreading misinformation"?

I'm not sure what joy you derive from dismissing statements you already acknowledge have an element of veracity with some blanket label of "misinformation", but you should probably reconsider it.
by Apreche | 2025-10-17 14:55:34+00:00
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.

For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.

Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.

Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.
by jerf | 2025-10-17 14:56:32+00:00
"I think the only way desktop Linux will ever approach something an "ordinary" computer user could use is if a corporation puts significant money behind the development effort."

Dunno, I used to think that, but between Microsoft putting significant effort into degrading the Windows 11 experience and ever more stuff moving to the web, I'm not so sure about that anymore. My house is nearly full Linux now. The major thing that gets the gaming computer booted into Windows now is VR, and my oldest son is sometimes annoyed by needing to use Windows for some theater tech stuff. So it's not like we don't still have some things Linux can't do. But increasingly at our house it is the Windows-only stuff we find the annoying exception rather than the other way around. It's nowhere near as impossible as it was 15-20 years ago. The falling Windows is getting awfully close to meeting the rising Linux.
by losvedir | 2025-10-17 14:56:33+00:00
Very cool! As a professional Elixir developer who loves types, I'm so happy to see them coming more and more to the language.

I have a question about how the type inference works. Dialyzer, which also attempts to do type inference, uses "success" typing which means it will not flag something if it could work. It tries to minimize false positives. In practice, this means it hardly ever catches anything for me (and even when it does warn about something, it's usually not real anyway!), so I don't find it that useful.

Does this approach use "success" typing as well? I found the `String.Chars` protocol example interesting, since I've had my fair share of crashes from bad string interpolations. But in the example, it's _clearly_ wrong, and will fail every time. That's not that useful to me because any time that code is exercised (e.g. in a simple test) it would be caught. What's more useful is if some particular code path results in trying to interpolate something wrong.

I know under the hood, the Elixir type system has something to do with unions of possible values, so it is tracking all the things that "could" be passed to a function. Will it warn only if all of them fail, or if any of them fail?
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-17 14:56:37+00:00
It's a heavily themed Gnome distro with extra extensions and branded apps to supplement the experience.

Some themes are free, others (like the IMO rather complete Windows and macOS lookalike themes) require the paid version of the OS. I think that's an excellent way to get financial support for a product like this.

There are also some other nice-to-have integrations, like a pre-installed detection mechanism for certain setup.exes that will suggest Linux alternatives rather than opening them in the pre-installed Wine runtime.
by webstrand | 2025-10-17 14:56:53+00:00
The lawmakers did not have any involvement. The executive branch unilaterally abused its power to declare that encryption was a munition, to work around the fact it had no other power to restrict it without convincing the legislature to actually make a law.

If you go by the common interpretation of "munitions" and by and large the contents of that list, then it clearly does was not intended to include mathematics.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-17 14:57:20+00:00
I got hit by a car in a hit and run, and despite there being dozens of cameras, and me getting the footage of the car hitting me and driving off (not clear shot on license plate), the police immediately called it a cold case and refused to even try to get footage from any other cameras nearby - so I'll hold my breath that they use this for anything to prevent crime.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-10-17 14:57:31+00:00
A decent newspaper can afford this because it also has a fact checker, a copyeditor, a line editor, and an expectation that a journalist will be fired[1] if they systematically fuck up the substance of their writing. It’s difficult to find a decent newspaper.

[1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-10-17 14:57:33+00:00
With AWS you are paying for the ancillary things; pretty good network, reliable portal, reliable management APIs, nearly perfectly commoditized products (one VM like any other, though in practice I observe minor exceptions to this all the time predominantly with worse connectivity to other services or disk). But the performance bare metal is good (AWS offers bare metal too but at insane price point because they only buy enormous servers).
by davidkwast | 2025-10-17 14:57:38+00:00
A deep-dive into composite color artifacts on NTSC. How did early computers sometimes generate color without an actual color signal? The Apple 2 line is considered the pioneer of this technique, where ALL of its colors were generated using this odd glitch of the NTSC standard. But color artifacts were exploited even earlier. Today we explore NTSC signals, color generation (both the proper way, and this odd "artifact" way), how artifacting was exposed by the hardware to early software developers, and the history of how early computers adopted this technique, including Home Pong, the Atari 8-bit computers, the entire Apple 2 line (other than the gs), the IBM PC CGA graphics card, and the TRS-80 Color Computer. Also, what's up with the color swapping that happens on the CoCo 1 and 2 when you hit the restart button?
by ashtonshears | 2025-10-17 14:58:23+00:00
You can make that. The only ai coding tools i have liked is openai codex and claude code. I would start with working with it to create a design document in markdown to plan the project. Then i would close the app to reset context, and tell it to read that file, and create an implementation plan for the project in various phases. Then i would close context, and have it start implementing. I dont always like that many steps, but for a new user it can help see ways to use the tools
by jon-wood | 2025-10-17 14:58:28+00:00
> But instead I watch Claude struggling to find a directory it expects to see and running random npm commands until it comes to the conclusion that, somehow, node_modules was corrupted mysteriously and therefore it needs to wipe everything node related and manually rebuild the project config by vague memory.

In fairness I have on many an occasion worked with real life software developers who really should know better deciding the problem lies anywhere but their initial model of how this should work. Quite often that developer has been me, although I like to hope I've learned to be more skeptical when that thought crosses my mind now.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-17 14:58:51+00:00
> “One possibility is that they were looking for caves with running water inside,” Muotri said. “Caves contain lead, so they were all contaminated.

I'm not buying this claim that all caves contain lead (throughout Europe, at least). Europe is not a wonderland for lead mining. Southern Missouri (USA) historically produced a significant amount of the world's lead supply, but no early hominids evolved there.

And I don't understand the figure early in the article. It seems to show that Homo sapiens evolved with quite a lot of lead exposure, while H. neanderthalis did not - so they didn't need our "immunity" to lead.

Finally,

> “If all humans have this newer mutation in all corners of the world, very strong genetic pressure must have selected for it in our species.”

Or, it was present in the bottleneck die-off of H. sapiens 800kya, and hasn't mutated since. The added complexity in organoids in the lab is interesting, but the mere presence of a single base pair in a gene doesn't guarantee that it is genetically important.

> “The FOXP2 gene is identical between us and the Neanderthals, but it's how the gene is regulated by NOVA1 that likely contributes to language differences.”

That at least does underline the importance of this genetic difference.