MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-22 21:50:46+00:00
> The long-term end goal for Microsoft is to lock down Windows and force signed code

Defender already forces binaries to be signed by developers that spent money on certs from Microsoft-certified CAs.

Pull those certs, or don't use them at all, and 99.999% of users will not figure out how to run what they want, because the OS will trick them into thinking they're about to get owned by Russian hackers for just thinking about running something that wasn't blessed by Microsoft.
by pryelluw | 2025-10-22 21:50:50+00:00
People generally don’t take the time to learn the framework and miss out on the tooling it provides. select_related for example. If I had a dollar for every project I’ve been hired to work on that didn’t use it, well, I actually do.

Also, people in general don’t seem to be able to do more than very basic SQL, so creating views is seen as a little known performance “trick”.

In general, people who don’t read the manual.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-22 21:50:54+00:00
If Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus, what happens when his estate sells majority control to pay the inheritance and estate taxes?

With federal taxes of 40% over $15 million, there's no way his estate maintains majority control, no matter Gabe's good intentions. After that, we can look forward to Microsoft Steam. Or, if the FTC is annoyed, Amazon Steam.
Ask HN: End-to-end encrypted LLM chat (open- and closed-model)
by 5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN | 2025-10-22 21:51:30+00:00
I’m exploring a software layer—analogous to public/private-key crypto—so a user can converse with an LLM where prompts and responses remain unreadable to all intermediaries, including the model host. (I mean “cipher” in the cryptographic sense.)

Two cases: Open-weights model: ensure the operator still can’t read prompts/responses. Closed, hosted model: true E2EE so even the provider can’t inspect content.

Topics we can discuss: Best near-term path: TEEs with attestation, FHE/HE, MPC/split inference, PIR for retrieval, differential privacy, or hybrids? How to handle key exchange/rotation for forward secrecy? Practical performance/accuracy limits (e.g., non-linearities, KV-cache, streaming)? Minimal viable architecture and realistic threat model? Any prior art or teams you’d point me to?

Please DM if you are interested in working with me.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-22 21:52:31+00:00
Bazzite does include the Steam frontend but that's a proprietary system, it's not something that the Linux/FLOSS community came up with. The KDE folks are starting to look into remote-control focused "10-foot" media center interfaces (see the Plasma Bigscreen project) that are also somewhat applicable to gamepad control (though these handheld devices generally come with touchscreens too, and this creates additional affordances) but that's a bit of a too little and too late situation. We need far more than that to make this novel class of devices usable for genuine production uses.
by RandomBacon | 2025-10-22 21:52:37+00:00
> 1m+

Is that one thousand plus? (Certainly not one million plus I hope.)

Either amount is pretty bad, although I suppose if you are a well-known person that people are trying to reach, that would make sense.

If not, and it's a bunch of newsletters or spam, I think you should try to make better email choices. (Be more discretionary with how you give out or publish your email address(es).)
by andai | 2025-10-22 21:52:40+00:00
On the subject of yt-dlp, I use it to get (timestamped) transcripts from YouTube, to shove into LLMs for summaries.

ytsub() { yt-dlp \ --write-sub \ --write-auto-sub \ --sub-lang "en.*" \ --skip-download \ "$1" && vtt2txt } ytsub [youtube_url]

Where vtt2txt is a python script — slightly too long to paste here — which strips out the subtitle formatting, leaving a (mostly) human readable transcript.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-10-22 21:52:47+00:00
Layoffs are everywhere. Millions of employees have had to do more without any change in compensation. My own team has decreased from six to two, but I am not seeing any increased pay for being more load bearing.

I will always pour one out for the fellow wage slave (more for the people who suddenly lost a job), but I am admittedly a bit less sympathetic to those with in demand skills receiving top tier compensation. More for the teachers, nurses, DOGEd FDA employees, whatever who was only ever taking in a more modest wage, but is continually expected to do more with less.

Management cutting headcount and making the drones work harder is not a unique story to Facebook.
by Izkata | 2025-10-22 21:52:56+00:00
> I mean if you really need super strong isolation, you can always create a copy of the library object; metaprogramming, dynamic classes, etc, all make it really easy to even, say, create a duplicate class object with references to the original method implementations. Or decorated ones. Or countless other approaches.

> My point isn't that I don't see problems that could be solved by this; my point is that I can't think of any problems that this solves, that wouldn't be better solved by things that don't do any innards-fiddling in what is arguably the most sharply-edged part of python: packaging and imports.

All these examples have the dependency order wrong, and you're right on those - it's simpler to wrap them somehow. But this is doing something different, that is either much harder or outright impossible with those methods: Tweaking something internal to the module while leaving its interface alone. This is shown in both their examples where they modify the TextWrapper object but then use it through the library's wrap() function, and modify the Session object but then just use the standard get() interface to requests.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-10-22 21:53:23+00:00
I love the idea of my Steam Deck, but most steam games just aren't make for tiny 720 screens. I'm an old man now, I can't read tiny fonts.

Also, the face buttons are just to far to the right. My thumb will begin aching after 15 mins or so. Other controllers are far more comfortable.

To be honest. I like my Playdate more than my Steam Deck.
by griffzhowl | 2025-10-22 21:53:44+00:00
Yes, from this very same FA,

"Back in 2019, we demonstrated that a quantum computer could solve a problem that would take the fastest classical supercomputer thousands of years."

The actual article has much more measured language, and in the conclusion section gives three criteria for "practical quantum advantage":

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6

"(1) The observable can be experimentally measured with the proper accuracy, in our case with an SNR above unity. More formally, the observable is in the bounded-error quantum polynomial-time (BQP) class.

(2) The observable lies beyond the reach of both exact classical simulation and heuristic methods that trade accuracy for efficiency.

[...]

(3) The observable should yield practically relevant information about the quantum system.

[...] we have made progress towards (1) and (2). Moreover, a proof-of-principle for (3) is demonstrated with a dynamic learning problem."

So none of the criteria they define for "practical quantum advantage" are fully met as far as I understand it.

The key word is "practical" - you can get quantum advantage from precisely probing a quantum system with enough coherent qubits that it would be intractable on a classical computer. But that's exactly because a quantum computer is a quantum system; and because of superposition and entanglement, a linear increase in the number of qubits means an exponential increase in computational complexity for a classical simulation. So if you're able to implement and probe a quantum system of sufficient complexity (in this case ~40 qubits rather than the thousands it would take for Shor's algorithm), that is ipso facto "quantum advantage".

It's still an impressive engineering feat because of the difficulty in maintaining coherence in the qubits with a precisely programmable gate structure that operates on them, but as far as I can see (and I've just scanned the paper and had a couple of drinks this evening) what it really means is that they've found a way to reliably implement in hardware a quantum system that they can accurately extract information from in a way that would be intractable to simulate on classical machines.

I might well be missing some subtleties because of aforementioned reasons and I'm no expert, but it seems like the press release is unsurprisingly in the grayzone between corporate hype and outright deceit (which as we know is a large and constantly expanding multi-dimensional grayzone of heretofore unimagined fractal shades of gray)
by caconym_ | 2025-10-22 21:55:04+00:00
> there is no reason to expect a modern day lunar mission to cost the same relatively

By some rough math, the cost of the Artemis program as a fraction of national budget is on the order of 1/10 that of Apollo in its day (comparing entire program costs to national budgets in representative years). So no, I'm not sure anyone would expect (or accept) that, and indeed it does not seem to be the case. It would be even cheaper if Congress had not mandated that SLS be built from repurposed STS parts (and later that Artemis fly on SLS), and if Congress and the executive branch had generally maintained a realistic and consistent vision for the program since work on it began (arguably with Constellation in the 2000s).
by immibis | 2025-10-22 21:55:10+00:00
By "sanitise" what's really meant is usually "escape". User typed their display name as <script>. You want the screen to say their display name, which is <script>. Therefore you send &lt;script&gt;. That's not their display name - that's just what you write in HTML to get their display name to appear on the screen. You shouldn't store it in the database in the display_name column.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-22 21:55:11+00:00
> Which one are we talking about?

You tell me. AVX and SSE are at-most two discrete hardware blocks and more often one. Apple Silicon, in it's genius RISC glory, possesses:

1) A Neural Engine

2) ARM NEON as Accelerate

3) Generic GPU SIMD as MPS

4) MatMul units in M5+ hardware

It's an impressive amount of fragmentation for a single vendor that supposedly knows what they're doing. Even Nvidia doesn't suffer from this level of identity crisis, despite burning the compute/raster candle at both ends. Apple's approach explains their NASDAQ performance but not much else. It's a bit baffling.
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-22 21:55:54+00:00
> I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP

It shouldn't. For some cases it helps, but other times it doesn't. Sometimes it helps but there would be better ways to do it, making it on a simpler protocol or making an entirely new protocol (which might or might not use TCP; sometimes it is better to use TCP and sometimes not) depending on the specific case.

> Stuff like file sharing or groupware, mail, calendars, and so on—these things could be a lot more efficient and don’t really need the overhead of JSON as the message interchange format, IMHO

I dislike JSON. I think it has many problems, and that DER is a better format.

(There are also the "small web" protocols such as Gemini and Scorpion and Spartan and Titan, which avoids some of the complexity of HTTP; I had considered using DER-over-Scorpion rather than JSON-over-HTTP. It is also possible to use SSH, although SSH does not have virtual hosting.)
by Gigachad | 2025-10-22 21:56:51+00:00
I hardly ever do that, but the one time I did (for Minecraft) I did just drop down to desktop mode and used the trackpad and touch screen. This wasn’t really to do with Linux though. Minecraft does not provide any way to install and log in with controller support.

After I installed it one time, I added it to Steam and could launch and update it with a controller. In theory GOG could integrate with Bazzite to offer a controller friendly store and UI. But considering they haven’t even bothered with a desktop Linux client, I’m not holding my breath.
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-22 21:57:10+00:00
> Notoriously so, it's why MIME types and MIME encodings get so complicated.

I made up ULFI because I thought MIME has some problems.

> JSON may not look efficient

Efficiency is not the only issue; there is also the consideration of e.g. what data types you want to use. JSON does not have a proper integer type, does not have a proper binary data type (you must encode it as hex or base64 instead), and is limited about what character sets can be used.

(Also, like other text formats, escaping will be needed.)

> I feel like "JSON over HTTP" is a subtle improvement over "custom text formats over telnet"

I think it can be, depending on the specific use; sometimes it isn't, and will make it worse. (HTTP does have the advantage of having URLs and virtual hosting, although I think it adds too much complexity more than should be needed.) However, I still think that DER is generally better than JSON.

> HTTP isn't the worst bootstrap layer the internet could use to build new protocols and apps on top of.

I think it depends on the specific application. However, even then, I think there are better ways than using HTTP with the complexity that it involves, most of which should not be necessary (even though a few parts are helpful, such as virtual hosting).
by qustrolabe | 2025-10-22 21:57:43+00:00
Okay if author so ignorant and doesn't even see difference and just genuinely hates this topic why even make an article? "Look see this new things someone else exited about, I don't give a damn about it so much that I'll write post about that, I'll even completely ignore figuring out what's different about it myself and just spew some surface level ignorant overview"
by shawndrost | 2025-10-22 21:58:51+00:00
This article is a midwit dismissal; it may contain valid corrections but it is ignorant on the core topic at hand. This is a shame, because it is extremely interesting and under-reported topic!

The core thesis of the book (per Claude) is: "Traumatic experiences become encoded in the body's nervous system, muscles, and organs, not just in conscious memory."

The perfect exposition of the concept is downthread, in a comment by 'neom, which I will excerpt: "[The acupuncturist] moved the needle, [I did] more crying, deeper, deeper crying, he kept moving the needle till I thought all the needles would burst out of me from how deeply I wanted to cry but he told me not to be scared and I thought I was going to die. Anyway, he left me alone in that room for about 35 minutes while I wailed, I mean, awkwardly wailed. After everything started to calm inside me, I slowly started to be able to think again, and the thought that was there was the memory of the guy who sexually abused me when I was a kid, moving his hand off my hip." (Thank you for sharing, neom.)

I've had two similar experiences myself in the last year. I haven't read the book and don't know how this subject shows up in the scientific literature, but the proprioceptive experience leaves zero room for doubt about what is happening.

People say lots of dumb and wrong things about trauma. Maybe the book contains some of that, but its titular observation is fascinating, true, and maybe even useful!

I'll close with a related theory of mine, also derived through proprioception: one of the functions of the full-body sob is to reorganize muscular patterns which share an origin with (are identical to?) the emotional origin of the tears.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-22 21:58:53+00:00
What a great way to say to someone that their words could've had some value if they hadn't been too crude/maybe rude and said things in a different manner lol.

I don't agree with the author's standpoint but I can kinda understand it but their passive aggression on the parent comment was just not needed and this clever way of saying it was kinda cool. I learnt something new to say but I am not sure how many ways it would be viable to say this

Any other quotes like this that you might want to share?
by chermi | 2025-10-22 21:59:13+00:00
Ehh, kind of. But at the same time, EMDR works. So revisiting it in a very particular way can help.

However, I concede that there's kind of a hammer and nail problem in therapy. They learn about how much trauma and childhood experience effects a person and tend to laser focus on that because they feel confident doing so. I think there's a certain unhealthines to spending too much time dwelling on the past. Up to some level it's ok, but there should be at least equal focus on the present, future, and agency+self-confidence+self-discovery. Whereas a typical client would not be unreasonable to feel more like a victim given the focus on past experiences and traumas, which naturally reinforces a past-oriented victim mindset. Meanwhile, what most people need is a sense of being able to make things better now and work toward a better future, and practical tools to do so (agency).

Of course, for severe cases, you should probably focus on dealing with the trauma and get the client to a more stable state before taking off the coddling gloves.
by jongjong | 2025-10-22 21:59:30+00:00
I get it though. Big tech's HR sucks big time. You need super intelligent people for this kind of work. You can't have incompetent people with PhDs holding back the real brains.

I don't know how it's possible that companies like Meta could get away with having non-technical people as HR. They need all their HR people to be top software engineers.

You need coding geniuses just to be doing the hiring... And I don't mean people who can solve leetcode puzzles quickly. You need people with a proven track record solving real, difficult problems. Fully completed projects. And that's just to qualify for the HR team IMO... Not worthy enough to be contributing code to such important project. If you don't treat the project as if it is highly important, it won't be.

Normal HR people just fill the company with political nonsense.
Show HN: ChatGemini – Easy tool, >50% cost saved with cache, multi(NL video edit
by Saki2007 | 2025-10-22 21:59:41+00:00
Hi HN,

This started as a simple script for my own workflow to optimize Gemini API costs using caching (often seeing 50-95% savings). Over time, I gradually added features I found useful, including wrappers for Veo 3.1 generation and a natural language video editor I call Flow Engine.

*Fair warning: The current UI and detailed docs are primarily in Traditional Chinese as it originated from personal use.* However, the underlying concepts (especially around caching strategy and the Flow Engine approach to video editing) might be interesting to the HN community.

Hope some find the ideas or code useful. Happy to answer questions!
by paranoidrobot | 2025-10-22 21:59:49+00:00
It gets half-way through the job, but runs out of paint. You load the new paint but instead of continuing, it fills the entire site with a big test print that uses 10% of the paint.

Randomly, it'll run a head cleaning cycle that involves spraying large amounts of paint into the neighbour's driveway before cleaning itself on their lawn.
by someNameIG | 2025-10-22 22:00:01+00:00
I've heard that too. And also Xbox had 2 different DirectX APIs, one more customised to the console, and one that's the standard Windows DirectX which is not as performant. From what I've heard most devs used the latter as it made porting the PC version of the game easier, and sales on Xbox would be tiny compared to PlayStation (1/3rd the install base, sales even less than that due to Xbox users not buying games and just using gamepass) there was less incentive to optimise.
by alephnerd | 2025-10-22 22:00:04+00:00
> Winning the AI race is winning the application war

This. 100% This.

As an early stage VC, the foundational model story is largely over, and understanding how to apply models to applications or how to protect applications leveraging models is the name of the game now.

> Maybe adversarial agents will see improvements...

There is increased appetite now to invest in those models that are taking a reasoning and RL problem.
by ycosynot | 2025-10-22 22:00:13+00:00
Hello, people. You can call me Pierre.

I have been a awkward recluse most of my life. So I figured I'd ask for AI top-tier advice & strategy. I asked it to save lives and give hope. This was generated with Claude 4.5 Sonnet. It's entirely free of course, and I hope you'll find it useful. I thought it had many clever insight & advice.

I'm pretty blown away by the extent of the strategy. Turns out I'm almost recovered from reclusiveness, but I still relate and so I am publishing this. I hope you will give it a chance & check it out. Feel free to share. I'm releasing it as public domain, as free as I can have it.

See you around,

Pierre
by taeric | 2025-10-22 22:00:34+00:00
On this, then, I would generally have a hard time agreeing. I'd be comfortable with the idea that not everyone is very resilient. I'd expect that. If the claim, then, is that there is an absurdly high variance there, I'd agree.

But I'm also growingly sympathetic to the idea that telling people they are, in fact, traumatized, is not healthy. People are, as a rule, susceptible to what they are told. Especially from authority.
by audelair | 2025-10-22 22:00:43+00:00
I heard some second-hand accounts that Hetzner's object storage was pretty slow even in the same location. For email, that sounded not too ideal.

Also, I only have 5 mailboxes right now holding less than 15GB of data total... S3 is still cheaper than the minimum at Hetzner since I don't need anything close to a TB.
by conductr | 2025-10-22 22:02:09+00:00
The you in that example is the Org, or the person leading it. I find that what usually happens is the executive in charge of it all either wises up to the situation or, more commonly, gets replaced by someone with fresh eyes. In any case, it often takes months and years to get to a point of bureaucratic bloat but the corrections can be swift.

I also think on this topic specifically there is so much labor going into low/no ROI projects and it's becoming obvious. That's just like my opinion though, should Meta even be inventing AI or just leveraging other AI products? I think that's likely an open question in their Org - this may be a hint to their latest thoughts on it.
by jamesponddotco | 2025-10-22 22:02:22+00:00
With my wife and I using our OpenRouter account, via the API, we spend about $20 per month. Plus a Claude Pro subscription for Claude Code which I’m meaning to cancel.

We mostly use Claude Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro, with a bit of GPT-5 when I need design work, and Claude Haiku in Home Assistant.

I prefer to use chat instead of agents… I use AI generated code as a starting point, mostly, and chat works better for that.

You’re definitely an outlier. Aside from companies, I don’t know anyone spending that much, to be honest.
by devilsdata | 2025-10-22 22:02:29+00:00
The biggest issue with this is that the developer did not read the documentation on the JavaScript Array prototype from MDN.

If you internet search "mdn array", you get the following as the first result:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Then `⌘F`/`Ctrl-F` "reverse", the first result will be a link to this page:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

The second result will give the non-mutating ES6 version:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Hell, even internet searching "mdn array reverse" will give you `reverse()` as the first result.

---

I genuinely find it concerning that it takes 20 minutes of "Googling" for the "Senior Developer" to work out something that is easily findable in the documentation.

It's especially worrying that they are then advising junior developers to do the exact same thing.

I appreciate that the author is trying to be encouraging. That's valuable, and we need more of it in this industry at the moment. But advising people that it's okay to avoid reading the documentation first is bad advice, in my opinion.