MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluehatbrit | 2025-10-16 16:53:36+00:00
The pace of new things coming to the ecosystem hasn't slowed at all, but it's happening beyond the language itself now.

Just look at projects like Nx, LiveBook, Explorer, Flame, and Nerves. All are making big steps forward and releasing new and interesting things.

As someone who uses the stack daily this is really wonderful. In the elixir world you just don't really have the problem where two tools don't work well together because they're built around very different versions of the language and runtime. I can pick up any elixir based tool and knowledge I can slot it into my tool chain or project and it'll just work.

To me this is even more exciting because it suggests a stable foundation, and makes it easy to adopt new developments. But I appreciate those projects aren't discussed as much on HN.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-16 16:53:39+00:00
> A “Global Progressive Payments Charity“ can’t have much of an effect as PayPal, if any effect at all. “Save American Spaceflight Charity“ can’t rival SpaceX, “Cars For Climate Change Charity“ and Tesla, and I can’t even think of an example for Palantir.

Feels like a misunderstanding.

Charities (by which I understand non-profit organizations that are also not grifts) are by typically anticapitalist: by which I mean, not concerned with accumulating capital beyond the means necessary to operate and fulfill their charitable goals.

Therefore they’re not optimized to produce commodities or extract surplus value. Therefore they tend to be bad at capital-intensive industries. That’s not their competitive advantage.

On the gripping hand, a company is not going to be as successful at feeding the poor, providing legal defense to the destitute, or sheltering the homeless. There’s no profit in any of these categories (in a free market—companies are capable of exploiting government funding through bureaucratic capture, but I digress). A well-run charitable org can.

Author asserts a lot of inefficiency in charities broadly speaking, e.g.:

> Most charities are a quagmire of conflicted interests. In fact, many charities realized intent is opposing their stated intent.

What data is there that shows this, hmm? Feels like an ideology is showing.
by fair_enough | 2025-10-16 16:53:40+00:00
A lot of those design decisions in OSes were influenced by hardware limitations of home computers in the 1970s and 1980s. UNIX may have been around since '71, but Windows NT was designed to expose an API similar to DOS-based Windows 95 (the Win32 API), which in turn was designed around backward compatibility with MS-DOS, which in turn was designed to mimic other other "DOS" OSes from other companies in the late 70s. This ultimately traces back to a time when consumer-grade hardware just couldn't handle all the features we now take for granted, like virtual memory and preemptive multitasking, or even floating point math.

However, Windows NT was also written after machines capable of running Unix cost less than a BMW so a lot of the good folks in Redmond during the early 90s took some liberties to improve on some fundamental design flaws of UNIX.

1. "Everything is a file" is very flexible for writing server applications where the user is expected to know and trust every program, but it is potentially harmful to expose devices as files to non-technical users. Nowadays with UEFI, you can even pipe /dev/zero to /dev/mem or /dev/port and brick your motherboard. There was a patch for this, but there are old servers running old Linux versions in the wild that can be permanently bricked.

2. Arguably, exposing such a wide range of signals to a userland program for it to handle is a design flaw, like the memory fault signals SIGSEGV and SIGBUS. They were not designed for IPC or exception handling, but they ended up being used that way by a lot of developers over the years. I won't start a war to make the case because I can see both sides on that, but #3 below is not controversial at all.

3. NTFS ACLs are a big improvement over UNIX-style ugo-rwx permissions. FWIW, they're also easier to work with than POSIX ACLs.

Just something to think about: the Windows way is radically different because compatibility with ye-olde DOS running on 68k CPUs ruined it in some ways, but in other ways its design was driven by learning from UNIX's mistakes.

despite the confusing name, Win32 is not just a 32-bit libc, it's a 64-bit libc on 64-bit Windows.
by derefr | 2025-10-16 16:54:06+00:00
> because they could make this so annoying to do that nobody would try (for example, stripping symbols).

Many of Apple's OS frameworks are managed code (ObjC/Swift); and in ObjC, calling across a library boundary is always done with a message-send — i.e. a dynamic-dispatch, necessarily symbol-table-based call into an entrypoint of the target library. So anything Apple did to "strip symbols" would make it impossible for them to have one of their libraries call into another of their libraries.
by aeternum | 2025-10-16 16:54:16+00:00
There is evidence from flat worms that electric fields is how cells naturally move in the right directions with purpose. However they produce the fields chemically via ion gradients.

There's a very cool researcher who used this method to create flatworms with heads (or tails) on both sides. https://www.cell.com/biophysj/fulltext/S0006-3495(17)30427-7

IMO the issue is with unhealthy people, things like poor circulation reduces the body's ability to produce the natural ion gradients and thus why the external electric field helps.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-16 16:54:22+00:00
Most new cars in Norway are EVs. How a freezing country beat range anxiety - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44141407 - May 2025

Here's Why Norway Hasn't Had Trouble With Winter EV Charging - https://insideevs.com/news/705338/norway-winter-ev-charging-... - January 19th, 2024

EVs work fine in the cold in Norway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39057299 - January 2024
by noir_lord | 2025-10-16 16:54:49+00:00
They make such strange choices though.

Like `Firefox Data Collection and Use` which includes `Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla` and some other stuff is on by default. [1]

Glean data is here [2]

Historically I don't think FF would have made that decision - now I have to periodically check what else they turned on without me asking.

I generally don't like telemetry but I really don't like telemetry that is on by default - that very much should always be a "Would you like to?" question.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/technical-and-interacti...

[2] https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/firefox_deskto...
by kordlessagain | 2025-10-16 16:55:42+00:00
The timeline problem:

Copyright/patent law says:

You wrote it at time T

Therefore from T to T+70years, you control it

Anyone who writes the same thing at T+1 is "copying"

But if we both arrive at the same solution independently, causality matters more than chronology. If your code didn't cause mine, why should your timestamp give you power over me?

This breaks the whole edifice:

If independent discovery isn't "theft," then copyright only makes sense for literal verbatim copying. And even then - if I retype your code character-by-character because it's the best solution, am I stealing or just recognizing truth?
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-16 16:55:49+00:00
Rust and Cargo do not build C programs, so, the answer to that is "no", strictly speaking.

However, some people use cargo's build scripts to build c programs, which then you can link into your Rust program. Support would then depend on whatever the person wrote with the script, which in my experience usually delegates to whatever build system that project uses. So it should work fine.
by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | 2025-10-16 16:56:06+00:00
> Also: You are promoting that we keep a grudge. Are you planning to let go of it sometime?

I have to ask -- why? Your population is hundreds of millions, you can afford to let go of bad people and replace them with better people. You don't need to let go of a grudge against war criminals and their media collaborators. They're not your family, or people that you simply have to learn how to deal with because you can't lose them.

I'm assuming here that it is a goal to get rid of such people eventually. Then that requires making steps towards that goal. Be unforgiving towards people who wield power unethically.
by monkmartinez | 2025-10-16 16:56:08+00:00
Nailed it. To make matters worse, Ollama obfuscate the models so their users don't really know what they are running until they dig into the model file. Only then can they see that what they thought was Deepseek-r1 is actually an 8B qwen distillation of Deepseek-r1, for example.

Luckily, we have Jan.ai and LM Studio which are happy to run GGUF models at full-tilt on various hardware configs. Added bonus; both include very nice API server as well.
by Herdinger | 2025-10-16 16:56:38+00:00
As a minor nit: Many of these are not actually source ports but reverse engineering efforts (e.g OpenMW). It would be nice to have a tag to highlight that is the case for accuracy purposes.

In my opinion gaining accuracy for a single engine is way harder than for general emulation since one does not have a giant corpus that can be used for validation, just the game as is. I‘ve seen a few approaches that try to go the extra mile like the bit identical Super Mario 64 decompilation, or Dungeon Master where the developer recorded inputs on actual hardware and checked that the play through reaches the end of the game provided the same inputs.

Not to take away from the tremendous task those reverse engineering efforts go through, I am very grateful to have classic games running on modern hardware with enhancements and modding support!
by jampa | 2025-10-16 16:56:39+00:00
I think this is great. A problem with huge codebases is that CLAUDE.md files become bloated with niche workflows like CI and E2E testing. Combined with MCPs, this pollutes the context window and eventually degrades performance.

You get the best of both worlds if you can select tokens by problem rather than by folder.

The key question is how effective this will be with tool calling.
by nebula8804 | 2025-10-16 16:57:26+00:00
Its been a fundamental problem for decades at this point that half of the government is just paralyzed on purpose. The voters who vote in this congress (a lot of members have been there decades) need to finally wake up and decide that enough is enough.

I don't know how this gets resolved when its been a whole generation since we've had a government that didn't act like this. These people don't seem to realize that things can be done differently. Only about 50% of the US population has a passport so they haven't even seen how things operate in places with better governance.
by Flux159 | 2025-10-16 16:57:56+00:00
I wonder how this works with mcpb (renamed from dxt Desktop extensions): https://github.com/anthropics/mcpb

Specifically, it looks like skills are a different structure than mcp, but overlap in what they provide? Skills seem to be just markdown file & then scripts (instead of prompts & tool calls defined in MCP?).

Question I have is why would I use one over the other?
by tracker1 | 2025-10-16 16:58:13+00:00
A deportation order is a final judgment from immigration authorities that a non-citizen must leave the U.S., while a warrant is a legal document that authorizes an action, such as an arrest or search.

You don't get arrest warrants for deportation orders. The "due process" for illegal entry is deportation... if people don't like it, don't enter the country illegally.

Why are you lying about needing an arrest warrant?
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-16 16:58:34+00:00
>and while it is not hard, it definitely looks intimidating and takes time to understand, especially the deductions.

Even this is overselling it.

Most people have ZERO deductions to deal with. You put in your W2 pay, you take the standard deduction, and you file and get your money back.

Next time you use something like turbotax, download the forms it generates and look at them. There's zero complexity. Turbotax doesn't do anything. It's literally filling in 14 rows of numbers that come directly from your W2.

Hell, turbotax purposely runs fake animations and makes you waste a ton of time saying "Oh we are looking for all these deductions" but it's all a lie. None of the animations actually do anything. Most of the deductions it is supposedly checking for would Never apply to someone with a normal job. They want you to think it's complicated. They will ask you questions they know the answer to just to waste your time. Every single year, TurboTax asks me if I'm eligible for the earned income tax credit, and every single year, TurboTax knows from the previous questions that I cannot possibly be eligible. They ask me anyway, because it seems like a complicated credit so it makes taxes seem more complicated.

Taxes could take less than 15 minutes for nearly all Americans. Turbotax's bullshit, even disregarding the stupid tax they are charging the whole country just to copy some numbers from column a to column b literally wastes everyone's time every year.

People who insist that taxes are complicated are flat out wrong. If you run a small business, you absolutely have the choice to just file extremely simple taxes and pay a higher tax rate. It is a choice to attempt to take every possible deduction. Each and every one of those deductions is a handout to business owners. They bitch and moan about how bad taxes are, but their taxes are complicated so that they can make more profit.

Guess what? Nobody forces you to run a business, which again, is a handout to capital owners. A few hundred dollars in permits or registration every year is a perfectly valid cost to enable you to take advantage of the insane benefit of "you can literally cause hundreds of deaths but as long as you weren't obviously grossly negligent you are in the clear". Nobody forced you to attempt to take every single handout offered every single year. Nobody forced you to be your own boss, to own capital, to profit off of the labor of others.

Such entitlement. These same people will turn around and cry about "freeloaders" and "welfare queens" and "handouts"
by usrbinbash | 2025-10-16 16:58:36+00:00
> We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum.

We have that. We know how to put digital data onto paper, at high density. Not high compared to actual drives or even optic disks of course, but still enough that we could put all importan data that a person produces throughout a lifetime into a large box of A4 sheets, which would still be legible after many decades. All that's needed is an agreement on a clever collection of formats for text and images, maybe even video, formats that are well documented (ideally the documentation is stored alongside the data).

The problem is not that we don't have the tech to do such things, the problem is

a) In our current world, the only things that seem to get huge amounts of resources are those that make some shareholders happy

b) Most of the data humanity produces these days, is useless noise, and the only reason anyone collects it, is to make a quick buck. And generative AI has made this trend a lot worse.
by glenstein | 2025-10-16 16:59:10+00:00
Mozilla is constantly responding to community feedback, almost to a fault, encompassing everything from user interface changes, to features requests, to rolling back undesired changes. I would recommend reading more about Mozilla Connect, which I would argue was specifically launched to get ahead of spurious accusations like these. For a big flashy example, their blog post introducing Tab Groups is titled "You Asked for it, we built it", and the first line is "What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it."

Moreover they've revised their Terms of Use following criticism (much of it here on HN), wound down Pocket and Fakespot in response to feedback about these being outside of their core mission, implemented visual search in response to community requests, made it easier to switch between different profiles again based on community requests, added a rollback option for extensions to previously approved versions in response to developer requests, brought back night mode on iOS after having removed it because the community asked for it, changed the design of the iOS toolbar to get rid of the share button, centralized developer support tools in an all-in-one add on hub. And offered extensive explanations when choosing not to implement or maintain features (e.g. Live Bookmark tool).

The trouble with the real work of responding to requests is it's often granular and unsexy, even when examples abound, and it's easy to not know what they're really doing and reach for the pitchfork.

A good place to start is this explainer on all the community feedback they've been taking in: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/about-mozilla-connect/
by bargainbin | 2025-10-16 16:59:34+00:00
In your defence, the choice of wording is confusing and that particular announcement did have a sense of “game over”ness to it.

But the intent was to say that Elixir as it stands from a paradigm perspective is done, but the existing features and runtime will still be improved.

Which as someone with many years in .NET, I can appreciate. I showed a friend who used C# since the first beta, who’s been hands off for over half a decade now, some modern C# code, and he could not believe what he was seeing.

Much like I can’t believe what I’m seeing when I review a C# code base and have no idea what flavour du jour the developers decided to write it with and how I have to frame the program in my mind to understand it.

Compared to Elixir, which just looks like Elixir has always looked, and does what you expect.
by 827a | 2025-10-16 16:59:37+00:00
At the end of the day, they're building silicon that can do this to be ready for when the software side of the house actually figures this stuff out. Of course, it doesn't seem like the software side is close to this, and a very real risk for Apple is a world where the local AI use-cases don't really grow to justify this level of silicon investment. More specifically: Personal context is a big thing that Apple is uniquely positioned to capitalize on; but will a mobile-sized LLM and mobile-sized memory ever be able to coherently handle the volume of contextual data that might be necessary to be truly great? I have 400gb in iCloud, I don't want to get into the weeds of most of that being images and such; you don't need to in order to recognize that modern data center-scale LLMs can handle, like, less than a megabyte of context.

There will always be local-first use-cases, but its also possible that, you know, we're already near the global maxima of those use-cases, and the local AI coprocessors we've had can do it fine. This would be a severe shock to my perceived value of Apple right now, because my view is: their hardware division is firing on all cylinders and totally killing it. But when you're putting supercomputers into the iPad... maybe that doesn't actually matter. Meanwhile, their software is getting worse every year that goes by.
by mati365 | 2025-10-16 16:59:39+00:00
In the latest Rails versions, it’s probably just as easy as in Phoenix. The question is whether, after years of churn in the Rails frontend ecosystem, the core team hasn’t already driven away most developers who might have cared. At this point, few people would use a library that targets the newest Rails versions when most teams treat Rails purely as a backend and handle the frontend with something else.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-16 17:00:26+00:00
> Are you saying they don't have good tech?

I will, yes. If macOS supported Vulkan, then those Intel Macs would have GPU acceleration too, and thus it would be a fair fight comparing it to MPS. Apple's tech stack is so miserly and poor that they never supported the common GPGPU libraries that literally every single OEM is and was shipping.

Apple's tech is appalling. Are you saying they exercise good judgement on behalf of their users?
by vel0city | 2025-10-16 17:00:38+00:00
In my travels I've found even the size and quality of the produce sections of SuperTargets can be quite variable.

But yes, I do agree their range of choices for fresh food products is usually more limited compared to good, actual grocers. But that applies to their packaged goods as well, they often don't have as many choices of lots of things. I might find almost a dozen brands of pasta at an actual grocer but only have three or four brands at Target. To me it seems the ratio is about the same, its just the scale is different.

And to be honest, its the same story for practically all the stuff at Target. They don't have the widest supply of craft supplies compared to craft stores like Michael's and Hobby Lobby. They don't have the widest selection of bicycles compared to the bike store. They don't have nearly as many toys as what Toys R Us did. The book section is smaller than a Barnes & Noble. What else is new.
by ryancnelson | 2025-10-16 17:00:46+00:00
The uptake on Claude-skills seems to have a lot of momentum already! I was fascinated on Tuesday by “Superpowers” , https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/09/superpowers/ … and then packaged up all the tool-building I’ve been working on for awhile into somewhat tidy skills that i can delegate agents to:

http://github.com/ryancnelson/deli-gator I’d love any feedback
by derefr | 2025-10-16 17:01:14+00:00
The other reason is that many of the companies that ship Electron apps are web-first companies. Slack, Discord, VSCode, Github, and Notion were all solely web apps at first — some for years — before any native app was released.

To these companies, a "native app" is just "a web app with its own start-menu icon, no browser chrome, and access to OS APIs."

(In other words: if PWAs had access to all the same OS APIs that Electron does, then these companies wouldn't ship native apps at all!)
by rchaud | 2025-10-16 17:01:22+00:00
Lots of nonprofits have CEO comp in the millions. Firefox is a large company with lots of employees and tens of millions of users. They have to offer compensation that is somewhat close to market rates to be able to hire people capable of managing that kind of scale. Mozilla isn't funded by individual donations and doesn't charge its users for Firefox, so what does it matter what the execs get paid?
by TophWells | 2025-10-16 17:01:29+00:00
Could you try explaining it in a comment? Not the general principle, but just the rules for one particular automaton. Whichever one is your favourite. Or Amazing Dragons, if you don't have a favourite.

The amazing part of cellular automata is the emergence of complicated behaviour from simple rules. Life's rules can be written in three sentences, maybe less.

Forgive my quibbling, but I don't understand what this is doing that other projects in this space haven't done before. Adding states and transition rules to edges is new to me...

I did try running your project, but I had to tweak it to get it to work with the instructions in the repo. I seem to be missing a few packages -- mpmath, sympy, typing_extensions. Can you add those to the requirements.txt file?
Show HN: UML Modeling Powered by AI Agents – Astah Pro MCP
by takaakit | 2025-10-16 17:01:54+00:00
A local MCP server that runs as a plugin for Astah Professional, a UML modeling tool. This MCP server enables you to do the following and more:

- Use AI to design systems and represent them as UML models and diagrams in Astah. - Ask AI to explain UML models and diagrams in your Astah project. - Generate source code from UML models and diagrams in your Astah project, and vice versa. - Create UML diagrams in Astah from hand-drawn sketch images.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-16 17:01:58+00:00
I mean the primary image editor in open source land is Gimp (which I had to explain to an ex many years ago when she hopped on my PC) and our main open source source control system is called `git` (funnier if you are British) so open source devs have form for picking bad names :D.

`Git can be a right git` is a valid sentence here.