MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kjellsbells | 2025-10-14 23:43:43+00:00
I'm strangely comforted by the fact that OP had to work so hard to get in.

I was expecting that the pin software would be IoT-standard terrible, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that the Humane team did their best to use SELinux and lock it down.

No knock on them for not getting it 100% right here, and besides, it's always been the case that once an attacker has physical access they will eventually get in.
by glommer | 2025-10-14 23:45:21+00:00
Author of Turso here. Couple of points

* You are right not to rush. You should keep using SQLite until Turso matures. Some use cases are more tolerant to new tech than others. It will take time for us to reach the level of trust SQLite has for broad use cases, but we are hoping to add value for some use cases right away. Never rush, tech matters!

* I have never met Hipp, but only heard great things about him.

* We never had a fight with SQLite over their contribution model (or about anything for that matter, I never even met Hipp or anybody else from SQLite). We just disagree with it - in the sense that we believe in different things. We don't think what they do is fundamentally wrong. Different projects take different paths.

* We are not using the SQLite name. We compare ourselves to SQLite because we are file and API compatible, and we do aspire to raise the very high bar they have set. It is hard to do this without drawing the comparison, but we are a different project and state it very clearly. I am not a lawyer (and neither you seem to be), but we believe we are doing is okay. If we ever have any valid reason to believe we crossed a line here, we will of course change course.

* We are not "startup bros". We spent 20+ years of our lives building databases and operating systems.
Ask HN: Designing complex or customisable platforms with good UI?
by CuriousRose | 2025-10-14 23:46:51+00:00
We are currently building out a SaaS product that will have numerous plug-ins, client specific customisations, etc. We will be catering to both users that are using the product in a largely "vanilla" fashion, as well as very industry specific use cases.

As we are early days, we are not feeling the bloat of extensive settings windows, complex navigations to find toggles, etc yet. Are there any good guides or best practices to follow to make even complex products easy to use for end users? I'm conscious of products like Salesforce or SAP that are so large they require teams with explicit knowledge to manage, or times where Windows has attempted to simplify its UI and managed to irritate power users.
by bitwize | 2025-10-14 23:47:17+00:00
That is literally the exact promise of CASE tools in the 80s and the early 90s; UML code generation tools in the 2000s, and "low-code/no-code" platforms in the 2010s. It turned out to be a disaster every time, especially when the Idea Persons chucked their creations over the wall to SWEs to bash them into actual products because the Idea Persons had Far More Important Things To Do than maintain their coalesced brain farts.

We're repeating history but with more energy consumption.
by bbor | 2025-10-14 23:47:18+00:00
Thanks for the interesting response! I disagree on a few points, though:

If your business model is theoretical, we call that "research" instead.

Are/were Uber and Lyft "research" companies, then? Is Reddit a research company? Edison Electric?

There is no reproducible or substantial evidence that AGI or singularities exist

There is also no substantial evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow, that climate change will continue, or a million other things that are critical to science. Physical science is empirical in that it inherently requires physical experiments, but that is not the only cognitive tool in play by a long shot.

Regardless: tell them, not me! I'm just reporting what I'd say is an objective fact: they are planning based on scientific predictions of an intelligence explosion -- at least a soft/cybernetic one if not a scarily-fast/purely-digital one.

It is another Big Tech marketing lie

I think there's a single fact that counters this common sentiment: there is no way in hell that they'd break ground on the largest private infrastructure projects in human history as a marketing stunt. Companies are woefully-shortsighted these days, but that would be another level of foolishness altogether.

They very well may be wrong of course, but I think you're doing yourself a disservice to assume they're lying about it.
by imtringued | 2025-10-14 23:47:28+00:00
That HN username is also bad news. Meanwhile yours is pretty cool. I really enjoyed the social credit memes with John Cena.

How exactly do you come up with a pet theory out of nowhere, randomly diagnose people on the internet with autism based on how they use LLMs and then start linking to a most likely AI generated blog post (there was simply too much repetition) that ascribes a lot of negative attributes to them with a username that is meant to be unrecognisable.

The post is basically a Kafka trap or engagement bait.
by snailmailman | 2025-10-14 23:47:37+00:00
While his durability test seemed quite extreme, including things like holding a lighter to the display, the test that made it explode was basically “bend it past 180 degrees like a 2-in-1 laptop”

I haven’t personally used a folding phone, but he was able to break it with his bare hands. I’d expect that from a laptop, but less so from a phone. I put my laptop in a padded laptop bag. I put my phone in my pocket, and sometimes sit on it without issues. JerryRigEverything mentioned the previous pixel folds all broke in the same test in the same spot, along the antenna.

It’s a crazy contrast to Apple, considering how much Apple advertised “titanium” in their phones.
by ForHackernews | 2025-10-14 23:47:43+00:00
Typical mind fallacy.

According to one estimate, there are about 250k total GrapheneOS users https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/12281-how-many-grapheneos-u...

This source claims Google shipped 10 million devices last year https://coolest-gadgets.com/google-pixel-smartphones-statist...

If we generously assume every GrapheneOS user bought a new phone in the last year, 2.5% of those Pixels are running Graphene.
by vincent-manis | 2025-10-14 23:48:17+00:00
The point about bounds checking in `safe' languages is well taken, it does prevent 100% test coverage. As we all agree, SQLite has been exhaustively tested, and arguments for bounds checking in it are therefore weakened. Still, that's not an argument for replicating this practice elsewhere, not unless you are Dr Hipp and willing to work very hard at testing. C.A.R. Hoare's comment on eliminating runtime checks in release builds is well-taken here: “What would we think of a sailing enthusiast who wears his life-jacket when training on dry land but takes it off as soon as he goes to sea?”

I am not Dr Hipp, and therefore I like run-time checks.
by biotinker | 2025-10-14 23:48:29+00:00
> Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.

As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuously operating as an in since 1686.

The New England climate isn't all that different than the original England. I think the cultural and legal climate around old buildings is more impactful here. I would be curious to know about the comparative longevity of 17th-century wooden buildings in Europe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayside_Inn_%28Sudbury%29
by crazygringo | 2025-10-14 23:48:36+00:00
This makes no sense.

He's insisting that they repeatedly remotely disabled his device in retaliation for blocking their data collection...

...yet they paid for the device to be shipped back and forth and inspected several times under warranty, presumably costing them $$$$?

It makes zero business sense to break your customer's products intentionally, which will lead to 1-star reviews and expensive support.

Plus, I hate to be the "this sounds like it was written by ChatGPT" guy, but this does. People don't write like this:

> Deep within the robot’s startup scripts, I discovered the smoking gun.

> It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.

> I may have lost my warranty, but I won back my autonomy.

Also, the idea that someone would waste months (?!) of their life on some broken vacuum cleaner until they "had a complete understanding of how the hardware was designed, down to each chip and wire connector" is just not real life. This is more like someone with a mental illness related to obsession, unless they're starting their own smart vacuum company.

I'm guessing this is 100% fiction from ChatGPT. Complete with the AI-generated image.
by cantrevealname | 2025-10-14 23:48:42+00:00
This sci-fi thing goes as far back as the 1983 movie WarGames, where they wanted to pull the plug on a rogue computer, but there was a reason you couldn’t do that:

McKittrick: General, the machine has locked us out. It's sending random numbers to the silos.

Pat Healy: Codes. To launch the missiles.

General Beringer: Just unplug the goddamn thing! Jesus Christ!

McKittrick: That won't work, General. It would interpret a shutdown as the destruction of NORAD. The computers in the silos would carry out their last instructions. They'd launch.
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-14 23:48:52+00:00
1. Rust has had ten years since 1.0. It changes in backward compatible ways. For some people, they want no changes at all, so it’s important to nail down which sense is meant.

2. This has been demonstrated.

3. This one hinges on your definition of “obscure,” but the “without an operating system” bit is unambiguously demonstrated.

4. I am not an expert here, but given that you’re testing binaries, I’m not sure what is Rust specific. I know the Ferrocene folks have done some of this work, but I don’t know the current state of things.

5. Rust as a language does no allocation. This OOM behavior is the standard library, of which you’re not using in these embedded cases anyway. There, you’re free to do whatever you’d like, as it’s all just library code.

6. This also hinges on a lot of definitions, so it could be argued either way.
by mempko | 2025-10-14 23:49:42+00:00
SLS took 11 years to first flight and cost $29 billion. First flight was perfect and went around the moon. Starship is estimated to have cost about $10B so far and has had 11 test flights and still hasn't achieved orbit.

SLS can reach the moon from the earth, Starship can't reach the moon on a signel flight and requires 10-40+ tanker flights to fuel one lunar mission. That's a lot of chances for failure.

Even after Starship finally achieve orbit, it's still years away from being able to attempt what SLS did on day one.

The claim is that Starship will eventually be cheaper because of it's re-usability because they target $10M per flight you are talking about $400M for a lunar mission. But $10M per flight is insanely unrealistic. Consider that the Falcon Heavy, which is much, much simpler than Starship, costs around $90-$150M per launch. If we generously assume $50M per launch and 15-20 tanker flights that's around $750M - $1B which is suddenly comparable or could be more expensive than SLS.

Considering that SpaceX does not currently have a fully reusable rocker and if they manage to make Starship fully re-usable each one would need to be spread out a huge amount of flights to start becoming economical.

What's obvious to me, and maybe not everyone here, is the design of Starship is optimized for LEO, not deep space missions. The re-usability features are earth-specific (heat shield tiles, flaps for atmospheric control, landing legs designed for earth gravity). All of this mass is dead weight for a deep space mission.

Notice the HLS variant of Starship depot ships don't re-enter the earth and don't have all this re-usability stuff.

The refueling requirement is a consequence of the design. Starship is too heavy to reach the moon on one launch. It's massive dry mass prevents it from leaving LEO without refueling.

It's design is also not optimized for Mars either. It's optimized for earth operations. Mars has only 1% of the earth's atmosphere requiring completely different aerodynamics. You still need orbital refueling to get there and also back. It needs in-situ propellant production on Mars just to return to earth.

All of this is enormous complexity that hasn't been even close to being demonstrated (remember, Starship still hasn't achieved orbit).

What they are doing is building a ship to deploy Starlink, and wasting NASA funding to do it.
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-14 23:49:46+00:00
Other than some operating systems projects, I haven’t run into a “requires nightly” in the wild for years. Most users use the stable releases.

(There are some decent reasons to use the nightly toolchain in development even if you don’t rely on any unfinished features in your codebase, but that means they build on stable anyway just fine if you prefer.)
by nullable_bool | 2025-10-14 23:50:45+00:00
I started taking it and within 6 months I was at $100/day habit just to not feel terrible. I was also experiencing pain in my liver. I had to go to the doctor to get a suboxen prescription in order to get off it. The first few days were hellish even with the suboxen. I got to experience gooseflesh, which as you can imagine, is not a great feeling.

All that to say this, it shouldn't be legal and everyone selling it knows what they are doing. There are A LOT of scumbags out there.
by skinnymuch | 2025-10-14 23:51:10+00:00
Having your mode of production focus on people and not profit. Having a dictatorship of the proletariat is the most important thing.

The end of private property is an eventual goal but it’s not close to the primary issue in 2025. The actual fight is against imperialists and global capitalists. Private property can be a tool in that fight. Being revisionist like China still makes you a communist/Marxist.
by slashdev | 2025-10-14 23:51:23+00:00
This is ignoring the elephant in the room: SQLite is being rewritten in Rust and it's going quite well. https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso

It has async I/O support on Linux with io_uring, vector support, BEGIN CONCURRENT for improved write throughput using multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), Encryption at rest, incremental computation using DBSP for incremental view maintenance and query subscriptions.

Time will tell, but this may well be the future of SQLite.
by Amezarak | 2025-10-14 23:51:38+00:00
This sounds great until you’re minding your own business in your house while these people engage in gun battles out in the street and you or your kids catch one of the strays.

If you google this you will find plenty of examples that made the news, and not all of them do.

https://abc13.com/post/houston-police-increasing-patrols-7-y...

Here is an article including two such examples. One kid was sitting down eating dinner and the other was sitting in a car. They were both shot totally incidentally during shootouts they had nothing to do with.
by ianferrel | 2025-10-14 23:51:39+00:00
That is a good point I hadn't considered.

I think, charitably, what might have happened here is:

1. Author left out the diagnostic step that restoring the connectivity didn't fix the robot, because it didn't work.

2. Author did the technical analysis mentioned (there is a repository attached. I haven't verified that it actually has the level of technical analysis indicated).

3. Author took some creative liberties (possibly involving some AI-assisted punching-up) when writing the blog post story to make it more compelling in a way that made it feel a bit off and left me and others questioning its veracity.
by oceanplexian | 2025-10-14 23:51:50+00:00
If you know anything about hardware and look at the typical instances AWS is serving up (other than the ludicrously expensive ones) it's Skylake and older.

I think people have a warped perception of performance, if only because the cloud providers are serving up a shared VM on equipment I'd practically class as vintage computing. You could throw some of the same parts together from eBay and buy the whole system with less than a few months worth of the hourly on-demand cost.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-14 23:51:51+00:00
> we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold

Like whom? We (and let's be honest, every other great power) are at war with many countries all of the time, and while they may be cold for long stretches, they absolutely (a) go hot from time to time and (b) are constantly threatening to go hot.
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-10-14 23:52:22+00:00
> the QA of car battery manufacturing is causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn

I've seen a lot of grumbling on this site about why the U.S. doesn't have access to cheap EVs like China, but it's almost entirely because the cheap EVs that China is pumping out aren't even close to being up to the U.S.'s stringent safety standards.

Eventually they will be safe enough, and they will also be more expensive.
by Gigachad | 2025-10-14 23:54:05+00:00
I’m not totally opposed to surveillance, I just wish it was more transparent and limited to need to know uses.

If the police need your google search history thats ok as long as they can get a warrant showing they have justification and then perhaps at a delayed time, the account owner should be notified that this happened.

If they need access to your phone, rather than hacking it they should just take it off you and get the password from you.

This limits tracking since this is a fairly disruptive and visible thing and prevents just passive tracking of everyone all the time.

Businesses who use facial recognition for loss prevention should be legally required to only use their data for this purpose and never for marketing and analytics. They must not ever sell the data and delete it within a reasonable time.
by jonahx | 2025-10-14 23:54:53+00:00
So is the argument that safe langs produce stuff like:

// pseudocode if (i >= array_length) panic("index out of bounds")

that are never actually run if the code is correct? But (if I understand correctly) these are checks implicitly added by the compiler. So the objection amounts to questioning the correctness of this auto-generated code, and is predicated upon mistrusting the correctness of the compiler? But presumably the Rust compiler itself would have thorough tests that these kinds of checks work?

Someone please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the argument.
by armchairhacker | 2025-10-14 23:54:56+00:00
Everyone thinks when they have power, they’ll use it correctly, because they have (from their perspective) good intentions.

An ideal government with total surveillance is the best case. You get the benefits of low crime without the drawback of corruption and ideology. The problem is in practice:

- Large institutions aren’t good at exercising fine control: even if the leaders have truly good intentions, corrupt mid-level employees and inaccurate data lead to bad outcomes.

- Good leaders seem to often pick bad successors, and unless they frequently pick better successors, someone will eventually pick a corrupt one.

- Corrupt leaders seem to be good at ousting or sidelining good leaders, more than vice versa, perhaps because good leaders are less passionate about gaining and keeping power.

Perhaps there are other reasons. Not just ideal governments, but even self-preserving governments don’t tend to last. Hence, although decentralization and privacy are never ideal, they should exist at least for backup, “just in case” (inevitably in practice) the centralized surveillance system goes rouge.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-14 23:55:38+00:00
All homicides should be reported in the news. At least in the local news. These are things that are very important locally, although generally not nationally.

Even if you could ban all news in an effort to make everybody live as enlightened hackers with disregard to worldly matters, you would still find that homicide is news which spreads like wildfire through word of mouth. It has been like this for hundreds of thousands of years.
by frenchtoast8 | 2025-10-14 23:55:51+00:00
At $WORK traffic between zones ($REGION-DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes) is our second largest cost on our AWS bill, more than our EC2/EKS cost. It adds up to mid six figures each year. We try to minimize this where it is easy to do so. For example, our EKS pods perform reads against RDS read replicas in the same AZ only, but you're out of luck for writes to the primary instance. To reduce this in any significant way can eat up a lot of time, and for us, the cost is enough to be painful but not enough to dedicate an engineer to fixing.

This is precisely how Amazon's bread is buttered. An outage affecting an entire AZ is rare enough that I would feel pretty happy making all our clusters single-AZ, but it would be a fool's errand for me to convince management to go against Amazon's official recommendations.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-14 23:56:36+00:00
> This reveals a whole new channel of modern warfare. Imagine a nation state getting control of an adversaries' smart devices?

I expect there are oodles of sci-fi references to this already, but in particular I remember an audio-log from the game Horizon: Forbidden West, where a hacker is critiquing some shady corporate research he found, implying a project to weaponize domestic robots:

> There's the Moldova brain-hack of course, but also up and coming little devils like the know-it-all MEMEr, or my personal favorite, Sovereign 7482.

> Now that's an apex predator. Assuming control of them Ti-D-O bots and arming 'em with household appliances? Imagine tidying up after that! Gotta admit, it'd be fun to see 'em hunt in the wild.
by benzible | 2025-10-14 23:57:36+00:00
The Free Press makes $15M in annual revenue and sold for $150M - that's a 10x revenue multiple. That's not a business outcome, that's an ideological bailout. Ellison didn't buy this as a media investment, he bought it to install Weiss at CBS. The early VCs (Andreessen, Sacks, etc.) weren't making business bets either - they were funding ideology and got rewarded for it when a fellow billionaire needed to acquire the vehicle to legitimize his hire (but still nowhere near the type of exit they would seek for their non-ideological bets).

Also, since when is "built a business" the qualification for editor-in-chief of CBS News? That's an _editorial_ position at a major news organization. The relevant qualifications are journalism credentials and editorial judgment - you know, the things Weiss notably lacks. She came up through opinion pages, not the news side, and as Oliver documented, her publication has repeatedly published poorly fact-checked stories that fell apart under scrutiny. But sure, she can raise money from right-wing billionaires, so let's put her in charge of 60 Minutes.
by nradov | 2025-10-14 23:58:09+00:00
Sure that's part of it. A lot of the delays in modern construction are due to labor cost optimization and supplier delays. A lot of the time parts of construction sites are idle because some specialized group of skilled workers is at another site or they're waiting for a delivery.

I saw a video where as a stunt a residential construction crew went from a vacant lot to a complete single-family house ready to occupy in less than two days. And that wasn't a prefab house, it was a regular wooden frame suburban house built using all the usual construction methods. They did it by staging all the materials right there and having all of the carpenters, roofers, painters, electricians, plumbers, etc standing around ready to jump in as soon as they were needed. Granted that was a small project, but the point is that with a sense of urgency construction can proceed quickly, and it doesn't require sacrificing worker safety.