MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-12 20:02:22+00:00
The fact that everything is not a file. No OS actually implements that idea including Plan9. For example, directories are not files. Plan9 re-uses a few of the APIs for them, but you can't use write() on a directory, you can only read them.

Pretending everything is a file was never a good idea and is based on an untrue understanding of computing. The everything-is-an-object phase the industry went through was much closer to reality.

Consider how you represent a GUI window as a file. A file is just a flat byte array at heart, so:

1. What's the data format inside the file? Is it a raw bitmap? Series of rendering instructions? How do you communicate that to the window server, or vice-versa? What about ancillary data like window border styles?

2. Is the file a real file on a real filesystem, or is it an entry in a virtual file system? If the latter then you often lose a lot of the basic features that makes "everything is a file" attractive, like the ability to move files around or arrange them in a user controlled directory hierarchy. VFS like procfs are pretty limited. You can't even add your own entries like adding symlinks to procfs directories.

3. How do you receive callbacks about your window? At this point you start to conclude that you can't use one file to represent a useful object like a window, you'd need at least a data and a control file where the latter is some sort of socket speaking some sort of RPC protocol. But now you have an atomicity problem.

4. What exactly is the benefit again? You won't be able to use the shell to do much with these window files.

And so on. For this reason Plan9's GUI API looked similar to that of any other OS: a C library that wrapped the underlying file "protocol". Developers didn't interact with the system using the file metaphor, because it didn't deliver value.

All the post-UNIX operating system designs ignored this idea because it was just a bad one. Microsoft invested heavily in COM and NeXT invested in the idea of typed, IDL-defined Mach ports.
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-12 20:02:46+00:00
> If I buy a CD from artist X, I know I won't be supporting artist Y with my money, just X.

That's not entirely true, since by buying X's CD you're also giving money to the label/publisher of that CD, who may be allocating that money to Y if Y is also one of their artists. However, overall I agree that the buy-a-CD model makes it more clear where your money is going.
by brandall10 | 2025-10-12 20:02:46+00:00
I have hundreds, possibly over a thousand hours on mine and it is significantly more delicate and expensive than the Uniqlo one, which I had owned previously.

To me packability and efficiency reign supreme, and I just reflexively know I’m wearing a delicate item and react accordingly to my environment when I wear it.

It’s similar to the sunglass paradox. For many years, I owned fairly cheap pairs and lost them often. Then suddenly I spent $300 on a pair of Oliver Peoples… had them for 10 years, finally gave them to an ex-gf who loved them more than I did.

You can in fact change semi-reckless behavior when the quality of the item dictates it. Perhaps the extra anxiety isn’t worth it, but this is an article about one bag travel - which I do - so it fits.
by sekai | 2025-10-12 20:03:01+00:00
"The plan? At dusk, 50 people went to San Francisco's longest dead-end street and all ordered a Waymo at the same time.

The world's first: WAYMO DDOS

We didn't actually get in the cars. They left after about 10 min and charged a $5 no show fee. Waymo handled this well. I assume this isn't much different than if a big concert had just ended. Eventually, they disabled all rides within a 2 block vicinity until the morning "
by smcin | 2025-10-12 20:03:36+00:00
The actionable take on this seems to be: "Why you should use a pseudonym on github, configure hiding your email and full name, and beware not to link to your social-media or other personal sites or information - if you choose to still be on Github".

How is this information leakage worse than (say) Discord though?

General advice seems to be to use pseudonyms in general online. (Then you have the reverse problem of not getting attributed with your code.)
by simonask | 2025-10-12 20:03:41+00:00
But the problem here is that our nice programmer-brained mental model does not match the actual requirements of text.

Unless you know about tree structures, it doesn’t make sense to the average person why you would have to stop and then restart a span of formatting options just because an unrelated attribute changed.

And that’s why XHTML failed - HTML is human-writable.
by dingnuts | 2025-10-12 20:04:23+00:00
I'd imagine that these men use their publications to advertise their personas, and their livelihood is made via celebrity and appearances. That's why you know their names.

Authors who make money primarily by creating art and selling it, and who do not wish to monetize their work through selling their persona, might have more of reason to be upset by the blatant violation of their legal rights by Sam Altman and his friends.
by didibus | 2025-10-12 20:04:32+00:00
As someone who uses AI for coding, emails, design documents, and so on...

I'm always a bit confused by the "training" rhetoric. It's the easiest thing to use. Do people need training to use a calculator?

This isn't like using Excel effectively and learning all the features, functions and so on.

Maybe I overestimate my ability as a technically savvy person to leverage AI tools, but I was just as good at using on day 1 than 2 years later.
by godelski | 2025-10-12 20:05:09+00:00
> in the context of the law

That's the key part. The metric has context, right?

And that's where Goodhart's "Law" comes in. A metric has no meaning without context. This is why metrics need to be interpreted. They need to be evaluated in context. Sometimes this context is explicit but other times it is implicit. Often people will hack the metric as the implicit rule is not explicit and well that's usually a quick way to make those rules explicit.

Here's another way to think about it: no rule can be so perfectly written that it has no exceptions.
by flyinglizard | 2025-10-12 20:06:04+00:00
From a software development perspective, the more I think of it, the more I understand it's just another abstraction layer. Before that came high level languages and JVM of sorts, before that came the compiler, before that came the assembler.

Outside of the software world it's mostly a (much!) better Google.

Between now and a Star Trek world, there's so much to build that we can use any help we can get.
Ask HN: What Are the Main Principles That Make You Appreciate Someone's Content?
by cryptography | 2025-10-12 20:06:39+00:00
Hey everyone!

I'm doing a small research project for my studies to better understand what makes certain accounts go viral. What actually makes them stand out? Is it mostly about the content itself, or does the creator’s background/personality play a big role?

I know this is a broad question, but I’d really appreciate it if you could share a few things that make you enjoy someone’s content — and maybe even follow them. What grabs your attention and keeps you coming back?

Thanks in advance!
by dcminter | 2025-10-12 20:06:52+00:00
If they're that profound you should be able to come up with one example though, right?

Not that I think you're wrong, but come on - make the case!

I have the very unoriginal view that - yes, it's a (huge) bubble but also, just like the dot com bubble, the tevhnology is a big deal - but it's not obvious to see what will stand and fall in the aftermath.

Remember that Sun Microsystems, a very established pre-dot com business, rose to huge heights on the bubble and was then smashed by the fall when it popped. Who's the AI bubble's Sun and who's its Amazon? Place your bets...
by ofalkaed | 2025-10-12 20:06:59+00:00
I am generally not one to engage in online political discussion, especially when it stems from such a glib and self serving post as GP but it is my thread and I am running out of time in the year to hit my quota (1).

Project seems a fitting description of American democracy and the project aspect is part of what makes it American. We the people are working towards that more perfect Union even if at times it does not seem it, the system mostly works but there is no straight line between where we started and that more perfect Union and whatever that more perfect union is, is not a constant. We do get lost along the way, take round about paths, sidestep, go backwards, etc, it is a requirement of the shared aim and sometimes a step backwards is actually a step forward. We can't achieve that more perfect Union, all we can do is keep trying and hope we are more or less going in the correct general direction.

As long as American democracy keeps evolving it is alive and has held up better than one would expect. For at least a century the country has been run by parties that supposedly want to kill American democracy, strangle it with their ideology and defeat the enemies of American democracy which just happen to be their political rivals; we would live in a utopia if it was not for <political party>. But they keep failing and the project continues on.
by toast0 | 2025-10-12 20:07:53+00:00
> Call me naive, but can't an artist just refuse to be listed on Spotify? No meetings, groups, boycotts necessary. If an artist feels like the payout isn't high enough, they can just exclude their catalog from the app.

Actually no. Or at least not completely. Radio-style play has mechanical licensing with statuatory royalties. Users wouldn't be able to request specific songs, but they could request a similar songs or similar artists station and likely hear your music.
by like_any_other | 2025-10-12 20:08:05+00:00
Yeah good riddance to self-reliance. When advocated for by Gandhi to enable Indian independence [1] it's enlightened and righteous. But when Europe wants it to avoid becoming a Chinese client state, it's "small-minded".

> European citizens would be fine given how much they like to import from china.

It's telling that your reply to my not wanting to reduce Europeans to mere consumers, does just that - saying they'll be fine because as consumers they'll be fine, ignoring all other considerations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadeshi_movement
by squishy47 | 2025-10-12 20:08:26+00:00
i have a Lab/Staffie mix and he has insane retriever drive when we get the tennis ball launcher out. pupils dilate and nothing else matters, to the point that we had to ban launcher because he kept loosing his thumb claws from sliding on the grass when the ground is too hard. Before we banned it his muscles were massive, rippling shoulders etc. When we had his (non-tennis) balls removed he developed insane food drive, the vet said this was common, to the point he'll raid the kitchen at night if we don't lock it down. The boy is build to do 1 of 2 things, eat or fetch!
by veeti | 2025-10-12 20:08:39+00:00
As we all know, the bloody Russo-Ukrainian war remains ongoing, and Ukrainian civilians are targeted by hundreds of Russian drones on a weekly basis. Helsing is a defense contractor working for the Ukrainian and European defense sector. So let me flip this argument on its head:

Americans! Do you want to help defeat fascism in Europe? Are you tired of your tech companies capitulating to Trump? Do you really want your music to support the IDF in Gaza?

There is something very easy you can do: simply switch to Spotify. Cancel your Apple, Amazon and Google subscriptions. Pull your music from their platforms.
by isodev | 2025-10-12 20:08:44+00:00
Devs are free to choose, provided we can vet the model prover’s policy on training on prompts or user code. We’re also careful not to expose agents to documentation or test data that may be sensitive. It’s a trade off with convenience of course, but we believe that any information agents get access to should be a conscious opt-in. It will be cool if/when self hosting claude-like LLMs becomes pragmatic.
by aceofspades19 | 2025-10-12 20:08:45+00:00
Saying it will go away in a future administration is no different than saying this bill won't pass or will be removed by a future Canadian government. Sure it might, it might not, there is no way to tell at this juncture. To say that it is localized to specific areas and groups in the US is wrong, ICE has been deporting people all over the country without due process. While I am sure there are some areas of the US that are unaffected, I would hardly call that localized. Not to mention the attacks on the constitution by the Trump administration which affects everyone or any number of things that this administration has been doing that is illegal.
by drnick1 | 2025-10-12 20:09:21+00:00
Libreelec is comically limited. Last time I checked the Youtube integration needed an API key tied to a Google account. No thanks. On Android, there is NewPipe and it's far better. Also no browser, so you can't stream from the high seas. Libreelec sucks for anything that isn't local playback. It's much better to run Kodi inside Android or Linux for that.
by 827a | 2025-10-12 20:09:32+00:00
IMO: There's a ton of circumstantial evidence Liquid Glass was supposed to be a 2026 feature, but at some point between 2024-2025 they accelerated it for a 2025 release. Stating that it was because of the Apple Intelligence disaster of 2024 totally fits in the timeline.

1. Liquid glass went through significant changes in every developer and public beta release between June and the full release in September. Transparency, border, light scattering changes, it was very clear that they didn't even have a strong definition internally of "how liquid" and "how glass" the liquid glass should be, and were responding in real time to reddit comments complaining about it.

2. Many aspects of the design system are still buggy, today, in October. There's some evidence that accessibility features like Increase Contrast and Button Shapes are implemented entirely differently depending on your model of iPhone [1]; they certainly do not do what the label says they should do for some users, and at the very least are implemented inconsistently, or not at all, across many apps.

3. The MacOS 26.1 developer beta further implements (welcome) changes to the design system [2]. Why weren't these ready for 26.0 GA?

4. It is expected that 2026 and 2027 are going to be a massive years for new iPhones, as we're expected the iPhone Fold to drop in 2026, then in 2027 we'll see something related to the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. Comparatively speaking, 2025 saw a new midrange iPhone model, but that's it. Coinciding a large design system change with a new phone format change (foldable) is an Apple thing to do.

If you think about Apple's timeline pre-AI, all of this kind of makes sense. A bunch of Apple Intelligence features were supposed to be done by the iOS 18 cycle, then for iOS 26 they could have continued to fill in more AI features, before a massive design refresh + new phones for iOS 27 in 2026. But they got to like iOS 18.2 before they realized that they screwed up and the AI features needed a ground-up rewrite [3] and wouldn't be ready for 18.4, let alone maybe even the 26 cycle. At that point, they realized that they went from a decent 18 month roadmap for AI stuff, to 0 months; and they needed something to make 26 interesting. So, they go to design and say "i know you thought you had 12 months until the 27 cycle, but actually, you have six, we want this in 26".

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1nx4aqe/comment/nhkor2...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1no2uuu/macos_26...

[3] this is not supposition - if you weren't following the Apple Intelligence drama of 2024, Apple has publicly stated that their AI had an initial v1 architecture that was demoed at WWDC 2024, but by late-2024 it became clear it would have to be thrown out: https://youtu.be/wCEkK1YzqBo?t=89
by netshade | 2025-10-12 20:09:43+00:00
I was an Emacs user for about 3-4 years. I never felt very proficient in it, I always felt like I was cargo culting in config changes that I never felt comfortable with. I liked the power, but never graduated to the point where it felt like it was working with me. AFA why I didn't switch to Vim, there was enough "Vim is great with a great config" which felt so similar to the situation I was already in with Emacs that I just wasn't convinced. Not the greatest rationale, but that's what it was.
by samus | 2025-10-12 20:10:10+00:00
> The same way, caller can know which exceptions are really likely to happen in TypeScript, C++, Python. Or in modern Java which avoids checked exceptions anyway. By reading documentation or source code. That's perfectly fine and works for everyone.

This provides no automatic verification that indeed all likely error situation that can and should be handled were indeed handled. The very idea is that you have to opt in to not handle a checked exceptions. Result types don't carry a stack trace; apart from that I'm not convinced that they are interently better. In fact, I'd argue that handling a Result and an exception looks much the same in imperative code.

> When I'm writing reading data from resource stream, the data that's located next to my class files, IO Exceptions are really unlikely to happen.

Java class loaders can do anything including loading resources from the network. Which is admittedly not that common these days after the demise of applets.

> ByteArrayInputStream -> ByteArrayOutputStream

The general assumption behind IO interfaces is that the operations might fail. These two classes are oddballs in that sense. Note that the other write methods in `ByteArrayOutputStream` don't declare checked exceptions.

Since the compiler cannot prove that an exception will never be thrown (essentially due to Rice's theorem) there are always going to be false positives. The issues with checked exceptions therefore boil down to API design and API abuse.

Re Errors: the programmer cannot do anything about it and might make matters worse by trying to do so. Preventing an OutOfMemoryError relies on whole-system design so peak memory consumption is kept under control. Also the StackOverflowError, can in no way be prevented nor handled by the caller. Therefore both of them are `Error`s, not `Exception`s.

> NullPointerException probably happens more than any checked exception.

Patently untrue, as network connections break down and files cannot be accessed all the time.

The NullPointerException indicates a bug in the application. By the very reason it occurs, the current thread cannot continue execution normally. After a checked exception, it very much might. Though I would very much like to not have to handle exceptions in static initializer blocks - there is no good way to react to any problem happening there.

> "Slow" is an understatement. I don't see this happening at all.

All of this is slow-moving, I completely agree, but due to backwards compatibility concerns the ecosystem cannot be weaned off the issues that the JPMS is designed to prevent in a short time.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-10-12 20:10:29+00:00
note: not all of these are language changes (affects substantially how you write zig) -- many are features and optimizations, true they could affect how you think about zig (inlining monomorphic function pointers), but most people will not notice. Of the ones that are language changes (requiring parens for ambiguous operator precedence, e.g.) many will be automatable and bundled with zig fmt.
by dbg31415 | 2025-10-12 20:10:55+00:00
I hope we'll get back to building things that actually matter -- solutions that help real people; products that are enjoyable to use, and are satisfying to build.

As the noise fades, and with luck, the obsession with slapping "AI" on everything will fade with it. Too many hype-driven CEOs are chasing anything but substance.

Some AI tools may survive because they're genuinely useful, but I worry that most won't be cost-effective without heavy subsidies.

Once the easy money dries up, the real engineers and builders will still be here, quietly making things that work.

Altman's plea -- "Come on guys, we just need a few trillion more!" -- and that error-riddled AI slide deck will be the meme that marks the top of the market.
by gizmo686 | 2025-10-12 20:11:04+00:00
We've had AI booms before. In terms of capabilities, this one is following exactly the same trajectory. Human researchers come up with some sort of breakthrough improvement to AI methods, that results in exponential like growth of capability as we both solve the low hanging fruit the method offers at it, and scale up the compute and data available to the limits of what is useful for the method. Then, capabilities start to plateau, and there is a long tail of the new techniques being applied in specific situations as they get combined with domain specific tuning and architecture.

We are well into this process already. Core chat capabilities have pretty much stalled out. But most of the attempts at application are still very thin layers over chat bots.
by satisfice | 2025-10-12 20:11:06+00:00
I bought my Betamax in the store having compared VHS to Beta side by side. When I say that Beta was better the main thing I'm referring to is the clarity during fast forwarding or reversing. When scanning through a video VHS was full of staticky noise, but Beta was clean. I don't recall that the quality during regular playback was particularly different, but I like to be able to see what's happening when I move around a video.

It seems like a clear winner. Of course, this was comparing one particular beta machine to one particular VHS machine.
by johnea | 2025-10-12 20:11:12+00:00
This, along with the upcoming requirement for android dev registration, are indicators that the time has never been more ripe for migration to a linux phone.

My current favorite: https://furilabs.com/

Yes, it runs a SoC vendor kernel, but please, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

It also runs android in a container, allowing execution of apps that are only available in android, and the ability to shut down the android VM otherwise.

The HN community is probably one of the most equipped to make this transition, so please seriously consider letting go of goggle...
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-10-12 20:11:22+00:00
The difference is:

1. Put all money in a big pot and pay out depending on all streams.

2. Put your money in a pot and pay out depending on your streams. Do the same for all users.

The total sum of money stays the same. If your audience listens to more music than the average Spotifier then you will get paid less using method 2.

All in all the difference isn’t massive.
by dgacmu | 2025-10-12 20:11:35+00:00
I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in 1982. It sounded pretty robotic and the decisions were 1982-level AI: Lots of if statements.

I'm not really trying to be snarky; I'm trying to point out to you that you're being really vague. And that when you actually get really, really concrete about what we have it ... starts to seem a little less magical than saying "computers that talk and think". Computers that are really quite good at sampling from a distribution of high-likelihood next language tokens based upon complex and long context window is still a pretty incredible thing, but it seems a little less likely to put us all out of a job in the next 10 years.