MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EasyMark | 2025-10-04 20:45:34+00:00
Seems more like a tr-ade off than a tr-ap. Everything has a price. I think LLVM is well worth the tradeoffs for all the stuff that it gives you. I'm sure that some better tech will replace it but calling it a trap seems like an exaggeration, it seems to work well enough for even the biggest companies and countries in the world.
by iLemming | 2025-10-04 20:45:42+00:00
Are you writing all that sql simply to examine the existing data, or you're actively writing migratory expressions and such?

For the former - if you're willing to completely alter your perspective here, you may discover something unusually good. To understand the data, I find myself more often reaching for a Clojure REPL with basic odbc lib dependency. Clojure, at times may feel like hands-down the best tool for dealing with certain types of data. It really is great for quickly retrieving/grouping/sorting/slicing/dicing - these days I use it for exploring JSON results from APIs (that I automatically convert to EDN), or for dealing with DB data.

And you can perfectly manage that in org-source blocks too - I typically keep at least one Clojure REPL instance running in Emacs - I'd connect to it and go like:

(-> (select :*) (from :users) (where [:= :status "active"]) (limit 5) (group-by :user_id) ...)

For someone with no clue, all these parens may feel like annoyance, for me, they are the best way to deal with structured expressions - composing and writing them is far more satisfactory than even writing plain sql. Although, sure - sql can be a mind-blowing, great tool on itself.
by Buttons840 | 2025-10-04 20:45:58+00:00
> No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work

Source: DMCA: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

I'm sure that spending a few hundred thousand dollars on lawyers might find a legal loophole, but I wouldn't count on it.

Why is it illegal to break the encryption of video game consoles? Whatever the answer is, the same can be applied to breaking the encryption of a car.
by dizhn | 2025-10-04 20:46:43+00:00
Not with MX but, look at google's split domain documentation. You can either have them handle the domain and forward you a copy, or you can have your own domain be the primary and forward to google. I have been using the latter for a few years now since not all of the users in the domain are using Google Workspace. They have a special address for forwarding to so you don't get into a loop. It has been working flawlessly for us.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-04 20:46:56+00:00
That’s the trick. We don’t own the devices. We merely license their use. No root, no ownership.

People have been warning of this outcome for years and years. Stallman was right and all that. We got laughed out of the room and called paranoid weirdos.

Ever since smartphones were a thing it’s been obvious that this is where we were heading.
by YZF | 2025-10-04 20:47:31+00:00
Every country should take Germany's stance against Nazis.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-ant...

- The German penal code prohibits publicly denying the Holocaust and disseminating Nazi propaganda, both off- and online. This includes sharing images such as swastikas, wearing an SS uniform and making statements in support of Hitler.

- It also places strict rules on how social media companies must moderate and report hate speech and threats. These hate-speech laws were tightened last year, after three far-right terror attacks in 2019 and early 2020 prompted German authorities to warn of increasing extremism.

But I think there is plenty of debate possible on free market vs. centrally managed market, tax rates, immigration policies, etc. that can be fact based and is with people who do have the same vision (a free prosperous society) but disagree on how we do it.
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-04 20:48:23+00:00
Good for him. That’s certainly a worthy accomplishment.

The point stands i think. It is difficult for someone in his position to offer meaningful commentary about the topic without alienating his customers. As I mentioned in another comment, I’ve see firsthand how this type of tech resulted in a prosecution that would have been impossible without it.

But… there are glaring risks to the public with this tech. Everything from dragnet surveillance to cops stalking their exes. Move fast and break things is a menace in this context, and the gulf between a foreign boogeyman and something closer to home may not be as wide as someone would like it to be.
by grafmax | 2025-10-04 20:50:12+00:00
> A recent study in Vancouver found that one of the most significant single causes of homelessness (20%) was people simply running out of money and being evicted. The direct cause of this is high rents. So any city that is building more housing in general, and not demolishing existing affordable rental is going to be doing a better job in this category at reducing homelessness.

Affordability isn’t simply a function of supply in a market but the wealth distribution of market participants. When wealth is concentrated, housing ownership is concentrated in the hands of rentier capital, which is precisely what determines the amount of financial outflows from the poor to the wealthy in the form of housing prices (rent and mortgages).
by bayindirh | 2025-10-04 20:50:18+00:00
Curious. That's the complete opposite of me. My sleep is akin to MacBook's Power Nap. Everything stays put except some small background processes. My version also has good and bad sides (esp. dealing with hard events in life).

I understand how your emotions/body work and how upsetting the current "configuration" is, but maybe it's the way because your body is trying to process or overcome something in the grand scale.

Did you try meditation, esp. not the canned ones from the apps, but a proper practice with a proper instructor and mentor? A good practice generally help you to understand what makes you tick, or live a more balanced inner life, which may help you reducing in this "work up" time, or change the things which you doesn't like about yourself.
by sreenathmenon | 2025-10-04 20:50:30+00:00
Universal SDK for switching between any LLM provider with one line.

10 providers: OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude Sonnet 4.5), Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Cohere, Perplexity, IBM Watsonx, Groq, Ollama, Sarvam AI.

Key features: - Workspace memory: AI remembers your project context across sessions - Auto-learning journals per project - Multiple "second brains" for different aspects of life

Python SDK + CLI

pip install llmswap
by reacharavindh | 2025-10-04 20:50:43+00:00
This. I don’t care much for MacOS. It pretty much gives me a terminal and browser and gets out of the way. But, the hardware, and drivers…. I can reliably shut the lid and open up at a different place and continue working. The battery last atleast a full working day. Displays text sharply. Touchpad works like no other.

I can’t imagine dealing with Linux without these conveniences.
by computerbuster | 2025-10-04 20:51:33+00:00
Hi, author here – the README covers this in the Performance section: https://github.com/gianni-rosato/fssimu2?tab=readme-ov-file#...

If you run the `validate.py` script available in the repo, you should see correlation numbers similar to what I've pre-tested & made available in the README: fssimu2 achieves 99.97% linear correlation with the reference implementation's scores.

fssimu2 is still missing some functionality (like ICC profile reading) but the goal was to produce a production-oriented implementation that is just as useful while being much faster (example: lower memory footprint and speed improvements make fssimu2 a lot more useful in a target quality loop). For research-oriented use cases where the exact SSIMULACRA2 score is desirable, the reference implementation is a better choice. It is worth evaluating whether or not this is your use case; an implementation that is 99.97% accurate is likely just as useful to you if you are doing quality benchmarks, target quality, or something else where SSIMULACRA2's correlation to subjective human ratings is more important than the exactness of the implementation to the reference.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-10-04 20:51:44+00:00
LLMs are statistical language models (d'uh) not reasoners after all. I found generating logic programs, and Prolog source specifically, to work unreasonably well, though [1], maybe because Prolog was introduced for symbolic natural language processing and there's a wealth of translation examples in the training set. Might be worth checking out Z3's alternative Datalog syntax [2] instead of its Lisp-ish SMTLib syntax.

[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/llm-demo/part1.html

[2]: https://microsoft.github.io/z3guide/docs/fixedpoints/syntax
by JoshTriplett | 2025-10-04 20:51:45+00:00
> When a company has the ability to push OTA updates to a device locked down with trusted computing, it's not even a backdoor at that point, it's a frontdoor.

Ideally, everything that runs outside of an app sandbox would be 100% Open Source. Anything short of that is not sufficient to give people full confidence against a backdoor. (Even that also relies on people paying attention, but it at least gives the possibility that people outside of a company whistleblower could catch and flag a backdoor.)
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-04 20:51:59+00:00
You can be okay with it, but it's not going to solve the problem. Management will fix the issue, then soon revert to enshittification and exploitation, so your next major issue will stay unfixed. In the best case, your software will become an annual subscription where you've to keep paying an obscene amount for no new features at all. Overall, it would be a step in the right direction, but only a single step.

> You don't outsource to a third world software mill or AI when your concern is quality.

That's a disastrously fallacious set of presuppositions. A good engineer will use AI well to improve their software, whereas a bad engineer will use it to produce junk.
by nis0s | 2025-10-04 20:52:26+00:00
Sorry, but I call bullshit.

The day someone gets hired for jobs that are for MBAs without an MBA, or for consulting jobs at big consultancies without prestige or college-degree schooling, I’ll believe any of this tripe.

No one is hiring engineering majors as technical program managers without an MBA or business experience, or GED-only people as life sciences CEOs. No is putting electricians on the assembly line for making quantum computing chips, or hell even the CMOS processes we make now.

Very little venture capitalist funding goes to anyone who didn’t get prestige schooling, so people need to cut the bullshit and tell the truth. You’re ruining young people’s lives.

If it’s not bullshit, then prove it with hiring and funding practices.
by strangattractor | 2025-10-04 20:52:59+00:00
Ok Before I am accused of misrepresenting things and in the interest of clarity.

1. I am in San Francisco.

2. Upon further research Flock does not appear to be used by SFPD for ticketing. They have another camera system for that. That does not mean that Flock could not be used for speeding tickets or a host of other things like running red lights, littering etc. Microprocessors and CMOS cameras can do amazing things.

Regardless of what company is doing the surveillance the debate remains the same.

1. Pervasive surveillance has the potential to be used inappropriately by authorities. Discussion is needed.

2. The data collected by a company such as Flock but not necessarily Flock could be used inappropriately or sold for other purposes. Benn Jordan has a good video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ&t=21s

3. The claim that Flock is responsible for %10 of solved cases seems dubious but without data it is difficult to know or believe. Given that Flock is in YC's portfolio makes it even more suspect.

Flock or a company like Flock may try and become pervasive and indispensable before a public discussion places any limits on their behavior.
by illiac786 | 2025-10-04 20:53:32+00:00
I think you can seriously improve your UX, because I don’t have any extra tap to access passwords, definitely not because of ID cards or the likes. I just search for any item (no matter what category) or it is already suggested and I don’t have to search.

I genuinely don’t mean this in a condescending way, but you must use it wrong or have a wrong setting somewhere.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-04 20:54:07+00:00
What would it look like if you were a staff software engineer whose job description didn't include theoretical work, but whose output consisted almost entirely of theoretical work?

That's not an issue of losing political battles, that's an issue of you getting fired very rapidly.

This advice is entirely premised on the idea that you can choose to do theoretical work if you want to, but that it will be a bad idea.
by abnercoimbre | 2025-10-04 20:54:17+00:00
Agreed, but If I can add one more angle: creative destruction is strangled when engineers are glued to the Internet about “how software should be built.”

I've published a blog post urging [0] top programmers to quit for‑profit social media and rebuild better norms away from that noise.

[0] https://abner.page/post/exit-the-feed/
by corimaith | 2025-10-04 20:54:21+00:00
>Ok, cutting taxes to the very rich while raising them on middle and lower classes and cutting services. This was part of the big beautiful bill. This is 'logical' from the point of view of the billionaire class

Deciding who benefits or not from legislation is not a Economist's domain, their work is descriptive, not normative. You're critiquing politicians here for prioritizing GDP, but that is divorced from your critique of economics. The economist will only tell you what they think will happen with regard to the economy if you pass a bill or not given the goals you've outlined to them.

https://taxfoundation.org/blog/big-beautiful-bill-impact-def...

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61387

Well you look at analysis here, do you then disagree with the predictions of the bill and the methodology used, and if so, what is your better analysis here with supposedly more refined epistemic assumptions?
by oscaracso | 2025-10-04 20:55:02+00:00
The history of physics is the exact opposite of what you say. Models were subject to considerable criticism and refinement on theoretical, philosophical, and aesthetic grounds. Newton did not discover universal gravitation because Kepler's laws broke down. Maxwell did not discover his correction because Ampère's laws broke down. Einstein did not discover relativity because Newtonian mechanics broke down. Investigation proceeded along different lines altogether and was accompanied by a degree of scrutiny not to be characterized as 'handwavy'.
by kh_hk | 2025-10-04 20:55:07+00:00
I write on my blog, but I am not sure who I am writing for. Which is fine, because in the end I write for myself. Years ago you would get comments, posts would get linked (remember pingbacks?). Maybe as time progressed I started writing more niche things that reach nobody, or maybe that web started disintegrating. Hope it comes back, but I will not hold my breath. I will keep posting though.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-04 20:55:38+00:00
> Some the benefit of using stablecoins are 1) they do not need user accounts set up for payments, so easier for machine to machine (AI agent can manage its own money) 2) they work everywhere not just in credit card rich countries 3) security profile is different (no credit card fraud)

Just to note, that Cloudflare is a public company which means that they have both internal and external auditors.

They definitely need to worry about fraud, but the first two things they need to worry about are sanctions screening (don't do business with the four countries the US doesn't like) and AML (anti-money laundering).

Stablecoins are a potentially huge vector for this kind of badness, so it would be unwise for Cloudflare to try to yolo this (but they probably will, because almost all tech companies try to work with finance this way).
by b112 | 2025-10-04 20:56:05+00:00
You know, you have to wonder what they did wrong.

Sure the Play store was dominant when they started their own store. Yet companies tend to have excellent success if they control the OS on the device.

They could have offered no commission for 5 years, or some such.

Does anyone reading this know if the contract they had to sign with Google, to have the Play store pre-installed, reduced their ability to compete?

I mean look at the whole Epic thing. They could have offered them commission free use of the store, and used that to draw users in.

It's like they weren't trying.
by araes | 2025-10-04 20:56:58+00:00
There's some examples in the first link, with the implication they're representative (unknown whether they are, yet, "detail about the distribution")

> Purdue administrator: a “$172,000 per year associate vice provost had been hired to oversee the work of committees charged with considering a change in the academic calendar” who defended their role to a Bloomberg reporter by stating “‘[my] job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what’s going on in the other committees.’”

> serve primarily as liaisons between bureaucratic arms. “Health Promotion Specialist”, “Student Success Manager,” and “Senior Coordinator, Student Accountability” are all positions currently available on higheredjobs.com. A Harvard Crimson article considered the university’s recent Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage”, a 24 member-strong committee including 9 administrators.
by supern0va | 2025-10-04 20:57:19+00:00
>If you believe computers can think then you must be able to explain why a chain of dominoes is also thinking when I convert an LLM from transistor relay switches into the domino equivalent.

Sure, but if you assume that physical reality can be simulated by a Turing machine, then (computational practicality aside) one could do the same thing with a human brain.

Unless you buy into some notion of magical thinking as pertains to human consciousness.
by chrchr | 2025-10-04 20:57:22+00:00
I had a surprising interaction with Gemini 2.5 Pro that this project reminds me of. I was asking the LLM for help using an online CAS system to solve a system of equations, and the CAS system wasn't working as I expected. After a couple back and forths with Gemini about the CAS system, Gemini just gave me the solution. I was surprised because it's the kind of thing I don't expect LLMs to be good at. It said it used Python's sympy symbolic computation package to arrive at the solution. So, yes, the marriage of fuzzy LLMs with more rigorous tools can have powerful effects.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-04 20:57:37+00:00
Too big to fail shouldn’t even be in the vernacular of our society. Every private business should be able to fail. Let it happen and the let new entrants take over and compete.

Is something does become so large and critical to the functioning of the nation that means we have either failed to trust bust or it needs to be nationalized and made a public service. If Microsoft for example were to fail tomorrow, no way in hell should we bail them out. Let them fail, let others enter the market and pick up the pieces.
by tptacek | 2025-10-04 20:57:45+00:00
I have no idea where the "10% of solved cases" thing comes from, but I posted across thread: I looked at effectiveness very carefully in my own muni, and my conclusion was that the cameras were of basically no help. It feels cynical to make this observation, but if I had to bet --- from the way our own PD, which I respect a lot, tried to formulate an argument for keeping the cameras --- they're counting every crime where an involved car blipped an ALPR. That's not at all the same thing as solving a crime.

Someone who knows more about how Flock generates that stat could say more.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-04 20:58:26+00:00
> Who exactly is "we" here? Because that's not true in a lot of (sovereign) countries in the world.

The CEO of coinbase recently said on a podcast that in the future, he expects stablecoins to wipe out all but ten currencies in the world.

This is a ludicrous statement that's gonna get Coinbase banned from many of these countries, and end up being subject to much, much more regulation than they expect.

Like, just because the US is currently pro-crypto doesn't mean that the rest of the global regulators have changed.
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-04 20:58:29+00:00
I think so too. It should include full free open source specifications of hardware, as well as fully FOSS for all software that is not inside of the sandbox system, and probably also FOSS for most of the stuff that is using the sandbox, too. Other things should also be done rather than this way alone, but this will be a very important part of it.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-10-04 20:59:07+00:00
That is fine, but it makes no sense that manufacturers are entirely unwilling to serve that market. People who need very large or very small clothes can still get clothes in their size, even though they are a minority. They might have to pay more, but the niche is filled by someone. We should see the same thing with smartphones, but for some reason we don't.
by saltcured | 2025-10-04 20:59:18+00:00
It amuses me to think about a modern smart TV as a really big smartphone. It would be a small tweak to add a 5G cellular modem, touch layer for the screen, and (more?) camera modules. They already have WiFi, speakers, microphones, and processors capable of running the bloated media apps and driving the screen with full motion video.

Then, you can really think about the core electronic guts, the screen, and the overall packaging and the price range of these products...
by andai | 2025-10-04 21:00:02+00:00
There was a blog posted to HN years ago describing a self hosted email setup in detail, and this was indeed the main issue. Everyone he emails is on a small number of big companies, and most of them don't like his server.

"After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437

https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-...
by logifail | 2025-10-04 21:00:37+00:00
> it was the fact that I needed 100% uptime or risk losing messages

Q: If your server(s) is/are offline for a few hours, why would you "lose messages"?

I've just checked my own email server -> "up 219 days"

Honestly, compared with the stuff we do all day, this is not hard...
by sublinear | 2025-10-04 21:00:44+00:00
There are far far too many sloppy devs who slip through the cracks. They never get the mentoring they need or shown the door.

All sense of teamwork was murdered about a decade ago by people with clipboards and other dead weight staff who don't give a rat's ass about anything.

Most devs under 30 don't have the same enthusiasm previous generations did because the opportunity being proposed just isn't the same. The room for creativity isn't there, and neither is the financial reward. Do more with less and these problems tend to go away.
by em-bee | 2025-10-04 21:01:29+00:00
I prefer higher level code and tooling wherever possible

exactly this.

go actually strikes a balance of being one of the few high level languages that can compile directly to binary. there are not many languages that can do that. common lisp, erlang, o'caml and maybe red are a few others that i am aware of. there are probably a few more that are less popular that i don't know.

for me high level implies at least automatic memory management and high level data types.
by EasyMark | 2025-10-04 21:02:01+00:00
“Human distress” today, and “human everything” tomorrow. They probably just don't currently have the processing capability or upload bandwidth for all the passersby talking, the only issue is technical and not moral. Flock is in this for money, all morals are turned off --corporations are not really people-- and will sell cops and the government anything they are willing to pay for, including listening for wrongthink. Every time I read a story like this I send EFF or the ACLU another $20