MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fragmede | 2025-10-04 19:40:47+00:00
Can you imagine how much worse it would be without that? Because how do you show the negative? There have definitely been cases where professionally licensed engineers have said no, or refused to sign off on something, or walked off the job, or otherwise have changed the course of human history for the better because of that code of ethics. That there have been failures in the system doesn't indight the concept as a whole. Software runs the world these days, it's time to grow up.
Show HN: Imbi-Automations
by crad | 2025-10-04 19:40:57+00:00
At AWeber our move from GitLab to GitHub demanded a tool that could migrate hundreds of repositories and automatically transform CI pipelines. That effort produced imbi-automations, a workflow engine capable of applying coordinated changes that leverage AI across our entire codebase.

Imbi is our operational source of truth. As an open-source system, it maps every project, service, database, and dependency into an interconnected graph. It tracks technical debt, enforces standards, and serves as a single control plane for configuration, project state, deployments, and operational change.

Imbi Automations leverages this graph to target projects by language, version, or type, executing workflows that combine AI with traditional tooling to enforce consistency at scale. It updates project metadata, identifies deficiencies, and monitors compliance with our standards.

We've used Imbi Automations to:

- Migrate several hundred projects from GitLab to GitHub, automating the transition from GitLab CI to GitHub Actions. Finish our Python 3.9 to 3.12 migration by updating all projects to use the latest syntax, tooling, and project standards.

- Scan all projects leveraging Claude Code, creating comprehensive AGENTS.md files for every project to ensure Agent readiness to work on project related tasks.

- Automate the scanning of our projects for standards compliance, updating Imbi project facts with the results.

- Update base Docker images across all projects in minutes instead of months.

What we're focused on next:

- Python 3.14 upgrade (January 2026): one to two sprints instead of months

- JavaScript → TypeScript: bulk migration instead of individual rewrites

- AWS infrastructure, security scanning, automated incident response: all candidates for AI-driven workflows

- Standards compliance: continuous reporting and remediation
by gtowey | 2025-10-04 19:41:49+00:00
Although I agree with this, I can also think of a counter example by analogy.

If you're on a construction project and you, say, spend a bunch of time inspecting and maintaining the safety systems so that you prevent any accidents that seriously injure or kill someone, it's an all-too-common problem that management doesn't think you've done anything and doesn't reward the effort.

It's a huge failure of management that they don't seem to have any concept of benefits unless it can be quantified as ROI. And in the case where it truly is a life or death situation, I consider it a moral failure as well.

In fact, this scenario isn't even a stretch of the imagination. This is Boeing, right now.
by fullstackwife | 2025-10-04 19:42:23+00:00
Think chefs at top restaurants for example: washing hands is something obvious, no need to get any customer infected with fecal bacteria in order to convince the restaurant management for investing into soap (hygiene takes time, you could serve additional customer!)

It is one of career progression milestones for a programmer when they can set a bar for their craftsmanship themselves. Successful SWE is someone who got hired at a team which does not require this kind of education. A team where this type of engineering hygiene is obvious like breathing.
by aidenn0 | 2025-10-04 19:42:35+00:00
In rereading Thomas's comments on this post, I'm going to try to sum up how I've read his comments:

I'm about 98% certain understands why people are against this; other comments make this more clear, but even sentence right before the one you quoted to suggests this fact ("I understand people not being comfortable with Flock.").

By "I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line" he seems to mean that, even if you ignore all authoritarians, there are plenty of smart people who believe the benefits (particularly when well regulated) outweigh the risks.

There are plenty of things that are wrong that are not "an obvious red line," so merely thinking that Flock is bad is not enough to make it "an obvious red line."

His argument for why people should not be against seems to be twofold:

1. If it could be made to work in such a way that isn't invasive, it could be a boon, particularly to the most disadvantaged[0].

2. If all of the places that regulate it well kick it out, then they lose political capital that could constructively be used to encourage their neighbors to also regulate it[1].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45475617

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45475478
by barthelomew | 2025-10-04 19:42:42+00:00
Yep! I have read your work! Pretty cool! I also worked on a similar deep research agent for autoformalization this summer at AWS ARChecks, building on similar patterns.

Although that work is not public, you can play with the generally available product here!

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/minimize-ai-hallucinations-...
by rafaelero | 2025-10-04 19:43:03+00:00
This is a good strategy, imo. I was following it for almost a year and I was having a blast working in a startup. Then a new manager came along and started to dictate how things should be done without much input from the technical team. I kept fighting for what I thought was good for the product instead of aligning with him. In the end it was just too stressful (the manager was not only an idiot but also rude). I resigned, but I wouldn't have done any other way. I simply can't be made to do dumb things from uncurious people.
by aSanchezStern | 2025-10-04 19:43:12+00:00
I agree that "proof of thought" is a misleading name, but this whole "computers can't think" thing is making LLM skepticism seem very unscientific. There is no universally agreed upon objective definition of what it means to be able to "think" or how you would measure such a thing. The definition that these types of positions seem to rely upon is "a thing that only humans can do", which is obviously a circular one that isn't useful.
by leakycap | 2025-10-04 19:43:36+00:00
Part of the reason is Microsoft's borgy/corpo-confusing service levels.

I have a paid 365 account and couldn't determine from logging in or account info screens if I was on paid or just the freemium version with my 365 plan

In testing out what I did have access to with Copilot, it was incredibly bad compared to ChatGPT or Claude, so I decided not to pay for Copilot whenever I see an ad for it.
by quotemstr | 2025-10-04 19:44:10+00:00
I'm not a Rust advocate. I'm a "the whole debate is silly: 99% of the time you want a high level language with a garbage collector" advocate.

What's the use case for Zig? You're in that 1% of projects in which you need something beyond what a garbage collector can deliver and, what, you're in the 1% of the 1% in which Rust's language design hurts the vibe or something?

You can also get that "safer, but not Safe" feeling from modern C++. So what? It doesn't really matter whether a language is "safer". Either a language lets you prove the absence of certain classes of bug or it doesn't. It's not like C, Zig, and Rust form a continuum of safety. Two of these are different from the third in a qualitative sense.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-10-04 19:44:14+00:00
In my view, the primary issue is that the FOSS world has a distinct lack of design-minded engineers, which has been the group that's been responsible for the high quality, well designed botique apps that macOS has become known for. That world is much more skewed towards folks that are near-exclusively "nuts and bolts".

There's nothing wrong or bad about that but it manifests quite clearly in the software that gets produced.

Design-minded engineers are great for UI-focused projects because they're the most capable of striking that balance of form and function, or better yet coming up with designs that serve both. By comparison, non-technical designers and fully technical engineers are both at a disadvantage; the designers can make things nice looking but don't have a grasp on what's practical to implement while the technical engineers struggle to design UIs that are appealing to anybody but other technical people.

It's a bit of a self-reinforcing problem. The FOSS world can't attract design-minded engineers because they have such little presence in that culture.
by FireBeyond | 2025-10-04 19:44:22+00:00
I'm an ex-employee of Flock who left when I learned just how empty their words about ethics and morality of increased surveillance really were.

They will happily look the other way when agencies share data that Flock knows they're not meant to be sharing.

They will happily "massage" data when needed to shore up a case (particularly with their gunshot detection).

Their transparency report probably lists only about 2/3 (at most) of the agencies that are actually using the system.

I asked lots of questions about ethics and morality in the recruitment process, got in, and rapidly learned that it was openly mask-off, surveillance state, Minority Report-esque mission.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-04 19:44:26+00:00
> If you're going to be snarky, could you at least clarify what the answer is for those of us who don't stay on top of ML research...?

The answer is "There's a difference, perhaps", but the GP appeared to imply that LoRA performed worse.

My understanding is that that paper found differences, but did not conclude that the differences were quantifiably better or worse, but this is not what GP's post implied.
by eszed | 2025-10-04 19:44:31+00:00
Agree with every word of this. It's the open-ness that's kept me on Android all these years. I'm less of a phone-tinkerer than I was a decade ago, but I still use dozens of those side-project, non-commercial F-Droid / side-load apps all the time.

If (looks like when) I lose those, I'll be (sigh) buying an iPhone. There isn't any other point to Android, for me.
by avianlyric | 2025-10-04 19:45:31+00:00
> You won't be able to ride the Tube in London or Subway in NYC with a card that does not support it, for example.

Those systems all perform online auths at the gate, they don’t rely on offline transactions at all.

Asymmetric encryption is used to prove the identity of the card itself, I.e. prove it’s a real card owned by a real issuer. But it’s not used to sign the transaction itself.

Transaction cryptograms, the cryptographic blob that’s built using data like transaction amounts, method of customer authentication etc only use symmetric encryption. The produced cryptogram itself is then also signed using an asymmetric key, but the asymmetric and symmetric blobs are distinct entities and processes separately by the card network.

Now this is the really important, and completely non-obvious part. Only the symmetrically encrypted transaction cryptogram is sent over the card network to the issuer. All of the asymmetric parts are only used locally by the terminal for validation, then thrown away. So the data produced by the card that is actually stored and eventually sent to the issuer can’t be used for cryptographic non-repudiation, because there’s no mechanism for the merchant to prove using only the transaction cryptogram, and public keys, that a specific transaction was signed by a specific card issued by a specific issuer.

This may seem very strange from a technical perspective, but only because people think that the technical elements of card networks is what prevents fraud. In reality fraud, at least between network participants, is entirely prevented using legal contracts, escrow accounts, and the simple fact that the benefit of abusing the technical measures to commit fraud is simply not worth the consequences. Being a network participant requires you to put millions of dollars in escrow, and be a large enough company that you can realistically move millions of dollars in transactions everyday. Fraud between companies at that level is solved using very expensive lawyers, the technical measures only need to provide enough evidence of tampering to stand up in a court of law, where everyone is under oath, and at risk of personal repercussions for perjury. There is no need for them to be completely fool proof, it’s much easier to just depose the engineers who were ordered to circumvent the technical controls, under threat of prison time, than it is to get every network participant to adopt some complex cryptographic non-repudiation scheme to protect against scenarios that don’t actually occur in reality.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-10-04 19:45:42+00:00
It boggles my mind how some people can seem to only think in terms of "teams". And can't think critically about their supposed team.

"I'm on their site so I'm on their team... Of course I back everything they do, I'm on their team."

Similarly (and slightly related) when a big part of your motivation is to see the "other" side upset you've lost the plot.
by EdiX | 2025-10-04 19:45:47+00:00
Ask yourself who is more legitimized to take such enforcement actions: a handful of privately owned corporations acting in concert or a democratically elected government?

No, the "first amendment only applies to government" is cope of the highest degree, it was always a cope.

You accepted that an oligopoly could dictate what you could do with devices you owned because it suited your preferences and now that you are on the other side of the sword you squirm.

The correct answer was neither all along.
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-04 19:45:49+00:00
In some abstract sense yes, but this doesn't mean that every moment of our lives when we leave our private home should be surveilled and recorded and analyzed for potential use by whoever is in power at any point in the future.

Not suggesting you are saying that, but there's a spectrum of what it means for behavior to be public.

Sure, my location is technically public in the sense that sometimes people see me when I go somewhere. But I would much rather not always be recorded with gps location and video and audio to be stored forever and available to those in power.
by nakamoto_damacy | 2025-10-04 19:45:50+00:00
LLMs lack logical constraints in the generative process; they only learn probabilistic constraints. If you apply logic verification post-hoc, you're not "ensuring the correctness of your LLMs reasoning" (I went down this path a year ago); you're classifying whether the LLM's statistically driven pattern generation happens to correspond to correct logic or not, where the LLMs output may be wrong 100% of the time, and your theorem prover simply acts as a classifier, ensuring nothing at all.
by beeflet | 2025-10-04 19:45:52+00:00
I wonder if the disappearance of small phones is merely to justify a higher price (now around ~$1000). Now that everyone in the world has a smartphone, the only way to increase sales revenue is to sell them more smartphone per smartphone.

On an unrelated note, I found this "small phone" kickstarter project: https://www.ikkoaudio.com/products/mind-one-phone

But what is really preventing me from buying one of these is lack of AOSP support. I want to run GrapheneOS or CalyxOS or postmarketOS, so if it can't do that it's off the table for me. I wish there was a way to sponsor the reverse engineering of a single phone's drivers.
by firesteelrain | 2025-10-04 19:46:13+00:00
My advice is to spend it where it matters. I took over a data center project. It’s really a software development environment. They implemented istio when nginx would have worked just fine. Only needed ingress controller and nothing crazy for what this is. There is a VM that runs nginx and it is the reverse proxy for Atlassian tools running in VMs. But we have NSX-T which can handle this so no need for a separate nginx reverse proxy.

Point is my predecessors made things too complicated by chasing shiny things instead of using what is native in our environment to get the job done and simple maintenance
by barthelomew | 2025-10-04 19:46:17+00:00
Hey there! I mostly designed and wrote most of the actual interpreter during my internship at Microsoft Research last summer. Constrained decoding for GPT-4 wasn’t available when we started designing the DSL, and besides, creating a regex to constrain this specific DSL is quite challenging.

When the grammar of the language is better defined, like SMT (https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20047) - we are able to do this with open source LLMs.
by notmyjob | 2025-10-04 19:46:31+00:00
Hilariously wrong to anyone who has spent any portion of their career working with actual economists. Every working economist is at the very least classic liberal/neo-liberal. It is the basis of the profession. Political economists don’t really exist now, even if they did they’d be liberal or anarcho/liberal. They worship in the church of free trade and unrestrained immigration. The most famous and influential media economists for those who are not familiar with economics or haven’t interacted with economists are people like Krugman and Robert Reich, or Larry Summers for the better educated. All deep blue democrats. Some economists may lean right and many tend to side against democrats but that’s because they all rightly fear government debt and socialism. They fear it less than tarrifs or tightened border security if you poll them. The most famous economist of all time is Marx!
by kbolino | 2025-10-04 19:47:03+00:00
Option<U8ButNotThreeForSomeReason> would have a size of 2 bytes (1 for the discriminant, 1 for the value) whereas Option<NonZeroU8> has a size of only 1 byte, thanks to some special sauce in the compiler that you can't use for your own types. This is the only "magic" around NonZero<T> that I know of, though.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-10-04 19:47:06+00:00
I have not noted his comment history so I'm only addressing this in a general fashion:

A lot of things actually are black and white, but people invent shades in them in order to avoid having to admit there's a problem without a solution. I've been accused of black and white thinking many times, almost never has the accuser been able to actually show a nuance to the situation.
by richrichardsson | 2025-10-04 19:47:35+00:00
In my experience of you're on currentVersion - 1 the security is just as good.

All I was saying is it's (imo) madness to upgrade immediately to the latest .0 version of macOS.

The long key press for diacritics is completely broken on Tahoe : white text on a white background.

All Electron apps are a bit broken until the vendors update.

There's probably more problems.
by buran77 | 2025-10-04 19:48:15+00:00
It was a statement that you're muddying the waters without implying whether bad faith or just a weak argument. And it was followed by the reasoning: that on a topic where the arguments against pervasive surveillance can be considered obvious, you aren't even hinting at an argument why anyone should not be against this in your dissenting opinion. Just an appeal to authority, "I am super experienced and say it's fine".

After repeated requests also from others you're still just waltzing around this, pretending you're not answering because you didn't get the question worded the right way.

If you think that's what good faith looks like I've got news for you.
by sokoloff | 2025-10-04 19:48:39+00:00
Does Congo lack electricity, modern medicine, and air conditioning?

If the industrial revolution has made their lives worse, it's a double-whammy because they are forced to suffer almost twice as long, as their life expectancy at birth has approximately doubled since 1870.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071021/life-expectancy-...
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-04 19:48:46+00:00
Ok I could be super wrong here, but I think that's not true.

Dropping a future does not cancel a concurrently running (tokio::spawn) task. It will also not magically stop an asynchronous I/o call, it just won't block/switch from your code anymore while that continues to execute. If you have created a future but not hit .await or tokio::spawn or any of the futures:: queue handlers, then it also won't cancel it it just won't begin it.

Cancellation of a running task from outside that task actually does require explicit cancelling calls IIRC.

Edit here try this https://cybernetist.com/2024/04/19/rust-tokio-task-cancellat...
by nzeid | 2025-10-04 19:48:49+00:00
No easy answer here. Individual MTAs or a cluster of them typically live under one unique domain. In your scenario, you'd have to point your existing records (or just MX) to your self-hosted instance, and have your self-hosted instance relay/autoforward to Gmail under a different domain. This might entail simply setting your Gmail back to @gmail.com.
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-10-04 19:49:44+00:00
(had to dug my comment from under a flagged parent)

I self-hosted for well over 20 years, I did not throw the towel and I do not plan to. Self-hosting is a sign of pride. Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry can host their own email.

Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted.

I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.

In all fairness, there is very little maintenance involved, and whenever I have to do maintenance work, I take the opportunity to learn something new. Like this year, I decided to finally replace my aging Debian jessie setup by Arch Linux, and I rewrote all cron jobs as systemd timers.

I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.

Lastly, a piece of advice: treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it.

Oh and the very last thing: the person who designed Exim configuration for Debian deserves a special place in hell for all the hours wasted. If you set up Exim on Debian, just figure out how to use the upstream exim config and adapt it to your needs.
by FireBeyond | 2025-10-04 19:50:07+00:00
> Or in the case of UnitedHealthcare, felony murder: their felony fraud in issuing false denials for their clients resulted in deaths — and deaths that result from a felony have a special charge.

Sadly, the insurers have a defense to this, and it has largely held up in court:

"We did not deny that person the healthcare that could save their life. We just declined to be the party to pay for it."
by pyrale | 2025-10-04 19:50:29+00:00
You're coercing EFF's point (corporations are tracking people's movements and building a database of people's whereabouts and connections using license plate scanners, and that's an issue) into a very different one (license plates should be a private information).

Of course, that leads you to a flawed conclusion.

> because I'm in a vehemently pro-freedom libertarian demographic.

That demographic hasn't had a very good track record on privacy recently, has it?
by jukkan | 2025-10-04 19:50:49+00:00
Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.