MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thrance | 2025-10-01 14:54:13+00:00
I am indeed "Western" as you put it, and generally adhere to the description you gave of me. I do recognize my statement is political, although I did not use the word "objectively" lightly and feel like I can justify my position quite solidly. So, while the other side may claim their ideas as "objectively right" too, I am yet to see any reasoning that would give credance to such claims. Here is a succint overview of the reasoning I used to arrive at my current position on trans-identity:

Facts (that you should be able to verify easily through e.g. a quick Google Scholar session):

1. Gender dysphoria is real and touches a significant part of the population. It makes those affected by it suffer mentally.

2. Transition is the only known way to cure gender dysphoria, and it does indeed work.

3. People very rarely regret transitioning (<1% of them, less than the rate of people regretting having their children, and most of these "detransitions" come from religious or social pressures).

4. Trans people are no more susceptible to committing crime (sexual or else) than the average person, if not slightly less so (they are, on the other hand, ~4 times as likely to be victims of violent crimes, because of the prejudice and rhetoric targeted at them).

Axioms (that I hope we both agree on):

1. Helping people feel better, or at least not hindering them while they try to, is good.

2. Ostracizing people because of something they can't change is bad.

Conlusions (that you have to agree with if you accept my axioms and my reasoning):

1. Facts 1, 2 and 3 + Axiom 1 => We should let trans people transition, and whenever possible, even help them to.

2. Fact 4 + Axiom 2 + Conclusion 1 => We should let trans people participate in society as no one gets hurt in doing so, and trans people have to transition for their own good, so it would be unfair to attack them on that basis.
by Lumoscore | 2025-10-01 14:55:03+00:00
I feel this deeply. I only use Google Sheets, too.

It sounds crazy, but it’s the best tool for so many random things, and here’s why I stick with it:

It Just Works: There's zero fuss. I don't need to install anything, I don't need to save it, and I don't need to worry about the format. It's always there, and it saves automatically.

It's Simple to Share: If I need to show something to my spouse, a coworker, or anyone, I just send a link. No one needs to sign up or download some special app. Everyone can open it right away.

It's the Perfect Checklist: For managing my own stuff—like a budget, a travel plan, or even just tracking a personal project—a sheet is faster than any fancy app. I can make columns that say "Done," "To Do," or "Waiting," and that's all I need.

For most of my personal data and quick shared work, trying to use a dedicated software package is just overkill. Sheets is the easiest way to organize information in a clear, digital table. It's the ultimate low-tech solution to high-tech problems.
by Swizec | 2025-10-01 14:55:14+00:00
> Renaissance fairs don’t really exist in Europe.

We have them in Slovenia. In the summer local castles will put on a fair for the tourists and kids. Sometimes multiple!

Typically you get a visiting troupe or two from Italy, they like to do flag twirling shows. There’s always a group of folks from Czech who put on an armored fighting competition. I’ve seen jousting tournaments too. And then you have a slew of local artisans selling wares roughly inspired by the time period. There’s often an outdoor play or two, maybe belly dancing.

It’s all great fun.
by yomismoaqui | 2025-10-01 14:55:32+00:00
True, the only right answer for a question like "Should we use X here?" is "It depends". Maybe NIH is the right answer in some specific case but not on another that seems quite similar to the first.

Some months ago I was re-enlightened when Anders Hejlsberg (creator of C# and TypeScript) explained why they chose Go for reimplementing the TypeScript compiler, instead of using any of those languages or something like Rust.

The way they defined the problem, the tests they did and how they justify their pick is how these kind of decisions should be made if we want to call ourselves engineers.
by anal_reactor | 2025-10-01 14:56:13+00:00
I know that one day I'm going to die, but it's just incredibly difficult to find meaning in life. The more I try the more I fail and the more depressed I get. I can't find meaning in work because toxic corporate environment is what pays most. I can't find meaning in hobbies because the mind just gets bored of them at some point, whether it's productive hobbies or doomscrolling. I can't find meaning in other people because talking to 99% of them leaves me frustrated rather than fulfilled, and the other 1% has better shit to do than talking to me. I can't find meaning in meaninglessness because mind starts to wander.

By the power of sheer discipline I keep moving on. I have my daily routine which encompasses a variety of activities that theoretically should push me forward as a person. But I can't escape the profound sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction. It's terrifying for me to think that this is how I'll spend the rest of my life and then I'll die, but at the same time I'm completely clueless what I could potentially change while there's still time. And the worst part is, compared to most of humanity, I'm very privileged.
by captn3m0 | 2025-10-01 14:56:19+00:00
For a static analysis approach, I wrote a NPM package called which-electron: https://github.com/captn3m0/which-electron

It uses an automatically update package listing the hashes of all files in electron releases: https://github.com/captn3m0/electron-fingerprints

I’ve been meaning to improve the detector to use ELF info.
Show HN: Perplexity for Makers
by rocknrollisdev | 2025-10-01 14:56:20+00:00
Hey, HN!

I’ve been working on an AI-powered search engine for DIY & home improvement. Think Perplexity, but tuned for building, fixing, and making things.

We just pushed a big upgrade: it’s faster, better at understanding DIY questions, and sharper at surfacing the right tutorials and guides.

I’d love your feedback:

- Does it feel useful for DIY compared to Perplexity or Google?

- Where does it break or give irrelevant stuff?

- What would make it your go-to when building or repairing?

Try it out: https://patio.so/ask — no signup required.
by da-x | 2025-10-01 14:56:33+00:00
I wonder didn't they used VDO thin provisioning with LVM2.

Also, a few years ago I've implemented VM management tool called 'vmess', in which the concept is to maintain a tree of QCOW2 files, which R/W snapshots are at the leafs and R/O snapshots are the nodes of the tree. The connection up to the root is made via QCOW2 backing-file store mechanism, so a newly created leaf starts a 0 space. I did this because libvirt+qemu impose various annoying limitations surrounding snapshots-with-in-qcow2, and I liked the idea of file-per-snapshot.

VDO: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/device-mapper/vdo.html (original project URL: https://github.com/dm-vdo/kvdo )

vmess: https://github.com/da-x/vmess
by velcrovan | 2025-10-01 14:56:35+00:00
> Download the precompiled binaries from the latest release to a Windows device and unzip them. The Linux binaries are automatically deployed to ~/.cache/cdc-file-transfer by the Windows tools. There is no need to manually deploy them.

Interesting, so unlike rsync there is no need to set up a service on the destination Linux machine. That always annoyed me a bit about rsync.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-01 14:57:11+00:00
> wanted to bake the version and the compilation time into the firmware. I didn't find a way to do this in plain C, but in C++ you can initialize a global struct and it gets statically linked into the output. This didn't even use constexpr, just preprocessor trickery.

I might be misunderstanding here, but if you are okay with preprocessor trickery, then it's doable.

I do this routinely in the Makefile, which (very tediously) generates a build_info module (header and implementation) that is linked into the final binary: https://github.com/lelanthran/skeleton-c/blob/8e04bed2654dac...
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-01 14:57:41+00:00
Culture has created this odd myth that if something is semantic it doesn't matter. That communication is just another soft skill.

Humans make meaning, we are the only source of complex, long term, meaning generation we have ever observed.

We emit meaning the way a star emits photons.

Sure, a lot of natural processes would still exist if we weren't around.

But in this universe, perhaps the only one that exists, we are the ones making meaning. Sometimes tge meaning exists physically in our imaginations, sometimes it maps to external facts, but everything that rationally coheres, creates and explains comes from us.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-01 14:58:00+00:00
VS Code I have but never use, Discord I have, Teams only on work machine, and Signal.

Man I'm not doing too bad!

I prefer Zed over VS Code, or just flat out Visual Studio proper (2026 has gotten snappy!), as for Slack, I rarely use it, but I can use the browser, they are forcing non-profits out of Slack and into Discord anyway.
by getnormality | 2025-10-01 14:58:24+00:00
It's nice that you think it's clear and responsive, but I think it [1] needs to be validated by an expert in both the material and education. Or we need some way to show that people have actually learned the topic. People sometimes prefer explanations that are intuitive and familiar but not accurate.

Meanwhile, there are math education resources like iXL that maybe cost a little money but the lessons and practice problems are fully curated by human experts (AFAICT). I'm not saying these resources are perfect either, but as a mathematician who has experimented a lot with LLMs, including in supposed tutoring modes, they make a lot of mistakes and take a lot of shortcuts that should materially decrease their effectiveness as tutors.

[1] LLM-based tutoring (edit: footnote added to clarify)
by causal | 2025-10-01 14:58:32+00:00
I got into Cursor a little late, went really heavy on it, and see myself using it less and less as I go back to VSCode.

1) The most useful thing about Cursor was always state management of agent edits: Being able roll back to previous states after some edits with the click of a button, or reapply changes, and preview edits, etc. But weirdly, it seems like they never recognized this differentiator, and indeed it remains a bit buggy, and some crucial things (like mass-reapply after a rollback) never got implemented.

2) Adding autocomplete to the prompt box gives me suspicion they somehow still do not understand best practices in using AI to write code. It is more crucial than ever to be clear in your mind what you want to do in a codebase, so that you can recognize when AI is deviating from that path. Giving the LLM more and earlier opportunities to create deviation is a terrible idea.

3) Claude Code was fine in CLI and has a nearly-identical extension pane now too. For the same price, I seem to get just as much usage, in addition to a Claude subscription.

I think Cursor will lose because models were never their advantage and they do not seem to really be thought leaders on LLM-driven software development.
by yvdriess | 2025-10-01 14:58:54+00:00
I wouldn't say they contain any model of the world. They're a statistical predictive model, which have proven effective at certain tasks. My take is that the demoware part is not inherent to the NN approach, but rather that the tasks it's unreasonably effective produce very cool demo-able tasks for which the audience readily fills in the blanks. Cool demos make it easier to get further resources, so demoware-prone techniques tend to pull more funding, at least for a while.
by rafaelmn | 2025-10-01 14:59:01+00:00
Just everything syphoning down RAM, standard office/desktop stuff like Slack, Chrome, Mail, Calendar, Messages, a few IMs will easily eat up over 12 GB, then add in VSCode, Rider, Docker (which I cap at 2 GB ram) - I am swapping gigabytes when I have multiple tools running.

But even when I kill all processes and just run a build you can see lack of cores slow the build down enough that it is noticeable. Investing into a 48gb ram/pro version will definitely be worth it for the improved experience, I can get by in the meantime by working more on my desktop workstation.
by xienze | 2025-10-01 14:59:11+00:00
> "The holocaust never happened" are not opinions

But would you dare state out loud in Germany that, in your opinion, the official number of Holocaust victims is actually much less than what's been widely reported? Even if you had what you believed was solid evidence supporting your argument? I bet you wouldn't.

> neither is, "Kick out all the <insert pejorative here>."

How about voicing your opinion that <people from some country> should be barred from emigrating to <European country> because <crime statistics>? Bet you wouldn't try that either, because your opinion is in "hate speech" territory now.
by postflopclarity | 2025-10-01 14:59:24+00:00
while I certainly agree that bug was a bit frustrating, in all that

* it happened in the first place

* it took so long to get noticed

* it took so long to merge the fix after being reported

I do feel like I should push back on the term "institutional friction." it was more of a bus factor problem; there were not enough (aka zero) maintainer eyeballs on the proposed fix. but there wasn't exactly anybody saying not to fix it, which is what I think of as friction.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-01 14:59:35+00:00
> 2) You can't put a change trigger on a cell or subset of cells, only on the whole sheet. So you have to manually check which cell the trigger happened on.

This is true of MS Excel's scripting language (VBA) as well. Worksheets are objects with events; cells are objects without (VBA-accessible) events.

It may be an issue with scaling and efficiency.
by sersi | 2025-10-01 14:59:49+00:00
I really don't understand Cursor's 30 billion dollars valuation (half of Antropic). I use it, it's not a bad tool by any means but it's so buggy from version to version. Latest bug I had, it completely stopped keeping my zsh state in the terminal, I had to downgrade. And honestly, I'm not that sure what secret sauce is worth 30 billion dollars? The agent loop? Others can do that? The autocomplete?
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-01 15:00:02+00:00
I'm at the tail end of a lifetime career of software development, and the way I've come to understand it is that I largely enjoy it because it lets you conjure dreams into reality - really a kind of superpower given how abstract and arbitrary those dreams can be. I used to think that "We are the gods of the digital age" would be a cool business card logo, although I doubt it would go down too well!

The other part of the job/hobby that I've always found enjoyable is in striving for "perfectly" minimal/clean designs where the code reads more like functional requirements than messy implementation detail. You look at the code and it is obvious that nothing can be taken out, and no more minimal implementation is conceivable. A bit like an impressionist painting perhaps, where every brush stroke counts, and all you are left with is the essence of the thing being captured. I would proudly consider myself to be a hardcore geek, but there is no doubt an aesthetic/artistic component to software done right, a goal you know has been achieved when at the end of a project you re-read the code and gloat over how beautiful and minimal it is!

This part of the satisfaction of software development will sadly be disappearing as the role of coding is taken over by AI, but perhaps there will still be some satisfaction in minimal design, if not in minimal implementation.
by andrewl-hn | 2025-10-01 15:00:22+00:00
Apple bought them, took it down from the web, then quietly open-sourced it a few years later. They tried to make it popular, ran a conference for it, but the adoption was too minor for Apple to care afterwards.

It's still maintained by a sizable team at Apple, GH stats show that the activity is much lower now than it was 3 years ago, but there're about 10 people that contribute on a steady regular basis, which is honestly better than 99% of open source projects out there.
by Aachen | 2025-10-01 15:00:28+00:00
There's sadly no silver bullet, especially for non-techies. To me it's like buying vegan products where available: I can't trivially become vegan with no effort, but I can affect market forces by preferentially buying things that align with that ideal. People could at least apply this where possible and buy products where they're in control somehow

For storage platforms like Dropbox or Onedrive, it can be as simple as ctrl+c'ing the data out of there every now and then

For Spotify, you can do the GDPR export and check that you can open it somehow. Even if it's not super readable, you can figure that out (with a tech friend or LLM perhaps) if you turn out to ever need it

For Signal, I've got no idea. The format is hard to work with for hardcore techies. They really really don't want you, ahem, attackers to get that data in the clear. (Two-sided coin). Make sure to turn on the backups, write down the passphrase, and take them off your phone every now and then, and hope there's a restore method when you need it
Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2025)
by whoishiring | 2025-10-01 15:01:06+00:00
Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:

Location: Remote: Willing to relocate: Technologies: Résumé/CV: Email:

Please only post if you are personally looking for work. Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here.

Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.

There's a site for searching these posts at https://www.wantstobehired.com.
Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2025)
by whoishiring | 2025-10-01 15:01:06+00:00
Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.

Please only post if you are personally looking to hire a freelancer or work as one. Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here.
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2025)
by whoishiring | 2025-10-01 15:01:06+00:00
Please state the location and include REMOTE for remote work, REMOTE (US) or similar if the country is restricted, and ONSITE when remote work is not an option.

Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no recruiting firms or job boards. One post per company. If it isn't a household name, explain what your company does.

Please only post if you are actively filling a position and are committed to responding to applicants.

Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about something. It's off topic here.

Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.

Searchers: try https://dheerajck.github.io/hnwhoishiring/, http://nchelluri.github.io/hnjobs/, https://hnresumetojobs.com, https://hnhired.fly.dev, https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/, https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com, or this (unofficial) Chrome extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-hiring-pro/mpfal....

Don't miss these other fine threads:

Who wants to be hired? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438501

Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438502
by morkalork | 2025-10-01 15:01:11+00:00
What would a new HST look like? Gonzo style journalism kinda already peaked in the 2010s with the wave of blogging and new media like Vice magazine.

HST was revolutionary because he broke the norms of journalism at the time while still making a coherent point. Nowadays journalism is plain broken, the norms are in tatters and the people that would be exposed don't give a shit and feel no shame for the awful things they do. No wonder HST offed himself.
by DevOpsMaster | 2025-10-01 15:01:12+00:00
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by bug_zapper | 2025-10-01 15:01:15+00:00
REMOTE (US-West preferred) OR on-site (DC, SF or London)

We are looking for a passionate and experienced Distributed Systems wizard. If some of the following items excite you, then you’d probably enjoy working with us.

* Systems Dependability: fault tolerance and high availability * Foundational D.S. problems (leader election, fault detection, consensus, atomic broadcast, etc. * Testing and benchmarking techniques (chaos Engineering, fault injection, fuzzing, property-based testing, Jepsen, ...) * Replication techniques and protocols * Debuggers and debugging techniques * Distributed Databases & Consistency Models * Durable Message Queues & Workflows * Formal verification

If you have (at least a few years of) experience in at least 3 of the items above, you’re a good fit.

About the job: you’ll get your hands dirty on a number of distributed systems of various shapes and sizes. Some traveling required (conferences, customers visits, and HQ visits if you are remote).

About us: Well established startup. One-of-a-kind product, used by a growing number of well-known companies. Great team chock full of impressive, passionate, fun people.

Send your CV to flybys.verb.4e@icloud.com

Please include:

* A brief comment of why you think we're a good match * Which of the areas above you are experienced in (prepare to be grilled on them!) * The string ‘mantis shrimp’ to make it past our spam filter.
by caitbit | 2025-10-01 15:01:20+00:00
Fundamental Research Labs | Machine Learning Engineers, Software Engineers, Ex-founders, Researchers | Menlo Park, CA | https://fundamentalresearchlabs.com

We're an applied research company building autonomous, collaborative, and socially intelligent agents. Our small team includes computational neuroscientists, AI researchers, engineers, and builders from MIT EECS, Stanford NLP Group, Google X, Citadel, and beyond.

Our latest product, tryshortcut.ai, just launched over the summer to amazing reception and we’re just getting started.

We…

...do everything from sophisticated Agent orchestration to SFT/RL post-training of foundation models.

...have an organizational structure where product leaders are given great autonomy to experiment and ship fast.

...compensate well above market and provide generous equity.

We’re looking for:

—> Machine Learning Engineers + Applied Research Engineers to bring our research to life.

—> Engineers and ex-founders to build Agent-first products.

—> Researchers to develop frontier technologies in the Agents domain.

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fundamentalresearchlabs