MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-10-13 18:59:17+00:00
I worry a lot more about the surveillance side than the misinformation side. The odd thing is, the surveillance side has been building for 20+ years, old-school en-masse data collection and ML inferencing, and most (myself included) just go along with it.

GenAI is more fun to doomspeak about, but eh, swaying elections, I don't see it. The pendulum will swing back and forth anyway; if voters like the party in charge, they'll likely get voted back in, and if voters don't, they won't. I think AI influence will be a drop in the bucket comparatively.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-13 18:59:29+00:00
Pre socials, you could attend a gathering of like minded people and come away energized and pumped about whatever the event was about, but that "high" eventually fades away as you re-entered the real world and got away from that echo chamber of an event.

Today, you can stay in the echo chamber and never hear anything other than like minded views because that's what the algo thinks you should see more of which means you never come down from that "high".

It's way worse in post-social algos than anything that's come before
by pessimizer | 2025-10-13 18:59:49+00:00
> the democratic process

There's no such thing. There are many different processes that some people consider democratic and others don't. But "democratic" has no other meaning than rule by the governed. It is not a description of a specific political process. Especially one that bans leading opposition candidates, which is clearly as undemocratic as anything that can occur in government. If a population wants to vote in somebody who is currently in prison for crimes they are obviously guilty of, preventing them from doing it is a direct repudiation of democracy.

Even killing opposition candidates is marginally more democratic, because at least that only lasts for an instant. Saying that people cannot vote for the government of their choice is a restriction on the governed, not a restriction on people who want to govern.
by dang | 2025-10-13 18:59:51+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Google's requirement for developers to be verified threatens app store F-Droid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45507173 - Oct 2025 (152 comments)

F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794 - Sept 2025 (564 comments)
by zipy124 | 2025-10-13 19:00:24+00:00
Yes, you can always stream data when training or doing inference on models when vram is lacking but the slow down is extremely noticeable. This is the case for CPU code too and is why optimising for bandwidth is so critical in high-performance computing. Your ability to compute is almost always substantially larger than your bandwidth. An Avx512 capable CPU with a suitable amount of cores is easily capable of doing multiple terabytes of fp64 operations per second, but is typically limited by memory bandwidth, GPUs with LLMs have just broadened this knowledge to more people.

A fun consequence of the fact that CPUs got faster at a rate quicker than memory is look up tables of pre-computed values used to be common optimisations in code, but now it is almost always quicker to re-compute them than to retrieve a pre-computed value from memory for common use-cases.
by lenerdenator | 2025-10-13 19:00:53+00:00
There's an overarching lesson that FLOSS needs to learn from the last fifteen years:

If it's not copyleft, it's not free. Also, it's more than just a legal classification of IP law, it's an ethos. I don't care how "free" your underlying OS is, if most of the userland is proprietary and the only way to really effectively use the software on consumer hardware is to use a megacorp's implementation of it and to bow to their whims, it might as well be Microsoft Windows.

This is why I always thought Android never really was Linux. Sure, it has a Linux kernel, but that kernel just exists to run a bunch of software in a way that you have no real control over.
by detectivestory | 2025-10-13 19:01:01+00:00
not the change mentioned in the news link. I was referring to what people are discussing over on the reddit play store sub. Google are terminating dev accounts without giving any reasons or warnings. I'm sure most, if not all terminations have have some element of justification but ultimately it means that Google seem pretty happy to terminate any dev account without letting the developer know why. And to make things worse, that developer is forever banned from ever publishing any content on the playstore for life. They cannot make a new account. Their career in android app development can be destroyed in an instant. Most terminations seem to be handled by bots... and to rub salt in the wound, Google only responds to appeals... using more bots. That is according to what the community has been saying at least. I'm sure they know what they are doing and one thing we all know is that Google actually IS big enough not to fail. But it does seem like the right thing to at least make new developers more aware of the risks. And it is obviously a very stressful time for anyone who is actually making a living off an android app.
by asveikau | 2025-10-13 19:01:06+00:00
I think it's more complicated just than NTFS's design.

In my original comment I said that the difference is the Linux VFS for a reason. The slow part in NT is when you go from a filename to a handle. Doing things like caching lookups by name is, IIRC, the responsibility of the individual drivers. Linux does better at this by having a heavily optimized layer sitting between the filesystem driver and the caller. Doing tons of open(2)s is faster on Linux because of the overall kernel design.
by nyeah | 2025-10-13 19:01:10+00:00
Yes, it was a made-up example. I feel that was obvious.

If your point [about share price jumping suddenly] was irrelevant, then maybe you shouldn't have mentioned it. How is this my problem?

I see that you edited your previous comment before replying. Very clever. Now (12:03 Pacific) you have a company worth $1000 trading on a major stock exchange. Ok.

Maybe you can make a spreadsheet similar to what I described in words, but using more believable numbers. If so, you can see the kind of effects I'm talking about. Buybacks are good for some shareholders and bad for others. Buybacks can be used to reward management, though others will be affected (+ or -) at the same time.

Or maybe you won't/can't make that spreadsheet. Again not my problem.
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-13 19:01:21+00:00
> JSON has very little wrong with it

JSON does have significant things wrong with it, both with the syntax and with the data types.

For example, there is no proper integer type (this is the one problem that MAML corrects with the data), and it always uses Unicode (which MAML does not correct).

However, different file formats can be helpful for different purposes.
by simmerup | 2025-10-13 19:01:30+00:00
You're assuming that the 200bn is all customer money. This is very doubtful to me considering that many times Tether magically starts minting billions of new coins to buy Bitcoin whenever Bitcoin prices start falling

You're also assuming that they make 7bn in profit per year just by keeping this rdiciulously large amount of money in a bank, but their own notation says that only 105bn is held as US treasury bills. The rest of the money is effectively invested, whether in gold or bitcoin or corporate bonds or loans. All subject to going down aswell as up.

Luckily for the cryptocurrency sector, Tether makes it so ridiculously hard to turn Tether into money that their bullshit probably won't be discovered for a long time, so the make believe valuations of bitcoin can stay as they are
by chrchr | 2025-10-13 19:01:48+00:00
I did something like this for Python [1]. The application I worked on at the time had a feature allowing users to import and export their data as a JSON document, and users often had enough data to make this cumbersome, especially with serialization and deserialization overhead. My implementation can also generate JSON documents as they stream out, from Python generators. The incremental JSON parsing was a little difficult to use, but incremental generation was an immediate win. We generated JSON documents from database results row-by-row and streamed the output to the web server, never producing the entire document in memory.

[1] https://github.com/chrchr/flojay
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-10-13 19:02:03+00:00
Robots are seen as a way to keep the economy going after a demographic implosion happens. I wouldn't call China a highly sexist society (at least outside of the countryside), far from it, just that women have high standards for mates and would rather be alone than marry wrong. And their families/society is letting them do that so isn't that a good thing? Even if they get married, they are going for either a DINK lifestyle or at most one kid, because that's what they have time for.
by cassianoleal | 2025-10-13 19:02:07+00:00
Don’t use live system secrets and credentials when running your application locally. Then you don’t need to access the same secrets.

Keep it simple and design your applications so they’re agnostic to that fact.

It’s really not that hard, I’ve been doing this for at least 6 or 7 years. A little bit of good engineering goes a long way!
by epistasis | 2025-10-13 19:02:11+00:00
That's horrible for California, whose generation wholesale electricity prices are about 40% of that, at $0.04/kWh. Nuclear sells on to grid at that wholesale price. If the nuclear operator is forced to run at 90% capacity factor, which it will be, somebody is going to be paying PG&E that difference between wholesale cost and the very high price of nuclear energy. That person will be taxpayers, subsidizing PG&Eu, to run an uneconomic nuclear power plant.

See, for example, Figure E. 1 on page 9 of this PDF report which compares the wholesale prices by month of CAISO to other neighboring system operators:

https://www.caiso.com/documents/2025-first-quarter-report-on...

With the addition of storage to the grid in CAISO, costs are staying super low.

California's high electricity costs are from the grid, not from electricity generation, which as you can see meets or beats our peers. Solar and storage are super cheap. If we invest in nuclear we will be adding high generation cost to our woes.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-13 19:02:29+00:00
There is a clear physical reality to the door opening, the steel and glass being displaced. The computer does that triggered by certain conditions, that you can determine by experiment. There is no goal being assigned here - I'm merely stating that the system goes through a certain series of states that depend on both the raw hardware, and the programmed instructions, probably so.

Lets put it another way. Say you are some alien being trying to study the inner workings of a system like this with no prior knowledge of how it arose in nature. You will apply the principles of empiricism and try to determine the workings of this physical system through repeated experiments, measurements of the electrical and chemical characteristics of various parts, etc. If your experimentation is sophisticated and complete enough, it will necessarily have to include a representation of the software running in this processor, and of the algorithms it encodes - the behavior of the system cannot be explained without that. An outwardly similar system, built with the exact same "parts" (in the traditional sense, i.e. the same model of processor, motor etc), but programmed with different software, will behave entirely differently. This clearly proves that the software is a physical object that is part of the system and is necessary to fully account for its behavior.
by xp84 | 2025-10-13 19:02:36+00:00
> renewable subsidies

I think a lot of (honest) smart people would say that there are circumstances where even for those of us who love green energy (raises hand) subsidies aren't the most productive use of tax dollars. It can distort markets and can make the subsidized industry wasteful and uncompetitive, begetting reliance on the subsidy instead of pressuring them to compete.

Solar and wind in 2025 aren't some fragile, experimental things that would die without subsidies. At this point they ought to be able to compete normally, and they can. Given a high percentage of the government dollars spent today aren't even tax dollars, they're borrowed money, at now-increasing interest rates, for our grandchildren to deal with, I'd rather not subsidize businesses that can get by on their own now.
by benbucksch | 2025-10-13 19:04:07+00:00
Actually, Thunderbird is using the Mozilla browser as a runtime for the UI and a lot of its code, in exactly the same way as Electron apps are using Chrome and node.js. Even a lot of non-UI code in Thunderbird is implemented in JavaScript, including some of the protocols like POP3 [1].

The same is true for Firefox: Almost the entire Firefox UI is written as HTML page with JavaScript. In fact, Firefox, Thunderbird and their predecessor Mozilla Suite were the first desktop apps written as webapps, and are the direct precedessors of Electron. And they also show that it can be done well. You just have to do it well, which is not easy.

There was a reason for that decision: Netscape tried to implement all its UI natively on 3 platforms - Windows, Mac and Unix -, which was too difficult in practice to keep them in feature parity. The big new thing about Mozilla - apart from the Gecko engine - was to implement the UI of the desktop app as web app, and run the same code on all platforms. That idea is the technical foundation of Mozilla.

Electron is just using that same idea with Chrome and node.js.

The only reason why using Linux as desktop today is realistic, is that web apps put an end to the monopoly of native Windows apps - which was the ultimate goal the whole time.

/Ben Bucksch Long-time core developer of Thunderbird

[1] https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/local/src...
by kratom_sandwich | 2025-10-13 19:04:35+00:00
Here's another previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25624456 which includes an answer of mine. To add to that list:

[1] "Andermatt - Global Village" - tracks the construction of a luxury resort in the Swiss village of Andermatt and how it affects people there. The village and the project still make the news occasionally. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0NjZjWpXyw

[2] "The Forgotten Space" - essayist movie by Allan Sekula, featured at documenta14. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0ZSlhoKiY

[3] "Cold Case Hammarskjöld" by Danish film maker Mads Brugger about the death of former UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld; absolutely wild ride. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Case_Hammarskj%C3%B6ld
by creer | 2025-10-13 19:04:43+00:00
That's confusing things. There are bad, good and great hotels. There are bad, good and great airbnbs. The problem is what will the management of that place do or try to get away with; what can the client do; what can the intermediary / rating. That was already the case before Airbnb.

If an airbnb and a hotel choose to race to the bottom, perhaps they deserve each other and the rest of us deserve a way to avoid them? (Or use them if it came to that...)

I think Airbnb and hotels.com do not push people to the bottom - they offer a minimal bar or set of features to look for quality / price ratio. Are they perfect? No. But they make discovery much easier.
by myne_throwaway | 2025-10-13 19:04:53+00:00
Having perused the site a number of times, I wouldn't say many people there "have a fetish for it". You're a million times more likely to be told to kill yourself on 4chan than on SS.

SS simply says a) suicide should be your choice, b) dehumanizing people for having suicidal thoughts is bad. Sadly these opinions are so far outside the overton window that suicidal people end up having no choice but to discuss their problems with other suicidal people - likely not a good basis for improvement but the human is a social animal so I'll take it over nothing.

And although SS provides info on how you can kill yourself, it also tells you how you can't kill yourself, and that has apparently saved me from permanent liver damage. So at least for me it has been objectively beneficial - more so than the brainless repetition of "consult a professional" which seems to be the gold standard for suicide prevention these days.
by m463 | 2025-10-13 19:06:21+00:00
Your "superfluous" comparison is kind of apples vs oranges.

I looked at the canon app on ios, and they have continually eroded all your privacy.

At first, you could give it limited privileges to add photos from your camera to your camera roll.

But updates changed the app, so it refuse to work unless you give full access to every photo on your phone.

this is why we need alternatives.
by iLemming | 2025-10-13 19:06:45+00:00
> I wouldn't say my expertise and abilities has grown exponentially

Things always look easier only after you solve a problem, don't they?

That is a known as hindsight bias (also called the "knew-it-all-along" effect). Once you've solved a problem or seen the solution, it seems obvious and you tend to overestimate how predictable or easy it was.

There's related phenomena known as the curse of knowledge - difficulty imagining not knowing something once you know it.

"The Mythical Man-Month" - discusses on why we underestimate complexity, it explains the psychology behind it.

There's also "forgetting the beginner's journey" or the "fourth stage" of learning where skills become so automatic you can't easily explain them.

___

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
by dmix | 2025-10-13 19:06:49+00:00
> It will still need all or most of the advanced avionics that make F-35s expensive.

Those jets are catch-all do-everything machines, almost entirely because it's so crazy expensive to build jets + the political/contracting games played, that they are forced to jam everything into them. There's lots of efficiency and tactical gains in small niche applications where each platform is specialized for the job.

> Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.

Even in Ukraine we really haven't seen 'cheap' defenses properly scale up to deal with the drone problem. Ukraine was getting 90% shoot downs in the early days but that's changed in the past year where Russia's tactics adapted. They've have been getting hammered weekly, even deep into their air defences along the polish border.

With Chinese SAMs and extreme range air-to-air missiles all of the fancy F-35 avionics will mostly be just them doing everything trying to survive those encounters far away from the frontline in Taiwan... where they mostly become very expensive missile launch platforms (bombers) and some radar networking. If you remove maximum survivability + narrow into niches those get a lot cheaper.
by ux266478 | 2025-10-13 19:06:53+00:00
If I was actually serious about the security of a system, I'd explicitly use virtualization at-minimum. If all I wanted was a mall cop and was happy to take the risk of misconfiguration or attacks on the kernel I'd probably say something that adds a lot of extra sanity to namespaces is "good enough", like bubblewrap. I would never trust it or say that it's secure though.
Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?
by marxism | 2025-10-13 19:07:15+00:00
I've been trying to articulate why coding feels less pleasant now.

The problem: You can't win anymore.

The old way: You'd think about the problem. Draw some diagrams. Understand what you're actually trying to do. Then write the code. Understanding was mandatory. You solved it.

The new way: The entire premise of AI coding tools is to automate the thinking, not just the typing. You're supposed to describe a problem and get a solution without understanding the details. That's the labor-saving promise.

So I feel pressure to always, always, start by info dumping the problem description to AI and gamble for a one-shot. Voice transcription for 10 minutes, hit send, hope I get something first try, if not hope I can iterate until something works. And when even something does work = zero satisfaction because I don't have the same depth of understanding of the solution. Its no longer my code, my idea. It's just some code I found online. `import solution from chatgpt`

If I think about the problem, I feel inefficient. "Why did you waste 2 hours on that? AI would've done it in 10 minutes."

If I use AI to help, the work doesn't feel like mine. When I show it to anyone, the implicit response is: "Yeah, I could've prompted for that too."

The steering and judgment I apply to AI outputs is invisible. Nobody sees which suggestions I rejected, how I refined the prompts, or what decisions I made. So all credit flows to the AI by default.

The result: Nothing feels satisfying anymore. Every problem I solve by hand feels too slow. Every problem I solve with AI feels like it doesn't count. There's this constant background feeling that whatever I just did, someone else would've done it better and faster.

I was thinking of all the classic exploratory learning blog posts. Things that sounded fun. Writing a toy database to understand how they work, implementing a small Redis clone. Now that feels stupid. Like I'd be wasting time on details the AI is supposed to handle. It bothers me that my reaction to these blog posts has changed so much. 3 years ago I would be bookmarking a blog post to try it out for myself that weekend. Now those 200 lines of simple code feels only one sentence prompt away and thus waste of time.

Am I alone in this?

Does anyone else feel this pressure to skip understanding? Where thinking feels like you're not using the tool correctly? In the old days, I understood every problem I worked on. Now I feel pressure to skip understanding and just ship. I hate it.
by eklitzke | 2025-10-13 19:07:18+00:00
I think it's important to point out the distinction between what POSIX mandates and what actual libc implementations, notably glibc, do. Nearly all non-reentrant POSIX functions are actually only non-reentrant if you are using a 1980s computer that for some reason has threads but doesn't have thread-local storage. All of these things like strerror are implemented using TLS in glibc nowadays, so while it is technically true you need to use the _r versions if you want to be portable to computers that nobody has used in 30 years in practice you usually don't need to worry about these things, especially if you're using Linux, since they use store results in static thread-local memory rather than static global memory.

As for the string.h stuff, while it is all terrible it's at least well documented that everything is broken unless you use wchar_t, and nobody uses wchar_t because it's the worst possible localization solution. No one is seriously trying to do real localization in C (and if they were they'd be using libicu).
by freeqaz | 2025-10-13 19:08:01+00:00
Recent reputation, yes. But their old reputation was very positive. They made cars that would survive in any condition (which is why they were popular for military uses).

These days, you're in one of two camps: Either you still believe (because you're ignorant or value the Jeep brand more than you value a reliable vehicle) or you've read the recent reviews and steer clear.

Jeep has been duking it out for the bottom of Consumer Reports ratings for a while now, yet they still seem to sell cars. As they continue to betray their loyal customer base though, I imagine this will change. I wish American car companies were better!