MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nine_k | 2025-10-15 18:05:46+00:00
One thing I could not find in the write-up is the change in the expense. Did serverless save any money, compared to always-up VMs? Did much of their load run under the free tier limits?

Serverless shines when the load is very spiky, and you can afford high long-tail latency. Then you don't pay for all that time when your server would be idling. (This is usually not the case for auth APIs, unless they auth other infrequently invoked operations.)
by resfirestar | 2025-10-15 18:05:47+00:00
Often it can be like that. This a case where the kind of attacker seems highly relevant, though. Imagine a group like Shiny Hunters were the ones to steal these vulns from F5, you'd know if they hit your F5s because they'd have already dumped all your databases and bragged about it. The attacker being a "nation-state" warrants a more careful investigation of historical activity if you're the kind of organization that gets targeted by espionage motivated attacks.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-15 18:05:58+00:00
If you skimmed the article and missed the subtle notes, the author deliberately chose the wrong way to use the Rust version to make a point. Even ChatGPT told him it was wrong for his use case:

> As mentioned, the other way to use the Rust version has the same behaviour as the Haskell/Lean/etc versions. ChatGPT did actually point out to me that this way was better, and the other way (the one I used) was adequate only if the input was limited to ASCII.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-15 18:06:13+00:00
When did HN become so bad at false equivalencies?

Can I say Singletons are not recommended but also agree that there are contexts where it's an "okay enough" option? Singetons are never the "best option" in modern software, but it's not the "worst" in every case either.

Now, filling your code base with incorrect calculations: pretty much always a bad idea.
by john01dav | 2025-10-15 18:06:48+00:00
We should have terms and rigorous standards for software that is proprietary but not otherwise restrictive of user freedom. Most (weighing by how commonly it's used) software is either traditional, abusive, proprietary software like Windows or Google'd Android or is fully free like Linux. But, there is a large library of software that isn't under a free license, but doesn't attempt to abuse the user into being more profitable beyond any initial sale. Examples include the Nvidia drivers on Linux (but not Windows), Jetbrains IDEs, many game engines (I'm thinking of Unreal here), and most commercial software in the 90s and 2000s. The defining feature of this is that 1) it is not under a free license; and 2) aside from basic license checks in some cases and bugs, it never does anything against the interests of the users. Having well-defined standards and terms in this area could encourage more of such software, for product designers that appreciate the promise of free software but are not convinced by its revenue options.
by robenkleene | 2025-10-15 18:06:59+00:00
> I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger show-stopper in my opinion.

I don't find your original anecdote convincing:

> A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail).

E.g., what does this mean? They lost mail messages? How did they verify they had those messages before and after? E.g., file-system operations? GUI search? How much do they know about how Mail app stores message (e.g., I used to try understand this decades ago, but I expect today messages aren't even necessarily always stored locally)? How are you syncing mail messages, e.g., using native IMAP, or whatever Gmail uses, or Exchange? What's the email backend?

E.g. without deeper evidence this sounds more like a mail message indexing issue rather than a mail-messages-stored-on-disk-issue (in 2025, I'd personally have zero expectations about how Mail manages messages on disk, e.g., I'd expect local storage of message to be dynamically managed like most applications that aren't document-based use a combination of cloud functionality and local caching, e.g., found this in a quick search https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/471801/ensure-maco...), but if you have stronger evidence I'd love to hear it. But as presented your extrapolating much stronger conclusions than are warranted by the anecdote in my opinion.
by daxfohl | 2025-10-15 18:07:27+00:00
So it's not really leftpad that's broken, it's that each language has a different definition of "String.length", generally corresponding to the definition of the underlying encoding, when dealing with accents, emojis, foreign characters, etc., and which notably does not always correspond to the number of spaces occupied by a string a monospace font.

IOW the proofs are correct: leftpad will result in spaces on the left, input string on the right, and String.length as specified. It's the spec itself that was incorrect: the last requirement should be based on "number of spaces occupied by the string in a monospace font", not "string.length", if that's what the desired requirement is.

That said, I think that's largely the author's point. You can prove that your code meets the spec, but you can't prove that your spec meets what you actually intended.
by mattmanser | 2025-10-15 18:07:38+00:00
Docker is much like microservices. Appropriate for a subset of apps and yet touted as being 'the norm' when it shouldn't be.

There are drawbacks to using docker, such as security patching and operational overhead. And if you're blindly putting it into every project, how are you mitigating the risks it introduces?

Worse, the big reason it was useful, managing dependency hell, has largely been solved by making developers default to not installing dependencies globally.

We don't really need Docker anywhere near like we used to, and yet it persists as the default, unassailable.

Of course hosting companies must LOVE it, docker containers must increase their margins by 10% at least!

Someone else down thread has mentioned a tooling fetish, I feel Docker is part of that fetish.
by codingdave | 2025-10-15 18:07:42+00:00
I'm seeing red flags all over the story. "Blockchain" being the first one. The use cases for that are so small, it is a red flag in and of itself. Then asking you to run code before a meeting? No, that doesn't "save time", that is driving you to take actions when you don't yet know who is asking.

Still, I appreciate the write-up. It is a great example of a clever attack, and I'm going to watch out more for such things having read this post.
by neilv | 2025-10-15 18:08:14+00:00
I just noticed the part about FSF Librephone being based on LineageOS (therefore, Android).

Has anyone told the FSF that it isn't "GNU/Linux"?

I suspect that Purism has the better idea for a sustainable starting point for an FSF-ish phone.

I'd be curious why FSF is barking up the Android tree again (the massive, intractable Android source code tree).
by varispeed | 2025-10-15 18:08:33+00:00
I bought iPad Pro M4 and I am yet to find a use case for it. Combined with non-secure cloud backup in the UK, I see it as a toy device.

Watch YouTube, casually browse web (I am yet to install VPN).

So far the most use I had with it was recording meetings, so that later I can relisten.

If I was able to run Ubuntu on it or even macOs - that would have been a different story...
by botanical76 | 2025-10-15 18:08:34+00:00
Yes, with major tradeoffs. Asahi Linux is an amazing project, but they have not yet figured out how to get anywhere close to a Mac's power efficiency when it is running MacOS. For example, you will lose a lot of battery life[0][1] with the lid closed, whereas on MacOS you lose pretty much nothing.

Also, note that thunderbolt not yet supported[2].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20241219125418/https://social.tr... [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/262 [2] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overvie...
by cjflog | 2025-10-15 18:08:48+00:00
For an individual acting on their own, single tests for phthalates and BPA/BPS/BPF normally cost ~$500. Laboratory.love tests three samples from different lots to ensure reliability (as PlasticList found variation of up to 59% between lots of identical products). Thanks to volume pricing and operational efficiency, we're able to target $425 per sample ($1,275 for triplicate testing). This covers not just the chemical analysis but also product acquisition, shipping, and operational costs. Right now there is only about 10% margin left as breathing room.

My partner lab specifically offers 300+ unique tests across the following categories: Contaminants, Elemental, Allergen, Preservatives and Additives, Microbial, and Phytochemical, Vitamin, and Actives"

So yes, expansion is definitely possible! If a billionaire wanted to fund a project like this it could certainly convert dollars into data, it's just a matter of choosing which products and contaminants to start chewing through first to ensure the data creates positive change in the real world.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-10-15 18:09:32+00:00
But don't most of the design issues apply to Talos as well?

And if it's security focussed, I think it's acceptable to say "It's AM4 (not 5), and only works with this RAM brand with these times and costs 5 times as much". It's a niche, and when people are into a niche they take the tradeoffs they get.
by apparent | 2025-10-15 18:09:42+00:00
Yep, I have the original 11" iPad Pro from 2018. It still works flawlessly and would be perfect for this use case. Someone who needs a device for school should buy a used iPad like this, not a new one that would be overpowered for the task and would cost double. Even with the edu discount, it's over $1k with the keyboard case. Why not just buy an MBA at that point?
by citizenpaul | 2025-10-15 18:10:45+00:00
>Seasoned accounts are a positive heuristic

I've found for the most part account age/usage is not considered at all in major online service providers.

I've straight up been told by Google, Ebay and Amazon that they do not care about account age/legitimacy/seasoning/usage at all and it is not even considered in various cases I've had with these companies.

They simply don't care about customers at all. They are only looking at various legal repercussions balanced against what makes them the most money and that is their real metric.

Ebay: Had a <30day old account make a dispute against me that I did not deliver a product that was over $200 when my account was in good standing for many years with zero disputes. Ebay told me to f-off, ebay rep said my account standing was not a consideration for judgement in the case.

Google: Corporate account in good standing for 8+ years, mid five figure monthly spending. One day locked the account for 32 days with no explanation or contact. At day 30 or so a CS rep in India told me they don't consider spending or account age in their mystery account lockout process.

Amazon: Do I even need to...
by bugbuddy | 2025-10-15 18:10:53+00:00
Yes, I agree the US is an a great country. The US culture is still the most influential in the world. Everyone loves American foods, movies, and consumer products.

Cambodians love American culture. Young Cambodians are desperate to see new American movies, try American foods, and get their hands on new Apple products. They love Facebook. The majority of Cambodians favor the US over China: https://www.statista.com/chart/32058/preference-for-us-china...

Interestingly, the majority of Thais favor China over the US. The most likely reason I guess would that a very large percentage of Thais claim some form of Chinese ancestry.
by eikenberry | 2025-10-15 18:11:40+00:00
Given the other answers here focusing on the single binary as the main benefit, Go would seem the only competitor of those listed and Go lacks good support for GUIs. Most GUIs are written in C/C++ and Go doesn't have as good a story for C/C++ integration (community convention is to generally avoid it if at all possible). IMO as Zig matures you'll see it grow as a language for GUIs. You get the same cross platform support, single binary generation and C integration with better tooling and a language with a significantly lower cognitive load.
by platevoltage | 2025-10-15 18:11:41+00:00
I'm a lifelong Mac user, so obviously I'm used to using CMD instead of CTRL. Inside the terminal we use CTRL for things like CTRL-C to exit a CLI application.

What messes me up when I'm working on a linux machine is not being able to do things like copy/paste text from the terminal with a hotkey combo because there is no CMD-C, and CTRL-C already has a job other than copying.

IMO apple really messed up by putting the FN key in the bottom left corner of the keyboard instead of CTRL. Those keys get swapped on every Mac I buy.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-15 18:12:00+00:00
On your computer, do you inspect the details of a file using Explorer? On the Mac do you do that with the Finder. Or do you actually open the file with an application?

Do you expect to use Windows explorer or the Finder to “convert file types”?

Using iOS 26 on my phone, I held down a file and there is an “Open With” option that gave me a choice of how to open the file.

Across applications? Applications these days save files using the File dialog, they may by default store them in a folder accesible by Files. Yes I know some apps still store their data in their own sandbox. But that’s not the case generally for standard productivity apps.
by crdrost | 2025-10-15 18:12:49+00:00
Another place where you will frequently find celluloid is guitar picks. Can just slowly amass a collection for free. Especially if they're thin, flexy, especially if they've got wavy or trippy designs in the plastic, it's probably celluloid. This can be handy for survivalism -- you buy your first ferro-rod fire starter, if you're having trouble getting wood shavings to ignite, try mixing them with shavings of guitar pick and see if the explosive reaction helps. Other folks keep a jar of cotton balls coated in petroleum jelly for a similar quick-start, or egg cartons filled with sawdust and parrafin (although that's less for getting the spark to take and more for getting a log to start burning in a stove)... and of course if you don't want to just slowly accumulate unwanted guitar picks you can buy big sheets of celluloid for like 5-10 bucks.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-15 18:13:10+00:00
No, of course I've read longer form posts and then realized they were just there for product placement, or affilate links, etc.

I don't click display ads or links to Amazon or YouTube listings, etc. If I want to buy something I try to go directly to the manufacture's site and search for it there. If I have to go to a third party sales platform I'll go there and search for the thing I want.

I rarely click on YouTube recommedations, because they are more and more just AI slop. I subscribe to people whose content is interesting, and that's the vast majority of what I watch.
by prettymuchnoone | 2025-10-15 18:13:30+00:00
I think this is a GNOME thing...the keychain by default has the same password as the login password, so logging in with the password unlocks it too. fingerprint login doesn't unlock it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38527876, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME/Keyring
by kelas | 2025-10-15 18:13:43+00:00
> without it being tacit, it would probably be more readable

definitely. tacit can be taken a bit too far sometimes, but when a certain discipline is observed (just like in any language, really) it is no less readable than... let me see. oh, lets take some typical pandas/polars heroics - no, those things don't give me brain aneurisms and not too shocking either. they just make wanna vomit no less than the poor people who were forced to write it and contemplate what they've done.

> tacit is "bad"

not at all. it takes one time to see how avg looks in explicit notation to understand that the idea of trains is totally justified.

> the question of how to thread data around without naming it is an interesting one to me.

good question. see above - yes indeed, things can be taken to extremes. when an apl/k program is a oneliner 80 chars long, that's just not cool. there is no reason not to break it down a bit into moving parts with names (and ample space on the right margin for annotations). in no way APL and friends are somehow exempt from commenting their code. but that's not really endemic to array languages, you'd agree.
by kraquepype | 2025-10-15 18:13:54+00:00
This is how I (also as a layman) look at it as well.

AI right now is limited to trained neural networks, and while they function sort of like a brain, there is no neurogenesis. The trained neural network cannot grow, cannot expand on it's own, and is restrained by the silicon it is running on.

I believe that true AGI will require hardware and models that are able to learn, grow and evolve organically. The next step required for that in my opinion is biocomputing.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-10-15 18:14:03+00:00
Fwiw everyone I knew in undergrad who ended up in HR that was basically their only option. They already got slammed in stem classes in HS or even first year or two in college so that was a nonstarter. They weren’t creative people so arts or humanities were out. They didn’t grasp business concepts so finance and other avenues in the business school were out. They landed an hr internship in their junior year then the rest is history.

It is bewildering to me that HR is responsible for hiring anyone outside the HR department.
by cedws | 2025-10-15 18:14:27+00:00
I think Apple hardware must be incredibly underutilised across the board. Every new generation of iPhone or MacBook they boast about lofty performance gains, but who is actually complaining about their iPhone not being fast enough? Nobody I know pushes their iPhone so hard it starts to lag. It's not like you can really do anything computationally heavy on your phone besides games, but people mostly play simplistic 2D games on iOS anyway.
by eptcyka | 2025-10-15 18:15:06+00:00
It depends entirely on your target - you don’t need an emulator if you are already running an android device.

Xcode on my macbook doesn’t need 12GB. It is of course a different story if you need to also run clang-analyzer or rust-analyzer in addition to xcode/studio, but still, 16GB would be enough to get by for a sizeable chunk of devs.
by mitchbob | 2025-10-15 18:15:21+00:00
If you're not afraid of heights (or maybe if you are):

- Free Solo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Solo

- Man on Wire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Wire

And one with the greatest ever road cyclist in the greatest one day race:

- A Sunday in Hell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sunday_in_Hell
by cudgy | 2025-10-15 18:15:21+00:00
Are you seriously trying to tell me that the Democrats have never denied a visa? Oh. I see now that you added “based on social media posts”. Still, I fail to believe that Democrats would admit someone into the country knowing that they posted something on social media that demonstrated the applicant is lying, made threats against political figures in the US, posted to known terrorist or friends with known terrorists, etc.

In fact, the Biden administration sued for the ability to continue the Trump policy of looking into social media. Here is an excerpt from the lawyer that was suing the Biden administration.

“We’re disappointed that the Biden administration has decided to double down on this Trump-era policy of mass surveillance of visa applicants’ social media,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute.””

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/biden-administration-tell...
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-15 18:15:39+00:00
It could be a great device for certain types of creation also.

I use mine for editing photos. But, I still have to start and end the process with Lightroom classic on my Mac because of stupid decisions by Adobe to rent-seek with cloud storage, offering no local-stroage workflow option with the iPad app (and deliberately leaving out some features only available in LR Classic).

Likewise, I would love to do all of my photoshop work on the iPad. It's a great immersive experience with the Apple Pencil vs. sitting down with a mouse and keyboard on a computer, but yet again, Adobe cripples the iPad app compared to the desktop app.

And those particular use cases aren't Apple's fault. I'm less and less frustrated with iPad OS as a whole, particularly with windowing in 26 (though it could use some polish). It's got external display support, a file manager, access to external storage, audio input select now, etc. But Adobe (and others) are still making crippled mobile applications for it instead of just doing work to port over the full desktop experience on a device that is now just as capable.

Sure you can't code on it (very well), but I feel like Apple should start putting some pressure on Adobe and the other creative-suite of software companies to beef up the iPad experience, maybe offer some incentive or something.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-15 18:15:52+00:00
Ctrl+Shift+(X,C,V) tends to work for many/most terminals in Linux and Windows (including Code and the new Terminal in Windows)...

I agree on the Fn key positioning... I hate it in the corner and tend to zoom in when considering laptops for anyone just in case. I've also had weird arrow keys on the right side in a laptop keyboard where I'd hit the up arrow instead of the right shift a lot in practice... really messed up test area input.
by scuff3d | 2025-10-15 18:16:00+00:00
Leave it to hackernews to be overly pedantic.

Yes, obviously different languages will produce different assembly based on the language semantics. So you will get performance differences. And it's certainly possible for code written in Rust or Zig or Odin to be more performant then C code depending on how it's written.

My point was about classes of languages (for lack of a better term). Loosely, from fastest to slowest you have:

1. Compiled languages (meaning straight to machine code) with manual memory management

2. Compiled languages with garbage collection

3. Languages that run in VMs but are AOT compiled or JITed

4. Purely interpreted languages.

I acknowledge that not all languages fit nicely into these and there will be exceptions, but it's a convenient mental model that's close enough for these purposes.

Languages in the first category are going to be the most performant. Obviously there will be some variation between them based on how the code is written, but unless it's written really poorly it's not going to drop into an entirely different category. Where as languages in other categories are going to be far more difficult if not impossible to get close to the same kind of performance.

And there is no meaningfully huge jumps left after the first group. We are all the way down at optimizing assembly code, and that's where you start to hit physical limitations. Some number of operations have to be executed and the CPU can only execute them so fast.
by jsnell | 2025-10-15 18:16:52+00:00
Good grief. Apple's official financials.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2025-q3/FY25_Q3_Consol...

Look, I totally understand making an off-hand comment like you did based on a gut feeling. Nobody can fact-check everything they write, and everyone is wrong sometimes. But it is pretty lazy to demand a source when you were just making things up. When challenged with specific and verifiable nubmers, you should have checked the single obvious source for the financials of any public company. Their quarterly statements.