MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IT4MD | 2025-10-15 20:38:37+00:00
Your statement: > Homosexuality and sodomy They do affect the future population count and this will affect the pension of everyone. They also will result in persons not being born. You can say that this is way less of importance then the right to do whatever you want, but it is not without effect to others. ===============================================================================

I assumed you were concerned with all social programs and not just your personal pension, hence the statement. Fixing pensions, while all other social safety net programs get gutted is not the way. Basic breeding by heterosexuals isn't the panacea you seem to believe it is, imo.

The real issue with US population growth is the insane world we live in. It's not "the gays failing to procreate". That's a laughable statement.

WTF would want to bring children into the world when literal criminals, rapists and alcoholics are running things, racism is on the rise and cheered, laws are optional for specific groups of people while abused for everyone else, SCOTUS is a complete parody of a court, Congress is run by wholly unserious people, prices of everything are rocketing up not because of genuine supply chain issues, or similar, but because of plain, old greed and much, much, much more.

Let's not forget that AI is being developed at a record pace to replace jobs, while shafting the working class, instead of being used to uplift everyone.

"The gays" were never the problem and never will be for population growth.
by jraph | 2025-10-15 20:38:52+00:00
Like many comments here, I disagree with this article.

Notably, I don't necessarily remember which colors are used by my code editors off the top of my head, but you can be damn sure that if the smallest thing is different tomorrow, I will notice, and if anything is the wrong color, I will immediately notice something is wrong. Put as many colors as possible and it makes it easier for me to spot any mistake. Although I can understand that more than a few colors can be distracting to some people.

As for "everyone does it wrong", and in particular wtt the Christmas tree effect, I find Kate's and IDEA's default color themes quite well designed and balanced, and where each sub expression start and end.

I do find light themes far more readable, and only use dark themes under very bad lighting conditions where a white background would hurt the eyes even at minimal screen brightness.

Bonus topic: in the Christmas tree screenshots, you can notice that parentheses are of different colors. This creates a visual mess but I do activate this option in Kate anyway because it is very useful to quickly check that the parentheses are balanc

It's less necessary when you have syntax checking though, because the editor will put a red background or draw squiggles.
by imoverclocked | 2025-10-15 20:38:56+00:00
... or UTM. I have run windows and Linux on my M1 MB Pro with plenty of success.

Windows - because I needed it for a single application.

Linux - has been extremely useful as a compliment to small arm SBCs that I run. eg: Compiling a kernel is much faster there than on (say) a Raspberry Pi. Also, USB device sharing makes working with vfat/ext4 filesystems on small memory cards a breeze.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-15 20:40:11+00:00
Not necessarily. There are quite a few levers the U.S. government and Federal Reserve have to keep things humming along since we're a giant. Stocks are not as rational as you're making them out to be. As the saying goes "gradually, then suddenly"

Your remarks about "shorting the market if you think this" are not only ignorant but passive aggressive.
by abdulmuminyqn | 2025-10-15 20:40:24+00:00
It’s a simple idea, but weirdly powerful. Because sometimes, the person who needs to hear from you the most… is you.

There’s something oddly magical about hearing from an earlier version of yourself who still believed, dreamed, and maybe even doubted the same things you do now.

On dearfutureself.me, you can write a message today and have it delivered to you in the future.

It runs on a distributing queue powered by Redis, with cron schedulers handling deliveries. Messages are encrypted and signed by you.
by lxgr | 2025-10-15 20:40:28+00:00
> Asked about the answer, ChatGPT points to the instruction set and that it allowed it to add additional statements: [...]

I don't think this is how this works. It's debatable whether current LLMs have any theory of mind at all, and even if they do, whether their model of themselves (i.e. their own "mental states") is sophisticated enough to make such a prediction.

Even humans aren't that great at predicting how they would have acted under slightly different premises! Why should LLMs fare much better?
by jrochkind1 | 2025-10-15 20:40:48+00:00
I've spent my career writing software in non-profit/academic library/museum/archives sector with tiny teams (15-person development team would be an embaresment of riches), but usually with (an attempt at) cross-institution open source collaboration -- and this definitely matches some of the ideas I've developed about how to do so responsibly in tiny poor institutions.

The team size may not get smaller -- but it may disappear entirely, which kind of the only room it has to get smaller! More likely, the actual team size may stay the same, but the experience/skill/initiative level the team exhibits may drop drastically.

Still same stuff.

One thing you don't mention that I do prioritize is keeping dependencies up to date. I'm thinking "if the development team disappears entirely, I want the runway to be as long and affordable as possible for you to figure out what to do about this (likely with some per-hour consultancy support) before the thing dies or will require investment you can't afford to survive."
by mfdupuis | 2025-10-15 20:41:01+00:00
I think this is the challenge and the dissonance. For something to truly run autonomously you need to provide it some many constraints that it almost loses its usefulness. I've tried using AI, or at least looked into what I could use AI for to automate marketing tasks and I just don't think I can seriously set up a workflow in n8n or AgentKit that would produce sufficiently good results without me jumping in. That said, AI is incredibly helpful in this semi-autonomous mode with the right parameters, to the point of the parent comment.
by strcat | 2025-10-15 20:41:10+00:00
Apps mainly avoid it because their most privacy invasive features are tied to their functionality and their own servers. They can share with third party server side and mainly do that. Client side stuff is mainly far less important analytics, telemetry, crash reporting, etc. If the app or SDK wants to evade filtering client side, they just need to do their own DNS resolution via DoH using a hard-wired IP whether it's 1.1.1.1 or their own server. Facebook has IP fallbacks in several of their apps.
by pbasista | 2025-10-15 20:41:15+00:00
> How is Asahi these days?

Much less active than it used to be when it was run by Hector Martin. The core development is a lot slower. Although the graphics stack, for instance, has reached a very mature state recently.

> Is it ready as a daily driver?

It depends. Only M1 and M2 devices are reasonably well-supported. There is no support for power-efficient sleep, Display Port, Thunderbolt, video decoding or encoding, touch ID. The speakers overheat and turn off momentarily when playing loud for a longer period of time. The audio stack in general had to be built from ground up and it seems to me like there are bits and pieces still missing or configured sub-optimally.

> Is it getting support from Apple?

Not that I am aware of.

> are they (Apple) hostile to it?

Not to my knowledge.

> Are there missing features?

Plenty, as described above. There has been some work done recently on Thunderbolt / Display Port. Quite a few other features are listed as WIP on their feature support page.

> Can I run KDE on it?

Of course. KDE Plasma on Fedora is Asahi Linux's "flagship" desktop environment.
by mikece | 2025-10-15 20:41:17+00:00
> Nabu Casa is now exploring what hardware could replace Home Assistant Yellow, so if you have any suggestions on what we should do next, please tell us in the comments!

How about installing the software on (now) old, minimally specced M1 Mac minis? User Asahi Linux as a base and give my currently decommissioned M1 Mac mini with 8GB of RAM new life!
by antisol | 2025-10-15 20:41:23+00:00
Yeah I was part of a group that was involved with a bulk shipment of one of the very first batches, we got all the warts.

Another thing that's worth mentioning was that at first, openmoko were very much over-selling the capabilities and readiness of the device: The Freerunner was initially supposed to be a "consumer-grade" device, with the neo1973 being the prototype / developer version. When I first contacted openmoko I was told that it would be totally usable as a phone out of the box with all the phone functionality you expect. They walked back on those claims and updated their website/wiki pretty quickly after the device actually came out. But not before a bunch of us had handed over our cash.

I'm glad to hear that the stack did get to a somewhat usable state. And I'm even more glad to hear that the librem is better. The experience I had with the Freerunner put me off foss phones for a long time, and the pinephone....didn't help. Maybe I'll take another look at the librem.

(which still works, BTW!)

Yeah my freerunner still mostly powered up the last time I tried, a year or two ago. I think maybe nand had corrupted and I might have had to re-flash it, or something like that. It wasn't in a healthy state but seemed to be mostly OK with a bit of tinkering.

It does deserve some credit as a cool little portable linux device - once I gave up on using it as a phone, I hacked it into a pretty useful GPS and music player device. I was still using it to record GPS tracks for trips in 2016, and I was running it as a second display attached to my workstation for some time after that. It did last quite well, I do have to give it that... But what I bought was supposed to be a phone.
by NoSalt | 2025-10-15 20:41:35+00:00
I like the dark color-scheme because the light color-schemes look like a lighthouse has been built on my desktop; it is an affront to my senses and burns my eyeballs.

I have no idea where I got it, but I have a quick JavaScript bookmarklet that darkens any page for me in an instant. I love it. And I, unfortunately, have to use it every time here on Hacker News.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

javascript: (()=>{var e="quick-and-dirty-dark-theme",d=document,i=d.getElementById(e);if(i)d.body.removeChild(i);else{var r=d.createElement("style");r.id=e,r.innerHTML="html, img, video, iframe { background: #fff;%20filter:%20invert(0.9)%20}%22,d.body.appendChild(r)}})();
by b7894 | 2025-10-15 20:41:38+00:00
Gemini 3.0 Pro (or what is deemed to be 3.0 Pro - you can get access to it via A/B testing on AI Studio) does a noticeably better job

https://x.com/cannn064/status/1972349985405681686

https://x.com/whylifeis4/status/1974205929110311134

https://x.com/cannn064/status/1976157886175645875
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-15 20:41:39+00:00
> A mixture of pine rosin and beeswax known as "sealing wax" played an important part in 12th through 19th-century information security and 19th-century high-vacuum apparatus.

I suspect you are referring to a different use of rosin and beeswax, but the mixture was used for centuries for sealing - which is for information security. It was mixed with either arsenic-based or copper-based minerals to both color it, and protect it from slow fungal attack, so seals (after about a century of colorful failures) were always red or green.

A slightly different proportion was used as "code" (no relation to cyphers), a shoemaker's waterproofing glue for seams. AFAIK no coloring was added.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-15 20:41:42+00:00
The speed is bad too. At least on Android, it does actually take 5-10 seconds sometimes. That's not an exaggeration.

It should be searching, what, a few hundred strings? What is it doing? Is it making a network call? For what?

Anyway, barely related, but it does bring into question the quality of modern software.
by xoa | 2025-10-15 20:41:44+00:00
You might have gotten lost on the steps involved in clean-room reverse engineering here?

>extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design

It's stage 1. Clean-room reverse engineering is about working with the nature of copyright, and classically goes roughly like this:

1. You set things up with a "contaminated" or "dirty" side team who have direct exposure to the IP in question, and a "clean" (or "virgin" is another older term) side team that are thoroughly firewalled. The clean side must only have devs who have never ever had any exposure to whatever it is you're trying to clean replicate [0].

2. The dirty side is in charge of producing a "fact sheet"/spec. That side absolutely extracts/disassembles or whatever else to get at the target, which is precisely what "contaminates" them. They are looking at copyrighted code. Then they use that research to a create a purely factual spec, which is then passed across the firewall to the clean side. This must be the only communication.

3. The clean side then uses that to write new code themselves that will handle state per the factual spec they've been given.

The reason it works is that (in the US) purely factual information cannot be copyrighted, there's no "sweat of the brow" doctrine or the like. Copyright, unlike patents, does not cover ideas or methods, it's about the creativity of the person in question. You can't copyright the mathematics of a function, of "when X input is received Y is output", or of general concepts. So if two (or more) people independently create works that happen to cover the exact same subject matter, but can prove they were fully independent, then it doesn't matter even if it happened to be literally identical (however improbable that would be). Each would have their own independent copyright on it.

So clean-room RE avoids all the legal snarls around "how close is this" in favor of the simple binary question of "did the team that wrote this RE'd code have any exposure whatsoever to copyrighted IP?" If the answer to that is "no" that's the end of any legal complaint, because by definition their output cannot be a derivative work. Software patents short circuit that, part of the many reasons they're evil, but as a practical matter the number of really fundamental hard to avoid ones is rapidly shrinking because it's 2025 and by 2005 a lot of the foundations had long since been done.

----

0: Which is not necessarily trivial to hire for, because the kind of person who has the kind of skills you need also is going to tend to enjoy hacking around and reverse engineering stuff for fun anyway increasing the chance they've managed to contaminate themselves.
by btown | 2025-10-15 20:42:04+00:00
To this point, I wonder if we can go even further in the direction "it's fine to have a 'zoo' of colors on the screen... as long as we're able to rapidly scan for patterns based on the shapes of code and relative positions of those colors."

Many games (especially gacha games where one may be tracking multiple orthogonal "levels" on any given piece of inventory) compress tremendous amounts of data into a character or gear item portrait; ticks on the top, dots on the side, colored frames, etc. - all so we can pick things out in a crowd without needing to set a custom sort order.

And yet our IDEs, citing silly things like "render optimizations" and "consistency with ANSI escape codes," allow each character to have just a single foreground color, a single background color, and maybe a squiggly underline. Why stop there?

Give me the freedom to add arbitrary overlays and decorations on any given token. Give me <ruby>-style elements [0] that will let me put a little colored dot or emoji at the top right of any token that meets a certain requirement... say, a utility function, or a reference from the file that's open at the top right of my screen.

Let us swim in rainbows with sparkles flying past our eyes. We're strong swimmers.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-15 20:42:08+00:00
What I found remarkable about that book is that 80% of what is in it can be done with functions and no macros, mostly you can rewrite the examples in Python except for the coroutines but Python already has coroutines. It also irks me that the I don’t think the explanation of coroutines in Scheme is very clear but it’s become the dominant one you find in the net and I can’t find a better one.

As for ‘compiler’ you also don’t need to go all the way to bare metal, some runtime like WASM or the JVM which is more civilized is a good target these days.
by Garlef | 2025-10-15 20:42:15+00:00
Interesting post.

Just like everyone else, I disagree on some aspects.

One has not been brought up. So here's goes:

My first reaction to the highlighting of the literals (strings, numbers, etc) was:

"This is wrong! Who cares about the exact value here? I want to understand the program flow!"

But thinking about it a bit more, this is actually a deficiency in the code itself, not the highlighting:

It's magic numbers! And they get highlighted for you.
by thfuran | 2025-10-15 20:42:17+00:00
>You are responsible for testing the code you write, not the one that actually runs

That's a bizarre claim. The source code isn't the product, and the product is what has to work. If a compiler or OS bug causes your product to function incorrectly, it's still your problem. The solution is to either work around the bug or get the bug fixed, not just say "I didn't write the bug, so deal with it."
by guptadeepak | 2025-10-15 20:42:28+00:00
I’ve been exploring how identity systems need to evolve as enterprises become increasingly autonomous — with AI agents and APIs making decisions without human intermediaries. The article argues that static credentials like passwords and API keys can’t scale in these environments. Instead, identity must be dynamic, context-aware, and cryptographically verifiable.

Three key areas stood out: decentralized identity standards, just-in-time credential issuance, and autonomous trust negotiation between agents.

I’m curious — how are others approaching machine identity lifecycle management when both issuance and trust decisions must happen autonomously in real time?
LWIZ: Outpacing Bitcoin to First Place
by meel-hd | 2025-10-15 20:43:12+00:00
I’ve been playing with an idea for a while. What if a token could actually be priced higher than Bitcoin? That’s why I created LWIZ—the goal is simple: to take the first spot before Bitcoin.

Community Minting: anyone can mint; no insiders.

Capped Supply: scarcity is built in.

DeFi Ready: ERC‑20, Ethereum-compatible.

Transparent Treasury: all collateral is visible on-chain.

It’s out there now. Go check it out at lwiz.sitezwin.com and see if it can pull it off.

*Learn More:*

- [Blog Post](https://sitezwin.com/posts/2025-09-16-lwiz) detailing the concept and mechanics behind LWIZ. - [Source Code](https://github.com/meel-hd/lwiz) available on GitHub.
by surgical_fire | 2025-10-15 20:43:13+00:00
> It's funny that in the first example where the author asked the viewers to find the function definition, I was able to do so faster with the colorful syntax highlighting he considered wrong.

Same. It sort of killed the article for me. I also thought that in his resulting theme the limitation of colors would eventually trip me up. Having numbers and strings be the same color is terrible - I have noticed mistakes in the oast where numbers were erroneously attributed as strings for being enclosed in quotation marks precisely because my theme gives those different colors.
by quentin-smr | 2025-10-15 20:43:14+00:00
Comparing haiku and sonnet for a question needing a code doc fetch:

haiku https://claude.ai/share/8a5c70d5-1be1-40ca-a740-9cf35b1110b1 sonnet https://claude.ai/share/51b72d39-c485-44aa-a0eb-30b4cc6d6b7b

haiku invented the output of a function and gave a bad answer. sonnet got it right
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-15 20:43:15+00:00
Windows crapiness is because they won’t deprecate anything ever. Read some of Raymond Chen’s posts about all of the special casing they did for apps that broke on newer versions of Windows because app developers were using unpublished APIs.

Every bit of backwards compatibility increases the testing surface and the vulnerabilities. In fact, an early bug in Windows NT that you could encode DOS shell commands in the browser URL bar from a client and they wouod run with admin privileges if the server was running IIS.

Should Apple have also kept 68K emulation around? PPC?
by ninjaranter | 2025-10-15 20:43:18+00:00
Agree with the premise, but I built a theme with a different interpretation: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=narenran...

The primary difference is that my theme has an underlying assumption that colors have semantic meaning that we all implicitly understand(red = bad, yellows/oranges are action-oriented etc). So instead of color = syntax, my theme semantically maps color = intent.

• Warm colors (orange/red) for actions — throw, return, await.

• Cool colors (blue/green) for definitions and values — function names, constants, variables.

• Muted neutrals for structure and noise — punctuation, keywords like var or const

This means comments are muted, contrary to the author's proposal - imo while they are important and helpful, they're secondary to the actual code

My primary design goal was that if you open a large file and squint at it, the flow should be immediately obvious (the flow colors stand out, if you see a bunch of blues it's calling a bunch of other functions etc)

(You can see screenshots in the link)
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-15 20:43:22+00:00
> But then, proposes to not highlight keywords at all, so misspelling "return" would still be impossible to quickly scan for visually!

Yeah I generally want the opposite. I want keywords to be the thing being highlighted.

I also really dislike overly colorful themes, and I prefer light mode (dark mode is far too hard on my eyes, oddly enough I have to strain to focus or it's fuzzy).

But the author's alabaster theme still highlights the wrong things and is inconsistent.

public async Task<byte[]> SomeMethodName(Type param, Type param) results in Task, SomeMethodName, and BOTh the data type and parameter name being highlighted.

If highlighting isn't for keywords, why is Task and the data types highlighted?

likewise var result = await SomeMethodName(param, param); has result and SomeMethodName highlighted and I generally want the opposite, I want the PL's keywords highlighted and nothing else.
by battesonb | 2025-10-15 20:43:32+00:00
Agreed on this. Especially with the return keyword argument presented in the same article.

An assertion of correctness relating to a matter of taste is, ironically, going to be trivially falsifiable. Even though I found myself personally agreeing with most of what the author had to say (for my tastes)! I definitely want to try lifting the visual importance of comments.
by mort96 | 2025-10-15 20:43:49+00:00
Their "peak GPU compute performance for AI" is quite different from your unqualified "performance". I don't know what figures they're quoting, but something stupid like supporting 4-bit floats while the predecessor only supported down to 16-bit floats could easily deliver "over 4x peak GPU compute performance for AI" (measured in FLOPS) without actually making the hardware significantly faster.

Did they claim 4x peak GPU compute going from the M3 to M4? Or M2 to M3? Can you link to these claims? Are you sure they weren't boasting about other metrics being improved by some multiplier? Not every metric is the same, and different metrics don't necessarily stack with each other.