MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fishpen0 | 2025-10-15 20:21:33+00:00
Yeah this is mostly the "build twitter in a day" projects that conveniently ignore the reason these companies have 10,000+ developers is the 99.9% of the software that is not the frontend that actually makes the company things happen at the company. The much bigger customers of many of these companies being the advertisers and the artists/creators who have their own interfaces and analytics and billing and payment tooling. The business rules engines and feature flags with tens of thousands of rules that allow any of these companies to operate in subtly different ways for customers in different states, countries, and regions with different laws for accessibility, fair use, and using and storing data. The auth and security layers that often have multiple interfaces for employees, customer classes, partners supporting native-auth, oidc, totp, developer tokens, etc... Apps for a dozen or more different app ecosystems on hundreds of device types from the obvious web and phone-based ios/android to the less obvious carplay, watch, roku, firestick, etc...
by ziml77 | 2025-10-15 20:21:59+00:00
Your thoughts seem similar to mine. Going overboard with the colors just turns it all into visual noise. But cutting down as far as they have removes useful colors.

I've always thought the default Visual Studio color scheme was a nice balance. And I especially like the green comment color in that theme. It doesn't scream for your attention but also doesn't fade into the background (which, annoyingly, many themes do quite literally).

Of course if the author prefers their extra minimal colors I'm not going to tell them they're wrong. Though framing it as objectively better I do disagree with.
by cudgy | 2025-10-15 20:22:21+00:00
If you leave your front door open, you’re gonna get a lot of strangers and stray animals in your house. If you don’t have the desire to close the door, I guess you’ll just give in and get familiar with your new roommates.

I’ve never understood why people use android, which was built by the largest advertising company in the world. A company with a history of violating privacy, scanning personal data for advertisement purposes. Also, what amazes me, is that many technical, well-informed people continue to use standard android os, knowing full well that they’re giving up major privacy protections and using a much less secure platform than alternatives like iOS. I’m sure there’s good reasons for it that people have and can rationalize.

The main rationalization that I have seen from technical people is that they just hate Apple. They’ll never use Apple, even if they have to give up significant privacy. Other people like the fact they can customize the device (which I like as well), but unfortunately, makes it easier for bad actors to customize your phone in ways you don’t want.
by ceejayoz | 2025-10-15 20:22:24+00:00
Ironically, a three year old can be on the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#False_positives

> Numerous children (including many under the age of five, and some under the age of one) have generated false positives.

And at least on one occasion, a sitting US Senator: https://www.theregister.com/2004/08/19/senator_on_terror_wat...
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-15 20:23:12+00:00
Do not take my word for it, read the draft legislation yourself

https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-10131-2025-...

Some HN voters seem to agree using third parties is not ideal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45468830
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-15 20:23:16+00:00
This is where this part of the thread started

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45594747

> The ability to run Xcode? Maybe run Linux in a VM (no, emulation does not count). Maybe run nvim with python/node/rust/go/gcc toolchains on the iPad? How about Wireshark? I really liked using Nixdroid on my Pixel, why can't I have something similar on iOS/iPadOS? Android can run Android Studio. Why can't an iPad run Xcode?

How much of that could you do on your Dynabook? How was web browsing? The office suites? Video and audio editing? The office suites? Even the games?
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-15 20:24:04+00:00
It's not a framing I haven't heard either ( :-) ), but I think that was what he wanted to suggest. I have however known this stance in general, and I think I agree to some point. You can always view a revolution from the side of your enemy, the lessons will be important when you are the large empire.

I think the wars and revolutions to free countries from being colonized were never honorable (like all wars) even when they served a greater good in the large scheme. I even think that also applies to WW2 (Churchill famously said later they should have gone after USSR first), there is always some dirty stuff going on from all sides, and maybe it applies to the American revolution as well. These revolutions often spark from egoistic interests even if they claim to fight for the greater good.
by css | 2025-10-15 20:24:33+00:00
I love the concept of lexical differential highlighting [0] (discussed here [1]). It makes reading math so much easier, especially in dense code. However I don't know of any editor that implements a feature like this.

If you paste the following code into the example block in [0] you can see how useful this can be:

while (b - a).abs() > EPSILON { let c = a + (a - b) * f_a / (f_b - f_a); let f_c = J(c); if f_c * f_b == 0.0 { a = b; f_a = f_b; } else { f_a /= 2.0; } b = c; f_b = f_c; }

[0]: https://wordsandbuttons.online/lexical_differential_highligh...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414528
by alephnerd | 2025-10-15 20:24:49+00:00
Weird.

I look stereotypical MENA and haven't faced any extra screening, and I travel a lot for work both domestically and abroad, and I'm too lazy to get Global Entry or TSA Pre so I'm dealing with general TSA.

Did your friend maybe travel to an Arab country at some point in time that either faced significant instability, a country that borders Syria+Iraq, or to the West Bank via Jordan?
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-15 20:24:57+00:00
I'd argue the exact opposite. Compared to what you can do if you can write compilers anything that involves composing functions is weak beer and most monad examples cover computational pipelines as opposed to computational graphs. It's like that Graham book On Lisp, it's a really fun book but then you realize that screwing around with functions and macros doesn't hold a candle to what you learn from the Dragon Book.
by myrmidon | 2025-10-15 20:25:51+00:00
By "materialism" I mean that human cognition is simply an emergent property of purely physical processes in (mostly) our brains.

All the individual assumptions basically come down to that same point in my view.

1) Human intelligence is entirely explicable in evolutionary terms

What would even be the alternative here? Evolution plots out a clear progression from something multi-cellular (obviously non-intelligent) to us.

So either you need some magical mechanism that inserted "intelligence" at some point in our species recent evolutionary past, or an even wilder conspiracy theory (e.g. "some creator built us + current fauna exactly, and just made it look like evolution").

2) Intelligence strictly biological

Again, this is simply not an option if you stick to materialism in my view. you would need to assume some kind of bio-exclusive magic for this to work.

3) Silicon is somehow intrinsically bound up with computation

I don't understand what you mean by this.

> It can't even explain color

Perceiving color is just how someones brain reacts to a stimulus? Why are you unhappy with that? What would you need from a satisfactory explanation?

I simply see no indicator against this flavor of materialism, and everything we've learned about our brains so far points in favor.

Thinking, for us, results in and requires brain activity, and physically messing with our brains operation very clearly influences the whole spectrum of our cognitive capabilities, from the ability to perceive pain, color, motion, speech to consciousness itself.

If there was a link to something metaphysical in every persons brain, then I would expect at least some favorable indication before entertaining that notion, and I see none (or some plausible mechanism at the very least).
by fsflover | 2025-10-15 20:26:03+00:00
Thank you for the willingness to help the free software community! People like you also inspire me to believe in its future.

> I might actually reconsider writing all of my software open source.

This sounds really promising. I recommend GPLv3 or, better, AGPLv3 license to make sure that anybody making changes to your software will have to share them, too.
by bitexploder | 2025-10-15 20:26:30+00:00
I immediately stopped reading when I saw the yellow. I like colors. I like rainbow delimiters. I will not change at this point. I am okay with minimalistic highlighting. Used to use visual studio with more minimalistic highlighting, and that was fine too. It is a preference and I don't think it is worth indexing much on. If it bothers you, change it until it doesn't. I don't think about it much.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-10-15 20:26:34+00:00
I will boldly state that std::variant makes all code worse and it is always better to not use it.

I love sum types in Rust. They’re great. This stuff exists solely to add ergonomics. If it’s not ergonomic it’s just making your code worse!

std::variant is fundamentally broken because it uses types as its discriminant. Want a variant with two ints that represent two things? Fuck you, you can’t. Rust enums of course can do this.

std::visit is an abomination. As is the template overloaded bullshit you have to copy paste into projects.

And of course the error messages when you get when it’s wrong are atrocious even by C++ standards.

No. std::variant is awful and you should simply never use it. This could change in 2040 when you can use C++32. But for now just avoid it.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-15 20:26:35+00:00
I was going to question how that's worth more than all the metals in a gas pump, but then I considered that fucking with a gas pump is probably notably more dangerous than an EV charger. The huge conductors that actually do that lifting aren't, AFAIK, energized until the unit detects a car that needs charging. They can probably just snip them off if they're of the mind to do so.
by strcat | 2025-10-15 20:27:07+00:00
We're working with a major Android OEM on the future generations of their existing devices meeting the official GrapheneOS requirements so we can officially support their devices. People will be able to buy the regular devices and install GrapheneOS at no extra cost. We're talking about selling devices with GrapheneOS preinstalled but that's not a requirement for the partnership to be a success and other companies could still do it as they do now with Pixels.

Play Integrity API doesn't impact GrapheneOS as much as other alternatives not focused on privacy and security in a similar way. A subset of the apps using the Play Integrity API are explicitly permitting GrapheneOS via hardware attestation including multiple banks like Swissquote. We're working on convincing more banks to permit it. Our hope is for regulators to invalidate the current approach and require defining clear security standards which need to be fairly enforced. The status quo of some banks banning using a much more secure OS that's even much more heavily using hardware-based security features while permitting a Google Mobile Services OS with no patches for 6 years is a massive antitrust issue. It impacts every alternative hardware platform and OS since Android app compatibility is important for competing. The obstacles to getting approved should also not be unreasonably high. It's better if apps don't do this but we can accept they are going to do it if it's a fair system permitting competition, unlike the Play Integrity API.
by jkestner | 2025-10-15 20:27:30+00:00
I’ve got a 2010 MBP that’s still perfectly suitable, but without OS updates, I can’t get a browser that websites will load cleanly on, can’t use Xcode, bunch of the Apple services the company hooks you on don’t work, etc. Used OpenCore bootloader to extend its life into newer macOSes, but that’s getting hard to keep up with. What a (e)waste.
by kokada | 2025-10-15 20:27:31+00:00
If anything the ones that got a worse reputation here is Apple itself. The bug basically slow the whole system, not just the application that has the bad behavior.

Sure, people in Hacker News now know that the issue is "that Electron bug", but I am sure lots of other people that are less tech savvy just kept questioning what the hell is happening and maybe even considered an upgrade. But maybe that is the whole point.
by netsharc | 2025-10-15 20:27:57+00:00
Your last sentence is a verbose way of saying "Just sayin'".

https://psychcentral.com/health/defending-against-im-just-sa...

You know why you posted that quote, it's not just to "[bring] up a factual quote", it's to imply the man is a fool who's not to be listened to. And when challenged you pretend you're "just posting a quote".

Here's a Krugman quote from today (in fact it's in the post):

> A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general
by zarzavat | 2025-10-15 20:27:58+00:00
The diagnosis is valid but the prescription is incorrect.

The solution is not to use fewer colors, but rather to take advantage of the 3D space of color perception.

Good themes have a hierarchy. Perhaps red is for keywords and blue is for symbols, but different kinds of symbols have different shades of blue. A lighter blue for functions, a darker blue for classes, for example.

This allows the highlighting to convey a higher amount of information when reading code closely, without causing distraction when skimming through code.
by cvoss | 2025-10-15 20:28:09+00:00
> Please, please don’t highlight language keywords.

Agreed with almost everything the author had to say, but not this. Hard disagree. In my view, keywords are the single most important thing to highlight. I'd be ok without anything else. Keywords sketch the structure of the program in most languages. The thing I want my eye drawn to, in the case of top-level definitions, for example, is the keyword. It's the predictable anchor as I'm scanning a long series of definitions. The identifiers are not: some are long, some are (very) short.

And how do I understand the control flow of my program? I look at keywords. If I want to read the condition, I have to find the condition. But all the conditions look different. What's the reliable way to spot them? The predictable 'if' that precedes each one, without fail.

My eye is a parser. It needs to recognize tokens. But some tokens are easy to confuse: keywords look just like identifiers.
by frou_dh | 2025-10-15 20:28:17+00:00
I like having the identifiers of function/method calls being a distinguishable colour, because when looking at an overall section of code, they are the 'wormholes' to other code, and so one of the most useful things to be able to pick out instantly at a glance.

But I agree with the author that if little to nothing ends up being given the base text colour (e.g. white or black) then the design is an unthinking one (less of a design process, more of a box-ticking exercise to assign a unique colour to everything that can possibly have one).
by leakycap | 2025-10-15 20:28:23+00:00
> I'm happy to hear your games work well for you, but it sounds like the games you're playing aren't demanding compared to modern AAA titles.

That's why I made the specific distinction in the comment you're responding to

When a $599 Windows laptop with a 3060 can play AAA titles and your $1599 MBP can't, I wouldn't normally call that great for gaming.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-10-15 20:28:36+00:00
riddle me this, who was complicit in perpetrating the lies in the invasion of Iraq. The fourth estate is dead. It does not protect safeguard democracy but erodes it.

Vietnam, Iraq, Covid-19, financial crises, NSA mass surviellence, afghanistan, opioid crises, not to mention the endless 'pee gate' russiagate crap. Jussie smollet, hunter bidens laptop, the crushing of occupy, coverage of gamestop, AI panic slop about destroying jobs... it never ends

narrative over truth, every time, without fail.
by getnormality | 2025-10-15 20:29:27+00:00
The really ironic thing is that this article demonstrates the correct, purposeful human usage of these stock phrases and is getting skewered for it because it superficially sounds like AI. It's not exemplifying what it's criticizing, it's exemplifying the exact reverse of what it's criticizing.

"It's not X, it's Y" is for when you know your reader will think X, and you want them to understand the difference between the X they are expecting and the Y that is actually the case.

Here are the two "not just" passages in the article:

> Driven by this discrepancy, I built a simple tracking script. It was not a sophisticated piece of software, just a tool designed to observe how "users" actually interacted with the website. I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior.

> The bots operating today are disturbingly good. They are not just hitting your site and leaving; they are programmed to mimic engagement, making your marketing ROI calculations dangerously inaccurate. I began to categorize them.

Both of these passages are using the "not just X, but Y" trope in a purposeful, meaningful way, anticipating what a typical audience member might assume and signaling for them to adjust their expectation. Not just trying to maximize the usage of the trope with random non-sequitur values of X and Y, as GPT does.

(Oh dear, I just said it too.)

It would be interesting to assemble a corpus of meaningful human text with superficial use of AI tropes, put it side-by-side with true AI slop, and see who can tell the difference. I suspect that, in the coming years, this will be a test posed in higher education and job interviews.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-15 20:29:42+00:00
Your preference for light and dark mode doesnt change with the ambient light?

Im always surprised by the number of people who will delcare one absolutely better than the other without consideration for this factor. Sure, people have some general preferences, but I thnk it's 90% about the ambient light.

If it's pitch black most people will prefer dark and if it's bright daylight people will prefer light.
by renewiltord | 2025-10-15 20:30:08+00:00
In my experience low-color guys were either uber-programmer greybeards or fucking morons cargo-culting uber-programmer greybeards. Most bimodal property ever. You don't find that with vim bindings etc.

I wonder which software engineer traits are like this. Maybe everything that it's kind of low-friction to do. If you had a CRT screen you're probably a details oriented person. If you've got conky running you're from the time when you needed to watch those things or you're a moron cargo culting that.
by realityfactchex | 2025-10-15 20:30:24+00:00
This article discusses the usage of the word "absolutely" by humans on HN, contrasted with machine (over)usage of the term, which has been referenced a lot in articles and memes, both the usage and the attempts at correcting the overuse.

The piece reflects on the recent HN post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591799 ("Apple M5 Chip").
by strcat | 2025-10-15 20:30:32+00:00
Waydroid is not a private or secure way to run Android apps. It uses an old fork of LineageOS and throws away most of the privacy and security model with how it's implemented. It does that to run Android apps on top of a much less private and secure base OS. Compatibility is far worse and it in no way avoids the Play Integrity API checks. Most banking apps do permit GrapheneOS and some of the apps banning using a non-stock OS or non-GMS devices with the Play Integrity API have explicitly permitted GrapheneOS via hardware attestation including Swissquote. Banks have no reason to ban GrapheneOS since it has all of the standard privacy and security model combined with major privacy and security improvements. They're often willing to permit it once they understand what it is and how they can verify it with a standard Android API. Convincing every app using Play Integrity to do this case-by-case is painful and unrealistic, but regulation can require permitting secure alternatives meeting defined security requirements.
by baq | 2025-10-15 20:30:37+00:00
I have a 5th gen? Can’t even remember now it’s so old. Nothing works anymore except Netflix, YouTube and Disney, and that only after a minute or so.

Which is fine, since it’s exclusively used to watch a kids show for a half an hour a day.

…but it’s also super sad to see a once fantastic piece of kit to degrade so much primarily due to software.
by aftergibson | 2025-10-15 20:31:16+00:00
Hello! Yes! Writing this from my commute home using my companies M3 Pro and I hate it. I'm waiting for a new joiner so I can hand this off to a new starter who has a different brain to me.

I can write up all the details, but it's well covered on a recent linuxmatters.sh and Martin did a good job of explaining what I'm feeling: https://linuxmatters.sh/65/
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-15 20:31:26+00:00
Its actually simpler on both an initial and, even moreso, ongoing basis to eliminate multiple means tested programs and replace them with a single UBI with clawback through progressive taxes than to adjust the numbers in all of them in a way which has the same effect and then administer that on an ongoing basis througn the separate bureaucracy attached to each program. (Especially since the UBI itself, as well as the clawback, can be built into the tax system simply by “adjusting the numbers” in that system. Which is why “negative income tax” is a name under which a policy identical to UBI+tax financing has been proposed.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-15 20:31:40+00:00
> I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.

It rather depends on what that 1% is.

The low-level code is what's most important to be free. If you have free firmware and drivers and operating system but then you still have to run a Windows VM or WINE for an old proprietary app, you can only have problems when running that app.

If you have opaque blobs interacting with the hardware, they can crash the whole system, expose firmware-level security vulnerabilities with persistence and the blobs are specific to a kernel version so when the vendor stops providing updates, you're stuck with an obsolete kernel version with known security vulnerabilities. If anything needs to be free software, it's that.

> This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.

Android is "open source" but then the devices are Tivoized or you run into attestation failures if you actually want to run your own version of it. GitHub literally got bought out by Microsoft. These seem like legitimate concerns.
by joshstrange | 2025-10-15 20:32:13+00:00
I've heard (but not tested) that Tahoe and iOS 26 do a _much_ better job of auto-connecting and reconnecting (if your cell drops, like going through a tunnel or similar) to make it easier to use your phone with your MBP.

I hope this is the case. I don't know if I would buy a cellular MBP (just wouldn't use it enough) but better tethering is a huge win for me.
by dahart | 2025-10-15 20:32:22+00:00
Hey I appreciate your comment, but you were doing a fine job! In case it comes up later, here are another couple of resources to defend science funding:

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/new-report-shows-nasas-75-...

https://www.sciencecoalition.org/2025/04/29/sparking-america...

https://sciencetechaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/The...

I don’t know why trying to ridicule funny sounding science papers is still such a popular thing to attempt, when the Golden Goose awards exist, and when people who do it have been shown repeatedly for many decades to fail to understand either science or money, yet here we are. Luckily science won’t stop, even with our current administration’s chaos.