MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bdcravens | 2025-10-04 16:06:08+00:00
by "Apps like", it means apps that are unsigned, not apps based on any particular category of functionality.

More details provided here: https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/6334#discussion...

> We are rejecting unsigned apps already for new registrations. > Keeping unsigned apps is only for the intel based macOS users. > Signing is required to run on silicon based macOS. > Apple announced that macOS 26 Tahoe will be the last version of macOS to support Intel-based Macs. > No more unsigned apps after this phase.
by baliex | 2025-10-04 16:06:20+00:00
Thanks for the info, that does help me understand what's going on in the protocol.

I suppose I was thinking about the app responsible for getting the data into, say, Leaflet's local database in the first place. For that app, the data structures you describe are the APIs that it consumes, for the sole purpose of populating its own database.

That gets my cogs whirring about how good a use-case this would be for SQLite. I suppose it would be somewhat appropriate for a small, private, PDS? Although, if I understand correctly, I wouldn't need to worry about that anyway if I'm using some off-the shelf PDS software, e.g. https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
by cultofmetatron | 2025-10-04 16:07:08+00:00
I bought a copy through my subscription.

having read through a few of their books, Manning has a pretty good record of producing a lot of good content. nostarch an pragprog are arguably better in terms of writing quality (slightly) but they dont' publish nearly as many books.

Pakt certainly has more books but the quality is absolute garbage.

whenever a new language comes out, I usually take a weekend to at least dabble in it to see if its worth getting into. Most of the languages end up in my "cool story" bucket but its also how I found elixir and I've been working in it fulltime for the last 7 years every since.

In the case of manning, they presell the pdf. that costs them nothing while expanding their catalog in a way that doesnt feel like a ripoff for the subscribers. I'm not expecting a MEAP title to have the same level of polish as a completed book. Rather, I appreciate having close to bleeding age info thats been somewhat curated for my consumption.
by finaard | 2025-10-04 16:07:42+00:00
> As for why you didn't see similar constructions in other cities, this was definitely an unusually large telephone office for the time

For some perspective here - it took until the mid-80s for most of Germany to be connected to a phone line. That is, the 1980s.

I recently talked about that with my father after I found a postcard from one of my uncles from the early 80s confirming meeting and dinner plans. While I remember them always having a phone they were one of the households only connected in the mid 80s - which in retrospect explains some of the things I've found odd about them when talking to them by phone. It was a new thing for them.

(My parents got connected early on - my mother used to work for the post office in the phone exchange, and one of the perks of the job was priority for getting a phone line. Which also explained why we had an old grey phone, while pretty much all my friends had a relatively modern - for the time - one: they all only somewhat recently got phones)
by luya | 2025-10-04 16:08:32+00:00
Hi everyone, I’ve been working with my team on a project called ValueCell. It’s an open-source framework designed to bring different kinds of financial agents under one roof. Instead of relying on a single trading bot or juggling multiple disconnected tools, the idea is to let agents collaborate inside one platform. For example: Market research Data fetching & preprocessing Sentiment analysis Strategy testing and optimization Risk monitoring & trade execution All of these agents can plug into ValueCell and interact, making it easier to experiment and build workflows. We’re still very early, and I’d love to get feedback: Do you see value in an open-source platform like this? What kind of agents or integrations would you want to see? Any pain points you face today that something like ValueCell could help solve? Repo here if you want to take a look: https://github.com/valuecell-ai/valuecell Thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions!
by the_af | 2025-10-04 16:08:36+00:00
Agreed about strong typing being a valuable tool, especially static typing.

We've come full circle with coworkers telling me that "the best thing" about LLMs is that they can tell you when you have a typo in your function invocation or you forgot a mandatory parameter. This always leaves me dumbfounded, mouth open. If only we had a system to prevent this, from before LLMs!
Ask HN: Why is software quality collapsing?
by razoorka | 2025-10-04 16:09:08+00:00
I've been tracking software quality metrics for 3 years as an engineering manager. The pattern is getting worse, not better:

- Apple Calculator: 32GB RAM leak - Spotify on macOS: 79GB memory consumption - CrowdStrike: One missing bounds check = 8.5M crashed computers - macOS Spotlight: Wrote 26TB to SSDs overnight

Meanwhile Big Tech is spending $364B on infrastructure instead of fixing the code.

I wrote up the full analysis with citations: https://techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-software-quality-collapse

But the real question: When did we normalize this? What happened to basic quality standards?

What are you seeing in your organizations?
by mindslight | 2025-10-04 16:09:10+00:00
Note that a restriction on commercial sales still does not make an item itself "illegal".

I'm not trying to ignore the frustrating activation energy of having to spec/get/install your own showerhead rather than automatically having a default you like. But it's clear that amount of market friction here is much less than say, the overt digital authoritarianism currently going on across the whole phone app/software market. And it's important to keep this perspective, lest memes about "illegal showerheads" morph into groupthink that supports different authoritarian movements.
by acdha | 2025-10-04 16:09:32+00:00
That’s certainly possible but I think it’s increasingly untrue for all but the smallest programs. The problem is that it’s hard to appreciate how many times your program didn’t crash but would have if you’d used a different language. You don’t need to be very complex before you have the risk of something crashing due to an edge case around values which are almost never null, even in languages like Python.
by jhallenworld | 2025-10-04 16:09:54+00:00
I just used the Raspberry-PI V to bring up the PCIe interface on a Lattice Certus-Pro NX "Versa" board, it's very convenient.

What's cool is that the Raspberry-PI V is just fast enough to run modern desktop software, including (ack!) Microsoft Teams. I was able to give a live demo of my FPGA design by sharing the desktop during a conference call.

My only complaint is, of course, lack of SoC documentation from Broadcom.

Say what you will about Intel, but they do provide full chip documentation if you go through their NDA process. With it, I made a very nice FPGA PCIe environment on Xeon Ivy Bridge: it let me save all of the PCI config registers, then reconfigure the FPGA, then reprogram them and have the chip show up on the bus without having to reboot the server or re-enumerate. The trick is to temporarily set the root complex bit to disable PCIe error detection during the reconfiguration process.

(Was using Altera Stratix-IIgx at the time).

There is possibly another way to this, but haven't tried it:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32334870/how-to-do-a-tru...

But even aside from that, with the documentation you have access to a lot of error reporting which is extremely useful during PCIe bring-up.
by whstl | 2025-10-04 16:10:15+00:00
IMO/IME these problems have more to do with program organization rather than with any individual architecture.

To avoid it, funny enough, you have to take cues from functional programming, and you need strong, composable, primitives with succint interfaces (the opposite of shadcn). Even for visually combining and placing components, you need stateless layout components [1] that don't depend on anything and just render children a certain way. This way it's possible to have a very flat component hierarchy. The entire state-logic at the top-level doesn't hurt much anymore. Also, just props+events are enough, no need for Context, Redux or other tricks.

But if you go the "Clean Code" route and the main reason to have components is so so they're not too big, then you get deep hierarchies, prop-drilling becomes a big problem, and you need Context or state libraries specifically for inter-component communication.

This is a problem that I've seen come up time and time again not only in Frontend but also in desktop apps and in video games. And backends often have the luxury of having the entire state in the database, so it doesn't happen as often.

Of course the side effect of this is that you will end up with bigger components, and you need better abstractions, but IMO this is a small price to pay for having code that is easier to work with and doesn't need special ways for handling the data. Also this method tends to work better in bigger apps and people complain it's wasteful in smaller apps, so there's that too.

[1] In the design world this is often called Templates. https://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/chapter-2/#templates It's interesting how this didn't catch among frontend devs. I remember "layouts" being a big part of WPF for example.
by ivansavz | 2025-10-04 16:10:44+00:00
If anyone is looking for an introduction to Python for absolute beginners, you can check out the Python tutorial I just prepared: https://nobsstats.com/tutorials/python_tutorial.html

It includes a section on "punctuation" symbols, which I haven't seen explained concisely anywhere else and might be helpful, even for non-beginners: https://nobsstats.com/tutorials/python_tutorial.html#python-...
by zahlman | 2025-10-04 16:11:00+00:00
> This will break tons of code

I don't see how. It adds a new, entirely optional syntax using a soft keyword. The semantics of existing code do not change. Yes, yes, you anticipated the objection:

> What if these imports were transitive? ... How could you be sure that adding lazy imports wouldn't break any code downstream?

I would need to see concrete examples of how this would be a realistic risk in principle. (My gut reaction is that top-level code in libraries shouldn't be doing the kinds of things that would be problematic here, in the first place. In my experience, the main thing they do at top level is just eagerly importing everything else for convenience, or to establish compatibility aliases.)

But if it were, clearly that's a breaking change, and the library bumps the major version and clients do their usual dependency version management. As you note, type hints work similarly. And "explicitly calling into typing APIs" is more common than you might think; https://pypistats.org/packages/pydantic exists pretty much to do exactly this. It didn't cause major problems.

> Import statements fundamentally have side effects, and when and how these side effects are applied will cause mysterious breakages that will keep people up for many nights.

They do have side effects that can be arbitrarily complex. But someone who opts in to changing import timing and encounters a difficult bug can just roll back the changes. It shouldn't cause extended debugging sessions unless someone really needs the benefits of the deferral. And people in that situation will have been hand-rolling their own workarounds anyway.

> Too many people in this thread hold the view of "importing {pandas, numpy, my weird module that is more tangled than an eight-player game of Twister} takes too long and I will gladly support anything that makes them faster".

I don't think they're under the impression that this necessarily makes things faster. Maybe I haven't seen the same comments you have.

Deferring imports absolutely would allow, for example, pip to do trivial tasks faster — because it could avoid importing unnecessary things at all. As things currently stand, a huge fraction of the vendored codebase will get imported pretty much no matter what. It's analogous to tree shaking, but implicitly, at runtime and without actually removing code.

Yes, this could be deferred to explicitly chosen times to get more or less the same benefit. It would also be more work.
by zZorgz | 2025-10-04 16:11:46+00:00
For macOS:

Applications may have permission to access files/services that other apps and even root (I believe) would need user-prompt access to, gated by TCC (potentially including sandboxed game’s data).

Code signed games that opt into enabling library validation should prevent the issue of loading arbitrary code, however many games likely don’t do this.

https://unity.com/security/sept-2025-01/remediation explains these details fairly well in macOS section
by wasabi991011 | 2025-10-04 16:12:23+00:00
> Hand waving details is fine when discussing with friends, it’s not a sound foundation for serious academic research.

It's how physics worked for hundreds of years. Make a handwavy model, find out it works on some cases but breaks down on others, then make a slightly less handwavy model the next time.

Metallurgy considering atomic structure is a very new concept, and was not needed for the first millenias of metalworking.

The issue with economics is not handwaving, is that models are hard to test due to systems not being well isolated.
by flkiwi | 2025-10-04 16:12:29+00:00
This is fascinating. I haven't used a dock in macOS in many years. Nor desktop icons (they're there, but I never really see the desktop). I don't really even use the global menubar much either. I guess I use macOS like gnome these days, probably because gnome is more like an evolution of pre-OS X operating systems (more like, not exactly like) than an iteration of OS X/macOS. That's an amusing result because I don't even use gnome on linux (I'm all niri now).

As for KDE, it's an extraordinary project. It is a genuine accomplishment. It's just not for me, because, for me, it's far too distracting, with options and configuration and more options on that invading the unsettled war zone that is my brain.
by miohtama | 2025-10-04 16:12:35+00:00
Some the benefit of using stablecoins are 1) they do not need user accounts set up for payments, so easier for machine to machine (AI agent can manage its own money) 2) they work everywhere not just in credit card rich countries 3) security profile is different (no credit card fraud)

Of course Cloudflare is riding the stablecoin hype here a bit. At least they are large enough they might be pull this off
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-04 16:12:55+00:00
And all of that "innate knowledge" still fits into under 1 gigabyte of compressed DNA.

1 gigabyte. That's the absolute limit of how much "innate knowledge" a human brain can have in it! Every single instinct, every learning algorithm, every innate behavior and every little cue a brain uses to build itself has to fit into a set of data just 1 gigabyte in size.

Clearly, nature must have found some impressively large levers - to be able to build and initialize brain with 90 billion connected neurons in it off something this small.
by parpfish | 2025-10-04 16:12:55+00:00
i've been beating the drum for a long time that we teach OO programming wrong.

we always start with inheritance (Car is subtype of Vehicle; Cat is subtype of Animal).

we need to teach encapsulation as the primary use for OO.

ime, the most effective way of using "OO" in practice is that you define data classes for different entities and then affix a few fancy constructors that let you build entities out of other entities. inheritance rarely gets used.
by giobox | 2025-10-04 16:13:04+00:00
This technique of pressing the dead key to the starter button works for quite a lot of brands, not just Stellantis vehicles. Always worth trying if you are in a "keyless" car with a dead key fob battery.

In my experience virtually everything made in last 15 years will either support this RFID backup or have a spare physical key hidden inside the keyless fob.

Lots of them will even let you press the dead key against some part of the exterior to unlock the doors too.
by codazoda | 2025-10-04 16:13:08+00:00
I read number 2 more as being ready with your own agenda items. For example, if you want to make a code base more minimal, have a POC and some details worked out for when the opportunity presents itself.

If you have something prepared and then there’s a site speed, SEO, or series of bug complaints you might be able to pitch your minimal ideas as part of that solution.

I like the concept but I don’t know how well it would work in practice or how I would document my preparations for some point in the future. I do often wonder if I should run my work a bit like I run my blog though, generating documents about why and how. Maybe keeping them in wait for that opportunity.

That could be a lot of extra work that never sees the light, but we probably do a lot of that anyway?
by nucleative | 2025-10-04 16:13:25+00:00
This reminded me of Gates' "The Road Ahead" book (late 90s if I recall) prediction that marketers would eventually be able to pay a dime to get an email in your inbox, if only the future economy could figure out micro-transactions.

I agree with you that we're moving away from banner ads to some novel way of monetizing traffic, and therefore content published by authentic human beings.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-10-04 16:13:55+00:00
It's very insightful to realize that the space of things that will go wrong or will be important does not overlap very well with the contemporary zeitgeist of warnings coming from "best practices" and industry "thought leadership." It took me a while to get there. It's just so easy to point to some blog post that's become popular and use it to support your point when the person who wrote it knows nothing about your situation.
by ben_w | 2025-10-04 16:13:58+00:00
This is why I genuinely suggest PV cells mounted into the bodywork of EVs. They'll "only" add 10-20 miles per (good weather) day depending on the specifics, but this is a significant fraction of the (mean) miles driven per day per vehicle, which means the necessary grid upgrades are much smaller.

Almost all those cars still need to be charged, the weather won't always be good, people don't generally choose to leave their cars parked in direct sun if they can help it, etc. — but as a systematic reduction in impact over the entire power grid, it's non-trivial.
by let_tim_cook_ | 2025-10-04 16:14:32+00:00
I'm not sure why progressive LoRa merging needs to be addressed here. They show there is a regime of problem where LoRa performs equivalently to FFT.

Progressive merging of LoRa is somewhere inbetween and categorically more complex than just LoRa so would be dominated by standard LoRa in that case.

While progressive merging could train faster as fewer params are trainable at any given time, it results in very larger adapter diffs OTO the size of the original model and doesn't retain the benefits of being able to deploy multiple adapters over the same base model idt.
by verdverm | 2025-10-04 16:14:39+00:00
> I have to convert myself into an http:// URL to Bluesky

at:// URIs and specific lexicon are not limited to a single app. The NSID (app.bsky.feed.post) has authority based on domain, but Bluesky cannot prevent anyone from reading / writing records of that type.

There are alternative apps that read the same at:// but put them under a different https://...

tl;dr, there is not a 1-1 mapping between at:// and https://, it's 1-N
by FireBeyond | 2025-10-04 16:14:47+00:00
And then they'll start proactively reporting to law enforcement when their AI model thinks what you're saying is "suspicious", just like they do now when it thinks the movement patterns of behavior of your car is suspicious.

Flock's CEO openly says the he intends that "Flock will help eliminate ALL crime", and has shown he has no concerns about how dystopian or Minority Report-esque Flock would need to be to accomplish that mission.
by shantara | 2025-10-04 16:15:03+00:00
>But Apple has made it clear that unsigned software is going away, so Homebrew is following the requirements macOS sets on macOS software.

I’m running LibreWolf installed via Homebrew with --no-quarantine flag. It was news to me that there’s been pressure from Apple to remove it. Running unsigned apps is already absurdly cumbersome, and if the option is removed, this would be the final straw to push me to install Asahi on my MBP
by amdsn | 2025-10-04 16:16:09+00:00
I think a feature like this sees best use in short lived programs (where startup time is a disproportionate percentage of total run time) and programs where really fast startup is essential. There are plenty of places where I could imagine taking advantage of this in my code at work immediately, but I share your concern about unpredictability when libraries we use are also making use of it. It wouldn't be fun to have to dive into dependencies to see what needs to be touched to trigger lazy imports at the most convenient time. Unless I am misunderstanding and a normal import of a module means that all of its lazy imports also become non-lazy?
by alphazard | 2025-10-04 16:16:10+00:00
It strikes me as a just a question of taste. No one has to do any significant extra work. Someone just has to recognize e.g. why white space matters, or wasted space, or contrast matters, and then make the necessary changes to the defaults.

It's not like we are arguing about the subjectivity of favorite colors. The basics that macOS, r/unixporn and even Windows get right and GNOME gets wrong are better understood as facts about the human visual system, and how the typical human performs when confronted with the interface.
by kakacik | 2025-10-04 16:16:13+00:00
Maybe I phrased wrongly (not a native speaker) but what you say is incorrect. I am not free coasting on parents, in contrary my first years all my earning went into providing them a good home for rest of their lives, while living in tiny rental rooms. You have no idea from sort of poor background I come from, most western kids have no clue. It was a massive improvement of QoL for them that they would never be able to afford themselves and they still appreciate it massively. Since we live 1500km from them they help with kids literally few hours per year, not a burden for anybody involved.

But freedom to chose with whom we spend our time is a thing, no matter how much people like you try to force their righteous values that are the only proper true way (TM) on everybody else. I am old enough and over time met plenty of folks like that, be it religious or other forms, they are at the end the same as your comment.
by TheFuzzball | 2025-10-04 16:16:21+00:00
I have been looking into Desktop Linux recently because macOS has taken a bit of a quality dip. GNOME - I'm never going to pronounce it guh-nome, please stop, it's embarrassing - seems to have a strong alignment with the old macOS philosophy. It's opinionated.

It also clearly copies macOS: Epiphany and the Settings app being prime examples.

I installed NixOS on an old T2 MacBook Pro, and it's... awful. Things just don't work, or don't work properly. It actually reminds me of running macOS on PCs back in the day (osx86, etc). GNOME 49 is headed in the right direction I think, but Desktop Linux is still in an absolute state.
by muldvarp | 2025-10-04 16:16:26+00:00
> Agreed. So I don't think it's a bubble.

I'm not arguing it's a bubble. I'm arguing it's not going to be a "gigantic benefit" for society.

> Will also be good for consumers in the long-term: much faster pace of drug discovery and new tech generally.

Medicine and tech that knowledge workers won't be able to pay for without a job. I also don't think "new tech" is necessarily a good thing societally.

The calculus is easy, really: AI makes 100% of my income worth less but only decreases the cost of a fraction of my expenditures. AI is bad for anyone that works for a living. That's pretty much all of society except for the top x%.