MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xwowsersx | 2025-10-12 22:36:01+00:00
> The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data.

That's fair, but I think it misses the distinction between who owns the infra and what the infra is built on. Yes, SaaS is often closed to end users, but the reason those companies could even exist at scale is because the underlying layers (OS, databases, frameworks, orchestration, etc.) are open.

You're right that control shifted from users to cloud vendors, but that's a business model problem, not a failure of open software. If anything, FOSS won so decisively on the supply side that it enabled an entire generation of companies to build closed services faster and cheaper than ever before.
by thrance | 2025-10-12 22:36:09+00:00
The monarchy is demonstrably powerless and unwilling to fight the destruction of UK democracy. Right-wing populism has infiltrated all sides of the political landscape there, and with it all the self-destructing ideas we have come to love: defunding of all public services, increase in policing and control, destruction of worker protections, tax cuts for the rich, tax increase for the poor, etc.

I live in France, our common mythology, our Roman National as it is called here, is that we beheaded our king. Yet, the most authoritarian people you know will still claim the legacy of our revolution, of De Gaulle and Jeanne d'Arc. Even worse, this mythology is poised as under threat by a made-up out-group and used to seed reactionary fear and divisiveness amidst our nation.
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-12 22:37:39+00:00
I think the article properly addresses that:

> Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version

What devs can build without much oversight or business pressure usually works well open sourced.

Almost everything else (hardware, non technical "productivity" software, services) doesn't, and that's most of our life. We live in a world that's still massively closed source.

I wouldn't call someone absolutist for wanting printers, coffee machines, laptops, TVs, cars, "smart" lights to be more open than closed.
by elisiariocouto | 2025-10-12 22:37:50+00:00
I’m working on Leggen (https://github.com/elisiariocouto/leggen), a self hosted personal banking account management system. It started out as a CLI that syncs your bank account transactions and balances, saves them in a sqlite database and can alert you via Telegram or Discord if a transaction matches a filter. Recently I started refactoring the project with the help of Claude Code and Copilot Agent to include an API and a Web app to explore the data and configure it. The product is using GoCardless Bank Accout Data APIs to connect to banks via PSD2 but I found out recently that registering a new account is no longer possible so I’m currently looking into alternatives.
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-12 22:38:17+00:00
> These configuration languages are just different syntaxes for expressing the same fundamental data, bearing the same semantics.

This is my complaint too. However, they do add a proper integer type, which is the only thing that they do change with the data, as far as I can tell.

> It would be much more interesting to see a language which experiments with what is fundamentally representable

DER (and TER, which is a text format I made up to be compiled into DER (although TER is not really intended to be used directly in application programs); so TER does have comments, hexadecimal numeric literals, and other syntax features) does support many more data types, such as arbitrarily long integers, ASCII, ISO 2022, etc. My own extension to the format adds some additional types, such as a key/value list type and a TRON string type; the key/value list type is the only nonstandard ASN.1 type needed (together with a few of the standard ASN.1 types: sequence, real, UTF-8 string, null, boolean) to represent the same data as JSON does.

> for example like how the Nix language supports functional programming and has functions as a first-class data type.

For some applications this is useful and good but in others it is undesirable, I think.
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-12 22:38:37+00:00
Well, their bets haven't been paying off, Chinese government is in huge amounts of debt due to a massive real estate bubble, and lots of subsidies that don't pay back. It's a systematic problem, for instance their HSR lines are losing a ton of money too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amtrak/comments/1hnvl3d/chinese_hsr...

https://merics.org/en/report/beyond-overcapacity-chinese-sty...

It's easy to think of Uber/AirBnB style apps as trivialities, but this is the mistake communist countries always make. They struggle to properly invest in consumer goods because only heavy industry is legible to the planners. China has had too low domestic spending for a long time. USSR had the same issue, way too many steel mills and nowhere near enough quality of life stuff for ordinary people. It killed them in the end; Yeltsin's loyalty to communist ideology famously collapsed when he mounted a surprise visit to an American supermarket on a diplomatic mission to NASA. The wealth and variety of goods on sale crushed him and he was in tears on the flight home. A few years later he would end up president of Russia leading it out of communist times.
by crote | 2025-10-12 22:39:20+00:00
> At some point things will mature and we’ll be left with plentiful, cheap, high end LLM access, on the back of the investment that has been made.

Okay, and? What if the demand for LLMs plummets because people get disillusioned due to the failure to solve issues like hallucinations? If nobody is willing to buy, who cares how cheap it gets?
by strcat | 2025-10-12 22:39:22+00:00
They're referring to the leaky network toggles in LineageOS for different kinds of networks. GrapheneOS won't include that because it doesn't work correctly and gives people the false impression that it's going to stop apps communicating over those networks when it only stops most (not all) direct connections.

LineageOS has the same Seedvault backup system with the same limitations. There are few limitations left since Android 12's API level stopped apps opting out of all backups by redefining it as an opt-out of cloud backups and similarly redefined the file exclusions as only being for cloud backups. The new system supports very explicitly omitting files from device-to-device backups but it has to be explicitly specified that way and few apps do it. The problems with apps opting out of backups due to not wanting cloud backups for space, bandwidth or privacy reasons has been solved for several years now. It doesn't mean all app data is portable between devices, such as Signal encrypting their database with a hardware keystore key making it fundamentally impossible to do backups at a file level for it rather than using their own backup system.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562664 for a response to the rest of it.
by sedatk | 2025-10-12 22:39:52+00:00
> AI-generated arguments in response to all questions

There are currently two items in the FAQ. While the first one seems to be formatted with AI (I don't know if the arguments are AI generated though, how do you tell?), the other certainly doesn't look AI-generated: https://github.com/maml-dev/maml/issues/3#issuecomment-33559...
by toast0 | 2025-10-12 22:39:57+00:00
It's pretty easy to run an alter table ... add index ...

If a team running a database can't or doesn't do that, when it's relevant, they don't know how to operate a database, or how to learn how to operate things. And they probably have no friends who know either.

That doesn't sound like a team where 'be sure to have an index on your DB' is going to be helpful.

Otoh, maybe they never bothered to add an index because they had no users, and unindexed queries were good enough while they developed their product that nobody wanted anyway. Table scans on 100,000 row tables aren't that slow when the whole table is in memory.

Adding indexes late isn't a huge deal. You add the index and things get faster and you go on with life. Worst case, you have to rebuild your table(s) so that indexes can apply... That could be a little rough, but probably not that rough until you have a lot of users; and if you have a lot of users, great!
Show HN: Databite – An open source integration library
by davidm123 | 2025-10-12 22:40:31+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m building Databite, an open-source set of tools to help developers build integrations faster and with ease.

If you’ve ever built a SaaS product or an AI agent that needed to update a CRM record, sync data between apps, or trigger a workflow in a third-party tool, you’ve probably spent way too much time writing glue code. Databite is here to be that glue.

With Databite you can: - Access prebuilt connectors using the databite/connectors package. - Create custom connectors to services of your choice like Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Google Sheets, etc. using our databite/build package. - Embed one click authentication flows to your React projects using our databite/connect package . - Schedule syncs and mange connections using our databite/engine package. - Provide docs and have AI build new connectors for you using our databite/ai package.

The idea is to make building integrations as easy as npm installing a library.

This is especially useful if you’re building AI agents that need large action libraries. Databite can serve as the “integration layer” for your agent to perform real-world tasks.

We’re still very early (wouldn't recommend using the libraries for anything serious just yet, sharing early or I might just never do it (: ). The goal is to start building a community of interested contributors. I believe given the nature and scale of the problem, integrations can only be truly solved by a vibrant open source project (we're under the MIT license which allows almost every imaginable use case).

You can find out more on our website (https://databite.dev). Or watch us on Github and get notified on our progress (https://github.com/DatabiteDev/databite)
by tootyskooty | 2025-10-12 22:41:24+00:00
Working on a new interface for learning with LLMs that creates courses on any topic.

https://periplus.app

The goal was to make the learning material very malleable, so all content can be viewed through different "lenses" (e.g. made simpler, more thorough, from first principles, etc.). A bit like Wikipedia it also allows for infinite depth/rabbit holing. Each document links to other documents, which link to other documents (...).

I'm also currently in the middle of adding interactive visualizations which actually work better than expected! Some demos:

https://x.com/mato_gudelj/status/1975547148012777742
Show HN: Diagramblog.js – A lightweight library for diagrams from Markdown
by batuhandumani | 2025-10-12 22:42:12+00:00
When I started this project, my idea was simply, “Why not convert blogs into diagrams?”. As the project developed, I remained faithful to this core idea.

We all use Markdown for documents and pretty much everything else, but seeing the structure visually has always been difficult for me. I was looking for a way to easily see the links and dive into detailed content when needed.

Of course, I could have used something like Mermaid, but I wanted to build it from scratch to make it more flexible, interactive, and dependency-free.

It's quite easy to use. You can adjust the colors of the blocks, easily create links, and most importantly, you can do all of this in a single Markdown file.

The demo I linked to is a chat application that also functions as a diagram generator. While chatting with AI, Markdown text is written for you on the left side. You can copy the code it generates. It is ready to use on your own site; all you need to do is add the library's CDN link to your page. You can access detailed documentation via the GitHub or npm link below or the links in the top right corner of the chat.

github: https://github.com/bthndmn12/diagram-blog

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/diagram-blog

chat demo: https://diagram-chat-ai.vercel.app
by strcat | 2025-10-12 22:42:18+00:00
GrapheneOS never had a stance against implementing RCS and has supported RCS at an OS level for years. The issue was that the only available RCS app in practice is Google Messages and it requires privileged access for Google Play services, which goes against the sandboxed Google Play approach. We worked around it by making it so that the access granted to Google Messages when it's set as the SMS/MMS/RCS app also applies to Google Play services where part of the implementation is done.

iOS does not currently implement end-to-end encryption for RCS. End-to-end encryption for RCS is exclusive to conversations between Google Messages users. Apple has said they'll implement the new MLS end-to-end encryption for RCS but has not done it and has provided no timeline for doing it. It took them a very long time to implement basic RCS support and this will likely take a long time too. Google Messages has not yet moved to the new MLS encryption, but it will need to do that too in order for iOS implementing it to provide end-to-end encryption across them.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-12 22:42:53+00:00
Take a look at the way people in a large part of the US are living. Paycheck to paycheck not because they're idiots that likes to consume, but because shit is expensive and wages haven't kept up with productivity for like 50 years.

People are suffering, agree with the rest of what I say or not, but I can't let you slide on that.
by xwowsersx | 2025-10-12 22:42:56+00:00
That's true. Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier.

Of course we'd all prefer open printers and cars, but those domains aren't mainly limited by software ideology; they're limited by regulation, liability, and econ. The fact that programmers can build entire OSs, compilers, and global infra as open projects is already astonishing.

So yes, the world is still full of closed systems... but that doesn't mean FOSS lost. It means it's reached the layer where the obstacles are social, legal, and physical, not technical. IMO that's a harder, slower battle, not evidence that the earlier ones were meaningless.
by Pulcinella | 2025-10-12 22:43:21+00:00
Perhaps by the time someone's at the shitting at the seat phase of a gambling habit the neurological feedbacks arising from the intermittent reward schedule have become too strong for him to resist on his own.

Bingo. The machines don't play themselves, of course. But at the same time, the manufacturers and casinos know exactly what they are doing. I would say:

We've utterly lost the capacity for describing deficiencies of the conscience.

applies to those the manufacturers and casinos as well.
by cjflog | 2025-10-12 22:43:57+00:00
Given the current reach of the project (read: still small!), I suspect for awhile yet the majority of successfully funded testing will be by concerned individuals with expendable income. It is cheaper and much faster to go through laboratory.love than it would be to partner with a lab as an individual (plus the added bonus that all data is published openly).

I've yet to have any product funded by a manufacturer. I'm open to this, but I would only publish data for products that were acquired through normal consumer supply chains anonymously.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-12 22:44:31+00:00
No, that’s the opposite of how it works.

I’ve seen how PR firms interact with creators. It’s much easier to get the small time creators to take your product and make a positive video because getting some free product is the biggest payout they’re getting from their channel. They will always give positive reviews because they have more to gain from flattering the companies that send them free stuff than from the $1.50 they’re going to earn in ad money.

The PR firms who worked with the company I was at had a long list of small time video creators who would reliably produce positive videos of something as long as you sent them a free product. The creators know this game.
by collinfunk | 2025-10-12 22:45:33+00:00
> While half of the language design of C is questionable and outright dangerous, making its functions locale-sensitive by all popular OSes was an avoidable mistake. Yet everybody did that. Just the existence of this behavior is a reason I would like to get rid of anything GNU-based in the systems I develop today.

POSIX requires that many functions account for the current locale. I'm not sure why you are blaming GNU for this.
by kukanani | 2025-10-12 22:45:36+00:00
An open source website I built to explain tensor functions in PyTorch: https://whytorch.org

It makes tricky functions like torch.gather and torch.scatter more intuitive by showing element-level relationships between inputs and outputs.

For any function, you can click elements in the result to see where they came from, or elements in the inputs to see how they contribute to the result to see exactly how it contributes to the result. I found that visually tracing tensor operations clarifies indexing, slicing, and broadcasting in ways reading that the docs can't.

You can also jump straight to WhyTorch from the PyTorch docs pages by modifying the base URL directly.

I launched a week or two back and now have the top post of all time on r/pytorch, which has been pretty fun.
by pizzly | 2025-10-12 22:45:47+00:00
What about the 'openness' of AI development. When I say 'openness' of AI I mean in research papers, spying, former employees, etc. Wouldn't that mean that after a few months to years after AGI is discovered that the other country would also discover AGI due to benefiting from the obtaining the knowledge from the other side? Similar to how the Soviets did their first nuclear test less than 5 years after US did theirs due to a large part in spying. The point here is wouldn't the country that spends less in AI development actually have an advantage over the country that does as they will obtain that knowledge quickly for less money? Also the time of discovery of AGI may be less important than the country that first implements the benefit of AGI.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-12 22:46:19+00:00
> - "Scan photos I upload" yes/no. No batch processing needed, only affects photos from now on.

This would create a situation where some of the photos have tags and some don’t. Users would forget why the behavior is different across their library.

Their solution? Google it and start trying random suggestions. Toggle it all on and off. Delete everything and start over with rescanning. This gets back to the exact problem they’re trying to avoid.

> - "Scan all missing photos (1,226)" can only be done 3x per year

There is virtually no real world use case where someone would want to stop scanning new photos but also scan all photos but only when they remember to press this specific button. The number of users who would get confused and find themselves in unexpected states of half-scanned libraries would outweigh the number of intentional uses of this feature by 1000:1 or more.
by doctoboggan | 2025-10-12 22:46:42+00:00
I said em dash _and_ the word comprehensive. If you work with LLM generated text enough it gets very easy to see the telltale signs. The emojis at the start of each row in the table are also a dead giveaway.

I am guessing you are one of those people who used em dashes before LLMs came out and are now bitter they are an indicator of LLMs. If that's the case, I am sorry for the situation you find yourself in.
by pooyan2 | 2025-10-12 22:47:29+00:00
I’m a big fan of WarGames.

It would be great to have something that could speak like Joshua.

I had a Votrax back in the 80s, similar to the following, which was awesome:

https://youtu.be/t27e3-6yBWw

Joshua was actually voiced by actor Jim Wood (Falken), though. Jim read the lines backwards and then they chopped it up and did some audio processing on it:

https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/128319/how-did-th...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-12 22:47:38+00:00
That's on my list, but not my maximum likelihood.

My maximum is that the courts restrain Trump enough that we still have at least the shell of a democracy after he's gone. But he blazed the trail, and in 20 or 30 years someone will walk it better, having done a better job of neutralizing or politicizing or perhaps deligitimizing the courts first. Then it's game over.
by paulpauper | 2025-10-12 22:48:12+00:00
Pundits said this 1,2 ,3 + years ago, for similar or different reasons like China or Covid or inflation, and the market is up significantly since then. Had you sold your stocks after the first warning you would need a crash just to get back to where you sold. The market is up 15% this year alone despite everything that is going on. These is no useful of actionable advice here. Yeah, there will always be threats.
by konmok | 2025-10-12 22:48:21+00:00
Can everyone stop beating around the bush now? Can we agree to call a spade a spade?

This is fascism. They are restricting the movements of the demonized outgroup (in this case, non-binary and intersex people) using the state apparatus. This will get worse. They'll categorize more and more people into the outgroup, and the restrictions will grow.
by nrdvana | 2025-10-12 22:48:26+00:00
Maybe at rendering menus and documents, but flash had graphic routines written in optimized assembly that simply weren't possible with JavaScript on that era of hardware.

I feel like people are talking past each other a bit here. FlashScript was never very fast, and rendering a document as a giant collection of bezier curves was not fast, but the people doing animations with it were getting the equivalent of modern day CSS3 animations + SVG, and it ran nicely on hardware two orders of magnitude slower than what we need for CSS3+SVG
by tuatoru | 2025-10-12 22:48:32+00:00
I have seen AI improve the quality and velocity of my wife's policy analysis dramatically.

She doesn't like using Claude, but she accepts the necessity of doing so, and it reduces 3-month projects to 2-week projects. Claude is an excellent debating partner.

Crypto? Blockchain? No-one sceptical could ever see the point of either, unless and until their transaction costs were less than that of cash. That... has not happened, to put it mildly.

These things are NOT the same.
by cm2187 | 2025-10-12 22:48:34+00:00
Retention is offline retention. Not online. So not sure what point you are trying to make. If it is that SSDs shouldn't be used for cold storage, yeah I agree, and enterprise SSds aren't designed for cold storage. But you seem to be linking retention to TBW, which are largely orthogonal metrics. If you are going to use the SSDs in a NAS, which by definition are running all the time, why would you even care about the rentention rating?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-12 22:48:38+00:00
> Wanting openness in everyday tech isn't "absolutist" in itself. But the article's tone (and a lot of the FOSS movement's rhetoric) frames it as failure rather than frontier.

It is a failure. Things have been moving away from openness. A frontier would move toward it.

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