MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by binary132 | 2025-10-18 15:06:28+00:00
Whence this idea that Web of Trust is an unsolved useless design that requires central certificate authorities?

The fact is that even the “canonical” CA’s can’t be automatically trusted, but here we are. CA is just one shitty implementation of WoT that has been near-universally imposed on us and most people simply accept as a necessity of life, but it isn’t necessarily the only way. It’s just how it is right now.
by dijit | 2025-10-18 15:06:49+00:00
The reason I’m talking about my city in particular is because everybody (even the poorest) can get around without a car and I’m not talking about just public transport.

It’s very liberating, even for children to be able to get around if not everything requires the use of a car.

I am aware that Orlando has optimised itself in a certain way, which makes it impossible to be any other way. That means being mildly convenient requires a complete overhaul of the whole system just for a small select group of people which is obviously unfavourable.

One of the major benefits of not being car dependent in particular is that there are more options not just public transport, you can get around by car- but there is also cycling, E-scooters, walking is more convenient, and of course there are buses trains and taxis. There’s even a bike rental scheme which covers the entire city and is so cheap as to be effectively free ($20 per year). With that in mind I find the argumentation that poor people have a worse time to be disingenuous- owning a car is the second largest expense most people have.

Malmo by the way is one of the poorest cities of the large cities in Sweden. I don’t know what the GDP per capita is compared to Orlando, but I’m not going to think that it’s much different to be perfectly honest with you.
by nobleach | 2025-10-18 15:07:06+00:00
For reference, I did use Magit for my short stint with Emacs (and then Spacemacs/Doom Emacs). I've always been more into Vim. I tried the Atom editor several years ago with lots of Vim emulation and quite a bit of customization - one of those being a Magit clone.

I moved to NeoVim many years ago and have been using NeoGit (a supposed Magit clone) the entire time. It's good but I'm missing the "mind blowing" part. I'd love to learn more though! What features are you using that you consider amazing?
by epistasis | 2025-10-18 15:07:08+00:00
I don't know that "well known" is any better than anecdotes. If there's data, I'd like to see it.

But what is indisputable is that the maintenance load for a gas car is super high and involved so many trips into a mechanic or changing your own oil, etc. With EVs you just rotate the tires and that's it. Maybe some wiper blades. I'll never be buying another gas car if I can avoid it. They do not seem ready in comparison to the ease of an EV.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-18 15:07:15+00:00
> GPT5 compared to the original GPT4 is a huge improvement. It exceeded all my expectations from 2 years ago.

Cool story. In my experience they're still on the same order of magnitude of usefulness as the original Copilot.

Every few months I read about these fantastic ground-breaking improvements and fire up whatever the trendiest toolchain is (most recently Claude Code and Cursor) and walk away less disappointed than last time, but ultimately still disappointed.

On simple tasks it doesn't save me any time but on more complex tasks it always makes a huge mess unless I mentor it like a really junior coworker. But if I do that I'm not saving any time and I end up with lower quality, poorly organized code that contains more defects than if I did it myself.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-10-18 15:07:31+00:00
About twenty years ago I did a consulting gig for a government agency that wanted to create a web interface for their CSRs to replace the green screens they had been using. The long time employees hated it because they had deep muscle memory for most tasks on the green screens and could get far ahead of the screen refresh. With the web UI, not only could they not type ahead, but many of the workflows now required use of the mouse.

The agency was happy to have something new and modern but more important to them was that new employees could be trained on the system far faster. Even though there were a small number of long term employees, they had high turnover with the frontline CSRs, which made training a major issue for them.
by an0malous | 2025-10-18 15:07:40+00:00
He didn’t say it was a joke and has benefited to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars from the prevailing belief that AGI is imminent, so it seems terribly convenient and charitable to interpret it as a joke. Should we have given the same charity to Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman Fried when they reported their technological capabilities and cash balance? “Oh it’s not fraud that they materially benefited from, it’s just a joke.”
by ndr42 | 2025-10-18 15:08:03+00:00
"There were absolutely successful products that came before"

I think it's just a question of definition. The Apple pencil was introduced in 2016, since then about 500.000.000 iPads have been sold. If you compare that with the number of Thinkpad yogas or HP elite book 2760ps it's possible to come the conclusion that they are relatively less successful. But of course they can be "absolutely successful" depending on your definition.
by JadeNB | 2025-10-18 15:08:05+00:00
> If a pattern is a common problem (e.g., becoming accustomed to a spectacular view) and generally-useful solution to that problem (blocking the view so that effort is required to obtain it), then an anti-pattern is what?

Strange choice of example! I'm not sure I agree that your example is a common problem, and I'm even less sure that the proposed solution to it is generally useful.
by dismalaf | 2025-10-18 15:09:07+00:00
From what I've seen the gaming benchmarks are fantastic. Beats the mobile 5070 for some games and settings, or slightly behind on others. While being very far ahead of every other iGPU.

I have a laptop with an Nvidia GPU. Ruins battery life and makes it run very hot. I'd pay a lot for a powerful iGPU.
Show HN: Open-source implementation of Stanford's self-learning agent framework
by kayba | 2025-10-18 15:09:34+00:00
We implemented Stanford's Agentic Context Engineering paper which shows agents can improve their performance just by evolving their own context.

How it works: Agents execute tasks, reflect on what worked/failed, and curate a "playbook" of strategies. All from execution feedback - no training data needed.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or the research!
by tremon | 2025-10-18 15:09:51+00:00
The given solution (create an indexed UPPER(name) column) is not the best way to solve this, at least not on MS SQL Server. Not sure if this is equally supported in other databases, but the better solution is to create a case-insensitive computed column:

ALTER TABLE example ADD name_ci AS name COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS;

(season to taste)
by binary132 | 2025-10-18 15:10:16+00:00
This is why Go’s dependency management doesn’t really qualify as “decentralized” in my mind. A decentralized provider (IPFS?) could possibly be implemented for some packages, but most of its packages are locked into centralized hosting and URLs today. Some of them sometimes being hash-identified and cache-proxied doesn’t help the case much and IMO the centralized proxying by default actually hurts it.
by npteljes | 2025-10-18 15:10:30+00:00
Same for me. Of course, I'm much older than the target audience, so I have seen many of the tricks already. The series was entertaining for the first very episodes, but then it would have required actual storytelling talent to properly handle the universe that was created, but lacking that, the series fell flat. I still appreciate that the videos serve their purpose, entertaining millions, and that I could have also been part of it, even though for just a little.
by JoelMcCracken | 2025-10-18 15:10:33+00:00
To navigate emacs, you really only need to know ctrl, alt, and the basic norms of keyboard usage (return for newline/accept, shift for capitals)

Really, compared to what I see here, the chief difficulty with emacs is the sheer volume of possible commands, and the heterogeneity of their names and patterns, which I believe is all a result of its development history. But the basics are just as you describe.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-10-18 15:10:33+00:00
According to HN, AGI is desirable because humans will absolutely won't try to:

- Use it to dominate others

- Make themselves and a few others immortal or/and their descendants smarter

- Increase their financial or/and political power

- Cause irreversible damage to the global core ecosystems in their pursuit of the 3 goals above
by Teknomadix | 2025-10-18 15:10:50+00:00
Disagree; I drive a 40 year old Mercedes-Benz turbo diesel sedan for the exact opposite reason that nothing made today is as effective and reliable with comparative economy and comfort. My huge tank of a vehicle is safe, comfortable, and economic. Runs entirely on plant based biofuels and delivers an experience that no modern machines can rival. The cost of these old sedans steadily increases despite being 4 decadea old. Mine has 550000km on the odometer and rising. Simple and affordable to maintain, and can be worked on with standard hand tools. No computers on-board.
by username223 | 2025-10-18 15:10:57+00:00
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!

TEXT EDITOR.

-- https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt
by guerrilla | 2025-10-18 15:11:24+00:00
What I'm saying is that they can't do anything I can't do in a terminal. Another way of putting it is why would I need an IDE other than UNIX (GNU) itself?

> But going further back, to the Turbo days in college and my first few years working, breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, watches etc were a godsend

gdb does all of that.
by buescher | 2025-10-18 15:12:16+00:00
Thirty years ago was 1995. TUI programming environments were closer to obsolete than obsolescent. We had 32-bit versions of Visual C++. We had Delphi and the Borland C++ stuff for Windows. We had Codewarrior. On the lighter end of RAD, Visual Basic was four years old, HyperCard was eight years old, and LabView was nine years old. The future was very unevenly distributed back then. I see now the article is from 2023, well, adjust appropriately.
by quamserena | 2025-10-18 15:12:26+00:00
Having done this search before I can tell you there aren’t many great options. There is one (1) 5G flip phone, the TCL Flip 4 5G, but it runs KaiOS (not Android) and is carrier locked to T-Mobile.

Unihertz makes smartphones, not flip phones. Some have keyboards but they don’t flip open (no moving parts). They also don’t provide regular software updates and their phones are easily damaged. Honestly if you’re thinking about buying one of these smartphones, the iPhone SE line is probably a better choice. I’m still using my 2016 iPhone SE without issue, supports 4G LTE but no 5G and gets security patches from Apple. Can run most apps without issue. Newer SE models have 5G but ditched the home button, headphone jack, and got bigger, all downgrades imo. Another phone in this area is the Pixel 4a 5G, which I’ve considered buying to replace my ageing 2016 SE but haven't yet. (I might just replace it with another 2016 iPhone SE).

Japanese flip phones (Keitai) are there own separate rabbit hole which includes texting a random Japanese man on WhatsApp and paying him to unlock the phone for you.[0] Also very difficult (if not impossible) to find a 5G phone, most are running 4G or 3G. But they can run Andriod

The bottom line is that there are no great phones in this space. Dumbphones are a slightly different concept than flip phones; many people who use dumbphones also have a smartphone for everyday tasks (maps, banking app, etc.). These people are drawn to dumbphones for help with screen addiction, minimalism, or just the aesthetic, which is different for me because I'm looking for a flip phone that is just as capable and well-supported as the mainline smartphones but that actually fits in my hands and my pockets and has a long battery life.

>Why 5G? Coverage and longevity. I've had my SE for nearly 10 years at this point and would like to be able to keep my next phone for just as long, even if 4G LTE becomes sparser/gets sunset. (I have already noticed that I get poorer coverage compared to 5G phones).

>Why Android? I need to be able to run my banking app and all other this-could-have-been-a-website apps packaged for the masses.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/comments/14qky1j/a_conso...
by an0malous | 2025-10-18 15:12:35+00:00
He has, many times. And when he doesn’t say it directly he insinuates it.

> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in January: “We are now confident we know how to build AGI.” This is after he told a Y Combinator vodcast in late 2024 that AGI might be achieved in 2025 and tweeted in 2024 that OpenAI had “AGI achieved internally.”

https://fortune.com/2025/08/25/tech-agi-hype-vibe-shift-supe...

Oh it’s all just jokes though, jokes that Sam has profited enormously from.
by tcoff91 | 2025-10-18 15:12:45+00:00
Neovim is my favorite editor and is a brilliant TUI.

I think what TUIs get right is that they are optimized for use by the keyboard.

I don’t care if they are a pain for devs to write vs OS APIs, they have the best keyboard control so I use them. I despise the mouse due to RSI issues in the past.
by throwup238 | 2025-10-18 15:12:54+00:00
They usually are. It’s a process akin to archaeology where they have to carefully wash away the dirt from the root system, measuring as they go. The problem with this method is that it's hard to reconstruct the entire 3d structure of bigger plants like trees so a lot of the root drawings on the site don’t accurately show how deep they go. It’s much easier with small plants where the researcher can control the soil used.

Modern methods like xray CT or ground penetrating radar can do it nondestructively in the field but they’re usually expensive to set up compared to just sending some grad students to dig.
by esseph | 2025-10-18 15:13:39+00:00
ROE for engagements for decades prevented US troops from firing at people even if they had weapons pointed at them. You could point a RPG at private snuffy and he couldn't even raise his rifle.

You point a cap gun at Officer Dipshit and 40 cops are going to unload on the holder of that cap gun and maybe 1 of them hits the target and the rest go into the crowd.

The legal situation has allowed police to be cowards and use disproportionate force. On the flip side, local NG troops should be FAR more disciplined as tensions rise, but ultimately their level of force they could bring to the table is far, far, far higher than local PD if it came down to it.

TLDR, private fatso should be far more restrained than local police, but poking that bear would not be advised. They should be holding up far better under pressure and riots than PD who are legally allowed to be cowards. Most police aren't used to dealing with the scale of riots many NG are, but that is unit dependent.

I'm not "missing the point", I'm telling you to expect more humane treatment from an out of state NG unit than your local police. The training in riots and arms are FAR higher with than NG unit, and many have far more experience in actually dealing with rising tensions. They're not there to enforce laws, they are Force Protection. Again, I'm talking riot control and facility protection. NG are not civilian police, they're not training in that mission, but also they aren't being sent to perform it. Two different roles.
by gnerd00 | 2025-10-18 15:14:12+00:00
NeXT was incredible engineering but not a drop-in replacement for Mac OS. The sociology of the use of the machine is very different.

The careful and kind attention to the non-technical computer owners in Mac OS was replaced by corporate-controlled computer science with a GUI. The ambitions of Jobs became clearer later in life -- bizarrely manifesting the Big Brother that the early ad mocked. The iPhone drives Apple now, while Mac OSX slowly deteriorates with episodes of iPhone takeovers in the interface.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Windows has also shown its true colors with spyware and ad-stuffing left and right.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-18 15:14:21+00:00
It’s not as simple as hopping on a train and leaving. No one in my immediate family has citizenship in another country or some other easy path I can take advantage of. Most countries require you to live months out of the year in that country for years and/or overcome some other major hurdle. Canada filters based on your education, profession, criminal record, etc. and IIRC it takes upwards of 5 years to get citizenship. It’s not like I can just fill out an application, pay a small amount of money, and be done with it. That’s not even considering if you have kids. Whole different ball game.

I know you probably know all of this, yet your response is vastly oversimplifying the issue. You would’ve just quit your job, packed up your family and belongings, sold your house if you own one, uprooted your kid(s) if you’re a parent, said goodbye to any friends/family here, and left weeks into the administration for a country you aren’t a citizen of? Just like that?

If it was just moving to another state, even though that is also not without its challenges, I could see an argument for that. That’s probably more akin to what it’s like moving around Western Europe/the EU. But permanently leaving the US is no small matter.
by maxerickson | 2025-10-18 15:14:43+00:00
Solar is like 10% of electric production, which is about 20% of energy use.

So if you expect solar to replace most of that, at steady state you probably need more panels per year than are currently being produced. No reason to expect diminishing production to increase costs vs today (they might rise vs the eventual floor).

I agree that we have an enormous calorie surplus that we can turn the knob on.
by dahart | 2025-10-18 15:14:45+00:00
This comment illustrates the core problem with reductionism, a problem that has been known for many centuries, that “a system is composed entirely of its parts, but the system will have features that none of the parts have” [1] thus fails to explain those features.

The ‘you have never seen’ assertion feels like a semantic ruse rather than a helpful observation. So how do you define “you” and “see”? If I accept your argument, then you’ve only un-defined those words, and not provided a meaningful or thoughtful alternative to the experience we all have and therefore know exists.

I have seen the night sky. I am made of cells, and I can see. My cells individually can’t see, and whether or not they can claim to be individuals, they won’t survive or perform their function without me, i.e., the rest of my cells, arranged in a very particular way.

Today’s AI is also a ruse. It’s a mirror and not a living thing. It looks like a living thing from the outside, but it’s only a reflection of us, an incomplete one, and unlike living things it cannot survive on its own, can’t eat or sleep or dream or poop or fight or mate & reproduce. Never had its own thoughts, it only borrowed mine and yours. Most LLMs can’t remember yesterday and don’t learn. Nobody who’s serious or knows how they work is arguing they’re conscious, at least not the people who don’t stand to make a lot of money selling you magical chat bots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism#Definitions
by drfuchs | 2025-10-18 15:15:18+00:00
Not being able to chown() caused us grief developing Frame Maker back in the 80s. The responsible way to handle "save" was to write the document into a new file mydoc.new, then rename mydoc.cur to mydoc.backup and then rename mydoc.new to mydoc.cur, so that failure never left you in the lurch. The only problem was that there was no way to create mydoc.new to have the same owner as mydoc.cur and customers complained that we'd keep changing the owner of their files. If only the semantics of the unix filesystem supported file generation numbers, like on Tops20 or VaxVMS, where the default for writing to a file isn't "yeah, sure, write over top of the old data, and let's hope nothing fails along the way" this would not have been a problem.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-10-18 15:15:20+00:00
> It is however fully self-documented and interactive.

Unfortunately not true. I've fired up emacs once or twice, and couldn't even figure out how to save a document because it didn't show me how to do that. It might be more documented than vi (but that bar is *on the floor, vi has one of the most discovery-hostile user interfaces ever made), but it's not self-documented enough to just pick up and use with no instruction.
by somat | 2025-10-18 15:15:29+00:00
C does as well, that is half the point of make. When building a large C project it will first create a bunch of object files from the source files then link them into an executable. make then keeps track of what source files have changed and rebuilds only those object files. The first build is slow, subsequent builds are much faster. only needing to compile one file then link them.

At least that's the theory, in reality make has a lot of warts and implementing a good solid make file is an art. Don't even get me started on the horrors of automake, perhaps I just need to use it in one of my own projects but as someone who primarily ports others code, I hate it with a passion. It is so much easier when a project just sticks with a hand crafted makefile.

For completeness: The other half of make is to implement the rest of the build process.
by a3w | 2025-10-18 15:16:06+00:00
Rough quote: "in 1984 we had at my house",

so even 41 years seems to be in the scope.

I was expecting

- early projects that ended in Visual Studio 1.0 or NetBeans soon after, (2 to 9 years too early for them)

not

- "vim (1991) was not out yet" (not-a-quote, but my feeiling upon looking at ncurses instead of floating windows)
by treesknees | 2025-10-18 15:16:21+00:00
Using Safari on iOS and MacOS I just see an error message telling me to check the console logs.

[Info] Content blocker prevented frame displaying https://job.careers/ from loading a resource from https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-HHZF8EGJ9Q (job.careers, line 1)

[Log] Received response: – false (content-script.js, line 2)

[Error] Failed to load resource: You do not have permission to access the requested resource.

[Info] Content blocker prevented frame displaying https://job.careers/ from loading a resource from https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/vcd15cbe...

[Error] Failed to load resource: You do not have permission to access the requested resource.

[Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 400 () (6701-a99880c18a67f101.js, line 0)

[Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 400 () (7342-c297967c6fb9a2b3.js, line 0)

[Error] ChunkLoadError: Loading chunk 7342 failed.
by conartist6 | 2025-10-18 15:17:22+00:00
Yep, the XML-like tree would become the source of truth.

Because we're designing a new and radically simpler IDE we'll just skip the part where the source of truth is bare text on disk (i.e. the git working tree).

We still will be able to read and write flat text files from disc if the user needs to, but our reason for being is to see what kind of good things we could make happen if cut out the middleman and make the IDE's state/history (i.e. undos) and the VCS state/history one and the same. To that end our in-memory representation of the CSTML trees is a reference-immutable btree with efficient copy-writes through deep structural reuse.
by Sophira | 2025-10-18 15:17:33+00:00
The article itself is a nice look at the state of editors and IDEs compared to those of yesteryear... but the site itself restyles my scroll bar to be thinner and less usable, which kind of spoils the experience.

I hate it when sites do this. I don't want my window decorations to be restyled in the name of aesthetics. I need them to be usable.