MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by truelson | 2025-10-15 19:22:25+00:00
Most people watch unemployment to gauge the economy. The problem is, by the time jobs fall, the recession has already begun.

This post looks at the smaller part of the economy that turns first: residential construction and durable goods and why it’s one of the best early warning systems we have. I also built a simple ML model to track it while the BLS is offline. That will be the second article.
by Vandolin | 2025-10-15 19:22:36+00:00
I built a modular n8n workflow that uses an LLM as its “decision engine” to enumerate, triage, and exploit an HTB “Editor” box end-to-end — from a single input to flag extraction. In my write-up, I walk through challenges like ephemeral shells, hallucinated commands, orchestration pitfalls, and verification logic.
by magicalist | 2025-10-15 19:22:36+00:00
> If you actually read the specific bug and use of a private method it really was a stupid decision by one developer awhile ago that just fell through the cracks. There really wasn't a benefit to doing what they did, which is why their fix was to just go back to using public APIs.

I don't think it's that clear cut. It looks like it was a workaround for a MacOS rendering bug going back to at least 2017, landed in 2019 and had no apparent downsides for six years[1].

The PR removing the private API code also included someone verifying that Apple had fixed the original bug some time in the intervening years[2].

I probably wouldn't have taken this approach personally (at the very least file the original rendering issue with Apple and note it with the code, though everyone knows the likelihood of getting a even a response on an issue like that), but it wasn't some cargo culted fix.

[1] https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/20360

[2] https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/48376#issuecomment...
by isoprophlex | 2025-10-15 19:22:40+00:00
> Creating AI models is hard, but working with them is simple

I'm not disagreeing with the overall post, but from closely observing end users of LLM-backed products for a while now, I think this needs nuance.

The average joe, be it a developer, random business type, a school teacher or your mum, is very bad at telling an llm what it should do.

- In general people are bad at expressing their thoughts and desires clearly. Frontier LLMs are still mostly sycophantic, so in absence of clear instructions they will make up things. People are prone to treating the LLM as a mind reader, without critically assessing if their prompts are self-contained and sufficiently detailed.

- People are pretty bad at estimating what kind of data an LLM understands well. In general data literacy, and basic data manipulation skills, are beneficial when the use case requires operating on data besides natural language prompts. This is not a given across user bases.

- Very few people have a sensible working model of what goes on in an autoregressive black box, so they have no intuition on managing context

User education still has a long way to go, and IMO is a big determining factor in people getting any use at all from the shiny new AI stuff that gets slathered onto every single software product these days
by random3 | 2025-10-15 19:22:57+00:00
I like the engineering part at the top but projecting AI perspectives blindsided through the lens of LLMs is effectively "looking backwards".

So this is nice

> productionizing their proof-of-concept code and turning it into something people could actually use.

because it's so easy to glamorize research, while ignoring what actually makes ideas products.

This is also the problem. It's a looking back perspective and it's so easy to be miss the forest from the trees when you're down in the weeds. I'm talking from experience and it's a feeling I get when reading the post.

In the grand scheme of things our current "AI" will probably look like a weird detour.

Note that a lot of these perspectives are presented (and thought) without a timeline in mind. We're actually witnessing timelines getting compressed. It's easy to see the effects of one track while missing the general trend.

This take is looking at (arguably "over") LLM timeline, while missing everything else that is happening.
by inovaitech | 2025-10-15 19:23:01+00:00
A look into how the next generation of smart gadgets is blending AI, automation, and IoT to reshape how we work and live. The article explores devices that go beyond convenience — from adaptive home systems to AI-driven wearables — and what these trends reveal about the near future of human–tech interaction.

Would love to hear your thoughts: are we moving toward true “smart living” or just more connected clutter?
by crystaln | 2025-10-15 19:23:25+00:00
It's definitely better to know what traffic is real for many reasons, however won't clicks just lower the value of a click and conversion numbers, but leave overall conversion the same?

If conversion rate drops 90%, the value of a click should also drop 90% as companies adjust the bids for ads.

I'm sure this isn't always true in practice and it takes time for bids to adjust. I'm just wondering how much impact this actually has.

And on the other side, if ad companies were better at filtering bots, their clicks become more valuable and companies should be willing to pay more.
by decimalenough | 2025-10-15 19:23:55+00:00
From the article:

> The loss of visa-free access to Brazil in April due to a lack of reciprocity, and the US being left out of China’s rapidly expanding visa-free list, marked the start of its downward slide. This was followed by adjustments from Papua New Guinea and Myanmar, which further eroded the US score while boosting other passports. Most recently, Somalia’s launch of a new eVisa system and Vietnam’s decision to exclude the US from its latest visa-free additions delivered the final blow, pushing it out of the Top 10.
by pron | 2025-10-15 19:24:04+00:00
> Java's major competitors, C# and Go, both have had value types since day one

Yes (well, structs; not really value types), but at a significant cost to FFI and/or GC and/or user-mode threads (due to pointers into the stack and/or middle of objects). Java would not have implemented value types in this way, and doing it the way we want to would have been equally tricky had it been done in Java 1.0. Reified generics also come at a high price, that of baking the language's variance strategy into the ABI (or VM, if you want). However, value types will be invariant (or possibly extensible in some different way), so it would be possible to specialise generics for them without necessarily baking the Java language's variance model into the JVM (as the C# variance model is baked into the CLR).

Also, C# and Go didn't have as much of a choice, as their optimising compilers and GCs aren't as sophisticated as Java's (e.g. Java doesn't actually allocate every `new` object on the heap). Java has long tried to keep the language as simple as possible, and have very advanced compilers and GCs.

> If the technical side isn't that hard, I'd have expected the JVM to have implemented value types already, making it available to other less conservative languages like Kotlin, while work on smoothly integrating it in Java took as long as needed

First, that's not how we do things. Users of all alternative Java Platform languages (aka alternative JVM languages) combined make up less than 10% of all Java platform users. We work on the language, VM, and standard library all together (this isn't the approach taken by .NET, BTW). We did deliver invokedynamic before it was used by the Java language, but 1. that was after we knew how the language would use it, and 2. that was at a time when the JDK's release model was much less flexible.

Second, even if we wanted to work in this way, it wouldn't have mattered here. Other Java Platform languages don't just use the JVM. They make extensive use of the standard library and observability tooling. Until those are modified to account for value types, just a JVM change would be of little use to those languages. The JVM comprises maybe 25% of the JDK, while Kotlin, for example, makes use of over 95% of the JDK.

Anyway, Project Valhalla has taken a very long time, but it's making good progress, and we hope to deliver some of its pieces soon enough.
by bwfan123 | 2025-10-15 19:24:29+00:00
addendum: The ground truth for an LLM is the training dataset. Whereas the ground truth for a human is their own experience/qualia with actions in the world. You may argue that only a few of us are willing to engage with the world - and we take most things as told just like the LLMs. Fair enough. But we still have the option to engage with the world, and the LLMs dont.
by palmotea | 2025-10-15 19:24:39+00:00
> Doesn’t really matter as it is in relation to what it used to good for.

If you read the actual article, it seems a US passport is about as good as it always was. It seems like much of the change is various countries expanding visa free travel, just not to Americans. Before when I went to China or Vietnam, I had to get a visa. Now with this change in ranking...I still have to get a visa.
by reactordev | 2025-10-15 19:25:46+00:00
Better! However, just including the filter could have solved this and other problems. Only having it on the main page was lost on me when initially viewing. Page on but let me filter. Also when clicking on a page, trigger a scroll to top. There were a couple times where I clicked on a pagination page number and it looked like nothing happened but the above content changed. Snappy but send me up. Little polish, little elbow grease, and bam. You got yourself an archive of the best of the best in old Mac software. Keep it up, for real, I kept telling kids about Bungie and Marathon but they still swear Halo is original.
by hinkley | 2025-10-15 19:26:00+00:00
We became the flagship customer for a division of AWS that was responsible for managing SSL certificates. We were doing vanity URLs and vanity URLs generally require individual SSL certificates for each domain name. We needed thousands and AWS tools for cert management at the time was really only happy with hundreds and they had backlog items to fix it but those were behind a year or two of other work. It took them about three months to get far enough along for our immediate needs. It's surprising the parts of AWS that have not adjusted to outliers that don't seem really to be that exceptional.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-10-15 19:26:10+00:00
Counting each country equally is itself a bias -- it slides the weighting 100% towards international recognition of a country. As a result, Somalia and Morocco are weighted equally, which is obviously incorrect; nobody is upset if they can't go to Somalia. A common-sense weighting would be imperfect, but almost certainly better than an equal weighting on each county. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good".

edit: it _SHOULD NOT MATTER_, but I grew up in Turkey, am half Persian, and am very liberal. If that matters to you, please think good and hard about what kind of person you have become.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-15 19:26:38+00:00
Do you regularly use the alternatives to these programs? Admittedly I'm not cut out to judge the office suite, but the consensus in the music world seems to be that Logic Pro is awful. It lacks support for lots of plugins and hardware, and costs loads for what is essentially a weaker value prop than Bitwig or Ableton Live. Most bedroom musicians are using Garageband or other cheap DAWs like Live Lite, and the professional studios are all bought into Pro Tools or Audition. Don't even get me started on the number of pros I see willingly use Xcode...

It's not exactly clear to me what niche Apple occupies in this market. It doesn't feel like "native Mac UI" is a must-have feature for DAWs or IDEs alike, but maybe that's just my perspective.
by fragmede | 2025-10-15 19:26:38+00:00
Thankfully, there has been nothing new to use computers for since 2022. Definitely no new technology that involves downloading different 10+ Gib large files to test with, and users couldn't possibly conceive of a NAS, nevermind owning one because Netflix has never removed shows while people are watching them, breaking an assumed promise by users. ISP speeds are never ever going to improve either. Everyone knows that!
by vacuity | 2025-10-15 19:26:40+00:00
I generally agree with you. I have a bad habit of simplifying my statements and losing nuance. If an error occurs, it should be handled reasonably and soon. If the cause or solution to an error is unclear, restarting at the task boundary is valid. Blowing away the whole task in one stroke is an instance of handling the error promptly. If the solution is in-task, it should be expediently reached through the call structure. Returning through many functions, performing cleanup all the while, in order to reach the handler is the pattern of deeply-nested error bubbling that I dislike.

Of course, this is still a cursory description. I think various strategies by domain agree on general principles. There is likely a class of errors that is too likely and/or unsolvable, in which case whole-task-restarts are advisable. Within the task, there may be other kinds of errors that can and should reasonably be resolved. User interactivity is also relevant (e.g. is a user directly interacting with a task in the error state). Overall, this comes down to a few factors for each error, roughly: likelihood, severity, solvability. Errors should always be reported when possible and brought to the attention, if not fixed, of a capable supervisor, which eventually culimante at a person (e.g. user or sysadmin).
by jillesvangurp | 2025-10-15 19:27:00+00:00
Exactly, natively compiled garbage collected languages (like Java with Graal; or as executed on Android) don't have a lot of startup overhead. In Java the startup overhead is mostly two things that usually conspire to make things worse:

1) dynamic loading of jar files

2) reflection

Number 1 allows you to load arbitrary jar files with code and execute them. Number 2 allows you to programmatically introspect existing code and then execute logic like "Find me all Foo sub classes and create an instance of those and return the list of those objects". You can do that at any time but a lot of that kind of stuff happens at startup. That involves parsing, loading and introspecting thousands of class files in jar files that need to be opened and decompressed.

Most of "Java is slow" is basically programs loading a lot of stuff at startup, and then using reflection to look for code to execute. You don't have to do those things. But a lot of popular web frameworks like Spring do. A lot of that stuff is actually remarkably quick considering what it is doing. You'd struggle to do this in many other languages. Or at all because many languages don't have reflection. If you profile it, there are millions of calls happening in the first couple of seconds. It's taking time yes. But that code has also been heavily optimized over the years. Dismissing what that does as "java is slow" and X is fast is usually a bit of an apples and oranges discussion.

With Spring Boot, there are dozens of libraries that self initialize if you simply add the dependency or the right configuration to your project. We can argue about whether that's nice or not; I'm leaning to no. But it's a neat feature. I'm more into lighter weight frameworks these days. Ktor server is pretty nice, for example. It starts pretty quickly because it doesn't do a whole lot on startup.

Loading a tiny garbage collector library on startup isn't a big deal. It will add a few microseconds to your startup time maybe. Probably not milliseconds. Kotlin has a nice native compiler. If you compile hello world with it it's a few hundred kilobytes for a self contained binary with the program, runtime, and the garbage collection. It's not a great garbage collector. For memory intensive stuff you are better off using the JVM. But if that's not a concern, it will do the job.
by lazypenguin | 2025-10-15 19:27:09+00:00
Basically you are correct, MacOS has to be treated like a console in that way. Except you get all the downsides of that development workflow with none of the upsides. The consoles provide excellent debugging and other tools for targeting their platform, can't say the same for MacOS.

For testing, I can do a large amount of testing in a VM for my game. Maybe not 100% and not full user testing but nothing beats running on the native hardware and alpha/beta with real users.

Also, since I can pass through hardware to my VM I can get quite good performance by passing through a physical GPU for example. This is possible and quite straightforward to do on a Linux host. I'm not sure if it's possible using Parallels.
by godelski | 2025-10-15 19:27:32+00:00
I suggest you head over to /r/unixporn, and you'll probably be presently surprised. Contrary to popular belief, most of this stuff is not very hard to setup. Of course, there are people also showing off custom tooling and the craziest (and sometimes silliest) things they can pull off, but a beautiful interface is usually something you can do in under an hour. It is customary to include a repo with all configurations, so if you wanted to direct copy paste, you can do it much faster than that.

Unless you're talking about the look of the physical machine. Well then that's an easier fix ;)

https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/
by dang | 2025-10-15 19:27:32+00:00
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597318 also. I'm sympathetic for where you're coming from, even though I don't fully understand—but this implementation is not working.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-15 19:27:36+00:00
> Maybe Prof. Peter J. Spiro only hangs out with very rich people who can buy some citizenships

That's what it sounds like to my ears. Plus, according to Wikipedia, anyway, he is a leading expert on dual citizenship. I suspect he lives in fairly rarified air and also that this is a special interest of his, so people who don't have the means required to have additional citizenships aren't really much on his radar.

That said, people don't necessarily have to be wealthy to do it (although I think they have to not be poor). A friend did it by living and working (in a field in demand) for enough decades in the country that he became eligible to apply for citizenship. He's nowhere near wealthy, but squarely middle class.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-10-15 19:27:45+00:00
I have to agree. The loss of sense of reality among Linux fanboys is really annoying.

I had been a Linux notebook user for many years and have praised it on this board years ago. But today the Linux desktop has regressed into a piece of trash even for basic command line usage while providing zero exclusive apps worth using. It's really sad since it's unforced and brought upon Linux users by overzealous developers alone.

Mac OS trounces Linux in absolutely every way on the desktop it's not even funny: performance, battery life, apps, usability, innovation. Available PC notebook HW is a laughable value compared to even an entry level Apple MacBook Air. Anecdata but I have no less than five "pro" notebooks (Dell Lattitude, XPS, and Lenovo Thinkpad) come and go with basic battery problems, mechanical touchpad problems, touchpad driver issues, WLAN driver issues, power management issues, gross design issues, and all kind of crap come and go in the last five years so I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about.

The one thing Mac isn't great for is games, and I think SteamOS/Proton/wine comes along nicely and timely as Windows is finally turning to the dark side entirely.
by fsflover | 2025-10-15 19:27:51+00:00
> fairly old hardware

How new do you think the chosen Android hardware will be at the end of the promised reverse-engineering efforts?

See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

It's fast enough and stable enough to serve me (and many other people, including in the HN comments) as a daily driver.

> bad customer service experiences

This depends: Purism is a quite small company, and sometimes they take time to reply, but the community at forums.puri.sm has been really helpful. I'm a happy user.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-15 19:28:19+00:00
They were definitely trying to make Rust look worse than it is. They even sarcastically acknowledge that:

> I didn’t deliberately pick the one which made Rust look even worse than all the others, out of peevish resentment for every time someone has rewritten some Python code (my go-to language) in Rust and made it a million times faster – that’s a ridiculous suggestion.

And

> Rust, as expected, gets nul points. What can I say?
by worik | 2025-10-15 19:28:29+00:00
I have thought for years Rust needs to bifurcate.

Asyc/await really desperately needs a garbage collector. (See this talk from Rustconf 2025: https://youtu.be/zrv5Cy1R7r4?si=lfTGLdJOGw81bvpu and this blog:https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/400)

Rust that uses standard techniques for asynchronous code, or is synchronous, does not. Async/await sucks all the oxygen from asynchronous Rust

Async/await Rust is a different language, probably more popular, and worth pursuing (for somebody, not me) it already has a runtime and the dreadful hacks like (pin)[https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/pin/index.html] that are due to the lack of a garbage collector

What a good idea
by graycat | 2025-10-15 19:28:37+00:00
For garbage collection and the idea of assigning storage requests to different categories of (dynamic) storage ....

Apparently part of the algorithm is based on the size of the storage being requested.

Hmm. So, we have historical data of storage requests and for each (i) the size of the request, (ii) how long until the storage is freed, (iii) etc. ....

Guessing about a bizarre case: It might be that on Monday many storage requests of certain small sizes have lifetime just a little longer than the decision to move the request to another category, i.e., the moving effort was inefficient, wasted.

So, in simple terms, for an optimization, for each of the variables have both in the history and real time, make the variable values discrete, altogether may have for some positive integer n a few thousand different n-tuples of variable values; then for each n-tuple pick the best decisions (policies, etc.). Uh, unless this idea has already been tried.
by hinkley | 2025-10-15 19:28:56+00:00
Some architectural arguments I kick myself for not establishing a bibliography of all of my justifications. The thing with mastering something is that you copy the rules into the intuitive part of your brain and you no longer have to reason through it step by step like Socrates's lectures. You just know and you do.

The biggest one I regret is "communicating through the file system is 10x dumber than you think it is, even if you think you know how dumb it is." I should have a three page bibliography on that. Mostly people don't challenge you on this, but I had one brilliant moron at my last job who did, and all I could do was stare at him like he had three heads.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-15 19:28:58+00:00
> It's kind of a myth though

It's kinda not. Here's a rough list of the 10 most-played games currently on PC: https://steamdb.info/charts/

macOS is supported by one title (DOTA 2). Windows supports all 10, Linux (the free OS, just so we're clear) runs 7 of the games and has native ports of 5 of them. If you want to go argue to them about missed revenue opportunities then be my guest, but something tells me that DOTA 2 isn't being bankrolled by Mac owners.

If you have any hard figures that demonstrate "antiquated calculations" then now is the time to fetch them for us. I'm somewhat skeptical.