MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IshKebab | 2025-10-15 08:27:34+00:00
> Making it scalable is easy work since it is deterministic

I don't think that necessarily follows. Especially the language choice is almost impossible to change - look at Facebook, Dropbox, etc. Facebook ended up creating an entirely new language that only they use, because it was impossible to rewrite in another language.

Language choice (and probably database choice too) are essentially locked in from the start, and they do affect scaling.

Growing customers is probably harder, but I don't buy "do everything in hacky Bash scripts because you can fix it later". Nor do I think having solid foundations means you need to be less agile. Would Dropbox have been less successful if they wrote their backend in Typescript? I doubt it.
by WoWSaaS | 2025-10-15 08:27:53+00:00
WealthAI is a SaaS product that automatically categorizes income, expenses, and investments using AI, and gives users actionable insights, budgeting guidance, and wealth-optimization suggestions. It operates on a freemium + Pro model, is production-ready, and already has user traction (≈150 monthly visitors).

Open to feedback, collaboration, or acquisition.
by gspr | 2025-10-15 08:28:01+00:00
I'm a Debian Developer, and do some Rust both professionally and for fun. I restrict myself to using only libraries and tooling from Debian. The experience is quite OK. And I find the Rust language team to be quite friendly and sympathetic to our needs.

Rather, what makes it hard is the culture and surrounding ecosystem of pinned versions or the latest of everything. That's probably in part the fault of Rustup being recommended, I agree. But it's not nefarious.
by mcny | 2025-10-15 08:28:17+00:00
I don't mind the many multiple distributions but the default experience really sucks.

For example, there should only ever be one clipboard by default. If power users want multiple, they can go out of their way to configure their device config as such. Similarly, the function keys should function as function keys on a keyboard out of the box, without us having to fiddle with config files. Also the scroll wheel click to scroll should work out of the box without requiring editing config files. The default experience is still pretty poor.
by blixt | 2025-10-15 08:28:25+00:00
It would be interesting to do a wider test like this but instead of trying to clump people together into "American English" and "British English" it would be interesting if the data point was "in which city do people speak like you do?" and create a geographic map of accents.

I'm from the south of Sweden and I've had my "accent" made fun of by people from Malmö just because I grew up outside of Helsingborg, because the accent changes that much in just 60 kilometers.
by j45 | 2025-10-15 08:28:45+00:00
You have a good point about things coming together, but open source often is a lot of design and development by committee, or interest.

Librephone appears to be taking existing linux approaches, and specifically reverse engineering the SoC blobs to be completely free. I may have mis read, but it doesn't appear they are building another android distro for android phones, as they already have done that in the past.

Just tried to learn the difference between these and it seems like:

- Graphene - For current devices only - An alternative for phones that are supported and updated by Google. Security Patches, etc.

- LineageOS - For devices while they're supported or may not be updated that often. Support can be sometime by community members.

- PostmarketOS - devices that no longer have a maintained Android version for it, can just become a linux computer. Mobile functionality doesn't necessarily.

Some phone chips overtime end up having a hardware security flaw that software can't fix.

I really enjoy using Android. Part of the issue is not all deices get timely security updates, even if they get monthly updates, the updates might be from 6 months ago. Google might release a security patch but sometimes it has to go through the device manufacturer, and maybe even the mobile company. Pixel / Android pure installs seem to improve this a bit, but it's hard to have complete trust.
by danielrothmann | 2025-10-15 08:28:58+00:00
Healthy skepticism. I think firm differs from ops as code in the sense that it focuses on the structural aspects and representing the people-ops side in a way that machines can interact with too.

To be clear, I'm trialing this out in my own small business. Whether it's ergonomic enough to add value and whether it's scalable, I don't know yet. So far, so good, though.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-15 08:29:09+00:00
> ### Why is Jujutsu a separate project? Why were the features not contributed to Git instead?

> The project started as an experiment with the idea of representing the working copy by a regular commit. I (@martinvonz) considered how this feature would impact the Git CLI if it were added to Git. My conclusion was that it would effectively result in deprecating most existing Git commands and flags in favor of new commands and flags, especially considering I wanted to also support revsets. This seemed unlikely to be accepted by the Git project.

This doesn't support what you said?

> I don't think it would have been doable.

This only states that JJ has a different user model, with a different structure of commands and flags, not that it magically does things that are impossible in Git.

Btw., you could just link to the commit diff instead. And are you quoting yourself?

-----------

Oops, now I see the issue, you misunderstood me.

> but they just never bothered.

"They" referred to the authors of blog posts. I didn't want to claim, that it would be a good fit to merge the JJ user model with the Git user model. My claim was that the approaches people learn with the JJ user model aren't exactly difficult in the Git model either. People just reconsider their approaches when they touch a new tool with the experience they gained since starting to use Git. They just never considered that approaches with a tool they have been using for years.
by jamil7 | 2025-10-15 08:29:21+00:00
You can do over 100k if you freelance but it's risky to be a freelancer in a lot of ways in Germany. Salaries in Berlin and Munich are approaching 100k or over for leadership roles. The problem is COL in both cities is high and Berlin you basically can't get a flat anymore even if you can pay the rent on it.
by fransje26 | 2025-10-15 08:29:21+00:00
For posterity:

- The UK had an estimated death rate of 4.7 road fatalities per billion vehicle miles travelled in 2024 [1]

- The US had an estimated 12.6 road fatalities per billion vehicle miles travelled in 2023 [2]

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

[2] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
by j45 | 2025-10-15 08:29:57+00:00
FSF could finally take a look at webOS / Open WebOS and release it for devices.

Apps built in HTML/JS/CSS, straight from 2009.

The feminine vibe doesn't really land, and seems to kind of undermine the rest of what you're trying to say.

There's no shortages of OSS floating around with individuals butting heads about splitting hairs to their preferred interpretation, forking away into oblivion or to a standstill alone.
by DanielHB | 2025-10-15 08:30:02+00:00
I have been advocating similar setups to this for years, no one wants to hear it. I get downright puzzled looks from people who think you need moon-landing monitorability of every little service and database...

We have 100k paying users and most of them don't actively use our service, yet we have microservice slop with k8 and load balancers galore running in big tech cloud provider and document databases.

From our whole setup I can only think of _maybe_ one thing that should be split into a separate dedicated service, everything else could happily live in a monolith backed by a relational database and a caching layer and a storage solution.
by brucehoult | 2025-10-15 08:30:22+00:00
And it still does.

And the last generation was wider and deeper than the one before it, also costing power and area.

The question that should be asked ... but which would never be answered ... is "What was it that you changed that REQUIRED and ALLOWED you to go wider and deeper?"

It's not a new process node every time.

Theres no NEED to have a massive reorder buffer unless you can decode and dispatch that number of instructions in the time it takes for a load to arrive from whichever level of memory hierarchy you're optimising for. And there's no POINT if you're often going to get a misprediction in that number of instructions. Ok, so wider decode is one component of that. Is there a difference in memory latency as well? Wider decode past 3 or 4 instructions increasingly means that you can't just end your packet of decoded instructions at the first branch -- as you get wider you're increasingly going to have to both parse past a conditional branch, and then have to predict more than one branch in the same decode cycle. You'll also get into branches that jump to other instructions in the same decode group (either forward or backward).

There are all kinds of complications there, with no doubt interesting solutions, that go far beyond "we went wider and deeper".
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-15 08:30:24+00:00
The Army software developer is 170D and supposedly they are vastly superior at training developers. There are only two factors to this: better selection of students/candidates and excellent training formulation.

My experience in corporate software is the opposite where it’s all about hiring/firing for the lowest common denominator. It’s not about being good. It’s about speed and not training.
by idle_zealot | 2025-10-15 08:30:53+00:00
I'd like to see some experimentation with core system UI, like the notification/quick settings thing. I'm not convinced the weird double-pull-down hybrid thing Android uses is a good design. I'd love to see some experimentation on a multitasking system that isn't clunky and inconsistent. Some of the tweaks Samsung puts in their Android spin could be nice. I'm not expecting a security-focused team to work on this stuff, but it's too bad that nobody is. I feel like we've settled on a pretty lousy core mobile operating system paradigm, and just generally wish people were experimenting and iterating on a variety of ideas.
Show HN: WealthAI – AI-powered personal finance and investment tracker
by astyawe | 2025-10-15 08:31:03+00:00
WealthAI is a SaaS product that automatically categorizes income, expenses, and investments using AI, and gives users actionable insights, budgeting guidance, and wealth-optimization suggestions. It operates on a freemium + Pro model, is production-ready, and already has user traction (≈150 monthly visitors).

Open to feedback, collaboration, or acquisition.
by saagarjha | 2025-10-15 08:32:06+00:00
I value effectiveness in manifesting change in the world. This takes many forms. I think one of the most depressing and myopic views that hackers have is that code rules everything, when in fact social movements live and die upon their accessibility and impact. If you think that laboring in a cave and writing the next Free text editor is going to bring about free software, the reality is that three proprietary editors have already eaten its lunch, the latter two of which are VC backed and soon to require cloud registration, and the last which was written using AI trained on your code that you very carefully structured to be unusable to build non-free software on top of.
by physicsguy | 2025-10-15 08:32:22+00:00
A few years ago I worked on an ARM supercomputer, as well as a POWER9 one. x86 is so assumed for anything other than trivial things that it is painful.

What I found was a good solution was using Spack: https://spack.io/ That allows you to download/build the full toolchain of stuff you need for whatever architecture you are on - all dependencies, compilers (GCC, CUDA, MPI, etc.), compiled Python packages, etc. and if you need to add a new recipe for something it is really easy.

For the fellow Brits - you can tell this was named by Americans!!!
by pizza234 | 2025-10-15 08:32:57+00:00
> you already have bug-free code due to massive time, attention, and testing, and the rate of change is low (or zero), it doesn’t really matter what the language is. SQLIte could be assembly language for all it would matter.

This is the C/++ delusion - "if one puts enough effort, a [complex] memory unsafe program can be made memory safe"; the year after this page was published, the Magellan series of RCEs was released.

Keeping SQLite in C is certainly a valid design choice, but it's important to be aware of the practical implications of the language.
by DanielHB | 2025-10-15 08:32:58+00:00
> While terraform is not ideal it is much much more easy to deal with managed services in AWS than to deal with on premises baremetal servers.

If you have one or two baremetal servers it is not, but yes once you start having a lot of infra it is way better.

But you can get really, really far with one or two baremetal servers and some SaaS solutions...
by bloppe | 2025-10-15 08:33:04+00:00
As companies grow, they tend to move away from subjective performance reviews like that and toward more objective metrics. Otherwise, it's too easy for personal politics to contaminate the promotion process. Employees are incentivized to find whichever manager will give them 5 star reviews no matter what, and managers are incentivized to be that guy, because then they have access to the best employees. When a company is small, and everyone knows everyone, this is not an issue. But when 90% of the company is a stranger to you, you need more objective metrics to rely on.
by razoorka | 2025-10-15 08:33:41+00:00
This isn’t about innovation — it’s about metrics.

Sora 2 is the perfect example: a dopamine machine disguised as progress. It doesn’t solve real problems; it just creates endless engagement loops to inflate “usage” numbers for investors.

The identical logic drives AI erotica — maximize attention, claim it’s “user engagement,” and call it growth. When the core product stops evolving, they start monetizing loneliness.

It’s not about what people need, it’s about what still moves the charts.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-10-15 08:34:19+00:00
Modern devices are simply too complex to be completely secure.

We have this tendency of adding more and more "features", more and more functionality 85% of which nobody asked for or has use for.

I believe that there will be a market for a small, bare bones secure OS in the future. Akin to how freeBSD is being run.
by sznio | 2025-10-15 08:34:28+00:00
From my understanding of the article, Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project. The goal is to provide FOSS drivers, so that you can run Lineage without proprietary blobs copied from the distribution of Android provided by the device manufacturer.

It's mainly a libre purity project. A Lineage user won't be able to tell a thing, but the system will be "ethically pure"
by ValveFan6969 | 2025-10-15 08:34:34+00:00
We all know that these "privacy preserving" services have to play both sides for the most part.

It's a shame. They start out innocently, get popular, then end up caving to the demands of the same people that they originally promised not to cave to.

I'll use Telegram, but I certainly won't be collaborating with my collages about how many people I am scamming on Facebook, that's for sure.
Tell HN: OpenAI removed budget limits from their API, you can only get warnings
by ea016 | 2025-10-15 08:34:34+00:00
This is PSA for anyone using OpenAI's API: a few months ago, they removed hard budget limits. As per this thread [0] they now only offer email reminders if you reach some thresholds.

This means that if you're on a high usage tier [1] and one of your OpenAI API key leaks, you can't set an upper bound on the spending (the highest tier is 200k/month).

Previously, you could set up a hard limit per project which was very useful for development work or not losing sleep at night over leaking API keys.

[0] https://community.openai.com/t/how-to-set-organization-usage-limits/1332014/8 [1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/rate-limits#usage-tiers
by zevon | 2025-10-15 08:34:51+00:00
I think all your concerns are valid but they are not necessarily insurmountable. The FSF or whatever other entity could do just what you suggest and seek certification within the current legal frameworks. They could also talk to the carriers and negotiate individually which is probably going to be quite annoying and slow but it's not impossible and it's not like that's not done in the commercial space. The could build mechanisms into the hard-/firmware that takes your device off whatever regulated spectrum/provider if you modify anything that is in regulated territory (as watched over by some form of maintainer-quorum-signing-negotiation-structure). I'm sure there are many mechanisms and processes one could come up with that could keep with regulatory or other control aspects while still keeping things open.

All that patent and legal business is probably a more important/existential concern and a go/nogo-factor if you want to be a commercial player in a market-driven environment and less so for an entity like the FSF.
by j45 | 2025-10-15 08:35:52+00:00
The options thinking they're an island retreat only for those who agree with their way while standing on the same continent.

What's missing is building something that resonates with the user/consumer's experience backwards, not just personal preferences or interpretations, which is fine, but at that point it's a personal project, not a product, or much larger unless it really captivates both people who can contribute to creating it and also it is adopted quite easily.

Creating beginners can seem like something too many OSS projects can be allergic to. It's the greatest sin of too many projects, and they ultimately can't be freed of it.
by pas | 2025-10-15 08:36:53+00:00
not to mention that ... there are simply more important things.

from climate change to a landwar in Europe, or simply spending time with loved ones (or the loneliness epidemic - which might be a measurement artifact, but just as with starvation, tuberculosis, measles, even one person is too many).

FOSS is a good amalgamation of ideas, it needs a bit more work on sustainability, but public goods provisioning is a well-studied field (note, not a solved one!)

we might not like it, but probably wrapping the problem in national/geopolitical security terms and civil and social infrastructure concepts is required to make progress on it. (providing a public safe baseline, then standardization and productivity cooperation, but all this requires the underlying problems to be also considered in similar terms - and as long as education, healthcare, transportation, housing, construction, logistics and so on lack a public basic quasi-standardized option there's not much software can do.)

and where a common platform makes sense FOSS software capital is already being accumulated. (though of course the iron laws of amortization/upkeep apply to software too.)
by globular-toast | 2025-10-15 08:37:37+00:00
Yeah, don't forget wobbly windows! I think a lot of people dreamed of actually having a UI like Minority Report or something, but people quickly realised the difference between fiction and the reality of actually getting things done.

These days I use a minimal tiling window manager and no animations whatsoever. As I'm of a certain age I still get a kick out of the fact I can make a floating window translucent and see the video playing underneath. But that's only because I know it was a technical feat to get there. It's hard to imagine why gen Z or younger would get a kick out of this stuff, though.
by BaudouinVH | 2025-10-15 08:38:32+00:00
dear FSF, let's discuss your https://librephone.fsf.org/ web site.

It does the job but it's not easy on the eye.

Full-width line of text. Readability nightmare. Here is how it looks with just a link to a CSS (I closed my eyes on the cssbed.com and picked one at random).

https://librephone.surge.sh/librephone-website.html
by dariosalvi78 | 2025-10-15 08:38:33+00:00
I am also very fond of Stallman, but we need to recognise that he had as many lovers as he had haters. He may have pushed many outside of the free software movement in fact because of his character.

I still think that the FSF needs a strong character with a clear vision, man or woman, but maybe with less orthodoxy than RMS.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-15 08:39:01+00:00
> You've got that backwards

No, I don't. The legal name of the Department headed by Pete Hegseth is the Department of Defense, and it is the only name that entity has ever had.

> Originally stemming from the War Department

This a somewhat popular myth, resurgent recently because it is expressly part of the narrative of the Trump Administration and therefore the MAGA cult, but its false. The Department of War is the predecessor of the modern Departments of the Army and Air Force which it was split into, not the Department of Defense, which was created ex nihilo to be placed over the existing military departments at the same time one of those department s was being split.

Originally, the US (following the British model, which also persisted until just after WWII) had two separate defense edtablishments, the Department of War (responsible for the Army) and Department of the Navy (responsible for the Navy and Marine Corps); after WWII a combined defense establishment was created above those, but at the same time it was created, the Air Force was split off from the Army and the War Department was split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force, which is why the Department of Defense is the only cabinet level department with subordinate entities also called “departments”.
by jamil7 | 2025-10-15 08:39:17+00:00
There's a lot to unpack here but to me your comment sort of contradicts itself. You're saying these things are in their infancy and therefore not able to produce code at the standard of a skilled software engineer. But you also seem to have an axe to grind against code review, which is fine but wouldn't that mean code review is even more important? At least right now? Which is kind of the point of the article.
by sznio | 2025-10-15 08:39:35+00:00
>by the time you have it worked out, the phone is obsolete and very few people still use it.

If you work out a phone from 5 years ago, you're not that far off from a phone of today. Nobody designs it all from scratch, you mostly modify the old one. Getting the foundations going will take years - adapting the foundation to a different phone of the same series will only take months.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-15 08:39:39+00:00
"Because none are" is a particularly hollow claim because to support it you have to caveat things so heavily.

You have to say OK, I allow myself platform specific intrinsics and extensions even though those aren't standard ISO C, and that includes inline assembler. I can pick any compiler and tooling. And I won't count other languages which are transpiled to C for portability because hey in theory I could just write that C myself, couldn't I so they're not really faster.

At the end you're basically begging the question. "I claim C is fastest because I don't count anything else as faster" which is no longer a claim worth disputing.

The aliasing optimisations in Fortran and Rust stand out as obvious examples where to get the same perf in C requires you do global analysis (this is what Rust is side-stepping via language rules and the borrowck) which you can't afford in practice.

But equally the monomorphisation in C++ or Rust can be beneficial in a similar way, you could in principle do all this by hand in your C project but you won't, because time is finite, so you live without the optimisations.