MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quamserena | 2025-11-04 21:20:50+00:00
I’m not a fan of serde either. I wish there was a way to have foreign derives (or even better: compile-time reflection). There wasn’t a great way to serialize things in Rust in the standard library and the ecosystem crystalized around serde, which is suboptimal imo. There are libraries like facet[0] that implement general reflection, rather than just a subset of it, but it probably won't be supported by all of your dependencies.

[0] https://github.com/facet-rs/facet
by GrinningFool | 2025-11-04 21:21:14+00:00
I created an account, picked "pets" as my interest. I was suggested several pet-related accounts to follow, and followed none.

I went to the home page and "for you" was populated about 80% from known right accounts and angry right-flavored screeds from people I didn't recognize.

The other 20% was just a smattering of random, normal stuff. None of it about pets.
by RaftPeople | 2025-11-04 21:21:30+00:00
Slight tangent but you seem well informed so I'll ask you (I skimmed Stanford site and didn't see an obvious answer):

Is the assumption that there is internal state and the rulebook is flexible enough that it can produce the correct output even for things that require learning and internal state?

For example, the input describes some rules to a game and then initiates the game with some input and expects the Chinese room to produce the correct output?

It seems that without learning+state the system would fail to produce the correct output so it couldn't possibly be said to understand.

With learning and state, at least it can get the right answer, but that still leaves the question of whether that represents understanding or not.
by juggernuggets | 2025-11-04 21:22:13+00:00
Location: New York City (NYC) Remote: Yes (Remote / Hybrid / O n-Site)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React Native| React, Next.js, Tailwind | Node.js, FastAPI, Flask, Express, Rails | PostgreSQL, MongoDB | BigQuery, Grafana | AWS, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD

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Email: gautam.somappa@gmail.com

Software engineer with 7+ years of experience building scalable & performant fullstack applications - from startups to global enterprises with 10,000+ employees. Most recently, I've built and released a React Native app as a solo developer. I'm only open to full time roles.
by franga2000 | 2025-11-04 21:22:43+00:00
In-app webviews are a usability disaster for normal users, I need to help a relative out of one at least once every few weeks.

The webviews don't have adblock so they fall for ads and scams, sometimes they don't properly follow UI scaling, they don't have the cookies or saved passwords needed to, for example, read a paywalled newspaper article that someone linked...
by wolrah | 2025-11-04 21:22:50+00:00
> None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind.

Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were not just excessive resource usage and instability, they were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plugin was simultaneously one of the greatest strengths of Flash as a creative platform and one of the greatest risks to the average person browsing the web in the 2000s.

The plugin needed to die. Unfortunately the Flash community was so firmly built around the web plugin as their distribution method of choice (presumably because many of us were browsing animations and playing games at work/school where we couldn't necessarily download and run arbitrary .exes) that the plugin was more or less a diseased conjoined twin, and when it died the community didn't have long left.

Compare this to Java where the death of the browser plugin caused a number of badly designed banking sites to have to be redesigned in a less stupid (but quite often still very stupid) way but the community as a whole continued on without huge disruption. The browser plugin was just one of many places Java existed, it wasn't the dominant focus of the community.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-11-04 21:23:15+00:00
The largest share of the eligible voting population was the 'did not vote' group.

I'm OK with calling fascists what they are. I'm also OK with recognizing a neighbor who has been consumed by fascist propaganda.

The fascist is not one that can be negotiated with. As Sartre said:

"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."

I can negotiate with the propaganda poisoned neighbor. There is no negotiating with the people who are running the fascist show. Giving a fascist the benefit of the doubt is playing into their strategy.
by phernandez | 2025-11-04 21:23:58+00:00
Location: Austin, TX

Remote: Yes (US-based preferred)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, FastAPI, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Vue, Nuxt, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Redis, Terraform, Docker, Event Sourcing, CI/CD, LLM Integration

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1neImwQawfg8lbedopWElJFoU...

Email: paul@basicmachines.co

Senior/Staff/Principal Software Engineer with 20+ years building scalable SaaS platforms. Recently founded Basic Memory LLC, growing it from concept to 2,000+ GitHub stars and 56 paying customers in under 6 months, building one of the first production Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementations. Previously: Engineering Manager/Principal at companies like Fracture (50% AWS cost reduction), Spot Insurance, Pensa (ML/computer vision), and Spanning (100M+ events daily). Strong track record of rapid iteration, technical leadership, and delivering products that generate revenue. Looking for Staff/Principal Engineer or Engineering Manager roles at product companies building developer tools, SaaS platforms, or AI-powered products.

GitHub: github.com/basicmachines-co

Website: basicmemory.com
by altairprime | 2025-11-04 21:24:26+00:00
I would probably have to make a video, honestly. Have considered it. Usage faded out years before screen recording was accessible. I’m going to be late for class but I can’t allow that article to stand unsupported by story tidbits.

The built-in editor for all files had two modes, line-based and character based. In edit (char) mode, you edited the text file as usual. In line (command) mode, you selected lines and hit Return on them to begin execution there.

Commands were wrapped in curly braces; non-wrapped text was ignored.

The built-in phone directory was just a macro file with a dedicated keystroke; so you could structure and annotate it however you liked, and navigate it with search or with line-based mode up/down/pgup/pgdn as one would expect. Each entry was something like {dial 472627} {user x} {pass y} {ifca {goto :autologin_wwiv}} {end} with whatever niceties you enjoyed outside the curly braces.

It understood {gets} and {puts} from the modem tty (I don’t remember the actual command names) and it had conditional logic and substring index stuff.

If you needed human input, you could throw a {dialog} and get it, acting according to the result.

In modern parlance, imagine if your terminal emulator had ansible playbook support embedded into it and pressing alt-E popped up an editor for the playbook that let you start playback from any point in the script, JMP/GOTO-style.

You can see an example playbook at https://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/dos/cavebbs/The%20Cave%2... inside PWRMC30S.ZIP. Read everything that isn’t a .MAC file first so that you know where to start reading. POWER.MAC is the main attraction; 53k of playbook macros serving as bionic assistance to TradeWars players.

My own archives are currently probably-lost unless I get very lucky someday, or else I’d share my own archive of playbooks built up over five years to auto-dial and auto-QWK hundreds of local BBSes for two-way mailing list packets.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-11-04 21:24:32+00:00
> At the core of most definitions you’ll find the idea of a machine that can match humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks.

I expect this definition will be proven incorrect eventually. This definition would best be described as a "human level AGI", rather than AGI. AGI is a system that matches a core set of properties, but it's not necessarily tied to capabilities. Theoretically one could create a very small resource-limited AGI. The amount of computational resources available to the AGI will probably be one of the factors what determines whether it's e.g. cat level vs human level.
by connorb-coder | 2025-11-04 21:25:31+00:00
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We passed 100k stars on GitHub! https://github.com/coder

All positions are fully remote in the countries listed unless otherwise specified.

[1] Software Engineer, AI tools (US/Canada)

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And more! Apply here + job descriptions, salary bands: https://coder.com/careers?utm_source=O2n5Ew72WD

Not all of our jobs are listed here. Please note that you must submit an application to be considered for any of our positions.
by esperent | 2025-11-04 21:25:56+00:00
> When I asked Weil about proof that these interventions work, based on randomized clinical trials, he told me that he believes such studies are not necessary when an intervention is unlikely to cause harm. “I grade evidence on a sliding scale,” he said.

I think this is a misrepresentation, or at least oversimplification of Weil's views.

Randomized clinical trials are expensive, and very often not available. If turmeric/meditation/fiber supplements (for example) are potentially effective but it's impossible to get funding for clinical trials, then it is quite reasonable to slide down to a lower standard of evidence. You're not replacing the clinical trial evidence, you're doing the best you can in it's absence, and either supplementing other medicine or trying to avoid expensive and potentially side effect laden treatments entirely.

As a personal example, I suffer from migraines, as do many people in my family. Sumatriptan works but I feel groggy for a day afterwards. If I'd listened to doctors I would have been placed on beta blockers or other daily medication years ago. Instead, I read a wide range of stuff, both western medicine and alternative. A lot of it was certainly bullshit. But a lot wasn't, too. I started listening to my body, getting more sleep, exercising more, and paying careful attention to what triggers migraines (a lot of it is food related, also alcohol, stress, stormy weather, too much caffeine, chocolate, old cheese). Now I very rarely get migraines, and I also live a healthier lifestyle.

I'm not in any way against medical treatment. If I hadn't been able to reduce migraines this way I would have gone back to the doctor. But it was only by ignoring their advice and doing my own research that I reached this healthy and non-medicated state.

> In decades past, alternative therapies may not have seemed so outlandish compared with conventional therapies, which often had significant side effects and limited efficacy. Now, though, doctors like me can prescribe treatments that turn many debilitating diseases into manageable conditions

This is definitely true! But conveniently leaves out all the other debilitating diseases for which modern medicine still doesn't have a good understanding or treatment that will reliably work (migraines, Alzheimers, chronic pain etc.), or work without bad side effects. It's great that this list is getting smaller, but it's honestly condescending to write an entire article condemning alternative treatments and lauding western medicine without addressing this in any way.

Some people do turn to alternative treatments because they've been taken in by charlatan TikTokers, or have an irrational mistrust of doctors. But many people do so because western medicine doesn't have all the answers yet, and as long as clinical trials get funded based on what will make the most money for pharmaceutical companies, never will either.
by genezeta | 2025-11-04 21:26:24+00:00
> I would be interested to know how they define web resources.

They explain things in the FAQ. You're supposed to do a "Cloudflare URL Scan" and read the "Total bytes". For HN this is 47kB [1], which, yes, is just the 6 requests needed for / and nothing more.

[1] https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan/4c2b759c-b690-44f0-b108-b9...
by zackmorris | 2025-11-04 21:27:12+00:00
This is great! I remember a turning point for me when I was feeling very low at the height of the War on Terror and jingoism appeared to have taken over the world. Just before the housing bubble popped and politics would swing the other way, but we didn't know that was going to happen yet.

John Mayer was playing music at Macworld 2007 (wish I could find the video) and said "Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. just make life more fun. It's like the opposite of terrorism":

https://www.cnet.com/culture/live-macworld-coverage/

I think of stuff like the Whole Earth Catalog as the opposite of neofeudalism and tech bro culture's revisionist history.

It doesn't have to be this way. Wealth inequality isn't invincible, or even inevitable. Back to basics works. We can get our hacker culture back. We can restore the timeline that's been stolen from us, the one we were on in the 90s before financialization and ensh@ttification ruined all the fun.
Ask HN: Google Ads Hacked?
by lskillen | 2025-11-04 21:27:14+00:00
Well, they've either been hacked, or it's a bad bug, or they're up to something unusual. Either way, they're admitting nothing.

Our Ads account had all user roles demoted to "Read Only" without any notifications, and there was no entry in the audit log. No other changes were made, and no unusual accounts or other changes were noted.

Turns out, we're not the only ones: https://support.google.com/google-ads/thread/385009035/all-admin-users-got-degraded-to-read-only-access-google-ads?hl=en

Google Ads' official stance right now is (in-verbatim):

"Please note that we have completed a preliminary review of the recent activity on your account. Based on this initial examination, we have not found evidence of unauthorized activity."

Which is interesting, considering that anywhere else, having everyone with ownership, administrative, management, or otherwise roles removed, with no paper trail to say how or why, would be ringing alarm bells.

Amusingly (or not), their identity protection, which we have enabled, states: "To protect your account against any unauthorised actions, you'll always be asked to verify that it's you when making important changes, like managing users ..."

Google Ads support appears to have either no understanding or a lack of concern about this issue, or they're hiding something. And if it really was "a security review", it's a very, very, strange way to go about it.

Finally, it appears that the incident occurred at exactly the same time as everyone else reported, around 10:00 AM UTC on October 31st. It might have been Halloween, and spooky, but it's certainly not fun.

Anyone else affected?
by 9rx | 2025-11-04 21:27:21+00:00
> Being a mechanic and being an engineer are both technical jobs which require skill, but one is design focused while the other is system focused.

Right. And such software-based work is always design-focused. You're writing documents that specify how the computer is expected to function. The computer takes those specifications and turns it into something functional. I think you can make a good case the latter is system work, but not something humans participate in.

In the olden days we had to write those specifications in arcane languages that were a speciality to learn. Now you can write the specifications in plain English, more or less. That's evolutionary, but since the advent of the compiler we've always been moving towards the language being more and more like English (or insert other natural language, if you prefer). Such progress is nothing new.

Perhaps it's like the difference between a manual and automatic transmission. Gearheads worried about their personhood might try to argue otherwise, but in reality you aren't not a driver if your car has an automatic transmission. It is not the exact details of the tool that defines the act you are engaging in. Likewise, you don't suddenly stop being an engineer just because the tools have now made it "easy".

> I don't really think of an engineer as being something you can do casually, it's a profession.

You're always free to come up with your own pet definition, but per the record of how the word is most commonly used out there in the world, there is no connotations to one's skill, ability, quality, or anything of that nature that is normally associated with professional engineer. It only refers to the act itself in any capacity. Which, of course, is why we also coined the term "professional engineer". That would have be entirely pointless — and therefore would have never been adopted — if "engineer" already captured that sentiment under common use.
by andreybaskov | 2025-11-04 21:27:33+00:00
Agentic browsers raise a lot of questions that were hanging there even before LLMs.

Can I ask my partner to buy a product on Amazon? Can I ask my personal assistant to buy a product on Amazon? Can I hire a contractor to buy products on Amazon? Can I communicate with a contractor via API to direct them what products to buy? What if there is no human on the other end and its an LLM?

Same issue with LinkedIn. I know execs who have assistants running their socials. Is this legal?
Show HN: PivotHire – Project delivery service as easy as e-commerce platforms
by CLCKKKKK | 2025-11-04 21:28:28+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Kevin, co-founder of PivotHire AI. We're building a platform to fix what we see as a core problem with freelance sites: clients spend more time managing freelancers than doing their own work.

Our approach is an "AI-Managed" abstraction layer. The key architectural decision is that clients and developers do not interact directly. Also, most talents are senior software developers from China that are cheap but high-value.

It's an event-driven workflow:

- A client submits a project goal in natural language.

- Our AI PM (built using LLMs) deconstructs the goal into concrete technical tasks, milestones, and deliverables.

- These tasks are routed to our vetted developer pool.

- The AI PM manages the entire lifecycle: progress tracking, check-ins, and validating deliverables before packaging the final product for the client.

The main technical hurdle we're tackling now is agent reliability. Getting it to correctly parse complex project info, monitor progress accurately, and trigger notifications via a VM-based system is non-trivial. The prompt engineering required for this kind of long-running, stateful project management is where most of our effort is.

Our stack: Next.js, Sass, shadcn/ui, and gpt-4.1-nano for the agent.

We're in the very early stages and would love to get your feedback on the core concept and our technical approach.
by yatopifo | 2025-11-04 21:28:52+00:00
> Can anyone who is not a mathematician tell me one thing they learned from this?

I can share my two take-aways.

- in the geometric sense, manifolds are spaces analogous to curved 2d surfaces in 3d that extend to an arbitrary number of dimensions

- manifolds are locally Euclidean

If I were to extrapolate from the above, i'd say that:

- we can map a Euclidean space to every point on a manifold and figure out the general transformation rules that can take us from one point's Euclidean space to another point's.

- manifolds enable us to discuss curved spaces without looking at their higher-dimension parent spaces (e.g. in the case of a sphere surface we can be content with just two dimensions without working in 3d).

Naturally, I may be totally wrong about all this since I have no knowledge on the subject...
by TZubiri | 2025-11-04 21:29:05+00:00
Additionally, there's almost no ethical use for a residential proxy. The purpose is always to deceive, at best you get lightly unethical uses like "avoiding georestrictions on IP distributors like netflix", or "avoiding controls in dictatorships" which is acknowledging that it is used to break the law, but maybe it's the wrong kind of law.

Even these soft reasons to use VPNs and residential proxies are like an alibi for bad actors, is IP 25.14.xx.xx creating a fake account on twitter to spread malware or is he downloading a show that wasn't available before? I guess we'll never know such are the limits of privacy I guess.
by ruralfam | 2025-11-04 21:29:12+00:00
Not disagreeing re: vision for quality software and new products. However this segmentation is pretty good. Most everyone buying a Macbook today wants "M" performance. Most everyone who does not care about "benchmarks" and is price sensitive (likely a surprisingly large number of folks), is put off by MB pricing. So you gimp the processor, lower the price, take a bit of a margin hit on net profit for hware, but capture lots of sales and canabalize virtually no "M" sales. Plus I would guess the Apple has done enough market analysis to understand that the folks buying this new Macbook are likely to want to subscribe to something Apple offers which will offset the lower hware margin.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-11-04 21:29:22+00:00
> I guess the increased bandwidth should at least show up on the ISP bill since that's the only place anyone would notice.

Not sure about other places, but where I live ISPs don't have bandwidth limits over which they make you pay an extra. In extreme cases they might suspend service if your usage is deemed abusive though, but I never heard of this happening to people I know IRL.
by somethoughts | 2025-11-04 21:30:25+00:00
Interestingly it's popularity or unpopularity would prove out two things - both of which are somewhat of a win win for Apple:

1.) If MacPhone/MacPad is popular then it would prove that there does exist a currently untapped, unaddressed market who wants Apple HW and are willing to pay a premium but do not want the locked down iOS garden which means more money for minimal effort.

2.) If MacPhone/MacPad is unpopular then it would prove that their motivation and hypothesis was correct - people do indeed come to Apple and pay the premium precisely for the walled garden and the convenience it affords.

If its indeed unpopular you could keep it around for a couple of years as an EU regulatory compliance device. Then you can say to any future regulator who wants to tear down the iOS walled garden - we tried that back in 2026 and nobody wanted it.