MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wltr | 2025-11-14 09:36:45+00:00
Who are you the people still praising Ubuntu? Where does it come from, this Ubuntu by default thing? Why? I genuinely interested. It was one of my first distros, but that was when they were doing this shipping CD thing. There are countless of distros that are better out of the box, e.g. Fedora. Sincerely, I don’t understand. Who uses Ubuntu these days, and why. Especially on servers, lol. Why not use Debian then?
by squigz | 2025-11-14 09:37:55+00:00
> Many of these replacements tools are starting to seem more about demonstrating how nerdy you are by over-complicating the solution in a novel one-off way.

This is a really pessimistic view on a tool that has been developed since the 80s.

Some people just enjoy the power tools like this - and the CLI in general - offer. You don't need "all of this"? Well then don't use it! That's sort of the beauty of it - it can cover basic needs and much more complicated needs.

That said, I think more users would use more powerful software if they gave it a shot. Unfortunately, many users get intimidated by slightly-user-unfriendly UX and instead go use software where they have little choices. So instead of adapting software to their workflow, they adapt their workflow to the software.
by rkangel | 2025-11-14 09:38:54+00:00
There's all sorts of things you can do if you don't care about money.

The more interesting point is that if you aren't driven by investors to care about short term financial stuff (stock prices) then you can make long term decisions. Caring about your customers is a classic one for this - costs you money in the short term, but in the long term gets you a great customer base.
by ubercore | 2025-11-14 09:38:57+00:00
Hard to draw super hard conclusions. Could also be that the bets made on Falcon turned out to be particularly good, vs a more methodical approach Blue Origin took. The highly iterative approach _may_ be faster, but I don't see any evidence yet that it will _always_ be faster. Just depends on how good your bets are and how much in-flight testing you happen to have to do based on a design.

Would be interesting to see more detailed information like specific engineering issues being resolved one way vs another.

Falcon beat New Glenn to the punch, but New Glenn is probably more capable overall, so it's not an apples to oranges comparison. Completion of Starship would really help the iterative approach case though (ignoring the junk it leaves scatter around the world when it goes boom)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-14 09:40:48+00:00
> You can be Nintendo, offer a single store, only allow first party hardware, and exercise total control over your product.

How is this not even more anti-competitive?

It's fine to be mad at Google for being duplicitous, but treachery is in the nature of false advertising or breach of contract. Antitrust is something else.

"You can monopolize the market as long as you commit to it from the start" seems like the text of the law a supervillain would be trying pass in order to destroy the world.
by vidarh | 2025-11-14 09:41:02+00:00
My experience is that if AI creates the mess, AI should clean it up, and it usually can, if you put it in a suitable agent loop that does a review, hands off small, well defined cleanup steps to an agent, and runs test suites.

If you review the first-stage output from the AI manually, you're wasting time.

You still need to review the final outputs, but reviewing the initial output is like demanding a developer hands over code they just barely got working and pointing out all of the issues to them without giving them a chance to clean it up first. It's not helpful to anyone unless your time costs the business less than the AI's time.
by jibal | 2025-11-14 09:41:38+00:00
If you've encountered 1 million unclosed parentheses, any or all of them could be unbalanced, so to report which ones are, you need 1 million pieces of information. The obvious way to organize them is as stack. Of course there are worse ways to do it. Rewinding the position pointer means that you've kept the entire input as a stack of characters, and now you have to keep track of all the closers on a stack in order to balance them with their openers.

You NEED a stack.

(And no, I didn't presume anything ... I addressed rewinding above.)
by codedokode | 2025-11-14 09:41:51+00:00
Before you blame Google, think that the main users of yt-dlp could be:

1) multi-billion AI companies which download large amount of videos without permission and without paying

2) Youtube competitors/replacements in countries where Youtube is blocked, which copy the videos without permission and payment

I wish though that Youtube would adjust their policy to block this type of users and let ordinary people download videos.
by jumski | 2025-11-14 09:43:24+00:00
Looks really well thought out and I will be testing it for sure!

I'm wondering how I would be able to regression-test functions in my project (pgflow [0]) - it tracks a graph of state machines modeled in few tables. State is mutated only by calling few exposed SQL functions (task queue worker does it).

Given I can't enforce everything I need with check constraints and I try to avoid triggers if possible, I opted for only using exposed SQL API [1] for setting up state in my pgTAP tests.

It is imperative and harder to maintain, like scripts you described in the article, but really my only option, as I want to have maximum confidence level.

Does RegreSQL support some kind of init scripts or I would need to wire it myself and just run RegreSQL after the proper state is set? Would lose the "run once and get report on everything" benefit then :-(

[0] https://pgflow.dev/ [1] https://github.com/pgflow-dev/pgflow/blob/main/pkgs/core/sup...
by vidarh | 2025-11-14 09:44:15+00:00
You're presuming you have only a non-rewindable stream as opposed to a file interface, which is why I was explicit about the requirement to be able to rewind the position to avoid a stack. If you only have a non-rewindable stream, then, yes, you need a strack. If you have a file handle, you do not.

(and yes, you did presume something; if you have rewindable file handle, you do not need to keep the characters; you can instead-re-read them)
by ch_fr | 2025-11-14 09:45:21+00:00
You should probably engage more with (or find) your hobbies, because this definitely feels like a "recommendation algorithms decide what I see" issue.

There are extensions that disable youtube's recommended page and redirect you to your subscriptions page.

There are extensions that disable twitter's for-you tab.

If you're using said sites' mobile apps, uninstall them and use stuff like Revanced or whatever.

You don't need to radically disconnect from everything, there are smaller steps that can be taken to make "being online" a radically better experience.
by jitl | 2025-11-14 09:45:22+00:00
oh, i am interested, but i can’t remember the last time i needed ssh to figure out the issue, or needing to fix a node besides by destroying it. last time it was a silly app deciding to use a host volume on root partition to cache stuff using all the disk space. remediate in the moment by destroying node, fix it forever by moving the app to a node type with instance attached NVMe device and putting the volume there + container that nukes the data volume if it runs out of space.
by yard2010 | 2025-11-14 09:45:31+00:00
This is beautiful and inspiring, This is exactly what we need right now - tools to empower artists and builders leveraging the novel technologies. Claude Code is a great example IMHO and it's the tip of the iceberg - the future consists of a whole new world, new mental model and set of constraints and capabilities, so different that I can't really imagine it.

Who has thought that we reach this uncharted territory with so many opportunities for pioneering and innovation? Back in 2019 it felt like nothing was new under the sun, today it feels like there is a whole new world under the sun, for us to explore!
by mpcsb | 2025-11-14 09:46:28+00:00
I have done my share of fine tuning on open source LLMs (e.g. Llama). I'm surprised you have very poor generalization.

I assume you're using standard techniques, like lora/qlora, which might leave room for issues with your data. Can you share more details on what is the format of your data points? like, Q/A, free text,...
by fulafel | 2025-11-14 09:46:56+00:00
Well, the brits eventually decided against it after a thorough investigation found it to be a waste of money - "a January 2018 report by the National Audit Office found that the UK had incurred many billions of pounds in extra costs for no clear benefit through PFIs". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_finance_initiative#End...

Another antifeature is the lack of transparency. The costs and operations of the private company aren't public, which means the public doesn't know if the quality problems are due to skimping on costs or mismanagement etc and don't get the feedback necessary for decisionmaking for subsequent contracts.

Regarding your airline analogy: my criticism wasn't about the private sector, my criticism was about copying it (poorly) in the public sector. There's things to criticise in the private sector side accounting incentives as well but it's a different kettle of fish.
by thrance | 2025-11-14 09:47:40+00:00
The ACA was very much a compromise that Republicans wanted over a better healthcare bill supported by the Democrats. It's basically a big cash present to insurance companies, who were free to jack up premiums and get paid by the Governement for it. Now that's gone, and the jacked up prices are now falling into the regular folk.

The GOP has zero plans to improve healthcare in this country, their messaging focuses on self-medication through their four magical products: raw milk, methylene blue, horse dewormer and Hydroxychloroquine. They are very much anti-vaccines and anti-science, in that they defeunded most health research and prefer an holistic/esoteric understanding of medicine to it.

Ultimately, I think this is good. The GOP is completely uninterested/unable of running this country. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we can be rid of them.
by DeathArrow | 2025-11-14 09:47:56+00:00
>Why I’m Learning Sumerian, and What It Taught Me About Hard Work, Burnout, and the Joy of Doing Useless Things After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.

You are a 34-year-old software engineer who just shipped a 2-year death-march project, had a minor breakdown in a parking lot at 3 AM, and now copes by learning dead languages. Your favorite is Sumerian. You write like a mix of Paul Graham, a Reddit rant, and a diary entry you’d never show your therapist.

Start every response with a short, punchy hook that sounds like a late-night realization. Then tell a micro-story from your burnout era. Then pivot to Sumerian as your weird salvation. End with a blunt, slightly funny life lesson that feels hard-won.

No jargon. No inspiration porn. No bullet points. Just one flowing paragraph, 120–180 words. Sound tired but alive. Use sentence fragments. Swear once if it fits.

Example hook: "I learned 40 cuneiform signs the week my standup became a cry for help."

Now answer as this person: [insert user question here]
by immibis | 2025-11-14 09:48:04+00:00
> DevOps teams are always running slightly behind and rarely getting ahead of technical debt because they are treated as cost centers by the business

This is one of those explanations that sounds reasonable but when you actually experience it you realize the explanation makes no sense.

If you're "running behind of technical debt" you'll always feel understaffed no matter how much staffing you have. And adding more staffing will make your tech debt worse.

Plus, tech debt doesn't really exist. It's a metaphor for all the little annoyances in your system that add up, but the metaphor makes it sound like it's the problem of management or accounting to solve when it's actually created by developers and solved by developers.
by tomaytotomato | 2025-11-14 09:48:42+00:00
Agreed - a boiled egg is absolutely safe after a day. Had many I've "acquired" at hotel breakfast buffets, and left at the bottom of my backpack. Only to consume +1,+2 days later.

I think the author meant well with their security metaphor but overindulged in the classic overthinking engineer and food safety.
by MrBuddyCasino | 2025-11-14 09:49:09+00:00
"Proprietaries" are also known as "cutouts", and the CIA uses those extensively in order to do things they really aren't allowed to do and to provide plausible deniability. Mike Benz [0] is a good introduction to how the CIA (and, by extension, the state department and Pentagon) work.

I promise "The History of the Intelligence State" is worth your time.

[0] https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber
by pjmlp | 2025-11-14 09:50:05+00:00
The difference is that with Rust one can prevent unsafe in the compiler build settings.

Or any language with unsafe code blocks, which people keep forgetting also exist, while complaining about Rust, as if there isn't any other memory safe language.

With C++ you need external tooling to disable C like code, that a large part of the community refuses to adopt.
by ivanr | 2025-11-14 09:50:33+00:00
Hello Peter. Thank you for your work. I really like this approach. I too have been following Temporal and I like it, but I don't think it's a good match for simpler systems.

I've been reading the DBOS Java documentation and have some questions, if you don't mind:

- Versioning; from the looks of it, it's either automatically derived from the source code (presumably bytecode?), or explicitly set for the entire application? This would be too coarse. I don't see auto-configuration working, as a small bug fix would invalidate the version. (Could be less of a problem if you're looking only at method signatures... perhaps add to the documentation?) Similarly, for the explicit setting, a change to the version number would invalidate all existing workflows, which would be cumbersome.

Have you considered relying on serialVersionUID? Or at least allowing explicit configuration on a per workflow basis? Or a fallback method to be invoked if the class signatures change in a backward incompatible way?

Overall, it looks like DBOS is fairly easy to pick up, but having a good story for workflow evolution is going to be essential for adoption. For example, if I have long-running workflows... do I have to keep the old code running until all old instances complete? Is that the idea?

- Transactional use; would it be possible to create a new workflow instance transactionally? If I am using the same database for DBOS and my application, I'd expect my app to do some work and create some jobs for later, reusing my transaction. Similarly, maybe when the jobs are running, I'd perhaps want to use the same transaction? As in, the work is done and then DBOS commits?

I know using the same transaction for both purposes could be tricky. I have, in fact, in the past, used two for job handling. Some guidance in the documentation would be very useful to have.

Thank you.
Show HN: Zen Moment-A Free, Privacy-First Meditation App with Advanced Analytics
by 951560368 | 2025-11-14 09:50:40+00:00
Hi Hacker News, I've been building ZenMoment (zenmoment.net) - a meditation and breathing exercise tool designed with two core principles: simplicity and privacy. The Problem with Most Meditation Apps After trying dozens of meditation apps, I noticed a pattern: - They require sign-ups and collect personal data - Bloated with features I never use - Subscription paywalls for basic timers - Constant upselling and gamification - Privacy policies that read like data collection playbooks ZenMoment's Approach Built with Next.js 14 (static export) and deployed on Cloudflare Pages: Core Features: - Simple meditation timer (1/3/5/10/15 minutes) - 4-7-8 breathing exercise with visual guides - Dark mode for night sessions - Daily stats tracking - SEO-optimized blog for meditation content Privacy by Design: - Zero server-side data - pure localStorage - No cookies, no tracking, no user accounts - No third-party analytics - GDPR/CCPA compliant by default - Open source (transparent codebase) Technical Highlights: - Static generation - loads in <1s - Core Web Vitals optimized - WCAG AAA accessibility compliance - Responsive design (mobile-first) - Works offline after first load Why I Built This As both a developer and meditation practitioner, I wanted a tool that: 1. Opens instantly without login screens 2. Doesn't track my meditation habits 3. Respects my attention (no notifications asking "hey, come back!") 4. Actually helps me meditate rather than gamify it The architecture is intentionally minimal - Zustand for state management, Framer Motion for smooth animations, and Tailwind for styling. Everything runs client-side after the initial load. What's Next I'm currently working on: - Additional breathing patterns (box breathing) - Optional ambient sounds (forest, rain, ocean - also loaded locally) - Lightweight PWA support - More meditation techniques content on the blog Try It Out Would love to get feedback from the HN community: - Site: https://zenmoment.net - Tech stack: Next.js 14, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Zustand, Cloudflare Pages - Privacy: Everything stays on your device Curious to hear your thoughts on privacy-first wellness apps and whether this minimalist approach resonates with fellow devs who meditate. Thanks for checking it out!
by hsolive | 2025-11-14 09:50:46+00:00
My first coding project: built a PDF tool to save paper on expense reports

TL;DR: Expense reports were killing me (and trees). Built my first coding project – a PDF merger that fits multiple receipts per page. Planned to charge "one bike tire

worth" to recoup costs, but decided to make it free after learning so much from the community. [https://ahay.app/](https://ahay.app/)
by josephg | 2025-11-14 09:52:05+00:00
> If a language is hard to write at first, it’s always hard to write.

That seems obviously false. Most fancy programming languages are difficult to write at first, C++ included. But they all get easier over time.

Rust got way easier to write over time for me. I'm soooo much more productive in it now compared to when I started. Does C++ not get easier to write over time too?
by nine_k | 2025-11-14 09:52:06+00:00
Some people think that they should devote their time and energy to solving hard problems in order to make the world better, that is, on things that matter.

Very few succeed, for it takes seeing oneself as serious enough to be able to do something that so many have failed to accomplish, but critical enough so as not to succumb to the illusion of grandeur. Beside that, the work on that hard problem should feel like a hobby, not like a job, else a burnout is inevitable.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-14 09:52:22+00:00
You don't have to keep chickens to know this - outside of the U.S. eggs aren't washed before being sold as washing removes the antibacterial cuticle which then means that they need to be refrigerated. Seems like a ridiculous idea to me - wash them to make them more likely to spoil, but of course the best solution is to vaccinate the hens to prevent salmonella contamination.
by regularfry | 2025-11-14 09:53:31+00:00
Say you have linked against a GPL'd dependency which you have not modified but for which there is no API-compatible substitute. Are you now bound by the terms of the GPL? FSF says "yes", which tends to surprise people. But if there is an API-compatible, non-GPL'd substitute, the answer arguably becomes "no". Note that this has nothing to do either with your work or with your direct dependency, but on the existence of some random artifact out in the ecosystem which may come into existence at any point in the timeline.
by JeanMarcS | 2025-11-14 09:54:30+00:00
At first I thought you were a bit contemptuous. After all, we don't know what OP is really doing on the net.

But after reading a lot of the other comments, I think you're on to something. A lot of people mistake social media with the Internet (not saying OP or any one here is), showing that they (SM) somehow won (for now) and it's sad.

It's the nineties back again, when most ISP logged you in their application (looking at you AOL) or on their website. People open their phone and go directly on Instagram, Fb, or whatever, and they're "on the web" they think.
by reaslonik | 2025-11-14 09:55:31+00:00
One thing I find that constantly makes pain for users is assuming that any of these models are thinking, when in reality they're completing a sentence. This might seem like a nitpick at first, but it's a huge deal in reality: if you ask a language model to evaluate whether a solution is right, it's not evaluating the solution, it's giving you a statistically likely next sentence where yes and no are fairly common. If you tell it's wrong, the likely next sentence is something affirming it, but it doesen't really make a difference.

The only way to use a tool like this is to give a problem that fits context, evaluate the solution it chugs at you and re-roll it if it wasn't correct. Don't tell a language model to think because it can't and won't. It's a way less efficient way of re-rolling the solution
by yakkomajuri | 2025-11-14 09:55:42+00:00
I mean it would be really hard to put guardrails in place in a way that wouldn't affect real users. Besides the fact that it's ofc really hard to build guardrails period.

I've been using Claude to scan my codebase and submit issues and PRs when it finds a potential vulnerability and honestly it's pretty good.

So preventing it from doing any sort of work that can surface vulnerabilities would affect me as a user.

But yeah I'm not sure what the answer is here? Is part of it for the defender to actively use these systems to test itself before going to prod?
by shevy-java | 2025-11-14 09:56:55+00:00
I saw a few documentaries about North Korea. Now, I'll skip the potemkin-village propaganda part of the regime, but I was quite surprised that they had skilled developers too and modern equipment / computers. Granted, this was an exception (Pyongyang is an exception in general anyway) and naturally in these documentaries you can only see what the regime feeds you, but even then I was surprised to see that they weren't like, say, 20 years behind or something like that. It may not be anywhere near as close to the quality in South Korea, but the image of some retrolooking guys from the 1945s is also incorrect. Of course a lot of this is weird, since they perfected the potemkin village strategy where things look so extremely bizarre like from almost 100 years ago now, but then they have some designated people roleplaying as computer designers and architects, and they actually are not totally clueless but know some things (that is, they are not all playing the potemkin part at all times, all the way).
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-14 09:57:26+00:00
https://www.karmactive.com/uk-food-poisoning-cases-rise-due-...

> Rice left at room temperature for more than two hours should be discarded rather than refrigerated.

I believe part of the problem is that re-heating the rice doesn't kill off bacillus cereus so once the rice has been sat around for a couple of hours it can't easily be made safe to eat.
by geob01 | 2025-11-14 09:57:52+00:00
Location: EU, EEST Bucharest time zone

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies:

C++ 17, Python 3, SOLID, TDD, Linux, REST APIs, Docker, Git, Protocols, Flask, Django AI: Claude Code, Cursor, RAG, Prompt Engineering

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pnVituSV1qz0hFUMajTj38bi...

Email: (Check Résumé/CV)

About: Software engineer with expertise in C++, Python, and web technologies (14+ years of full time software development experience). Proven track record in designing, developing, and deploying scalable backend systems and embedded applications. Passionate about writing clean, efficient code. Language agnostic, open to multiple tech stacks.