MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cbsmith | 2025-11-05 20:53:08+00:00
> The image meant you basically got whatever state the developer ended up with, frozen in time, with no indication really of how they got there.

That wasn't a function of the image system. That was a product of your version control/CI/CD systems and your familiarity with them.

Consider that Docker and other container based systems also deploy images. No reason Smalltalk has to be any different.

I did software development work in Smalltalk in the 90's. We used version control (at one point, we used PVCS, which was horrible, but Envy was pretty sweet), had a build process and build servers that would build deploy images from vanilla images. Even without all that, the Smalltalk system kept a full change log of ever single operation it performed in order. In theory, someone could wipe their changelog, but that's the moral equivalent of deleting the source code for your binary. Image-based systems are no reason to abandon good engineering practices.
by willseth | 2025-11-05 20:53:26+00:00
The lead dev driving the Chrome deprecation built a wasm polyfill https://github.com/mfreed7/xslt_polyfill. Multiple people proposed in the Github discussions leading up to this that Google simply make the polyfill ship with Chrome as an on-by-default extension that could be disabled in settings, but he wouldn't consider it.
by brandonb | 2025-11-05 20:53:38+00:00
Unfortunately, this is a limitation of nearly all nutritional studies.

Partly we use mechanistic evidence to separate cause from effect--that's part of why the article goes into detail about, e.g., how soluble fiber binds to bile in the liver. If there's an association between A and B, and a known physiological mechanism where A causes C which causes B, it makes it more likely that ultimately A is the cause of B.
by aerhardt | 2025-11-05 20:53:56+00:00
I'm confused. The article opens with:

> OpenAI is changing its policies so that its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, won’t dole out tailored medical or legal advice to users.

This already seems to contradict what you're saying.

But then:

> The AI research company updated its usage policies on Oct. 29 to clarify that users of ChatGPT can’t use the service for “tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional.”

> The change is clearer from the company’s last update to its usage policies on Jan. 29, 2025. It required users not “perform or facilitate” activities that could significantly impact the “safety, wellbeing, or rights of others,” which included “providing tailored legal, medical/health, or financial advice.”

This seems to suggest that with the Jan 25 policy using it to offer legal and medical advice to other people was already disallowed, but with the Oct 25 update the LLM will stop shelling out legal and medical advice completely.
by breve | 2025-11-05 20:54:05+00:00
Swasticars don't sell well.

The main problem with Musk's proposed pay deal is that he still gets paid billions even if he continues to fail:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/musks-record-tes...

Tesla's sales target is now to have sold 20 million cars in total by 2035. That's fewer cars in total in what will then be the 32 year history of the company than Toyota sold in the last two years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/business/elon-musk-tesla-...

Tesla's target used to be 20 million per year:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

But Tesla's board doesn't care. They got theirs:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/business/tesla-stock-sale...

https://www.afr.com/technology/life-changing-wealth-stopped-...
by Frannky | 2025-11-05 20:54:17+00:00
I think there are situations where crypto is better for legal purposes—for example, sending money via SWIFT can cost like $50, whereas using an efficient stablecoin is easier and cheaper. Another benefit is allowing agents to buy stuff in an easier and more affordable way. In general, another advantage is preventing bad governments from choking bank accounts for not legal political motivated attacks.
by jll29 | 2025-11-05 20:54:33+00:00
Cool, I installed it on a Mac with M1, which gives you a glimpse how fast live could be without bloat.

Using it shows how rotten the World Wide Web has become, with mandatory JavaScript everywhere, even on google.com, which I was not aware of.

I'm very much looking forward to Ladybird's first alpha release next August.
by fsckboy | 2025-11-05 20:54:43+00:00
>In practice the US HQ could mandate a security update that secretly uploads all data to the US but that's a whole other can of worms that I don't think anyone is ready to open.

incredibly ambiguous/unsatisfying sentence. if this french hearing is concerned about french data security, then asking a question about your "in practice" is exactly a can of worms the french would like to open.
by thisislife2 | 2025-11-05 20:54:48+00:00
I kind of wonder what the best form of added fiber should be.

There are plenty of foods rich in fiber that you don't need to consider supplements. The article itself mentions - Foods high in soluble fiber including avocados, whole grains, chickpeas, apples, lentils, broccoli, brussels sprouts, certain seeds, and artichokes. Most fruits and vegetables also have varying amount of fiber, as does some variety of rice, millets and wheat (that are common in some Asian diets). See https://www.cancer.org/cancer/survivorship/coping/nutrition/... for more.
by 1659447091 | 2025-11-05 20:54:51+00:00
And just to show how (US) universal this idea is becoming, a Texas law banning cellphones went into effect at the start of the school year.

This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while it works it's way through the courts [0]

[Texas educators praise new school cellphone ban] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/10/texas-cell-phone-ban...

[0] https://apnews.com/article/ten-commandments-bill-texas-schoo...
by tech234a | 2025-11-05 20:55:04+00:00
IIRC SketchUp 8 (released in 2010) was the last version released by Google, which had licensing allowing commercial use of the free version. After the sale to Trimble, later versions of SketchUp 8 and all future free versions become for non-commercial use only. SketchUp Make 2017 was the last free version that could run locally.
by estebank | 2025-11-05 20:55:33+00:00
Generators in particular has been blocked on the AsyncIterator trait. There are also open questions around consuming those (`for await i in stream`, or just keep to `while let Some(i) in stream.next().await`? What about parallel iteration? What about pinning obligations? Do that as part of desugaring or making it explicit?). It is a shame because it is almost orthogonal, but any given decision might not be compatible with different approaches for generators. The good news is that some people are working on it again.
by justapassenger | 2025-11-05 20:55:46+00:00
> Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US. The only thing stopping me is the permitting hassle or the contractor hassle.

Does decentralized solar plus batteries give you same amount of reliability? How many days without sunny weather can you survive without having to change your energy use habits?

Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s.
by calebm | 2025-11-05 20:55:48+00:00
Thanks for the feedback (you and all the others - both positive and negative). HN is such a great way to present ideas to smart people.

I may have been a little hyperbolic in the opening sentence, and may try to tighten up that language. It's true that I've encountered things like visualizing error gradients (in the ML space) in a non-binary way. And yes, mapping 3D to color (and 3D graphing) is nothing novel.

But, I think that the idea of visualizing equations using the question "How different are both sides?" instead of "Are both sides EXACTLY equal - Yes or No?" is a new way to think about it - I don't know of any other graphing app/calculator (besides https://fuzzygraph.com) that does it.

I think some would say that the "Fuzzy graph" of an equation is not a true graph of that equation because a "visualization transform" is being applied, and that only the conventional/binary graph is a valid graph of the equation. But even conventional graphing apps must apply a "visualization transformation" to the equation - something like: 'black' if Boolean(left(x, y)==right(x, y)) else 'white.
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-11-05 20:56:07+00:00
> Well it doesn't eclipse savings

I mean it's several hundred fold more expensive I'd call that "eclipse" but maybe you have a higher threshold for that word?

> And many will make do without a battery, just relying on power during the day.

I mean I guess that's an option if you don't want these places to advance in quality of life or produce much of anything.
by waffletower | 2025-11-05 20:56:08+00:00
I am torn -- while I love the bitter critique of std::simd's nightly builds (why bother with any public release if it is never stable?), I cringed at the critique of "(c)urrently things are well fleshed out for i32, i64, f32, and f64 types". f64 and i64 go a long way for most numerical applications -- the OP seemed snowflaky to me with that entitled concern.
by buellerbueller | 2025-11-05 20:56:15+00:00
>most people are rejecting contemporary right-wing policies and politics.

Hmm...

>No longer are we going to tolerate the intolerant. If you are willing to look past the moral failings, you are seen as part of the problem and should expect consequences. Social dynamics are at work

The woke left forcing ideological conformity loses them a lot of support from the center-left, which turns out is not a winning electoral strategy. At which point one must wonder if the wokeness is just performative and virtue signaling, rather than an attempt to gain actual political power.
by organsnyder | 2025-11-05 20:56:47+00:00
> I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid without anyone from the government ever even looking at it or taking money for it.

That's... not common (perhaps more-so in rural areas).

In my area, being connected to the grid brings a lot more hassle: the utility gets a say in how much solar you can build, as well as how it's connected. Some of it makes sense (they want to make sure you're not going to backfeed during an outage and cause a hazard to linemen), but a lot of it is them protecting their bottom line.
by taeric | 2025-11-05 20:57:26+00:00
I'm curious on the uptake of SIMD and other assembly level usage through high level code? I'd assume most is done either by people writing very low level code that directly manages the data, or by using very high level libraries that are prescriptive on what data they work with?

How many people are writing somewhat bog standard RUST/C and expect optimal assembly to be created?
by Munksgaard | 2025-11-05 20:57:40+00:00
Also, while not exactly the algorithm Raph is looking for, here is a bracket matching function (from Pareas, which he also mentions in the talk) in Futhark: https://github.com/Snektron/pareas/blob/master/src/compiler/...

I haven't studied it in depth, but it's pretty readable.
by schiffern | 2025-11-05 20:57:43+00:00
False premise. The company isn't demand limited, despite the (conspicuously implied and never actually stated) conclusion the headline desperately wanted you to reach.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45827800

I really wish people had any media literacy left. This brand of lying without lying is extremely common in modern media, and also extremely easy to spot once you know what to look for.
by Mouvelie | 2025-11-05 20:58:01+00:00
Are smart people even fulfilled ? How many smart people work on industries they can't wait to quit ? On problems they don't even care ?

I feel like everyone within 2-standard division of the IQ mean is still susceptible to the never-ending that being rich and having money is all that matters instead of, I don't know, supporting life on the only habitable planet we know.
by renewiltord | 2025-11-05 20:58:02+00:00
Yes, indeed, repeating the same thing over and over again is one form of humour. Seth McFarlane reached the pinnacle, and now Hacker News and Reddit users the world over wallow in the shallows of it. A tragedy that a 3B LLM can replicate such glory as repetitive posts about corporations and bootlickers and so on and so forth.
Show HN: Guardrail Layer – Open-source AI data privacy firewall
by tcodeking | 2025-11-05 20:59:03+00:00
I’ve been building Guardrail Layer, an open-source, self-hosted backend that acts as a data privacy firewall between your database and any AI model, dashboard, or automation tool.

It automatically enforces redactions, access control, and audit logging, so you can safely connect LLMs or analytics systems to real data without leaking sensitive information.

⸻

Recent update

Just released Global Regex Redactions — pattern-based rules (like emails, SSNs, or credit cards) that apply across all tables automatically.

Other improvements: • Expanded audit logging (create, update, delete events) • Cleaner, more modern redaction management UI • Docker setup reliability • Foundation for role-based access control

⸻

How it works • Runs locally or via Docker Compose • Connects to PostgreSQL or MySQL • Provides a web UI for managing connections, regex rules, and audit logs • Works with AI query interfaces (e.g. natural language → SQL)

⸻

Example use cases • Safely connect a local or hosted LLM to your production database • Build internal chatbots or dashboards without exposing PII • Enforce consistent privacy rules across teams or tools

⸻

It’s early-stage but functional, and I’d love feedback on what privacy or compliance features you’d want next. Repo: https://github.com/tyoung1996/guardrail-layer
by rbanffy | 2025-11-05 20:59:04+00:00
> (still maintain and sold a high price)

I was surprised a couple years back they still maintain Mantis, a 4GL I used on a mainframe (it was kind of Rails for the 3270 terminal). Even the documentation is hideously expensive. I asked if they had a “hobby license” I could use to run under Hercules. They seemed genuinely perplexed that someone would imagine they would allow me to use their software without sacrificing my firstborn.
Show HN: Echo – first personal CRM with voice mode
by DmitryDolgopolo | 2025-11-05 20:59:16+00:00
Hi everyone, Dima here

Echo is a rethinking of what personal CRMs could be. I kept meeting amazing people, but weeks later I’d forget who was who or lose the thread entirely. Existing CRMs were built for sales teams, not humans. They're never up to date, and it's impossible to find relevant information.

I built Echo to be your personal assistant for relationships. Met someone new? -> say "Add John to contacts" Want to remember something? -> say "Sarah said she loves pizza." Looking for someone? -> say "Who do I know that's an engineer?"

Would love to hear your thoughts on it!

You can start using it for free.
by jmole | 2025-11-05 20:59:16+00:00
"I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid"

Where exactly do you live? I'm not saying you're lying, but this smells like a tall tale. You can easily buy solar panels and batteries, and if no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.

Maybe what you're saying is, "my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?
by kjellsbells | 2025-11-05 20:59:37+00:00
Exactly the same behavior as a conversation with an idealized human doctor, perhaps. One who isn't tired, bored, stressed, biased, or just overworked.

The value that folks get from chatgpt for medical advice is due in large part to the unhurried pace of the interaction. Didn't get it quite right? No doctor huffing and tapping their keyboard impatiently. Just refine the prompt and try as many times as you like.

For the 80s HNers out there, when I hear people talk about talking with chatgpt, Kate Bush's song A Deeper Understanding comes immediately to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deeper_Understanding?wprov=sfl...
by gdulli | 2025-11-05 20:59:39+00:00
A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today. All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.

Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights.

We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.
by mothballed | 2025-11-05 20:59:48+00:00
Interesting. My utility let me do my own service entrance and everything. They didn't even give a shit what I connected it to. I ended up powering a whole house and a trailer without anyone from the power company even looking at either of them (I added them after I built a 200 amp service entrance as just a stubbed entrance with no load).

If I added a solar system they would neither care nor have any idea. Only the government cares here.
by convolvatron | 2025-11-05 20:59:54+00:00
the distinction matters less and less. Inside the GPU there is already plenty of locality to exploit (catches, schedulers, warps). nvlink is a switch memory access network, so that already gets you some fairly large machines with multiple kinds of locality.

throwing infiniband or IP on top is really structurally more of the same.

Chapel definitely can target a single GPU.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-05 21:00:01+00:00
I'm inclined to think of

https://morbidology.com/the-town-that-got-away-with-murder/

I was talking to my wife the other day and she was testing a rather hard position which was that in traditional cultures disabled or crazy people were probably often quietly killed (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men)

You could imagine that a society that thinks that way could be well organized into vigilante groups that would eliminate crime by eliminating criminals. From the viewpoint of our society that seems terrible problematic (do they kill deaf people? all non-conformists? gay people?) but if our civilization collapses the survivors will turn their back on everything it stood for and the next nation might start with a bill of responsibilities rather than a bill of rights.
by calebm | 2025-11-05 21:00:02+00:00
I'm not sure I've tried that - might good idea. I've actually been playing with all kind so of visualizations - I've done most of my art as stand-alone Python scripts. Here's an open-source starting point for doing this kind of math art in Python: https://github.com/calebmadrigal/truthygraph.py. You might want to try your idea yourself :)
by KrisDev52 | 2025-11-05 21:00:06+00:00
Wappify is a Firefox extension for Android that lets you install any website as a true standalone app in full-screen, with no address bar, and your favorite extensions (like uBlock Origin adblocker and/or SponsorBlock) still active.

Firefox has a built-in "Add to Home Screen" feature, but it only works properly on sites that define a valid web manifest (like X or Reddit). Most sites don't, so instead of an "Install app" option, you only get a regular shortcut that opens in a normal browser tab.

Wappify fixes that. It automatically provides the missing manifest data (name, icon, theme color, etc.), allowing you to install any site as a real app.

For example, you can: Install YouTube as a real full-screen app with Adblock and SponsorBlock active (and more extensions if you have any).

Turn any website (news, tools, dashboards, etc.) into a standalone app. You can choose the title of the app and choose an icon or upload your own icon.

How it works: - Install the Wappify extension on Firefox for Android. - Open any site. - Open the Wappify extension and hit "Wappify" - The browser will reload and and now there is an option to install the site.

An app icon appears on your home screen. Launch it anytime in full-screen mode, with all your favorite Firefox extensions still working.
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-05 21:00:07+00:00
Good user-facing software tends to have a coherent vision, and that involves getting features cut that people put a lot of time and effort into; even though those features have value, it's possible they don't have value in the product under development.

I don't really have enough context to say whether that was the case here. Mostly I'm raising the comment to note that this is an issue in commercial software too, but the sting is immediately moderated by "At least you got paid." It's a lot easier to see one's work fail to be reflected in the finished product when you can dry your tears with the bills in your money-pile (and I don't know how open source competes in things as cut-throat and taste-opinionated as UI when that continues to be true without solving the problem by injecting money into the process, which carries its own risks).
by soVeryTired | 2025-11-05 21:01:44+00:00
It confused me a lot - I cancelled the denominators in my head too.

But then I realised they're just plotting

y/(x^2+y^2) - (x+1)/(x^2+y^2) = c

and colouring by c (i.e. a heatmap, as others have mentioned in the thread).

That's why you get a more interesting image than you'd get with y - (x + 1) = c
by isr | 2025-11-05 21:01:44+00:00
Hmm, well I don't know exactly when Monticello was first developed, but it was certainly in heavy use by the early 2000s. How is that "meh" when compared to ... cvs & subversion?

I don't know much about the systems used in commercial smalltalks of the 90s, but I'm sure they weren't "meh" either (others more knowledgeable than me about them can chime in).

image-centric development is seductive (I'm guilty). But the main issue isn't "we don't know what code got put where, and by whom". There were sophisticated tools available almost from the get go for that.

Its more a problem of dependencies not being pruned, because someone, somewhere wants to use it. So lots of stuff remained in the "blessed" image (I'm only referring to squeak here) which really ought not to have been in the standard distribution. And because it was there, some other unrelated project further down the line used a class here, a class there.

So when you later realise it needed to be pruned, it wasn't that easy.

But nevertheless, it was still done. Witness cuis.

In other words, it was a cultural problem, not a tooling problem. It's not that squeak had too few ways of persisting & distributing code - it had too many.

IMHO, the main problem was never the image, or lack of tools. It was lack of modularisation. All classes existed in the same global namespace. A clean implementation of modules early on would have been nice.
by giobox | 2025-11-05 21:01:53+00:00
It seems Apple have added support for shipping alternate browser engines in the EU, and could in theory be sold using Apple's own store there, as well as third party ones:

https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...

FWIW, it does look like Apple have made it pretty hard to qualify to ship one though! To best of my knowledge, no one has actually shipped one yet in the EU.

> https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...
by _puk | 2025-11-05 21:02:19+00:00
Edit: Parent has edited out the comment ranting about "the normal people using chatGPT as a modern WebMD".

This is not shutting anything down other than businesses using ChatGPT to give medical advice [0].

Users can still ask questions, get answers, but the terms have been made clearer around reuse of that response (you cannot claim that it is medical advice).

I imagine that a startup that specialises in "medical advice" infers an even greater level of trust than simply asking ChatGPT, especially to "the normal people".

0: https://lifehacker.com/tech/chatgpt-can-still-give-legal-and...