MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Using GitHub Pages as zero-cost APT repository with global CDN
by vejeta | 2025-11-01 18:21:55+00:00
I discovered an interesting approach to software distribution while solving a packaging problem: using GitHub Pages infrastructure to host a production APT repository.

*The setup:* - GitHub Actions builds .deb packages for multiple distributions - GitHub Releases stores the binary packages - GitHub Pages serves APT repository metadata (Packages, Release files) - Custom domain provides professional presentation - GPG signing ensures package authenticity

*What makes this compelling:* - *Zero costs:* No hosting fees, unlimited bandwidth via Cloudflare CDN - *Global distribution:* Better performance than most personal servers - *Zero maintenance:* No servers to patch, backup, or monitor - *Enterprise reliability:* 99.9%+ uptime backed by GitHub SLA - *Automatic HTTPS:* Security by default

*Real-world results:* - Users report faster downloads than official mirrors - Repository accessible globally with <100ms response times - Completely automated updates via CI/CD

*The broader implication:* This democratizes software distribution infrastructure. Small projects and individual developers can now provide enterprise-grade package distribution without the traditional barriers of cost and complexity.

Previously, running a proper APT repository required: - Dedicated servers ($10-50/month minimum) - Bandwidth costs (expensive at scale) - Maintenance overhead (security updates, monitoring) - Global CDN setup (complex and costly)

Now: Push to git, everything else is automated and free.

*Technical implementation:* https://github.com/vejeta/stremio-debian *Live repository:* https://debian.vejeta.com *Architecture details:* https://vejeta.com/from-documentation-to-distribution-the-co...

This pattern could be valuable for any project needing to distribute Linux packages at scale without infrastructure investment.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-01 18:22:01+00:00
You seem pretty informed on this stuff. Do you have any insight into why I’m hearing, at least anecdotally, a much higher failure rate among their desktop offerings over their laptops? My M1 Pro Mac Studio crapped out after 2.5 years! Anytime it went to sleep it would kernel panic and restart. It got all green with their diagnostic test, they did a full firmware refresh, literally nothing could fix it and they had no idea what it was. They wanted me to pay over $700 to replace the logic board and weren’t even sure if that would fix it. Also, the ethernet port failed after a year.

My buddy has almost the exact same story about his M1 iMac. Just under 4 years, now it crashes and forces a safe mode boot randomly. The computer can take upwards of 10 minutes to even start up. They gave him the same business, exact same repair offering, and he’s moving on like I am. I’ve got 1 other friend with a similar unfolding right now, none of these situations were with laptops.
by dathinab | 2025-11-01 18:22:33+00:00
non of the listed architectures have official Debian support anymore

i.e. they are only still around because they haven't caused any major issues and someone bothered to fix them up from time to time on their own free time

so yes, you probably won't get them back in once they are out as long as a company doesn't shoulder the (work time) bill for it (and with it I mean long term maintenance more then the cost of getting them in)

but for the same reason they have little to no relevance when it comes to any future changes which might happen to get them kicked out (as long as no company steps up and shoulders the (work time) bill for keeping them maintained
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-11-01 18:22:35+00:00
Exactly, this rude and insulting behavior is why many people shy away from open source. Not everybody has the time and mental capacity to engage in ideological battles about software architecture.

We should really hold more value to keeping existing user setups working. Breakages are incredibly damaging and might very well have a bigger impact than insecure defaults.
by esseph | 2025-11-01 18:23:03+00:00
https://abc7ny.com/post/man-falsely-jailed-nypds-facial-reco...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/24/met-polic...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01634-z

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/facial-recognition...

https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2479&con...

Yeah it's pretty fucking shit, actually.

Here's the science.
by cpitman | 2025-11-01 18:23:09+00:00
Yeah, I was thinking of the same study. Looking at just the conversation on HN, lots of people are installing solar. Solar reduces the amount of energy used by that customer, but does not lower the cost of infrastructure to distribute power to that customer at all. And the cost of electricity is dominated by distribution and transmission, not generation. With an increased share of costs going to overhead infrastructure, the cost per watt goes up. Higher consumption increases the share of costs due to generation, and cost per watt goes down.

"Contrary to these concerns, our analysis finds that state-level load growth in recent years (through 2024) has tended to reduce average retail electricity prices. Fig. 5 depicts this relationship for 2019–2024: states with the highest load growth experienced reductions in real prices, whereas states with contracting loads generally saw prices rise."
by alephnerd | 2025-11-01 18:23:48+00:00
> you (c-suite, boards) aren’t giving direction then how are the middle managers supposed to know what to build so that it aligns with long term growth goals...

> This feels like abdicating responsibility...

How a tech company is supposed to work is:

1. You get feedback from a cohort of customers. This is primarily collected by the CEO and Sales, as well as PMs.

2. Based on feedback collected, you then decide what to prioritize or build. This is primarily done by Product Management

3. Based on the scoped feature, you then try to understand how long it takes to build and what is the expected cost to build. This is primarily done by Engineering Management and a bit of Product Management

4. Based on the scoped proposal, now you try to project net new ARR and COGS that can be attributed to that proposal. This is done by Product Management with coordination with Sales and a subset of Engineering Management

5. Based on the set of proposals that have come in from all PMs and EMs, you now decide which ones make sense with existing customer demand, and which can drive revenue. This is done by Product and Engineering Leadership.

6. Based on those proposals that passed muster, you now propose an annual operating plan (AOP) to the board to justify headcount allocation. This is done by the C-Suite.

In a normal tech company, the primary steps (2-5) are done without the CEO in the conversation because that is not the job of the CEO. Their job is supposed to be the Sales and Customer Relations Manager for your largest 20 accounts, Investor Relation Management, and arbitrate between the various different functions within an organization.

A CEO is not expected to take part in the larger product creation lifecycle because it creates fear amongst ICs, because no one below the VP level wants to give a CEO unadulterated feedback - even if they really trust them - because of the power differential. This is why most CEO-driven initiatives have been severe boondoggles, such as Zuckerberg and the Metaverse, because no one could tell Mark otherwise and expect to keep their job - even people as powerful internally as Sheryl Sandberg (COO), Mike Schroepfer (CTO), and Marne Levine (CBO).

We are all adults. It is expected that people in your reporting structure are adults who are aligned with the primary incentive of the business - generate growing revenue while maintaining or enhancing COGS.

Mind you, this is the ideal world. Like everything else, humans muck it up. Boards, C-Suites, Mid-Level managers, and line level ICs all have various relationships with each other, and in a lot of cases, rational business decisions are disincentivized in order to prioritize personal decisions.
by jonahbenton | 2025-11-01 18:23:48+00:00
I read the Omelas story differently but maybe is the same. It's just a predatory dominance play. Some people get the dopamine hit from dominance, so for them it is a double win- their stuff is funded by others and it is the "weakness" of others (perceived by the dominant) that produces the funding. Having and eating the cake, etc.
by qsort | 2025-11-01 18:23:48+00:00
If you're working like that then the prompt is the code and the LLM is the interpreter, and it's not obvious to me that it would be "better" than just running it normally, especially since an LLM with that level of capability could definitely help you with coding, no?

I think part of the issue is that most frameworks really suck. Web programming isn't that complicated at its core, the overengineering is mind boggling at times.

Thinking in the limit, if you have to define some type of logic unambiguously, would you want to do it in English?

Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud, it's pretty cool that this works at all, interesting project!
by pstuart | 2025-11-01 18:23:56+00:00
Apparently so: https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-pronatal-policy-work-it-did-...

Daycare is significant financial burden: https://blog.dol.gov/2024/11/19/new-data-childcare-costs-rem...

Of course the expected response is "that's the mother's job" but millions of families need both parents working to get by.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-01 18:24:01+00:00
The main issue was shipping it without proper runtime support, and even nowadays async/await is synonym with Tokio.

Look at .NET, it took almost a decade to sort out async/await across all platform and language layers, and even today there are a few gotchas.

https://github.com/gerardo-lijs/Asynchronous-Programming

Rust still has a similar path to trail, with async traits, better Pin ergonomics, async lambdas, async loops,..... (yes I know some of them have been dealt with).
by Certhas | 2025-11-01 18:24:18+00:00
So this is typical of criticism of the EU democratic structure: It's just factually wrong. The EU Parliament can dismiss the commission. From Wikipedia:

"The Parliament also has the power to censure the Commission by a two-thirds majority which will force the resignation of the entire Commission from office. As with approval, this power has never been explicitly used, but when faced with such a vote, the Santer Commission then resigned of their own accord."

The fact that the whole democratic setup is highly complex is in itself a problem. But the concrete deficits people mention are never true or don't apply to other democracies either...

In practice the EU Parliament has been a lot more trouble for the executive than is typical in national bodies. The one valid point is that the parliament does not have the right to initiate legislation itself. That is unusual, but in practice many people who are actually close to political processes seem to say this is mostly symbolic, as national bodies can't really draft effective legislation without cooperation from the executive either... Stil definitely something I would love to see addressed.
by hyko | 2025-11-01 18:24:32+00:00
The fatal problem with LLM-as-runtime-club isn’t performance. It’s ops (especially security).

When the god rectangle fails, there is literally nobody on earth who can even diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. Reasoning about the system is effectively impossible. And the vulnerability of the system is almost limitless, since it’s possible to coax LLMs into approximations of anything you like: from an admin dashboard to a sentient potato.

“zero UI consistency” is probably the least of your worries, but object permanence is kind of fundamental to how humans perceive the world. Being able to maintain that illusion is table stakes.

Despite all that, it’s a fun experiment.
by nnnnico | 2025-11-01 18:24:53+00:00
I tried this too! Where every button on the page triggered a get or post request, but the consistency between views was non existent lol, every refresh showed a different UI Definitely fixable with memory for the views and stuff though but keeping it pure like this is a very cool experiment. Since yours is using a actual storage maybe You could try also persisting page code or making the server stateful and running eval() on generated code. Love this
by blfr | 2025-11-01 18:24:54+00:00
While I get the surprising modernness of Aurelius' writing, I don't get the fascination with him since he ultimately failed at his most important task: choosing a reliable heir. Maybe he should have cared more and be more attached. Maybe the lesson here is that leaders should actually be engaged. Caesar may have committed a genocide and caused a civil war but he hit his KPIs with the state of Rome and Octavian.

Meanwhile Trump's "You do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter" is a tremendous insight for someone in a relatable position. A production system is down, some deal is falling apart, company going bankrupt, someone clowned on you live on tv? These matter but we're not in the ER here, no one's dying, and certainly not 400k people, keep perspective.
by nickpinkston | 2025-11-01 18:26:28+00:00
Feels like, while there are people (like me) who are childfree by choice, nearly everyone I meet wants kids (RIP my dating life...), and it seems more economics / pessimism that prevents people from having kids.

Perhaps because regardless of some policies targeting the economics/material issues of having kids that some countries have put in place (Russia, Hungary, S. Korea, etc.), those policies don't change the brutal cultural situations in those countries: 2 authoritarian regimes + extreme competitiveness of S. Korea.

It seems like the neoliberal era growth model has long since broken down, and our politics haven't adapted with deeper reforms to reflect the latest technologies, etc. that could produce more material abundance than today (see: China's rise).

As a left accelerationist, I can't help but think that a society with a 4 day week, no precarity, cheap access to good housing, healthcare, education, etc. would increase the social trust and the birth rate, as most people want kids and want them to grow up in a thriving society.
by iamnothere | 2025-11-01 18:26:37+00:00
Great news. Now maybe we can go on the offense for once. Work to enable constitutional protections against this sort of thing, and develop systems that can work around it if and when this comes back again.

There are places in the world today where only sneakernet communication has any semblance of privacy, so we need non-specialist tools that can provide privacy and secrecy regardless of local conditions. (I’d love to see more communication tools that don’t assume an always-on connection, or low latency, or other first world conditions.)
by aurintex | 2025-11-01 18:26:42+00:00
I completely understand your concern, and I agree, the kind of scenario you describe would be morally unacceptable. I wouldn’t want to build or be responsible for anything that could enable it.

That said, I often think about how this tension applies to nearly every new technology. Most tools can be used for good or bad, and history shows that progress tends to happen either way. If we had refused to develop technologies simply because they could be misused, we might not have any at all.

I do believe it’s possible to build responsibly through transparency, local-first design, and strong legal safeguards. The EU’s data protection laws, for example, give me some hope that we’re not entirely defenseless.

Do you see this kind of outcome as something we’re tangibly heading toward, or more as a warning of what could happen if we’re not careful?
by pstuart | 2025-11-01 18:26:59+00:00
Per another comment: https://blog.dol.gov/2024/11/19/new-data-childcare-costs-rem...

Obviously looking for existing patterns of success to validate assumptions is a reasonable ask, but it doesn't mean we couldn't forge new ones with proper diligence.

It would be expensive but an investment in the people that would pay huge dividends. Safeguards from fraud and abuse would be required but these are technical problems and are solvable. The only hurdle is consensus.
by jstanley | 2025-11-01 18:29:31+00:00
> the additional concern of bringing a child into a world in crisis

I don't understand this view.

If you think it is net negative for a child to be born in this world then isn't it also net negative for you to continue in this world?

Yet people will continue living their own life while talking about how they don't think it's fair to have a child.

If your life is worth living despite the supposed world in crisis (as if there is any other kind) who are you to say somebody else's wouldn't be?
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-01 18:30:09+00:00
Ultimately, a key reason to write these papers in the first place is to guide practitioners in the field, right? Otherwise science itself is just a big (redacted term that can get people shadow-banned for simply using it).

As one of those practitioners, I've found good review/survey papers to be incredibly valuable. They call my attention to the important publications and provide at least a basic timeline that helps me understand how the field has evolved from the beginning and what aspects people are focusing on now.

At the same time, I'll confess that I don't really see why most such papers couldn't be written by LLMs. Ideally by better LLMs than we have now, of course, but that could go without saying.
by overvale | 2025-11-01 18:30:28+00:00
I'm so genuinely confused by all this. It seems that Altman has a lot of detractors here, and I'm not sure why (my fault for not keeping up I guess). But a company that wants to spend trillions of dollars on AGI infrastructure and hopes to re-shape the entire global economy surely needs to plow a staggering amount of money into its operations and not into a non-profit. I get that there is controversy over redirecting profits of a very successful business from a non-profit entity (which would be great) to private parties, but... that was always going to happen right? Am I just too cynical?

What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious.

Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?
by blauditore | 2025-11-01 18:30:40+00:00
Distancing yourself from a trauma (as a coping mechanism), not having any thought of it for years, and then have it re-surface is not the same as fully suppressed, inaccessible memories as discussed in the article.

If it takes long, intense therapy to "bring back", it's almost cerainly untrue or falsified. There was a case of accused childhood abuse among close relatives of me, by someone who found out about this in therapy. It tore apart the family. I cannot take any sides because I was not there and cannot know the truth, but it checks all the boxes of falsified memories. It has destroyed multiple lifes. That's how I even learned about that stuff, and why I care.

Btw, better source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory (I originally mostly read stuff in my native language, so I didn't what to look for initially)
by jasonsb | 2025-11-01 18:31:24+00:00
> Household electricity prices in 1st half of 2025: -0.5% - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/... - October 29th, 2025

This statement from the EU is not just irrelevant, it’s deliberately misleading. Claiming a modest –0.5% change after a staggering 40% price surge, while oil and gas prices remain near 2019 levels and solar and wind capacity has grown tenfold, feels like a slap in the face to consumers. And yet, you’re amplifying this technically true (but deeply deceptive) narrative because it conveniently props up a flawed argument.
by 9rx | 2025-11-01 18:31:27+00:00
While that is probably good advice in general, the earlier commenter wanted even the abusive jerks to have access to his content.

He just doesn't want tools humans use to access content to be used in association with his content.

What he failed to realize is that if you eliminate the tools, the human cannot access the content anyway. They don't have the proper biological interfaces. Had he realized that, he'd have come to notice that simply turning off his server fully satisfies the constraints.
by jama211 | 2025-11-01 18:32:09+00:00
It’s slightly different because apple is a hardware manufacturer primarily that happens to have its own OS, whereas there are many other phone manufacturers, and not all of them even use google’s version of android/linux on them, nor have to in the future. And sure google makes hardware too but they’re small relatively speaking.

I guess what I’m saying is it’s less of a duopoly traditionally speaking because as companies they build primarily different things.
by uvaursi | 2025-11-01 18:32:15+00:00
> Apparently catching a brief glimpse of the abyss during the 2020 campaign cycle, Trump expressed his wish to “hop into” one of his supporters’ trucks “and drive it away.” As he mused, “I’d love to do it. Just drive the hell outta here. Just get the hell out of this.”

Damn. Trump dropping some serious truth pills here frfr
by apgwoz | 2025-11-01 18:32:21+00:00
I think that the "tools" movement is probably the most interesting aspect of what's happening in the AI space. Why? Because we don't generally reuse the "jigs" we make as programmers, and the tool movement is forcing us to codify processes into reusable tools. My only hope is that we converge on a set of tools and processes that increase our productivity but don't require a burning a forrest to do so. Post AI still has agents, but it's automatically running small transformations based on pattern recognition of compiler output in a test, transform, compile, test ... loop.... or something.
Mapping VC behavior via anonymized founder data
by boggsss | 2025-11-01 18:32:35+00:00
I shared this on LinkedIn and it blew up with 70+ founders and VCs discussing it. The idea: an AI-driven tool that tracks anonymized VC responsiveness to help founders see where real conviction lies. Would love feedback from the HN crowd — should we build it?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7388905560617795585-lSnG?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAB7IqsBmGzMMQYV4Lb5nVKYZRFAd9j5HhI
by dtagames | 2025-11-01 18:32:46+00:00
It's great news and I hope it happens. Many of us are old enough to have watched electronics and computer tech that was invented here and once made here become offshored and sold to us by other countries. It's sad, unnecessary, and overall not great for the country.

Since the US is blessed with nearly limitless natural resources, abundant land from sea to shining sea, and a large population ready and interested in working, it seems natural that we would try to make every single thing in this country that we are able. Many nations don't have that luxury.
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-01 18:32:48+00:00
Especially when those same speculative gains were predicated on the "theft" happening in the first place. The non-profit got at least a full order of magnitude more value out of the current deal than they could have gotten had OpenAI left their corporate structure unchanged. And they still get to control more of OpenAI if its valuation explodes, so the "upside" profile that they used to get by capping profits is broadly unchanged. Want even more upside? Then the non-profit can just plow some of their current stake into buying cheap options at their fair market price.