MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by assemblyman | 2025-11-13 20:03:33+00:00
I find this obsession with building strange. It's a very SaaS Silicon Valley mindset. There are whole swathes of very talented engineers who spend most of their time debugging, characterizing systems, doing performance analysis and resolving bottlenecks. Some of it might require writing significant code but mostly it's writing small test cases. The key skill is to treat a computing system as the object of study and to be a good empirical scientist (which requires understanding theory pretty well). These are people with deep expertise in networking, GPUs, CPUs, memory etc. One only has to look at national labs that do large-scale HPC (high-performance computing) to see examples.

One can argue that a lot of "building with AI" is commoditized by fine-tuning and RAG libraries or even reduced to prompt engineering. A lot of it is also tricks that might work on one dataset but not others. Putting together libraries fueled by pizza and coke gives an illusion of skill and speed.

Are there grifters who are jumping onto the AI bandwagon? Of course! In spades. Are there also engineers who want to build up their skills and are failing to do so or in the process of doing so? Of course, this happens too! But there are also people who are trying to understand, debug and improve models who are not necessarily "building". After all, the scaling laws paper (the original one) was a result of pure analysis of empirical data.
by aljgz | 2025-11-13 20:04:32+00:00
Using AI to let UIs suggest sensible defaults is, IMHO, one of the less appreciated ways that AI can improve our interaction with machines. As long as the models is local, fast, and the suggestion is not disruptive, there is very little to oppose these, even if the benefit is not realized by all audience.

I think we'll see many many more instances of this type of AI use in our everyday tools, including UIs of physical products.
by missingcolours | 2025-11-13 20:04:58+00:00
Only indirectly (see other comment).

In 2018 a provision was attached to the Farm Bill to legalize "hemp". The public and presumably the senators were led to believe this was about legalizing textiles and things like that, not drugs. It turned out that the language actually legalized delta-8 too. Many people were displeased with that outcome, because in many states it's completely unregulated with no additional taxes or anything like there is in "legal cannabis" states, and again because it was not understood or anticipated by most people. So now that provision is being reverted in this year's Farm Bill, passage of which was part of the shutdown deal (I think because SNAP benefits are part of the farm bill).

Until a month ago in Texas my kids could buy Delta-8 weed gummies at the gas station by my house (the Texas governor issued some emergency regulations to limit this). You didn't even need to be 18. This bill is targeted at those products legalized by the 2018 loophole.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-13 20:05:10+00:00
The out-of-band verification is for initial key enrollment, not every credential exchange. You verify the fingerprint once through a trusted channel, then use that verified key indefinitely without needing the trusted channel again. That's the entire value proposition: establish trust once, communicate securely many times.

Without this, you'd need out-of-band verification for every single credential exchange, which doesn't scale.

As for "PGP is trash"... That's a different argument entirely, and you've provided zero technical justification for it. If you have specific criticisms of PGP's cryptographic primitives, key management model, or implementation security, make them.
by dzonga | 2025-11-13 20:05:22+00:00
i'm now guessing the software engineering universe is becoming like the lawyer ones

1. big corporate shops / vc funded ones - many tens of programmers working on features (this is where zed collab features might be needed) 2. bespoke high productive small teams - less than 5 product programmers in a company e.g basecamp - these would be your bespoke law firms 3. the indies (injury lawyers) -> 1 - 3 programmers chunning out products at scale or eating of one product + maybe with help of A.I

for 2 & 3 - a lot of stuff being shilled is not needed. a legal pad + some notes that can be posted via a google doc is all that's needed. Jira isn't needed too
by stalfosknight | 2025-11-13 20:05:25+00:00
I switched to Mac 20 years ago out of sheer frustration over the total lack of coordination between hardware and software, the frothing at the mouth obsession over excessive backwards compatibility over good design, privacy and security, and hardware that isn't total rainbow blinky light horseshit.

But I try to keep abreast of whats happening on the other side of the fence and I am often recoiling in horror and wondering why the fuck Windows users tolerate any of this.
by lrvick | 2025-11-13 20:05:28+00:00
I have made no false claims or implications that I am aware of.

Mainly I was arguing at your implication that PGP is the wrong tool for any job as your link concluded.

I don't doubt you or a lot of people could build something better, but nobody has yet, and I doubt any will get it as widely adopted and supported end to end for all the use cases PGP is used for today. PGP is here to stay, and thus must be maintained and improved.

I don't see bike shedding about things that could have been done better historically in the spec itself as productive as there are no significant security problems with any of the active uses of PGP I use or am aware of in wide use today, if done with modern tools and with modern cipher defaults.

I would not recommend generating keys with GnuPG today any more than I would recommend using Internet Explorer. Advising against old broken implementations is not the same thing as saying we should abandon an established widely used cryptographic identity standard for which no comparable alternatives exist. Especially when alternative tooling with reasonable secure defaults exists now.

I doubt this discussion was productive for you or me, but hopefully it will be productive for others reading trying to make sense of their choices and tradeoffs.

I do appreciate people like you keeping me honest on this stuff regardless.
by PeaceTed | 2025-11-13 20:05:54+00:00
It is said you only realise you are in jail once you feel the chains. And this is something Apple has tried to walk the line on, be locked down but in a fashion that causes the least push back on users.

Personally I never felt Mac OS was that locked down, but it has been over a decade since I last used it.

The only time I felt it was trying to delete 'Chess' only it to be listed as a vital system application. I know this isn't true but I would love it if Chess turned out to be a load bearing application for the entire OS. Like folks at Apple don't know why but if you remove it, everything stops.At least MS managed to remove the load bearing Space cadet pinball. Replaced it with a One drive popup that handles all memory management in the kernel ;)

Back to the original point, by comparison on iOS I definetly did feel the chains. One could fear Mac OS will turn into that but they haven't conditioned people yet.
by jemmyw | 2025-11-13 20:06:03+00:00
I've spent quite some time evaluating the different tools over the last year, for both working on my employers complex codebase, and for my personal projects. At the start of the year I found Cursor pretty unsatisfactory and unable to complete tasks. At the time I rated Cline+vscode as the best agent and experience.

Now Claude code and Cursor are the best options imo, and I would say Cursor takes the edge for ide integration. Claude, as a separate thing to the ide, does mean you can do now flexible things like run it in a script loop.

Copilot doesn't get a shout in. It's fine for autocomplete but as a full agent it doesn't seem there yet.

If you're paying for it yourself Cursor seems to give the most bang for buck as well.
by alberth | 2025-11-13 20:06:08+00:00
I love Zed’s minimal design language ... clean, restrained colors, low visual noise.

The screenshot below surprised me:

https://zed.dev/img/post/zed-is-our-office/this-week.webp

All the colorful avatars and the busy side/top panels feel out of character with the usual Zed aesthetics.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-13 20:06:40+00:00
> most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers

Yes, but large cities still produce the most value if we're talking in economic terms. For food production especially. Most logistical operation also operates in large cities.

>You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.

Well, yes. That was the big comprmise made by the constitution to begin with. They needed something like a Senate to get smaller states to sign on.
by wholinator2 | 2025-11-13 20:06:50+00:00
Has anyone invented an alternative to that yet? I could imagine emailing you a code to enter in a specific part of a site to get you to the right link, but then people could just scan all the codes. To solve that you could make the codes long 64bit strings but then that's too hard to remember so you could just provide functionality to automatically include that info to get you to the site but then that's just a link again.

Maybe if you expected everyone to copy-paste the info into the form? That might work
by 12_throw_away | 2025-11-13 20:07:10+00:00
> Helm is the number 1 reason I'm looking to leave behind my DevOps/SRE job.

A few years ago, the startup I worked at folded - just as the new CTO's mandate to move everything to K8s with Helm was coming into effect. Having to scramble for a new job sucked of course, but in retrospect, I honestly have good feelings associated with the whole debacle: A) I learned a lot about Helm, B) I no longer needed to work with Helm, and C) I'm now quite sure that I don't want to be part of any engineering org that makes the decision to use it.

This is not exactly a criticism of these technologies, but simply me discovering that I'm simply utterly incompatible with it. Whether it's a failing with the Cloud Native Stack, or a personal failing of mine, it doesn't matter - everyone's better off when I stay far away from it.
by satvikpendem | 2025-11-13 20:07:17+00:00
For images of people generated from scratch, Nano Banana always adds a background blur, it can't seem to create more realistic or candid images such as those taken via a point and shoot or smartphone, has anyone solved this sort of issue? It seems to work alright if you give it an existing image to edit however. I saw some other threads online about it but I didn't see anyone come up with solutions.
by jajuuka | 2025-11-13 20:07:20+00:00
User freedom isn't really that though. It's corporate goodwill. If a company uses GPL code and doesn't release it what is the enforcement mechanism? A lengthy court proceeding that can go either way and will likely bankrupt the less wealthy party. Or if they are in another country they can tell you to piss off and you have no way of getting the code. We see this all the time with China. In essence, they are the same but one allows you ask nicely and hope that the corporation is feeling generous.
by imbnwa | 2025-11-13 20:08:03+00:00
Uh

* two major platforms on PC and one of em doesn’t sport a Big Picture mode

* the other store does nasty tricks like never terminate a game process completely when you launch their titles through the other platform (very obvious w/ Alan Wake 2)

* other store’s titles doesn’t have this problem if I use Playnite as the TV frontend, but Playnite is a giant security vulnerability waiting to happen cause you need 3rd party plugins to emulate Steam Big Picture

* entire swatches of games that act funny with Steam Input or have incomplete configurations and I don’t feel like figuring that out just to play Backrooms

* Windows window management when using Steam Big Picture w/ controller is bad, b/c lots of desktop things will steal focus (hello Rockstar Games and EA)

* oh yeah, mandatory LAUNCHERS

* Try to play Mass Effect Legendary Edition on a TV with a controller; no really, try

* don’t even get me started on OOTB auto HDR config for almost any random TV with PS5 vs dicking around with the NVIDIA control panel

* the Steam store navigation w/ controller is baaaaad in 2025, many times you won’t be able to move or select certain things.

This is an incomplete list. It actually doesn’t matter whether you have a point-by-point refutation, no non-technical person wants to deal with any of this. They want machine to take care of everything. That’s what an appliance is

(Edit: formatting)
by jcgl | 2025-11-13 20:08:25+00:00
> but still there is a long lived secret a user must maintain somewhere

Of course. I'm not suggesting that there's no need to have long-lived private key material. But that does not require some thick GPG-keyring-style concept (especially one that includes both public and private key material). Something like a directory of private keys (like with SSH) fits the bill here and yet bears precious little resemblance to GPG's system.

> have a strategy for backup, rotation, discovery, validation, etc etc

Again, I see no reason to bake this stuff (I'll call it "identity management") deeply into the cryptosystem itself. Especially because different encryption use-cases have vastly different needs. The identity management needed for a one-time message exchange between humans shares little structural similarity to that needed for authenticating OS packages from multiple parties. These two use cases are almost entirely disjoint, I daresay. To the point that any effort to devise a shared abstraction will only muddy the waters since there is so little intrinsic similarity.

> What I take issue with is people recommending age or minisign or signing with ssh keys when all of these just pretend the problems PGP solves do not exist, and thus set people up to fail.

I can agree with this for sure. If you need these various features, then age et al. do not fit the bill.

On the other hand, in cases where these systems have adequate functionality or can be shimmed up by other systems, they're lightweight and easy for users to comprehend.

Take commit-signing with SSH keys to provide verification mediated by GitHub. Everyone (lol) knows how to generate and manage an SSH key. Easy enough to set up git for signing with that key. Then GitHub uses its own identity layer to show users what commits are verified and which aren't. From the user's perspective, it's super lightweight, easy. When it comes to cryptographic signatures with long-lived identities, it basically doesn't get easier than this.

Of course, that GitHub example misses some features, and isn't perfect. But it captures a lot of the value of signing with a bare minimum of error-prone work for the user.
by joshuaissac | 2025-11-13 20:08:38+00:00
> Rolling out fiber nationwide [...] would have been catastrophically expensive

It seems like they had managed to bring the cost below copper:

> In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper

> we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham

But the British government was concerned:

> BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do

> So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915949

This might be an argument for privatisation, because the government was still in full control of the company when they prevented the fibre rollout. Would the owner of a private company squander such an advantage over concerns for their competitors?

On the other hand, would a private company have had the capability to plan this forward in the first place? We do see that from Big Tech companies (e.g. Apple silicon) but could BT have done it under private ownership?
by Spivak | 2025-11-13 20:08:45+00:00
Hard disagree, I think time has proven that the filibuster (or some process like it) is necessary as a stabilizing effect on democracy. Making legislation easier to block than pass makes it so that small swings in representation, say 51-49 to 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy. The minority party being able to, with effort, stop certain pieces of legislation they find abhorrent by raising the bar to it passing is a good thing.

The Veto is also profoundly undemocratic in exactly the same direction and it's also a good thing.
by whimsicalism | 2025-11-13 20:09:09+00:00
Wyoming has 16k native americans. California has 762k native americans (if you agree with self-id, which I don't). Your friend clearly must be in favor of disenfranchising these native americans if she thinks her Wyoming vote should count for 67 native american votes in California.

In general, I don't find the idpol defense of 67x relative voting power for Wyoming's particularly compelling.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-13 20:09:42+00:00
If we truly believed in a capitalistic system, wouldn't the US become a hyper aggressive competiton to make the most citizens settle in their given state? It would bring down home prices, offer amenities, fight cut throat for the best labor laws, and so much more.

But it seems like we gave up and focused on a republic when it came to this matter instead.
by theshrike79 | 2025-11-13 20:10:07+00:00
Yes and no. I have a Steam Deck and a Macbook M1 Pro, my previous Windows PC is from 2010, it ran Overwatch 1 at about 30fps on a good day and managed through multiplayer Valheim games during covid lockdowns =)

I _can_ play something like CP2077 on the Deck, but it's not exactly a worthy experience, it's better suited for stuff like Citizen Sleeper or Rogue Trader
by rmellow | 2025-11-13 20:10:10+00:00
Question - How does this capture the entire screen, except its own window?

I've tried making similar functionality in Python to add visual effects to the screen, but the only way I found is to use one of the packages which leverage the Screenshot functionality.

But this causes recursion since my app's window will be in the screenshot (unless I put my app on a different monitor or a different area of the monitor). How do they avoid that?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-13 20:10:11+00:00
> I think you misunderstood my comment and/or fail to properly appreciate the subtle points of what I suggest you keep.

Nah, but I understand the error. Not a big deal.

We. Just. Plain. Don't. Keep. Any. Data. Not. Immediately. Relevant. To. The. App.

Any bad actor can easily register a throwaway, and there's no way to prevent that, without storing some seriously dangerous data, so we don't even try.

It hasn't been an issue. The incident that I mentioned, is the only one we've ever had, and I nuked it in five minutes. Even if a baddie gets in, they won't be able to do much, because we store so little data. This person would have found all those connections to be next to useless, even if I hadn't stopped them.

I'm a really cynical bastard, and I have spent my entire adult life, rubbing elbows with some of the nastiest folks on Earth. I have a fairly good handle on "thinking like a baddie."

It's very important that people who may even be somewhat inimical to our community, be allowed to register accounts. It's a way of accessing extremely important resources.
by freefaler | 2025-11-13 20:10:16+00:00
We have used Hetzner for 15+ years. There were some outages with the nastiest being the network ones. But they're usually not "dramatically bad" if you build with at least basic failover. With this we had seen less than 1 serious per 3 years. Most of the downtime is because of our own stupidity.

If you know what you're doing Hetzner is godsend, they give you hardware and several DCs and it's up to you what you can do. The money difference is massive.
by jMyles | 2025-11-13 20:10:27+00:00
Yeah, awesome! I love bandcamp.

You can buy our stuff on bandcamp if you want:

https://justinholmes.bandcamp.com/

In my mental model, participating in bandcamp (and getting your supporter badge) is a sort of "merch". You aren't really buying the music - the music is something you hear as the result of a FLAC file being decoded, and that FLAC file can be endlessly and freely copied.

Even better than the bandcamp model, in my thinking, is for you to get the music via pirate channels like bit torrent or IPFS, listen to it, and if you want to, you can buy album-related merch on the ethereum blockchain. That's the long-term vision.

As far as affording concerts: on sufficiently long time scales, I'm wanting to make our shows free-to-enter, buy-a-ticket-stub-if-you-want. Sadly, a lot of great rooms around the country are locked behind contracts with Ticketmaster/AEG and are prohibited from hosting such a show.

> If you release all your work under permissive licenses, how do you expect to be supported?

I believe that a huge majority of our fans are like you: they _want_ to support us, and the spotify model doesn't really give them a channel for that. Permissive licenses don't prevent people from supporting us on bandcamp and similar models.
by wongarsu | 2025-11-13 20:10:36+00:00
Being this capital heavy also "justifies" their valuations. New shares issued in each funding round are typically around 10% of total shares, so to get to a valuation of $30B you have to raise something around $3B

Of course you could also just spend your money wisely and not do another funding round, but then how are people supposed to know how much you are worth? And how are investors supposed to know they made a great investment?
by echelon_musk | 2025-11-13 20:10:48+00:00
I watched A Simple Plan (1998) at the weekend and SPOILER ALERT: a large percentage of the bill's serials were recorded.

I just don't understand in practice how this is an issue.

Say you spend $100 on groceries with marked cash, how are you de-anonymised? The cash mixes in with all the rest of the cash from other registers and then gets picked up by Securicor and so on.

Never made sense to me!
by swyx | 2025-11-13 20:11:26+00:00
i think its a bit of a VC lingo that i dislike seeing adopted by actual... operators. it casts the world into two: either you own a business, or you operate one. that makes it look like a 50-50 choice that is usually a valid option for a privileged few. also if the world actually looked like that then we'd have a lot less building going on and there are too many VCs already.

instead I propose to call VC's "non-operator characters" and see how they feel about that
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-13 20:11:41+00:00
If they can reinvent RL so it works with this then I guess the big labs will be all over it, as ~halving inference costs would be huge (especially if Ed Zitron's leaked OpenAI inf costs are accurate). Potentially the difference between inferencing being profitable and loss making. It's an elegant approach.

I also wonder how far they can push K if other aspects are tweaked. The approach of just doubling each parameter each time leaves a lot of space between the chosen value and the next value known to not work.