MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bayindirh | 2025-11-06 20:28:46+00:00
It's a misconception that (A)GPL source code should be publicly available.

GPL family mandates source code access to people who can access to the software itself. So as long as ICC gets the source code of the NextCloud EE and the Guard app, the GPL is fulfilled.

This is how RedHat operates, and is not a violation of GPL.

Also, this is how you can build a business around GPL. You only have to provide source code to people who buys your software, or you can sell support to it.

Another example: Rock Solid curl [0].

[0]: https://rock-solid.curl.dev/
by hypeatei | 2025-11-06 20:29:15+00:00
I see what you're getting at now, thanks. I left a comment on a thread about iOS recently[0] where Apple is only making their things open in jurisdicfions where they're forced to which was kinda infuriating/nonsensical to me. Governments have obviously caught onto this but Apple is still trying to squeeze out as much rent as possible while they still can.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822302
by elmerfud | 2025-11-06 20:29:19+00:00
Just because it applied 2500 years ago it doesn't make it not true. I think there's some fallacy that people can cite that this happens most generations and then indicate that it must not be a true thing.

What's closer to the truth is that each generation hopes to make life easier for the subsequent generations. The effect of that is all of the things that we complain about. More than one thing can be true at the same time. As things get easier people get lazier. It is only a natural thing. That can be demonstrated over and over in society. That can be demonstrated over the generations. So what was true 2,500 years ago still is true today.
by vitaly-pavlenko | 2025-11-06 20:30:27+00:00
Yeah, I see your point. You want same alterations on different Roman numerals to look the same. (In my current system b9 over I and b9 over V look different.)

I briefly explored this appoach: https://rawl.vercel.app/edit?a=beethoven_op10no1mov1 (Although it was a mess.)

In current Rawl terms I call it "annotate modulation at every chord".

Back in the days I thought it's better.

It turned out that:

- You need to do tedious annotation. So you can only work with classical repertoire datasets like https://github.com/MarkGotham/When-in-Rome

- Worse even, you need to look at two places simultaneously: to the score and to the string of Roman numerals

- And worse still, all chords then look the same. The score itself becomes bland. Most of the time, if you aren't deep inside the jazz repertoire, there isn't that many alterations. So you'd mostly see the same four colors - root, minor third, major third, perfect fifth.

- And, as evident in Mozart-Beethoven repertoire, you need to decide what to do with fully diminished chords. Because they sorta don't have a root, acoustically.
by Fwirt | 2025-11-06 20:30:53+00:00
I have been spending hours the past couple weeks "ensmartening" my home with IoT switches and power outlets. Home Assistant is gorgeous and is an absolute feat of engineering and a testament to the power of open source, but messing with it you can tell that it's very much "by nerds, for nerds". I don't expect my wife to learn to edit YAML files so she can customize a dashboard. The drag and drop editor mostly works but it's missing a lot of functionality. And if your network topology is anything but flat (i.e. everything connected to one consumer router, which probably does cover 95% of people) then good luck with any of the discovery technology like mDNS or broadcast domains. I have dnsmasq allocate hostnames and static IPs for all my stuff and manually punch in the hostname for 99% of things in HA.

The ecosystem I've had the best luck with is, sadly, Tuya, aka Smart Life, aka giant Chinese conglomerate. Pretty much any small brand (or even some bigger brands) use Tuya to build because they have easy off-the-shelf solutions, and I have some confidence that they're large and entrenched enough that they won't randomly shut off their cloud services. But even if they do, enough reverse-engineering work has been put in that you can run most of your devices locally without a cloud connection. The cloud connection is pretty seamless and is the easiest thing I've had to configure in HA. Once you add a device in the Smart Life app you just reload the HA integration and there it is, ready to go. I actually get less latency toggling lights through HA than through the Smart Life app. I don't really worry about them knowing when my front door is shut or my living room lights are off, and I keep all that stuff on its own VLAN with no outgoing access to the rest of my network.

As I start dabbling with Zigbee and Thread and Matter and stuff, it seems like all of these other "open" "ecosystems" are really complicated and require buying a bunch of hardware I don't want and coordinating another network on another protocol, whereas the Wi-Fi stuff just usually works. It makes (some) sense for extremely low power devices that need to run for years on a battery, but lights and outlets don't really need to be Zigbee devices. BLE devices over an ESPHome Bluetooth proxy work surprisingly well too, and BLE is a less crummy technology than Bluetooth proper and seems to be low power enough for a lot of battery operated devices. I wish everything would just support MQTT because that seems like the most "universal" IoT protocol there is.
by thomasmg | 2025-11-06 20:31:02+00:00
Pypy is great for performance. I'm writing my own programming language (that transpiles to C) and for this purpose converted a few benchmarks to some popular languages (C, Java, Rust, Swift, Python, Go, Nim, Zig, V). Most languages have similar performance, except for Python, which is about 50 times slower [1]. But with PyPy, performance is much better. I don't know the limitations of PyPy because these algorithms are very simple.

But even thougt Python is very slow, it is still very popular. So the language itself must be very good in my view, otherwise fewer people would use it.

[1] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/doc/perf...
by deafpolygon | 2025-11-06 20:31:44+00:00
There are ways to do it in most GUI applications. On Windows, pressing Alt will sometimes show you the combination to activate certain parts of the UI (keyboard accelerators). It's not obvious anymore because people don't focus on accessibility. Sadly, it's not common practice to ensure a good workflow, because it's assumed that they will use a mouse. Or people keep re-inventing TUI every time they think they want a terminal-friendly utility.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-11-06 20:32:05+00:00
I got this email from from our local provider the other day..

"For a limited time only, we're offering a $500 upfront electricity bill credit* with every eligible home battery system (Tesla Powerwall 2 & 3, LG Chem HV, SolarEdge batteries only) purchased through Electrify with ActewAGL and installed by one of our approved installers - plus a further $100 credit* every year for the next five years, so long as you stay connected to our Virtual Power Plant.

Join the thousands of households across across Australia taking advantage of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program. Over 100,000 systems have been installed since July 2025, and with the rebate scheduled to decrease as installations rise, now is the time to act."
by jjice | 2025-11-06 20:32:43+00:00
I get what you mean, but OpenAI did release the gpt-oss in August, just three months ago. I've had a very good experience with those models.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ (August 5th)

I like Qwen 235 quite a bit too, and I generally agree with your sentiment, but this was a very large American open source model.

Unless we're getting into the complications on what "open source" model actually means, in which case I have no clue if these are just open weight or what.
by foxglacier | 2025-11-06 20:32:52+00:00
Food production is a huge one. We don't want highly optimized farming where only the most efficient growers feed everyone else because that has the risk of global famine if something fails there. The more a system is optimized, the closer to failure it is. Same goes for all other kinds of production but food is really important compared to, say, CPUs or cars.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-11-06 20:32:55+00:00
Actually there are ways you might get on device models to perform well. It is all about finding ways to have a smaller number of weights work efficiently.

One way is reusing weights in multiple decoders layers. This works and is used in many on-device models.

It is likely that we can get pretty high performance with this method. You can also combine this with low parameter ways to create overlapped behavior on the same weights as well, people had done LORA on top of shared weights.

Personally I think there are a lot of potential ways that you can cause the same weights to exhibit "overloaded" behaviour in multiple places in the same decoder stack.

Edit: I believe this method is used a bit for models targeted for the phone. I don't think we have seen significant work on people targeting say a 3090/4090 or similar inference compute size.
by snickerbockers | 2025-11-06 20:33:28+00:00
Ignoring the fact that one of this service's primary reason for existing is that corporations and governments are already abusing their ability to retroactively change history.

If this is truly a concern then the answer is to have more than one publicly-accessible independent archive service. Archivebro has never taken any steps towards securing a monopoly on archiving things. The FBI are the only ones doing that.

Also not everybody in Russia is on the FSB payroll. News media always stops investigating as soon as there is credible information that somebody or their server is located in Russia because if they learn too much then it becomes difficult to discredit them as "possibly being linked to the kremlin". If you used any other nationality to imply that somebody is acting in bad faith on behalf of a hostile foreign government without additional evidence those same journos would call you a racist and try to get you canceled.
by giantg2 | 2025-11-06 20:33:34+00:00
"Lack of autonomy is the most draining thing."

This. I recently moved from a developer team to a non-dev team. I've written more lines of code in the past month than I had in the last 6 months on the dev team. No vague requirements to deal with. No picky reviews or politics from other devs or TLs. Freedom to write moderately high coverage, fairly robust test suites (compared to minimal coverage with low value checks).

To be fair, this is green field development, so there is a fair amount of easy code and it's not spaghettified yet. However, I am also training non-devs on the team to run an maintain the repo, so there's that.
by MengerSponge | 2025-11-06 20:33:59+00:00
It's naive or foolish to think that the problem with "Black Lives Matter" was insufficient specificity.

People who are not operating in good faith won't operate in good faith. There were thousands of words written on the phenomenon protested by BLM, but those are easily ignored. Three words are twisted and co-opted by propagandists. Consider a function that describes "comprehension by bigots" as a function of word count. We know that 0 words yields 0 comprehension. Evidence suggests that 10k words also yields 0 comprehension. There is no evidence that this Laffer curve will ever achieve anything other than zero.

It's possible to reach and change bigots' minds, but it requires human connections. Not sloganeering, prose, or reels.
by zkmon | 2025-11-06 20:34:49+00:00
When I was child, I observed how peasants worked on their own small farms. Get up at around 4:30 am (with rooster call), be at farm by 6 am. short break at 10 am, lunch at farm around 2pm, back home 6pm, have dinner and back at farm until 9 or 10pm. Any travel to other villages would be mostly during all night by walk, preferably under moonlight. We usually reach destination by 6am.

Basically, work stops only for food breaks and sleep of about 6 hrs. Ofcourse, this is seasonal, with summers having more free time, due to lack of crop work. But summers would have different types of work such as spinning fiber for cot threads or ropes, mending home roofings, repairing farm tools, carts, fixing irrigation systems, having marriages and festivals etc.
by kazinator | 2025-11-06 20:35:06+00:00
But a per capita figure is diluted by how big of a tech sector that country/region has relative to the rest of its economy. The more people work outside of that sector, the lower is any per-capita figure from tech. Fewer lines of code written per capita, fewer bugs per capita, ...

The figure per invested dollar is much better: how many unicorns emerge per billion of investment money.

Those who chase unicorns are mainly investors (plus people who want to join startups that become unicorns). That figure is directly relevant to them.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-06 20:35:24+00:00
Agree. We took NIH too far.

You don't need to pull in a library for every little function, that's how you open yourself up to supply chain risk.

The left-pad fiasco, for example. Left-pad was 11 lines of code. Literally no reason to pull in an external dependency for that.

Rust is doomed to repeat the same mistakes because it also has an incredibly minimal standard library, so now we get micro-crates for simple string utilities, or scopeguard which itself is under ~400 LoC, and a much simpler RAII can be made yourself for your own project if you don't need everything in scopeguard.

The industry needs to stop being terrified of writing functionality that already exists elsewhere.
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-11-06 20:35:39+00:00
Yes, and the Cloud Act pretty much forces upper management to ensure that there is always a US IT guy that can be compelled to implement the wishes of The US Federal Government, as the penalties apply to executives of US companies, too.

We can quibble about whether the term "threaten", which implies some moral wrong doing, is correct though. It's a law with defined criminal penalties. That's how criminal law works
by tobr | 2025-11-06 20:36:06+00:00
Interesting from a technical point of view. But the real problem to solve here is buried in this throwaway at the end, and it even suggests that this is entirely the wrong tech for the job:

> So the way I see auraphone working at an event, you walk around and mingle as normal but yeah every one has their phone out and running the app but ONLY this app. You are still present and in the conversation not just looking at other distractions from your phone.

What is so magic about this app that it will make your phone not be a distraction? And how do you get everyone to download a new app? And if you can get them to do that, why not just exchange the info through a normal server? Then you could literally just tell the app which event you’re at (and sure, use Bluetooth for that, but a QR code or even just a link would probably work better) and then they don’t need to walk around with the app open.
Hello, Shopify Merchants
by Returnlytic | 2025-11-06 20:36:13+00:00
I'm looking for beta testers for Returnlytic, a returns management tool i built exclusively for Shopify that helps you prevent fraud, streamline processing, and recover revenue—at 70% less cost than competitors like Loop Returns.

As a beta tester, you'll get:

Early access to all features before our Shopify App Store launch

Direct input on product roadmap and feature prioritization

Free Pro plan access during the beta period (normally $49.99/month)

Priority support and dedicated feedback channels We need merchants who:

Process at least 20-30 returns per month on Shopify

Have a team that handles returns (or want better workflows for solo operations)

Can provide honest feedback on features like our risk scoring, analytics dashboards, and approval workflows.

Comment if interested or email me at returnly@zohomail.com.

Looking forward to building something great together and solving the returns headache once and for all!
Ask HN: Why don't programming language foundations offer "smol" models?
by xrd | 2025-11-06 20:36:21+00:00
I'm using claude code A LOT. And, I'm using gemini cli A LOT. Definitely getting a ton of value as a developer from those tools. Not sure I can go back to the old way of developing.

And, I'm getting worried that someday Anthropic will say "Hey, yeah, about that Max plan which is $100/mo. Sorry, we decided we need to charge you $5000/mo. Oh, and LOL, btws, that's if you commit to an annual plan."

Or, a Google rep will email me saying "Sundar (it wasn't me!) says you were too critical of Google on HN that one time four years ago (Sundar verified it isn't a gemini hallucination, but I can't really question it). So, your gemini cli is cut off immediately."

Then, I'll be stuck and no more software engineering work because my brain rotted away.

For this reason, I want to run LLMs locally, using llama.cpp/ollama and use tools like Aider. But, running a "big" model with my hardware is tough. The quality of output and all the things that make claude and gemini so powerful are not there the combination of local LLMs and tool like aider, at least when things run locally. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong?

I wonder why I can't find a model that only does Python and is good only at that, and run that locally. When I need to do zig, I can switch to a zig model, and unload the python one from memory. If it only does a single language, and it does not need to know about US presidential elections, couldn't it be very small and something I could run on my MacOS M1 laptop with 16GB of ram?

I feel like models get big when they get generalized. I am never working on a codebase that has Rails and FastAPI and Elixir and React and Svelte and Go and Rust and COBOL. I might work on a repo with typescript and python, but never more than one, and I'm usually focused on either the frontend or backend.

If this is the solution, are language foundations building their own models? Is this already happening on huggingface or somewhere else?

This seems like an approach where a language foundation could train and certify their own model and it would be safe and "open source" and "open weights."

Is there a big stupid assumption I'm making here that makes this idea impossible?
by vkou | 2025-11-06 20:36:32+00:00
> "If you convert our entire Sun to energy, using Albert Einstein's famous formula E = mc2, that's how much energy has been pouring out from this flare since we began observing it,"

It's a great journalistic quote, but the implication here is that the star's entire mass is being converted to energy as part of this process, which it very obviously isn't. (The black hole is net-gaining mass as a result of all this.)
by jamesponddotco | 2025-11-06 20:36:35+00:00
The recommendations are pretty good; even though I only input six books, it was enough for it to recommend books I have on my wish list. Definitely going to play around some more. Plus, the website is super fast, very impressive.

Any chance we could get an API going at some point? Are you planning to open source the work?

I'm interested in the scrapping of Goodreads too. I'm building a book metadata aggregation API and plan on building a scrapper for Goodreads, but I imagine using a data center IP address will be a problem very fast. Were you scrapping from your home network?
by rachithrr | 2025-11-06 20:36:46+00:00
Avtal | Austin, TX | ONSITE | Full-time

Avtal builds software for the digital debt collections space, with a strong focus on data workflows, compliance, and reliability at scale. The environment is pragmatic and fast-paced — small team, high ownership. Looking for engineers who have shipped production systems and are comfortable making architectural decisions.

Roles (3–5+ years experience preferred):

Full-Stack Engineer – React + Go

Backend Engineer – Go / Python (ML experience is a plus)

Platform / DevOps Engineer – AWS, Linux, Infrastructure-as-Code

DBA – PostgreSQL, RDS tuning, query optimization, replication strategies

The work involves building and scaling core systems, improving data pipelines, and shaping internal architecture. Ideal fit: someone who has owned features end-to-end and is comfortable diving into unfamiliar parts of the stack when needed.

Please reach out at rachith at avtal dot com
by worldfoodgood | 2025-11-06 20:37:34+00:00
The downside to having many vanity urls and giving out a unique email address to each website you visit is that you cannot use haveibeenpwned without paying (despite being a single human). I have no idea how many email addresses I've given out over the years, probably hundreds across at least 6 or 7 domains, and they want to charge me a monthly fee to see which of those have been pwned.

I understand they gotta make a buck, but I find it interesting this is the first real negative to running a unique email address per company/site I work with.
by aidenn0 | 2025-11-06 20:38:05+00:00
A lot of teachers (particularly, but not exclusively, younger teachers) are uncomfortable being strict with students, and especially teenagers. The local High Schools recently banned having phones during class (each room had a pigeon-hole style place for each student to put their phone), but enforcement is poor.

At least some of this is poor support for teacher's enforcement by the administration (I have been told that teachers are not allowed to kick students out of class for having their phones).
Ask HN: Why is there a stigma around working in defense-related tech?
by piratesAndSons | 2025-11-06 20:38:13+00:00
I've noticed people have a low opinion of people who are in military-related work. I know the obvious reason is that the military tends to involve killing sometimes, but that's not what they do all the time. For example, the USA military also has a lot of programs for food distribution, girls' education, and preserving human rights for minorities in all the places the USA was involved militarily. People don't have similar disdain for working at advertising corps like Google and Facebook for the killings they do indirectly. People brag about working in these ad corps.

I thought about this because I am currently working on a pretty advanced drone that I want to sell to the DoD. My friend argued that I am in the "death industry," which pisses me off. Drones could be used to help distribute medicine in remote areas, or for surveillance. My drone is for surveillance only—it has a self-detachment feature (SDA) that is activated when the drone is attacked, but other than that the drone is for surveillance only.

My friend still insisted what I'm doing is bad and equated my work to some sort of mercenary, as an analogy. Granted, my friend is on the far left of the political grid, so maybe this is an exceptional situation.
by mediumsmart | 2025-11-06 20:38:16+00:00
this blog post?

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

Get in the habit of using Ctrl-r (isearch-backward) and Ctrl-s (isearch-forward) for moving around in the document. Whenever you need to jump the cursor backward or forward more than about 5 lines, and you can see the target location, you should be using i-search.

To do it effectively, you don't necessarily need to search for the exact word where you want to put the cursor. Let your eye defocus slightly and take in the whole paragraph or region around the target point, and choose a word that looks reasonably unique or easy to type. Then i-search for it to navigate to it. You may need to hit Ctrl-r or Ctrl-s repeatedly if your anchor word turns out not to be unique. But Emacs will highlight all the matches, so if there are more than a couple of them, Ctrl-g out of the search and choose another anchor word.

It's difficult to overemphasize how powerful this technique is, once you've mastered it. Mastering it simply requires that you do it repeatedly until your fingers do it "automatically". Emacs eventually becomes like an extension of your body, and you'll be performing hundreds of different keystrokes and mini-techniques like this one without thinking about them. It's comparable to the hundreds of subtle techniques you acquire for driving a car well.