MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-19 10:34:48+00:00
The tao of open source: never invest time/money/effort you aren't comfortable giving away, other people using, and someone else forking perhaps as a commercial offering.

There are undoubtedly those preach GPL 3 and AGPL zealous control freakery but it's pretending to be "free" while dictating what can and can't be done with code. If the agreement attempts to discriminate against users selectively, it ain't free or open. GPL 2 is the line in the sand.
by twhitmore | 2025-11-19 10:35:22+00:00
Exception handling would be better than what we're seeing here.

The problem is that any non-trivial software is composition, and encapsulation means most errors aren't recoverable.

We just need easy ways to propagate exceptions out to the appropriate reliability boundary, ie. the transaction/ request/ config loading, and fail it sensibly, with an easily diagnosable message and without crashing the whole process.

C# or unchecked Java exceptions are actually fairly close to ideal for this.

The correct paradigm is "prefer throw to catch" -- requiring devs to check every ret-val just created thousands of opportunities for mistakes to be made.

By contrast, a reliable C# or Java version might have just 3 catch clauses and handle errors arising below sensibly without any developer effort.

https://literatejava.com/exceptions/ten-practices-for-perfec...
by wvh | 2025-11-19 10:35:32+00:00
You're right, but between my carrier and Meta, I'd prefer to trust my carrier, even if it's just to know which window to throw a brick through. Maybe I'm being too European on this, but I'm not willing to hand over basic communications to private industry, especially companies whose entire business strategy is building profiles on people.

I still hope for a protocol to win out that's not tied to one party.
by monegator | 2025-11-19 10:35:58+00:00
the epiphany moment was when the dev team stopped listening to the neckbeards that wanted things different for the sake of them being different, and started listening to professionals that wanted more sane workflows. There must be a reason if all industry does things simillar ways, other than inertia.

Guess what, user adoption increased dramatically, because it became pleasant (or tolerable) to use by people that used literally any other program.

V8 included in the core many things that were plugins before, and replaced the old utilities that the neckbeards in the forum were crying to keep, or else! (or else more adoption.)

V9 had even more many improvements, but also many regressions, over V8. V10 might be the release that truly consolidates the core of the suite and then they can start really focus on high speed designs.

I've navigated many programs over my career, and unless a future employer mandates me to use Altium, or purely technical reasons (8+ layer, high speed designs) requires me to use Cadence, only kicad for me.

Incidentally, it feels like this past two years freeCAD GIMP and Inkscape have started moving away from listening to noisy members of the community, to useful members of the community. I'm seeing a slow but steady progress that will eventually accelerate and make both toold true alternatives, as it happened with KiCAD (though it will really be tough for GIMP, even if it's perfectly usable for many, many tasks, any graphic designer will kick and scream if they're not given the adobe suite, pity.)

Myself, i do very little basic graphics like replicate buttons and such things to not bother my colleague, or apply correction to my photos, i proudly do that in GIMP and inkscape.
by fredoralive | 2025-11-19 10:36:57+00:00
I think some of the more academic discussions on CPUs can often be stuck in the late-1980s 5 stage classic RISC paradigm. Those really would cripple your performance for misaligned access, as it would raise an OS exception and make the kernel fix things rather than trying to fix it up to you in hardware.

x86 has always been forgiving to misaligned access, and high end ARM has evolved towards forgiving over time. So you get into far more complex scenarios of how much of a penalty the CPU has fixing up alignment vs the whopping penalty a cache miss gives you with modern memory speeds.
by natmaka | 2025-11-19 10:37:03+00:00
A machine that operates continuously is a perfect machine, and no machine is perfect.

The greater the number and diversity of machines, as well as their geographical dispersion, the greater their availability.

In this respect, a mix of renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, etc.) deployed on a continental scale, along with storage (batteries and V2(G|H), hydro, green hydrogen...) is unbeatable (total cost, availability, risk, etc.).
by zerosizedweasle | 2025-11-19 10:38:49+00:00
Don't have to take my word for it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2025-11-19/odd-lots-the... This is going to a backlash like no other. Better prepare.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-19/how-the-p...

A tsunami of rage.
by tauntz | 2025-11-19 10:38:52+00:00
<snark>

Pressing the "Submit" button on their "Google Antigravity for Organizations Interest Form" (https://antigravity.google/interest-form) doesn't actually do anything for me (tried Firefox and Chrome) -> their metrics will indicate that there's no interest from organizations -> the product will be killed in a year.

</snark>
by tpoacher | 2025-11-19 10:38:59+00:00
Slightly off-topic, but I really hate this trend that now every developer / researcher / engineer also needs to be an actor (typically cringy one) pretending to be quirky for the camera while trying to act unnaturally excited about the technology.

I really miss the days of the professional casualness and naturalness of something like the "mother of all demos" [0]. Like, can you imagine the guy wearing a turtleneck and going, "but wait!" and acting surprised after every sentence? It would NOT have been the same demo.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
by b112 | 2025-11-19 10:39:05+00:00
But what Google is doing, is like what Firefox did when Chrome came out. Panicking.

Panicking, and therefore making horrible design and product choices.

Google has made their main search engine output utter and complete junk. It's just terrible. If they didn't have 'web' search, I'd never be able to use it.

In almost every search for the last month, normal search results in horrible matches. Switch to web? Bam! First result.

Not web? The same perfect result might be 3 or 4 pages deep. If that.

(I am comparing web results in both cases, and ignoring the also broken 80% of the pages of AI junk.)

In an attempt to compete, they're literally driving people to use ChatGPT for search in droves.

They could compete, and do so without this panicky disaster of a response.
by matteocontrini | 2025-11-19 10:39:18+00:00
It would still fail if you were unluckily on the new proxy (it's not very clear why if the feature was not enabled, indeed):

> Unrelated to this incident, we were and are currently migrating our customer traffic to a new version of our proxy service, internally known as FL2. Both versions were affected by the issue, although the impact observed was different.

> Customers deployed on the new FL2 proxy engine, observed HTTP 5xx errors. Customers on our old proxy engine, known as FL, did not see errors, but bot scores were not generated correctly, resulting in all traffic receiving a bot score of zero. Customers that had rules deployed to block bots would have seen large numbers of false positives. Customers who were not using our bot score in their rules did not see any impact.
by KronisLV | 2025-11-19 10:39:34+00:00
> There are many self-hosted alternatives to protect against botnet.

What would some good examples of those be? I think something like Anubis is mostly against bot scraping, not sure how you'd mitigate a DDoS attack well with self-hosted infra if you don't have a lot of resources?

On that note, what would be a good self-hosted WAF? I recall using mod_security with Apache and the OWASP ruleset, apparently the Nginx version worked a bit slower (e.g. https://www.litespeedtech.com/benchmarks/modsecurity-apache-... ), there was also the Coraza project but I haven't heard much about it https://coraza.io/ or maybe the people who say that running a WAF isn't strictly necessary also have a point (depending on the particular attack surface).

Genuine questions.
by dangus | 2025-11-19 10:40:00+00:00
This seems to be a disingenuous comparison. With RCS it’s supposed to work but it’s broken, which is your “parental control.”

But I don’t think either platform lets you control messaging group chat functionality this way. They just offer approved contacts and complete disable as your options to control messaging.

I also think your “amount of drama” might be badly measured simply because the majority of kids in the US use iOS.

87% of teens have an iPhone.

https://www.pipersandler.com/teens
by graemep | 2025-11-19 10:40:06+00:00
Its not practical. Lots of things are copyright by default. HN comments are covered by copyright. Every photo you take is covered by copyright, so are letters contracts, kids drawings as well as professional artists,.....

What would work is an orphan works exemption, whereby if a work is not available and its not possible to trace the copyright holders you could use it.

The other problem is the term of copyright is far too long. it is ridiculous that something written during the reign of Queen Victoria could remain in copyright into the 21st century in the UK and EU. US law is slightly saner (in avoiding bringing out of copyright works back into copyright) but not much.
by red75prime | 2025-11-19 10:40:33+00:00
> To succeed this well in math, you can't just do better probabilistic generation, you need verifiable search.

You say "probabilistic generation" like it's some kind of a limitation. What is exactly the limiting factor here? [(0.9999, "4"), (0.00001, "four"), ...] is a valid probability distribution. The sampler can be set to always choose "4" in such cases.
by falcor84 | 2025-11-19 10:40:37+00:00
> human oriented aspects

The irony is of course that humans in general and software professionals in particular (myself definitely included) notoriously struggle with communication, whereas RLHF is literally optimizing LLMs for clear communication. Why wouldn't you expect an AI that's both a superhuman coder and a superhuman communicator to be decent at translating between human requirements and code?
by L-51 | 2025-11-19 10:40:38+00:00
I built a LaTeX template and setup guide for using LaTeX locally in VS Code. It includes a modular project structure, preconfigured LaTeX Workshop settings, local/offline compilation and Git integration.

The goal is to provide a clean, lightweight alternative to Overleaf for students and researchers who prefer full control, privacy, and local performance. Contributions and feedback are very welcome
by betareducer | 2025-11-19 10:41:25+00:00
Messages catalogs are very useful for stakeholder communication (such as business sponsors, auditors or security teams). In one place they define the entire set of critical events or state changes within an application.

Manifest is a crate that provides a mechanism to operationalize such catalogs by generating appropriate constants (with must use / deprecated semantics, comments and the like) and structs.
by tovej | 2025-11-19 10:41:53+00:00
Here's your own "source" (wikipedia) on neolithic people on the British isles.

"Recent genetic studies have suggested that Britain's Neolithic population was largely replaced by a population from North Continental Europe characterised by the Bell Beaker culture around 2400 BC, associated with the Yamnaya people from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe."

And you can't use the fact that wikipedia uses the term "non-indigenous" for a group to prove a point about "non-native", when what your arguing is that they mean the same. That's a circular argument, the premise is only true if the conclusion is true.

There's also a category error here, whether a group belongs to non-indigenous minorities says nothing about indigenous majority, which is what you're claiming the English are. They would not be present in "non-indigenous minority" because they are not a minority.

Again, you're the only one bringing up "indigenous" as a relevant concept. Something that neither DHH nor anyone else but you in this discussion is arguing about.
by vbezhenar | 2025-11-19 10:42:04+00:00
IMO: there should be explicit error path for invalid configuration, so the program would abort with specific exit code and/or message. And there should be a superviser which would detect this behaviour, rollback old working config and wait for few minutes before trying to apply new config again (of course with corresponding alerts).

So basically bad config should be explicitly processed and handled by rolling back to known working config.
Show HN: Fastmail.com masked email CLI tool
by fredmb | 2025-11-19 10:44:33+00:00
I generate a unique email alias for all web services that I sign up to, so I made a CLI tool to make it easy to instantly create or get an alias for a website.

While I'm planning to eventually self-host anonaddy[1] or SimpleLogin[2], I'm currently happy with Fastmail.com's masked email feature[3].

90% of my own usage consists of entering `masked_fastmail website.com`, which will get the alias for website.com or create one if it doesn't exist. The alias is automatically copied to clipboard. There's a GIF of how this works in the project README together with some more examples.

The CLI tool is written in Go and is very simple. I've used it myself for almost 1 year now. I made some upgrades yesterday and wanted to share it here in case it's useful for someone else :)

[1] https://github.com/anonaddy/anonaddy

[2] https://github.com/simple-login/app

[3] https://www.fastmail.com/features/masked-email/
by rldjbpin | 2025-11-19 10:44:37+00:00
will always champion the notion of keeping things as simple as possible. however this take seems a bit overreactive.

their stack has been some of the easiest low-hanging fruits for enhancing self-managed web stuff. almost everyone who agrees with this sentiment is also relying on someone else in the chain to keep their sites up. in my limited experience, the latter ended up being less reliable in the past decade or so.

funnily enough the site was (momentarily) not loading for me, but instantly did right after.
by roenxi | 2025-11-19 10:45:05+00:00
If they're happy to do it to 1970s standards, probably most of them. The standard of what an ordinary life looks like has gone up a lot. Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job - much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot. It is worth remembering that in the early 1900s there were a lot of houses that didn't even have electricity.

The trends [0] are clear. As society offers people more comfort they have less children. Often radically so, having a GDP per capita of above $30k basically means that people stop having enough babies to hit the replacement rate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
by Iulioh | 2025-11-19 10:45:30+00:00
Having the shinyest toys is useless if you don't play with them.

They had the tech but didn't see the danger in it, they belived that the lower quality digital camera would fail and investing in them would mean exploring a new market and they choose the safe corporate move, buisness as usual.

Turns out that low quality but way more pratical and cheaper on the long run really sells
by Narciss | 2025-11-19 10:45:45+00:00
It sounds like an API issue more than anything. I was working with it through cursor on a side project, and it did better than all previous models at following instructions, refactoring, and UI-wise it has some crazy skills.

What really impressed me was when I told it that I wanted a particular component’s UI to be cleaned up but I didn’t know how exactly, just wanted to use its deep design expertise to figure it out, and it came up with a UX that I would’ve never thought of and that was amazing.

Another important point is that the error rate for my session yesterday was significantly lower than when I’ve used any other model.

Today I will see how it does when I use it at work, where we have a massive codebase that has particular coding conventions. Curious how it does there.
by KronisLV | 2025-11-19 10:47:39+00:00
> However Nginx doesn’t panic on malformed config. It exits with hopefully a helpful error code and message.

The thing I dislike most about Nginx is that if you are using it as a reverse proxy for like 20 containers and one of them is up, the whole web server will refuse to start up:

nginx: [emerg] host not found in upstream "my-app"

Obviously making 19 sites also unavailable just because one of them is caught in a crash loop isn't ideal. There is a workaround involving specifying variables, like so (non-Kubernetes example, regular Nginx web server running in a container, talking to other containers over an internal network, like Docker Compose or Docker Swarm):

location / { resolver 127.0.0.11 valid=30s; # Docker DNS set $proxy_server my-app; proxy_pass http://$proxy_server:8080/; proxy_redirect default; }

Sadly, if you try to use that approach, then you just get:

nginx: [emerg] "proxy_redirect default" cannot be used with "proxy_pass" directive with variables

Sadly, switching the redirect configuration away from the default makes some apps go into a redirect loop and fail to load: mostly legacy ones, where Firefox shows something along the lines of "The page isn't redirecting properly". It sucks especially badly if you can't change the software that you just need to run and suddenly your whole Nginx setup is brittle. Apache2 and Caddy don't have such an issue.

That's to say that all software out there has some really annoying failure modes, even is Nginx is pretty cool otherwise.
by tmtvl | 2025-11-19 10:48:17+00:00
There are a couple of references to earlier games, but if you read the manual then you know enough to just get started with QotA (Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar). QotA, WoD (Ultima 5: Warriors of Destiny), and TFP (Ultima 6: The False Prophet) kind of make a trilogy (the so-called 'Age of Enlightenment' trilogy) and you can port your character over between one game and the next, but they're perfectly playable by themselves. While TFP has the best story of the 3, I consider QotA my favourite because I love the concept of an RPG without a big evil villain. It's a story of a normal person cleaning up their act and becoming an exemplar of virtue and I love it.

Ultima VII is again perfectly playable by itself, but, yet again, it's best if you thoroughly read the manual for all the background information you need. There's an old joke of Bethesda introducing a new feature for one of the Elder Scrolls games (NPCs have schedules and go about their daily life! You can bake bread!) and the response being that Ultima VII already did that back in 1992.
by jbreckmckye | 2025-11-19 10:48:18+00:00
But I could screw it up in Go, if I made the same assumptions

fvs, err := features.AppendWithNames(..) if err != nil { // this will NEVER break panic(err) }

Ultimately I don't think language design can be the sole line of defence against system failures; it can only guide developers to think about error cases
by monerozcash | 2025-11-19 10:49:09+00:00
In my case, I use bigger screen devices with somewhat exotic productivity tools that would not necessarily fit well in the walled garden.

On the other hand, an ultra locked down macbook would sound pretty ideal for day-to-day browsing, handling financial tasks, work communications and so on. Really everything except the software development tasks I work on.

On the other hand, I do almost everything over SSH already. I guess I really could easily live with a completely locked down base MacOS install without any issues. Even Terminal.app isn't too bad anymore.
by AndreasMoeller | 2025-11-19 10:51:07+00:00
Exactly, I would be suspicious of anyone who can remember the syntax .

Timing functions is the most extreme example IMO. Being able to visualize a Bezier curve from cubic-bezier(0.47, -0.02, 0.57, 1.04), and THEN mentally map that to an animation behavior is just not humanly possible :)
by DrewADesign | 2025-11-19 10:52:42+00:00
And I hate the aesthetics of them (for me,) which is going to be a huge problem for the smart glasses world. Glasses dramatically change how you look, so few frames look good on more than a handful of face types, and that’s not even considering differences in personal style. Unless you come up with a core that can be used in a bunch of different frame shapes I can’t see any of these being long term products.
by ktpsns | 2025-11-19 10:53:48+00:00
Modern software deployment methods can fill the gap between your selfhosted need and the work to be done. I won't name technologies here, because existing have its flaws (docker, helm, etc).

Mastodon is federated and thus basically fulfills your whish. IMO "decentralized Web3" such as IPFS may rempve that need for classical "hosts" but at the costs of an entrance barrier for users (have to install that client).
by lm28469 | 2025-11-19 10:53:53+00:00
Reading comprehension must not be your forte, or you're arguing in bad faith. American nuclear reactors aren't built with Chinese tech or by Chinese engineers as far as I can tell.

If you give up your sovereignty on topics like defence, energy or agriculture don't come crying in 20 years when you're someone else's bitch. Ask German's how it's going with the cheap russian gas lmao
by jacquesm | 2025-11-19 10:53:58+00:00
No, they don't guide you to the exit, they guide you past the collection.

The whole point is that the thing is set up like a very long serpentine track so that you 'see everything' rather than that you can go to the one thing you want and then to the cash register. This is because they - rightly - figure that if they can keep you in the store longer and expose you to more stuff you might buy more.
by poisonborz | 2025-11-19 10:54:29+00:00
You confuse open source with free software, and all the shades of it.

GPL/copyleft exist because some people make products because they want to help and improve a community. Not just to let the product go in the wind, "whatever happens to it" (meaning corporations using it for profit extraction and/or the exact opposite goals). Even if AI made this less defendable by legal means.

This isn't because these people are "control freaks", but because of their beliefs and purposefully chosen legal framework.
by rckt | 2025-11-19 10:55:23+00:00
My personal experience with any approach I tried ended up in a semi-failure state. I can't trust LLM and have to check everything myself to either actually solve a problem or be sure that the LLM did not invent things. This fact simply kills the usefulness of LLMs. They are not reliable and I waste more time trying to accomplish something just using the AI. If people around me were praising AI and I was the only one unable to find an approach, I would agree with your points. But it's not the case. The general perception of the AI tools is quite pessimistic.
by Eingrand1978 | 2025-11-19 10:55:57+00:00
With companies deploying an average of 75+ security tools to manage their network infrastructure, the complexity of cybersecurity management has reached critical levels. The network security tools market alone is expected to reach $50 billion in 2025, growing at a 12% CAGR through 2033.

This complexity creates significant operational challenges: security teams struggle with tool sprawl, fragmented visibility, and increased mean time to resolution (MTTR). A single pane of glass (SPOG) solution addresses these challenges by unifying multiple monitoring tools and data sources into one centralized interface, providing complete network visibility and enabling teams to monitor thousands of connected devices efficiently