MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Quothling | 2025-11-13 11:00:38+00:00
Valve is a private company. I'm not going to say that every public company lacks a product focus, but I think there is a danger in public companies where it becomes natural to promote MBA's over product and even sales roles. I know MBA is treated with hatred here, but I don't think they are necessarily bad or evil, but I do think they have an advantage in obtaining power naturally because it's basically their profession and espesially product people are often bad at corporate politics.

In many public companies there is the added level of investor interest, and it can often be a challenge for the C levels to remain in power during periods of slow or even negative growth. Challenges that companies like Valve simply don't have as long as the CEO is fine with it. On the flip side, I'm happy with my own stock portfolio so there is that.
by kragen | 2025-11-13 11:01:01+00:00
GCC outputs textual GNU assembly language, in which I have written, for example, a web server, a Tetris game, a Forth interpreter, and an interpreter for an object-oriented language with pattern-matching. Perhaps you are under the illusion that I am not a human programmer because this is some kind of superhuman feat, but to me it seems easier than programming in high-level languages. It just takes longer. I think that's a common experience.

Historically speaking, almost all video games and operating systems were written in assembly languages similar to this until the 80s.
by pbiggar | 2025-11-13 11:01:03+00:00
I see. Well, let me explain what this is about.

AI models represent society, and society has significant biases against certain groups, which find their way into the AI. One of those groups is Palestinians. In fact, Israel is currently running an influence operation [1] to make AIs significantly pro-Israel (which means in many cases inserting an Israeli narrative to cover up their long history of Crimes Against Humanity against Palestine, including the current genocide, but also the apartheid in Occupied Palestine).

Existing AI companies have shown significant bias not just against Palestine, but against basic internationally understood principles of human rights, and indeed are cozying up to the US war machine in meaningful ways. Many people around the world do not trust any of these companies as a result.

Our Ethical tech alternatives, including https://thaura.ai, are built to provide an ecosystem of alternatives to the heavily-controlled tech companies, many of whom are directly complicit in the genocide in Gaza (eg Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta), and many of whom suppress pro-humanity narratives because of biases towards Israel (esp Meta, but also LinkedIn, Youtube, X).

Another example is https://upscrolled.com, which is an alternative to Instagram and X, against built on basic humanitarian principles (which IG and X do not adhere to).

Hope this helps!

[1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-chatgpt/
by outime | 2025-11-13 11:01:26+00:00
It's always the same discussions here whenever a company decides to use Electron or a similar solution. It's beyond tiring to see the same arguments being repeated.

A company's goal is to make money by optimizing its resources. What benefits would Meta gain by maintaining native apps for WhatsApp across the three major operating systems? I can tell you: absolutely none, only negatives. Nobody except a negligible fraction of users would care about native performance or idle memory consumption. No one is going to switch to Signal or whatever the flavor-of-the-year messaging app is because of this.

It would be a different story if WhatsApp were to lose a significant portion of its user base due to the app becoming unusable or extremely slow. But for the vast majority, this change will go unnoticed or frankly won't matter at all. So, expect most companies to continue adopting Electron-like apps (for the few that still have native apps anyway) for exactly the same reasons.

Sorry to be blunt, but it's really tiresome to see these discussions going around in circles here. It’s pointless to keep debating this, it's not going to change. If one day a framework emerges that's comparable to Electron (or something similar) but requires fewer resources to develop against, I could see Meta and other companies considering it... provided the migration costs aren’t too high. But again, no end-user truly cares about this.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-11-13 11:01:34+00:00
I enjoy doing the same thing: if I am reading and something in the text triggers a memory (could be a historic person, a philosophy, some technology, place, etc.) then I like to have a back and forth for a minute or two to fill in my memory or get more background.

A fortune has been spent developing AI coding agents and they are useful, but I think that if used properly LLM based AI can be most useful in short educational or spitballing sessions. I probably only directly use LLM based AI for about two hours a week (including coding agents), but that is well used time for me.
by automatic6131 | 2025-11-13 11:02:23+00:00
>that there's people in power that still care? strange feeling, still curious about it

One day, Gabe Newell will die. Maybe his racer son will inherit the job, or maybe he'll delegate the job. Maybe this new CEO will take Valve public to ensure they get a centi-million dollar payout.

Then all the good times end. This is the halcyon for Steam customers.
by Bengalilol | 2025-11-13 11:02:43+00:00
Meaningless word + list of "lies"... Nice read anyways.

"BabelJS is arguably one of the first “transpilers” that was developed so that people could experiment with JavaScript’s new language features that did not yet have browser implementations"

Just my two cents. Haxe was created long time ago, and BabelJS is arguably not one of the first "transpilers" people can play with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haxe

[2] https://haxe.org
by nabla9 | 2025-11-13 11:03:35+00:00
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) investigation on Google will assess whether it’s “demoting” news outlets and other publisher websites when they include sponsored or commercial material.

Google’s policy restricts publishers from doing business with third-party providers and monetising their websites and content.

If the Commission concludes that Google has breached the DMA, the company could be fined up to 10% of its worldwide turnover and may face further penalties for any ongoing infringement.

Separately, back in March, the Commission’s initial DMA investigations into Google reached a preliminary conclusion that it had breached the rules for self-preferencing on search and anti-steering on its Play app store.
by superdisk | 2025-11-13 11:03:47+00:00
Contrary to what everyone else is saying, I think you're completely correct. Using it for AI or "reasoning" is a hopeless dead end, even if people wish otherwise. However I've found that Prolog is an excellent language for expressing certain types of problems in a very concise way, like parsers, compilers, and assemblers (and many more). The whole concept of using a predicate in different modes is actually very useful in a pragmatic way for a lot of problems.

When you add in the constraint solving extensions (CLP(Z) and CLP(B) and so on) it becomes even more powerful, since you can essentially mix vanilla Prolog code with solver tools.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-13 11:04:30+00:00
Readers of a certain age will remember the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products from Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Every product - doors, lifts, toasters, personal massagers - was equipped with intensely annoying, positive, and sycophantic GPP (Genuine People Personality)™, and their robots were sold as Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to be With.

Unfortunately the entire workforce were put up against a wall and shot during the revolution.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-13 11:04:32+00:00
They're half-right. Microsoft do keep supporting the OS APIs, but it's the UI frameworks that get half-assed and abandoned. Which is why so many people recommend Avalonia these days. Microsoft don't even reliably use their own frameworks - go through Win11 and see how many Windows Forms dialogs are still present in things like settings and Explorer.

(WinUI is also a hybrid: since it uses the DirectX APIs rather than the old GDI model, most of it is in a userspace package that's delivered as an .appx)
by dspillett | 2025-11-13 11:04:46+00:00
> The donation is more or less virtue signalling rather than actual insight.

I see it more as a middle finger to the perps: “look, we can afford to pay, here, see us pay that amount elsewhere, but you aren't getting it”. It isn't signalling virtue as much as it is signalling “fuck you and your ransom demands” in the hope that this will mark them as not an easy target for that sort of thing in future.
by mjburgess | 2025-11-13 11:04:57+00:00
I'm not convinced your L/S dichotomy applies. The concern there is that the natural world (or some objective target domain) has natural joints, and the job of the scientist (, philosopher, et al.) is to uncover those joints. You want to keep 'hair splitting' until the finest bones of reality are clear, then grouping hairs up into lumps, so their joints and connections are clear. The debate is whether the present categorisation objectively under/over-generates , and whether there is a factor of the matter. If it over-includes, then real structure is missing.

In the case of embeddings vs. vectors, classical vs., baroque, transpiler vs., compiler -- i think the apparent 'lumper' is just a person ignorant of classification scheme offered, or at least, ignorant of what property it purports to capture.

In each case there is a real objective distinction beneath the broader category that one offers in reply, and that settles the matter. There is no debate: a transpiler is a specific kind of compiler; an embedding vector is a specific kinds of vector; and so on.

There is nothing at stake here as far as whether the categorisation is tracking objective structure. There is only ignorance on the part of the lumper: the ignorant will, of course, always adopt more general categories ("thing" in the most zero-knowledge case).

A real splitter/lumper debate would be something like: how do we classify all possible programs which have programs as their input and output? Then a brainstorm which does not include present joint-carving terms, eg., transformers = whole class, transformer-sourcers = whole class on source code, ...
by kragen | 2025-11-13 11:05:12+00:00
That sounds reasonable, but I doubt F-Droid can cough up the required US$1 million to pay 12 Google L7 SWEs to spend a month reviewing F-Droid once they get enough free time. I wonder if they'd require F-Droid to comply with PCI-DSS? That seems to be the trendy thing in review and certification processes, and naturally it's important for an "App Store" to have secure payments, isn't it? (Never mind that F-Droid doesn't accept payment except donations via liberapay.)
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-11-13 11:05:13+00:00
You're ignoring the benefits though - it will help adapt more services to work online and reduce bureaucracy.

Look at Germany where they outright refuse to acknowledge emails as a legal notification / correspondence so everything still gets sent as letters and fax. It's extremely slow and cumbersome.

Also it will help for security as the central service can authenticate you, instead of every little hotel and bank branch, etc. keeping a copy of your passport.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-13 11:05:38+00:00
Secure, end-to-end, multi-device encryption isn't easy. Plenty of people try and fail to build secure messengers based on top of PGP and Signal's protocol.

I don't use the Telegram web app, but their native apps work excellently. The insertion of ads has been a major disappointment but the chat UX itself is still great, even on native Linux.
by BoredPositron | 2025-11-13 11:06:48+00:00
There are millions of companies even century or decade old ones without a hacking incident with data extraction. The whole everyone gets hacked is copium for a lack of security standards or here the lack of deprecation and having unmantained systems online with legacy client data. Announcing it proudly would be concerning if I had business with them. It's not even a lack of competence... it's a lack of hygiene.
by sunaookami | 2025-11-13 11:07:03+00:00
I don't think that the activation of this process is tied to the enabled-state of any features and the recommended section/start menu in general does not even use a Webview. It may be active all the time because various parts of the OS use it (I think the settings app for MS account stuff and the Explorer for some Office 365 features?) and it's faster keeping it active instead of starting it constantly.
by graemep | 2025-11-13 11:07:10+00:00
> hackers started to realize en masse that it was all a ploy to extract free labor from them.

There are at least three different groups of people here:

1. Those paid to write permissively licensed software - not free labour.

2. Those who are happy to be free labour. I read a comment by a BSD developer about being very proud and happy to be able to buy a games console that ran on a BSD derived OS.

3. Naive people who are are shocked when someone creates a proprietary fork of their code. It is something that they explicitly gave everyone permission to do, and it is something that has been happening for decades - I can think of Windows using BSD network code in the early 90s, but there are probably much earlier examples. Apple's OSes are very high profile examples since 2001, and Nextstep before that.

The last group have themselves to blame. Did they not take the trouble to understand a legal document? Do they know nothing about the history of their industry? Do they takes steps to stop it - for example by doing releasing updates under a copyleft license?

I agree with you that big players do push licenses that suite themselves, but it relies on either deliberate choice or foolishness by contributors for it to work. I also think copyleft is usually of greater benefit to society.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-11-13 11:08:24+00:00
It's not wrong nor misleading at all. Win32 doesn't even support dark mode properly because it's effectively "deprecated" like all the others in the graveyard.

Who cares if they keep working if the only way to get dark mode is to custom render the whole UI yourself? Might as well do something non-native at that point.

Microsoft does not provide a serious UI library for applications to use. It provides 10 half broken and deprecated ones.
by berkes | 2025-11-13 11:08:39+00:00
I always presume the "We are sorry" opens up to financial compensation, whereas the "we regret that you are worried" does not.

In my country, this debate is being held WRT the atrocities my country committed in its (former) colonies, and towards enslaved humans¹. Our king and prime minister never truly "apologized". Because, I kid you not, the government fears that this opens up possibilities for financial reparation or compensation and the government doesn't want to pay this. They basically searched for the words that sound as close to apologies as possible, but aren't words that require one to act on the apologies.

¹ I'm talking about The Netherlands. Where such atrocities were committed as close as one and a half generations ago still (1949) (https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/blog/2022/10/how-do-dutc...) but mostly during what is still called "The Golden Age".
by metalman | 2025-11-13 11:08:50+00:00
ok!thanks I took the numbers I found at face value. Having local copys of OSM and wiki will be a big asset for work, as mobile data is my only source, and it is not exactly reliable. though I do have enough data on my business plan to indulge in an occasional download frenzy from the awsome site you linked.

https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-11-13 11:08:50+00:00
Is that human vs robo or is it just that one had the enshittification dial turned up earlier?

If you were running a private equity robotaxi firm and your bonus relied on 1% more rides wouldn't you be dialing up the aggressive driving? Repeat for a few quarters and the robot will be cutting the same corners that the human is forced to.

Some future Fight Club reboot will reference your ChatGPT logs that show you asked how much the corporation would need to pay to the people killed in crashes vs increased profit to find the profit maximising level of dangerous driving.
by Quarrel | 2025-11-13 11:08:52+00:00
My worry is that they're training it on Q&A from the general public now, and that this tone, and more specifically, how obsequious it can be, is exactly what the general public want.

Most of the time, I suspect, people are using it like wikipedia, but with a shortcut to cut through to the real question they want answered; and unfortunately they don't know if it is right or wrong, they just want to be told how bright they were for asking it, and here is the answer.

OpenAI then get caught in a revenue maximising hell-hole of garbage.

God, I hope I am wrong.
by rwmj | 2025-11-13 11:08:52+00:00
Every time I use it, it has some huge box over a third of the page saying I must "verify sessions".

It's incredibly slow to propagate messages.

Initial set up is very confusing and offers far too many choices.

I've never worked out how to find rooms. Regularly someone will give me a room name and I can't find it or join it.

Their entire service went down (did someone say "decentralised"?) a few months ago.
by vintagedave | 2025-11-13 11:08:55+00:00
> The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and experiments here, there and everywhere, then the coordination complexity increases nonlinearly with the number of platforms.

Why not use a common library, where platform teams can update what features they use from it at their own pace?

Or why not use some other tech that allows multi-platform native shipping? The company I just started at, RemObjects, builds software for Mac and Windows (and iOS etc) from a common codebase. They just keep the UI separate, and all that is done when there's a new feature is _only_ UI layer coordination.

So an app has a C# (say) or Go codebase, and a UI layer in WPF and Cocoa.

I feel like coordination cost goes way down with both of these:

a) Library approach: central functionality, platform teams not tied to specifics

b) Shared codebase where all logic lives: platform teams do only UI

Edit: forgot to add, all this is can be across languages, ie maybe you have a Go shared library and write your Cocoa UI layer in C#, that's fine, their tech makes it all interop.
Show HN: Oratio – Natural language programming that expands itself with AI
by manuzz88 | 2025-11-13 11:09:18+00:00
Hi HN! I built ORATIO, a programming language where you write in natural language (Italian/English) and it executes directly.

The interesting part: it uses a local GPU model (DeepSeek 16B) to automatically generate new operations by analyzing the Python ecosystem. It literally programs itself.

Example: "Create a red dot. Save as output.png" → Works instantly

Live playground: https://oratio.dev/playground.html Install: pip install oratio

Currently supports data analysis, visualization, and graphics. The autonomous expansion system is in development.

Would love feedback from the community!
by dspillett | 2025-11-13 11:09:26+00:00
> If companies want security, they should pay for security.

Or just properly follow best-practise, and their own procedures, internally.⁰

That was the failing here, which in an unusual act of honesty they are taking responsibility for in this matter.

--------

[0] That might be considered paying for security, indirectly, as it means having the resources available to make sure these things are done, and tracked so it can be proven they are done making slips difficult to happen and easy to track & hopefully rectify when they inevitably still do.
by barrkel | 2025-11-13 11:10:01+00:00
So you want to gradually reduce the fidelity of the error message as it makes its way up the stack.

That means that the top level handler can at best log a vague message.

That in turn means you must log along the way where you have more precise information about the failure, or you risk not having enough information to fix issues.

And that in turn means you must have lots of redundant logging, since each point in the stack doesn't know whether the abstraction it's invoking has already logged or not, or encapsulation would be violated.
by npteljes | 2025-11-13 11:10:37+00:00
Even for personal use? If devs preferred Linux so much, I'd expect them to use it at least in their own time. But, what the stats say is that people use Win even more when it comes to personal devices, and Linux, not even a tenth of a percent. If anything, that looks like that dev don't prefer Linux. They use when the employer pushes it onto them, but not anywhere else.
Show HN: Sync Supabase Users to Beehiiv
by valliveeti | 2025-11-13 11:10:56+00:00
Created a simple tool to solve our own problem of syncing new users from supabase to our beehiiv. Hopefully you also find it useful.

Includes: Checks for unsubscriptions to not resubscribe unsubscribed people. Dry runs to double check the additions we would do.

No immediate plans to extend this with new features.
by andsoitis | 2025-11-13 11:11:04+00:00
> state socialism. US government owns 10% of Intel.

State socialism usually involves the government owning or controlling the means of production, running companies to serve social goals rather than primarily for profit.

The government bought about 10% of Intel stock, mainly through a structured deal using existing funding commitments.

These shares are non-voting (or at least carry no special governance rights), meaning the government does not control Intel’s daily operations.

Intel remains a publicly traded, privately managed company operating for profit.

Owning 10% of Intel is not state socialism. It’s a government investment in a private company, primarily for strategic and economic reasons, without controlling the company.
by darkwater | 2025-11-13 11:11:36+00:00
Yep, this 100%. Every time there is a technology which has became the "de facto" standard, and there are people proposing "simpler alternatives", this is the kind of practical detail that makes a GIANT difference and that's usually never mentioned.

Network effect is a thing, Helm is the de facto "package manger" for Kubernetes program distribution. But this time there are generally no alternative instructions like

tar xzf package.tar.gz; ./configure; make; adduser -u foo; chown -R foo /opt/foo
by sharperguy | 2025-11-13 11:11:43+00:00
Considering phone scammers often convince their victims to:

- install remote desktop software

- run commands in the windows terminal

- withdraw cash from the bank

- lie to the bank teller about their purpose

- insert their cash into a bitcoin ATM at a gas station

- ignore warnings about scams which appear on the screen of the ATM

- insert the scammers bitcoin address into the machine

It isn't a stretch to imagine they could convince the victim to install adb and sideload an app.