MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I Spent 200 Hours Compiling These Open Source Reviews
by honestabraham | 2025-11-19 01:46:28+00:00
I was trying to find a review about a certain privacy product, but all I found was a bunch of spam/affiliate ridden "review" sites. This led me to some guides which, instead of having any real information, the only page on the privacy guides that seemed to have any meaningful "research" was their VPN page.

So I built Open Source Reviews which anyone can contribute to.

All of the reviews generate from markdown: https://github.com/opensourcereviews/opensourcereviews.githu...

I'm looking for moderators(maintainers).

Please don't hesitate to fork and submit a PR for review!

I hope someone finds this useful!
by mxmilkiib | 2025-11-19 01:46:29+00:00
https://youtube.com/@letspainttv

beautiful art

I started to see them on IG a few years ago when I used it a lot more than I do now

the "positive power electronics" music thing is a take I don't think I had seen before (though it must be more uncommon than rare), and it's delightful

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_electronics_(music_genre...

positive, as in, compared to, say, big name UK act Whitehouse https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m0wDEjccTkHXUG52Cz...

fwiw, not all of it is that harsh!

there's a fair netradio for that style; https://www.radio-browser.info/search?page=1&order=clickcoun...

I think a lot about the "it's easier to destroy than create" thing, to paint a dystopia than a eutopia, n the Let's Paint work is an interesting reflection on that
by Thugonerd | 2025-11-19 01:47:28+00:00
I spent the last year (2,080+ hours, 8–12 h days) turning LLMs into the paranoid senior engineer every dev wishes they had.

Turns out what we needed was the Scientific Method for LLMs.

→ Forces the model to list every possible hypothesis instead of marrying the first one

→ Stress-tests each hypothesis before writing a single line

→ Refuses to touch files until the plan survives rigorous scrutiny

→ Full audit trail, zero unrecoverable states, zero infinite loops

95%+ hallucination reduction in real daily use.

Works with ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Llama 3.1, local models.

Why this protocol exists (real failures I watched for months):

I watched Cursor agents and GitHub Copilot lie to my face.

They’d say “Done – file replaced” while the file stayed untouched.

They’d claim “whitespace mismatch” when nothing changed.

They’d succeed on two files and silently skip the third.

I tried every model (GPT-4, Claude 3.5, Gemini 1.5, even O3-mini).

Same “False Compliance” every time.

The only thing that finally worked 100 % of the time was forcing the LLM to act like a paranoid senior engineer — never letting it “helpfully” reinterpret a brute-force command.

That’s exactly what this protocol does.

No theory. No agent worship. Just the rules that turned months of rage into reliable output.

You get:

• Full Zero-Bullshit Protocol™ (clean Markdown)

• Quick-Start guide

• Lifetime updates on the $299 tier

$99 → Launch Price (one-time)

$299 → Lifetime Access + all future updates forever

https://gracefultc.gumroad.com/l/wuxpg

If you’ve ever had an AI agent swear it did something it didn’t… this is the fix.
by omnicognate | 2025-11-19 01:47:31+00:00
> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche.

I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has for as long as computers have been used for that), (lib)ffmpeg is used everywhere for video/audio transcoding and between them nginx and apache still account for the majority of webservers. Most popular programming language compilers/interpreters/runtimes are open source too, of course.
by triceratops | 2025-11-19 01:47:34+00:00
> I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it... why should I be the sucker who does it?

You really are a fool. Who willingly gives up the chance to get some free exercise and feel morally superior? I'm over here happily returning others' shopping carts, not just my own, and basking in the knowledge of how I'm a better human being than you maest.
by like_any_other | 2025-11-19 01:47:41+00:00
> especially in the United States.

China has 1.4 million immigrants, and 12000 foreigners with permanent residency. Not per year, but total, cumulative [1]. Despite having 4x the population of the USA.

Meanwhile the USA has gone from 83% White in 1970 [2], to White children being a minority [3] in less than 50 years. And most of that change was due to legal immigration (that they were promised wouldn't change anything [4]) Yet still they're called out for not erasing their own identity even faster.

So do you just not believe in the national right to self-determination, to decide who may live among them? Do you also not believe in this right for Kashmir [5,6] or Palestine?

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

[3] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/less-than-half-of-us-chil...

[4] Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other politicians, including Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), asserted that the bill would not affect the U.S. demographic mix - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...

[5] Kashmir’s new status could bring demographic change, drawing comparisons to the West Bank - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...

[6] Human rights activists said that the moves to change Kashmir’s status were only the first steps in a broader plan to erode Kashmir’s core rights and seed the area with non-Kashmiris, altering the demographics and eventually destroying its character. Previous laws barred outsiders from owning property. - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/world/asia/india-pakistan...
by brigandish | 2025-11-19 01:47:46+00:00
Of course. He actually completely rewrote the code and still merged it in, so I got what I wanted. We've all had such experiences, I'm sure, but I was making the point that different people can have different experiences - I've had straightforward chats with Evan too. I'm sure people have had super nice and welcoming experiences with DHH too.

Should we not include the negative ones for one person and the positive ones for another?
by Reason077 | 2025-11-19 01:47:57+00:00
This must have been around the same time (1993 or so) when many organisations were upgrading old coax 10Base2 network equipment to modern 10BaseT (and eventually 100BaseT). My friends and I, strongly motivated by the incentive of being able to play multiplayer DOOM, managed to source some free ISA 10Base2 Ethernet cards and coax cable and T-connectors from someone's Dad. The only thing we were missing was the terminators which could be made yourself by cutting a coax cable and soldering a resistor between the conductors... fun introduction to LAN technology for us!
by ademarre | 2025-11-19 01:48:26+00:00
I integrated Turnstile with a fail-open strategy that proved itself today. Basically, if the Turnstile JS fails to load in the browser (or in a few specific frontend error conditions), we allow the user to submit the web form with a dummy challenge token. On the backend, we process the dummy token like normal, and if there is an error or timeout checking Turnstile's siteverify endpoint, we fail open.

Of course, some users were still blocked, because the Turnstile JS failed to load in their browser but the subsequent siteverify check succeeded on the backend. But overall the fail-open implementation lessened impact to our customers nonetheless.

Fail-open with Turnstile works for us because we have other bot mitigations that are sufficient to fall back on in the event of a Cloudflare outage.
by Retric | 2025-11-19 01:48:58+00:00
The space shuttle’s design was also deeply flawed to the point it failed to do the core objective, significantly lowering costs. Instead the core mission was sacrificed to meet some arbitrary design goals such as being able to de-orbit heavy objects.

That’s the core issue with decomposition of tasks, you aren’t communicating back up the chain and finding globally optimal solutions unless the task is simple enough to be completely understood.
by gpm | 2025-11-19 01:49:24+00:00
Rust's foo: Option<&T> is rust's rough equivalent to C++'s const T* foo. The C++ *foo is equivalent to the rust unsafe{ *foo.unwrap_unchecked() }, or in safe code *foo.unwrap() (which changes the undefined behavior to a panic).

Rust's unwrap isn't the same as std::expected::value. The former panics - i.e. either aborts the program or unwinds depending on context and is generally not meant to be handled. The latter just throws an exception that is generally expected to be handled. Panics and exceptions use similar machinery (at least they can depending on compiler options) but they are not equivalent - for example nested panics in destructors always abort the program.

In code that isn't meant to crash `unwind` should be treated as a sign saying that "I'm promising that this will never happen", but just like in C++ where you promise that pointers you deference are valid and signed integers you add don't overflow making promises like that is a necessary part of productive programming.
by adzm | 2025-11-19 01:49:41+00:00
> make them look like a GIANT EYESORE

React.__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED comes to mind. I did have to reach to this before, but it certainly works for keeping this out of example code and other things like reading other implementations without the danger being very apparent.

At some point it was renamed to __CLIENT_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_WARN_USERS_THEY_CANNOT_UPGRADE which is much less fun.
by amy_petrik | 2025-11-19 01:49:58+00:00
It's a simple catch-22

- women don't want to leave the workforce because one salary cannot support a family

- yet women remaining in the workforce, since single-salary is infeasible, thusly doubling supply of workers, lowering salaries, which itself makes it infeasible to single-income a family

Not to pick on women, as a feminist if you ask me, all modern men should have to be houseboys to serve their feminine masters. It does suck but it is necessary to benefit the modern women who did not suffer, in so by causing modern men to suffer -- to make amends for the suffering of all women in the perpetuity of history at the hands of all historical men, neither of which are alive today.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-11-19 01:50:11+00:00
There are many many pages of text discussing this topic, but having programmed in both styles, exceptions make it too easy for programmer to simply ignore them. Errors as values force you to explicitly handle it there, or toss it up the stack. Maybe some other languages have better exception handling but in Python it’s god awful. In big projects you can basically never know when or how something can fail.
by exmadscientist | 2025-11-19 01:50:48+00:00
> > A longer answer than mine: https://whn.global/yes-we-continue-wearing-masks/

> I skimmed read a bit of this (pretty sure I've read it before a few years ago). This is all Germaphobe logic.

Worse, that page is AI slop. There are good reasons for some people to wear masks. You won't find them on that page, at least not as believable arguments.
by smj-edison | 2025-11-19 01:50:55+00:00
Isn't the point of this article that pieces of infrastructure don't go down to root causes, but due to bad combinations of components that are correct individually? After reading "engineering a safer world", I find root cause analysis rather reductionistic, because it wasn't just an unwrap, it was that the payload was larger than normal, because of a query that didn't select by database, because a clickhouse made more databases visible. Hard to say "it was just due to an unwrap" imo. Especially in terms of how to fix an issue going forwards. I think the article lists a lot of good ideas, that aren't just "don't unwrap", like enabling more global kill switches for features, or eliminating the ability for core dumps or other error reports to overwhelm system resources.
by pdimitar | 2025-11-19 01:50:58+00:00
While I heavily frown upon using `unwrap` and `expect` in Rust code and make sure to have Clippy tell me about every single usage of them, I also understand that without them Rust might have been seen as an academic curiosity language.

They are escape hatches. Without those your language would never take off.

But here's the thing. Escape hatches are like emergency exits. They are not to be used by your team to go to lunch in a nearby restaurant.

---

Cloudflare should likely invest in better linting and CI/CD alerts. Not to mention isolated testing i.e. deploy this change only to a small subset and monitor, and only then do a wider deployment.

Hindsight is 20/20 and we can all be smartasses after the fact of course. But I am really surprised because lately I am only using Rust for hobby projects and even I know I should not use `unwrap` and `expect` beyond the first iteration phases.

---

I have advocated for this before but IMO Rust at this point will benefit greatly from disallowing those unsafe APIs by default in release mode. Though I understand why they don't want to do it -- likely millions of CI/CD pipelines will break overnight. But in the interim, maybe a rustc flag we can put in our `Cargo.toml` that enables such a stricter mode? Or have that flag just remove all the panicky API _at compile time_ though I believe this might be a Gargantuan effort and is likely never happening (sadly).

In any case, I would expect many other failures from Cloudflare but not _this_ one in particular.
by alsetmusic | 2025-11-19 01:52:54+00:00
One thing that helped me a lot was practicing in low-stakes situations. I started chatting up Uber drivers pretty consistently and learned a lot about just letting go in the moment. I was using rideshare for all my travel at the time, before the pan made me realize how vulnerable I was without a car. I don't get that practice anymore because taking Uber is much less frequent and I let the habit ossify.
by AgentME | 2025-11-19 01:53:02+00:00
This is assuming that the process could have done anything sensible while it had the malformed feature file. It might be in this case that this was one configuration file of several and maybe the program could have been built to run with some defaults when it finds this specific configuration invalid, but in the general case, if a program expects a configuration file and can't do anything without it, panicking is a normal thing to do. There's no graceful handling (beyond a nice error message) a program like Nginx could do on a syntax error in its config.

The real issue is further up the chain where the malformed feature file got created and deployed without better checks.
by DrewADesign | 2025-11-19 01:53:32+00:00
It depends on your definition of safe. Most of the code that gets written is pretty simple — basic crud web apps, WP theme customization, simple mobile games… stuff that can easily get written by the current gen of tooling. That already has cost a lot of people a lot of money or jobs outright, and most of them probably haven’t reached their skill limit a as developers.

As the available work increases in complexity, I reckon more will push themselves to take jobs further out of their comfort zone. Previously, the choice was to upskill for the challenge and greater earnings, or stay where you are which is easy and reliable; the current choice is upskill or get a new career. Rather than switch careers to something you have zero experience in. That puts pressure on the moderately higher-skill job market with far fewer people, and they start to upskill to outrun the implosion, which puts pressure on them to move upward, and so on. With even modest productivity gains in the whole industry, it’s not hard for me to envision a world where general software development just isn’t a particularly valuable skill anymore.
by captain_coffee | 2025-11-19 01:55:07+00:00
That is literally the reason for which I finally canceled Spotify a few years ago. At that point I was accumulating reasons to switch for the last few years but that was the last straw.

I am paying your most expensive subscription and if you would have had a more expensive / premium one I would have paid more explicitly for the service to not include ads anywhere, under any possible curcumstance. Aparently that was impossible.

Never looked back and I should have done the switch years before.
by true_religion | 2025-11-19 01:55:36+00:00
From what I can see, sanctuary cities were acting within the law. Their only stance was that they wouldn’t spend precious time and resources verifying immigration status for schools, and city services. As these are paid for and voted on by city residents, that seems fair.

If states, and cities aren’t bound to help the federal government enforce every law, unless congress writes a law to say they must.

CBP and ICE always had the general authority to be more effective, but did not use it. As we can see from actions in this era, enforcing immigration law at all costs has draconian side effects on civil liberties, and general happiness and wellbeing.

While it’s true, the immigration issue has been marinating for a while, the current policy is not a good solution.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-19 01:55:56+00:00
That is a huge problem.

We were not pushing 40 trillion in debt at the time of the great financial crisis.

The TARP was a max of 700 billion and we didn't even disburse all the funds.

Trying to do a bailout of this size could easily cause a crisis in the treasury market. Then we really are in huge trouble.
by Izkata | 2025-11-19 01:56:15+00:00
Chicago's Lake Shore Drive/Belmont intersection has 3 stoplights you have to pass to get out. During rush hour it sometimes gets so backed up my bus has gotten stuck in it for a half hour. The first light is for the northbound on/off and a small side street that goes to some tennis/etc courts, the second for southbound on/off, and the side street adjacent to LSD splits in two so the third light is for the same street as the second light and is where you can finally enter it.
by fsckboy | 2025-11-19 01:56:34+00:00
was what I was responding to supposed to be a constructive suggestion?

>It's inability to provide for its citizens

provide some evidence, and also the counter evidence that shows that other countries don't leave people waiting for important procedures.

I don't claim to have the answers, but I will claim that you and GP for sure don't, I don't even think you are in possession of any facts.
by afavour | 2025-11-19 01:57:04+00:00
I actually think HN achieves the illusion of greatness via excessive moderation. It’s very easy for users to flag a topic from the front page and (IIRC) there are even automated downranks for threads that attract a lot of back and forth arguing.

The result is a site with relatively measured debate but also a large chunk of missing debate. All that said I don’t have some genius idea about how to do it better so my criticisms can only go so far.
by willis936 | 2025-11-19 01:57:52+00:00
Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.
by benatkin | 2025-11-19 01:58:05+00:00
I happen to be inclined to agree with what the post says. First it leads with a similing mastodon with hearts. Later on it says "I’m also aware that my aversion to public appearances cost Mastodon some opportunities in publicity." I'm sad about part of the reason why he decided to transition away from being CEO, not that he's decided to transition away from being CEO, and I'm optimistic about Mastodon.
by exmadscientist | 2025-11-19 01:58:44+00:00
Flashing on-off and always on aren't the only options. I wish more designers went with flashing bright-dim, because it solves a lot of problems.

I once worked on a device where we were required to blink the Important Safety Light™ on-off. I often glanced at this light out of the corner of my eye, and saw that it was off, so we were Safe™. We were not Safe™: it was just in the off phase of its blink.

I am very glad I never got hurt by trusting that light.

I wanted to blink it bright-dim but was denied by people who said that IEC 61010 required it to blink, and blinking bright-dim isn't blinking. I didn't quite understand that objection.
by MichaelBurjack | 2025-11-19 01:58:53+00:00
That page has existed in one form or another for quite some time. I don't believe there's any AI slop in the substance of the content or arguments, and the rationale is presented in a balanced way.

In fact, the section "Are you going to wear a mask forever?" speaks directly to the OP's asking why I wear masks, and their short answer, that "masks are a tool we can use when and where it makes sense—especially indoors, in poorly ventilated areas, or when community transmission is high." is, if anything, a more concise version of my longer reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973239.

The WHN has a very distinguished set of experts that review and vouch for the content on the site (https://whn.global/meet-our-team/).

I'm sure there are even better sources out there, but as I was looking to answer an inquiry without taking on excessive personal research time, I felt this was a good summary article. If you have a better source from a similarly credentialed team, I look forward to reading it!
by foolswisdom | 2025-11-19 01:58:57+00:00
> It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily assume that 100% of anyone with a degree has mastered what the degree is for. So to me the takeaway is that ~90% have mastered the math. And so in terms of the original comment, not necessarily do we need them all to go to undergraduate.
by nomel | 2025-11-19 01:59:07+00:00
I would claim the opposite. If you don't catch an exception, you'll get a halt.

With return values, you can trivially ignore an exception.

let _ = fs::remove_file("file_doesn't_exist"); or value, error = some_function() // carry on without doing anything with error

In the wild, I've seen far more ignoring return errors, because of the mechanical burden of having type handling at every function call.

This is backed by decades of writing libraries. I've tried to implement libraries without exceptions, and was my admittedly cargo-cult preference long ago, but ignoring errors was so prevalent among the users of all the libraries that I now always include a "raise" type boolean that defaults to True for any exception that returns an error value, to force exceptions, and their handling, as default behavior.

> In big projects you can basically never know when or how something can fail.

How is this fundamentally different than return value? Looking at a high level function, you can't know how it will fail, you just know it did fail, from the error being bubbled up through the returns. The only difference is the mechanism for bubbling up the error.

Maybe some water is required for this flame war. ;)
by duped | 2025-11-19 01:59:15+00:00
This is not a reasonable take to me. unwrap/expect are the idiomatic way to express code paths returning Option/Result as unreachable.

Bubbling up the error or None does not make the program correct. Panicking may be the only reasonable thing to do.

If panicking is guaranteed because of some input mistake to the system your failure is in testing.