MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marginalia_nu | 2025-11-25 14:59:46+00:00
At the same time, narratives (fictional or not) are how we understand the world, its history, its politics, its art, and it's even how we understand our own personal history, and how we reason about events around us, and what might transpire in the future.

It's not really possible to remove ourselves from this fact of being human. We can of course create a narrative about removing ourselves from narratives and experiencing the world directly, but that's not it.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-11-25 14:59:47+00:00
I do have felt similar shift around that age, but I wonder if it is due to reaching certain points in career where you are put into more leading position and have more confidence in what you do even if you don't have children? Easy to go into horoscope style confirmation bias here though.

Nonetheless I am never going to stop saying I still feel like I am 16. Just more confident 16.
by pbmonster | 2025-11-25 15:00:10+00:00
> You download a picture in a browser, crop it in a photo editor and attach it to an email. All three apps need access to the same picture. Your backup app needs access to everything.

On Android, each of those three apps would ask you for file system permissions on first launch. Your choices are "full access to user files", "limited access" (usually one directory and all its sub-directories), "full access, but only this time", and "no access".

Both the "save file as" and the "open file" dialog only show directories the app can access, and have a button at the top that reads something like "change storage scope" or "allow more access".

The system even has options where apps can request access to e.g. all photo/video/media directories - the photo editor would probably request only those to begin with.

Also, apps can pretty much never access each others config/keys/etc files - which they never should. If they need to communicate with each other, they're supposed to use interfaces like the Content Provider, Intents or Bound Services.

I think it's pretty well designed.
by lelanthran | 2025-11-25 15:00:24+00:00
> You hardcore vim folks are a different breed :-)

Nah, we're just lazy :-)

Need a shell? Why leave vim? Need to connect to and issue SQL queries to diagnose a database? Why leave Vim?

The actual hardcore folk are those Emacs weenies.

Need a shell? Use Emacs.

Read email? Use Emacs.

Manage my calendar? Emacs.

Note taking? Static website builder? Browse websites? Git client?

Emacs, Emacs, Emacs and (you guessed it) Emacs.

Spreadsheet, File manager, Remote editing, Calculator, Dictionary/Thesaurus ... all Emacs.

Those guys seriously need a therapist ... of course, Emacs has that too (Good 'ol M-x doctor)
by bakugo | 2025-11-25 15:01:13+00:00
> I think you'll experience some pushback on the assertion that that particular quote has a lot of arrogance or disdain in it.

It's just a roundabout way of saying "anything that isn't running Rust isn't a REAL computer". Which is pretty clearly an arrogant statement, I don't see any other way of interpreting it.
by maeln | 2025-11-25 15:01:19+00:00
You know, it is easy to find this kind of nitpicking and seemingly eternal discussion over details exhausting and meaningless, but I do think it is actually a good sign and a consequence of "openness". In politics, authoritarianism tend to show a pretty façade where everyone mostly agrees (the reality be damned), and discussion and dissenting voice are only allowed to a certain extent as a communication tool. This is usually what we see in corporate development.

Free software are much more like democracy, everyone can voice their opinion freely, and it tends to be messy, confrontational, nitpicky. It does often lead to slowing down changes, but it also avoids the common pitfall of authoritarian regime of going head first into a wall at the speed of light.
by epolanski | 2025-11-25 15:02:00+00:00
The problem is that rust is being shoved in pointless places with a rewrite-everything-in-rust mentality.

There's lunatics that want to replace basic Unix tools like sudo, etc, that are battle tested since ages which has been a mess of bugs till now.

Instead Rust should find it's niches beyond rewriting what works, but tackling what doesn't.
by MarkusQ | 2025-11-25 15:02:25+00:00
Yes. Provided it works as well as they claim.

Not only cheaper, but (since in this case money ≈ hardware-cost × time), faster. They claim that training time can even approach inference time:

> EGGROLL's efficiency results in a hundredfold increase in training throughput for billion-parameter models at large population sizes, nearly reaching the throughput of pure batch inference
by steebono | 2025-11-25 15:02:32+00:00
Thanks a lot for the feedback, really appreciated!

I’ve just updated the landing page and made the main CTA much more visible, following your "big pancake button" suggestion (while keeping my color palette). It already looks clearer, so thank you for pointing that out.

Also thanks for the tip about contacting hn@ycombinator.com.

Really appreciate you taking the time to check the project!
by nawtagain | 2025-11-25 15:02:46+00:00
Congrats on the launch!

Can you clarify the license and if this actually meets the definition of Open Source as outlined by the OSI [1] or if this is actually just source available similar to OpenWebUI?

Specifically can / does this run without the /onyx/backend/ee and web/src/app/ee directories which are licensed under a proprietary license?

1 - https://opensource.org/licenses
by reidrac | 2025-11-25 15:03:16+00:00
> As an end user, it doesn't concern me too much ...

It doesn't concern me neither, but there's some attitude here that makes me uneasy.

This could have been managed better. I see a similar change in the future that could affect me, and there will be precedent. Canonical paying Devs and all, it isn't a great way of influencing a community.
by NoSalt | 2025-11-25 15:03:26+00:00
> "There are also pictures of people enjoying the spectacle that demonstrate the morbid fascination that many Americans had with nuclear weapons at the time."

This is, in my opinion, a stupid statement; people today, with today's sensibilities, writing about people decades, almost a century ago. The was nothing "morbid" about it. It was a new, and extremely powerful technology. Those people were not watching while licking their lips thinking about the people that can be killed with this technology. They were thinking about the "clean and limitless" energy that was supposed to have come from this new technology. Stop trying to foist your "modern" ideals on people many years ago.
by slfnflctd | 2025-11-25 15:03:38+00:00
It took me until my mid-30s to feel like I had crossed a threshold in processing grief and trauma from my late teen years. I was capable of adult behavior long before then, but my concept of the world and how I fit into it (or don't) was still childlike in many ways on a fundamental level.

Like most such things, I'd expect this to be a spectrum, and I may be somewhat of a late bloomer. Regardless, I have a theory that there is somewhat of a protective effect operating here. Believing in a simpler reality which involved future wish fulfillment for me - however unrealistic it was - may have helped me survive. Coming to acceptance of what I see as a more accurate but far bleaker perspective required me to grow strong enough to sustain my will to live despite that perspective.

Biggest lesson learned: I could not do it without at least one other person (or more) who I trust almost 100% with all of myself. Realizing that going it alone is futile is definitely part of what I consider becoming an adult, and it can take a long time to fully accept that.
by riazrizvi | 2025-11-25 15:05:07+00:00
They are the same type of thing yes.

You have a narrow perspective that says there is no value in sprinkling your car with water to keep it safe. That’s your choice. Another, might intuit that the religious ceremony has been shown throughout their lives, to confer divine protection. Yet a third might recognize an intentional performance where safety is top of mind, might program a person to be more safety conscious, thereby causing more safe outcomes with the object in persons who have performed the ritual, and further they may also suspect that many performers of such ritual privately understand the practice as being metaphorical, despite what they say publicly. Yet a fourth may not understand the situation like the third, but may have learnt that when large numbers of people do something, there may be value that they don’t understand, so they will give it a try.

The optimization strategy with jumps is analogous to the fourth, we can call it ‘intellectual humility and openness’. Some say it’s the basis of the scientific method, ie throw out a hypothesis and test it with an open mind.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-25 15:05:07+00:00
Yeah, I still can't understand how people don't get it yet. They never wanted to reduce the deficit whatsoever, they just wanted to cut spending on things they didn't personally like.

The point was never to "save money" for the United States. They might as well have said the point was to save puppies -- it's just a framing they adopted so people would say "I agree with it in spirit". Instead of focusing on and pointing out the corrupt intent, you say you actually agree with their intent. Diabolical really.

Come to think of it, they did it with immigration to. DOGE was going to get rid of waste fraud and abuse. ICE was going to get rid of rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. Who can disagree wit that goal? You don't support MURDER do you?!

But just as DOGE didn't live up to their promise, ICE went after landscapers, builders, and farmers and people are surprised Pikachu over it. "But I thought he said just the violent criminals..."
by jbn | 2025-11-25 15:05:26+00:00
it's funny because I have seen the opposite. Engineer: "it crashed because it dereferenced a null pointer" boss: "add null pointer checks everywhere!"

... and because it used "if" instead of "assert", it made the null pointer arg a valid argument, making it a tolerable state of the running software, which displaced the locus of crashes far from the source of the issue. Moral of the story, use "assert" to make it crash as early as possible and debug THAT. You want to restrict the representable states in the software, not expand them by adding null checks everywhere.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-25 15:05:39+00:00
What is my concern? That my passport, state ID/driver's license, or portrait photos used for identification will leak? The data is already out there and of low value imho. I voluntarily added my finger printers for Global Entry to speed transiting the US border as a US citizen. If one has nation state adversaries, this is not the OSI layer where you would or could defend against them. It's a governance and political issue, not a tech issue.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-11-25 15:05:41+00:00
Any time there are large sums of money being thrown about, financial games will follow.

As will the lawyers.

Just my opinion but the lawyers are likely to be the real pin prick that blows the whole thing up.

Anyone with half a brain knows that AI is inherently unreliable. Using it for anything serious (like say a medical diagnosis) is a liability issue waiting to happen.

Once AI liability becomes as well known as the lack of reliability, I look for companies in many industries to start banning it's use.
Ask HN: Is There a Market for a "Phone-Only" VA Proxy?
by ibogunov | 2025-11-25 15:06:49+00:00
There exists pure technical solutions like "hold the call" & Virtual Assistants solutions (subscribe for remote worker for 500$/month).

I’m thinking about building a service specifically for Phone Tasks, distinct from the general "Virtual Assistant" market.

The Problem with the Current Options:

* OS Features (Apple "Hold Assist"/Pixel "Hold for Me"): Great for holding, but they fail the "Dead Air" test. Agents hang up on silence/bots. They also can't execute complex tasks (negotiating, scheduling).

* General VAs (Wishup/Magic/Upwork): The model is "Hire a person for 15-35$/hour.". This is overkill if you just need one specific, high-friction call made. The onboarding friction (interviews, contracts) is too high for a transactional task.

The pain: High-earners don't want another employee to manage. They want a "Button"/tool that solves a specific headache.

The Solution: "Solve For Me " (Phone Only)

Not a General VA (so it can be semi-automated later). We don't manage your email, travel, or groceries. We only do one thing: Interact with the Analog Phone System.

Task-Based: You don't pay us to "work for an hour." You pay per outcome (e.g., "Appointment Booked," "Subscription Canceled," "Discount Applied").

Specialized Stack: Unlike a VA using their personal cell, we use masked numbers, call recording (for evidence), and persistent redialing.

Low-Trust First: We are starting with "External Actions" (finding mechanics, canceling gyms, negotiating bills) where we don't need your SSN/sensitive data.

I’d love to hear the community’s thoughts on these questions:

1. The "Unbundling" Thesis: Do you believe a "Phone Specialist" is distinct enough from a "General VA" to warrant a separate service? Or is the friction of using a separate tool too high?

2. The "Dead Air" Problem: For those who use Pixel's "Hold For Me," how often do agents actually hang up on the bot? Is this a pain point you experience?

3. Pricing Psychology: Would you prefer a flat fee per task (e.g., $25 to cancel Comcast) or a monthly "insurance" subscription (e.g., $50/mo for unlimited calls)?

I am manually testing this workflow this week (Scheduling mechanics, canceling subs, disputing bills? - not sure if possible without sensitive data).

If you have a call you've been avoiding and want to test the service: I’ll handle it for you. I don't want payment. If I succeed, I just ask that you donate $1 to a charity of your choice (or leave a comment here with a review). Use this google form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScechDHb0zzREtPajBC-k-OZjdwbPHn6igKw91rutSoGwKj8Q/viewform?usp=dialog

Looking forward to the discussion.

Edit (i suck at fortmatting on HN)
by _heimdall | 2025-11-25 15:07:00+00:00
Are you proposing that as an example that animals (and humans) seem to be born with natural instincts for survival or that we know they are born with that information?

If the latter, how do you propose we know that as a fact? Presumably we would really need to know how that information is passed down to the child and how it knows how to interpret it. To my best understanding, we effectively stop at DNA seeming to be a complex set of instructions for how to make the animal. We don't know if or how it might encode knowledge, or if something else entirely is at play to make those instincts known to the newborn.
by scotty79 | 2025-11-25 15:07:10+00:00
Some level above 0% is achievable target at our techlevel. But we could have easily have higher assisted suicide rate than this ideal non-zero level if we made our health services worse than they are. Same way I don't suppose they are administered perfectly right now so there's still long way to go before achieving lowest technologically possible level.

And even 0% is possible without going StarTrek, if for example full-time narcotic-induced bliss till the "natural" end of your life was an option. Then assisted suicide rate would just cease to be a good indicator of how good our health care and services are.
by msabalau | 2025-11-25 15:08:15+00:00
The articles references articles she has written on science fiction, but if one is interested in SFF more broadly, Monidipa "Mimi" Mondal is India's first Hugo nominee, as he co-editor of Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, an anthology of letters and essays. This won a Locus award.

Her fantasy novella, "His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light" was nominated for a Nebula. She also contributed a DnD adventure to "Journeys through the Radiant Citadel"

Not a profilic author, but a strong one.
by fn-mote | 2025-11-25 15:09:05+00:00
The most interesting criticism / idea in the article was that the parts that are intended for Rust-ification should actually be removed from core apt.

> it would be better to remove the code that is used to parse the .deb, .ar, and .tar formats [...] from APT entirely. It is only needed for two tools, apt-ftparchive and apt-extracttemplates [...]

Another interesting, although perhaps tangential, criticism was that the "new solver" currently lacks a testsuite (unit tests; it has integration tests). I'm actually kind of surprised that writing a dependency solver is a greenfield project instead of using an existing one. Or is this just a dig at something that pulls in a well-tested external module for solving?

Posted in curiosity, not knowing much about apt.
by danillonunes | 2025-11-25 15:09:07+00:00
I think it's weird having an arbitrary minimum age to be president. I would probably never vote for someone in their 20s anyway, but I don't think there should be a legal barrier. In my country (Brazil) it's the same age, but we usually just copy US in think kind of policy. I wonder how common it's in the rest of the world.
by freehorse | 2025-11-25 15:09:41+00:00
Wasn't it 25 that the prefrontal cortex matured and people could be considered adults? We will have to infantilize people until their 30s now?

The problem with such reports (the studies themselves method-wise etc are in general fine I guess, but how the results are interpreted and disseminated is the issue) is that unless we find some specific correlations with behavioural and such measures, it makes no sense to give these kind of meanings such as "adolescence", adult mode", behavioural/mental/cognitive matureness or whatever cultural or other norms one may think a "mature/adult person" should abide to. Especially since these abstract topological measures, while interesting, are not that trivially linked with real outcomes in a causal sense, and instead of eg simply reflecting rather environmental or other changes in a person's life.
by Crroak | 2025-11-25 15:09:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Fracture, a testing framework that brings deterministic chaos engineering to async Rust.

We all know the pain: async code often passes unit test but fails in production due to timeouts, race conditions, or network blips. I built Fracture to reproduce these failures locally and deterministically.

What it does: Fracture is a drop-in replacement for Tokio during testing. It runs your async code in a pure in-memory simulation. This allows it to:

Inject Chaos: simulate packet loss, connection resets, high latency, and task aborts.

Control Time: fast-forward timeouts instantly (no real sleeping).

Guarantee Determinism: It uses a seeded RNG. If a test fails due to a specific sequence of race conditions and network drops, it gives you the seed. You can re-run that seed to trigger the exact same bug again.

How it handles dependencies: One of the hardest parts of testing async Rust is dealing with external crates (like reqwest or sqlx) that depend on the real Tokio runtime. Fracture solves this via a "shim" crate strategy. You can patch tokio in your Cargo.toml to redirect the dependency tree to Fracture’s simulation runtime, meaning you can chaos-test your entire stack without changing your production code.

Current Status: This is an Alpha (v0.1.2) release. The core concepts work, but there are edge cases we haven't found yet.

I’d love for you to try breaking it (and your code).
by uberman | 2025-11-25 15:10:03+00:00
I think there are several factors here. When I say "you" here, I don't necessarily mean you unless of course you are asking because you want to host your own.

First, why make it hard for me to review your code? You would almost certainly not have the review features that say Github has to browse code. You are probably asking me to pull your repo(s) and explore them in my IDE. I'm just not going to do that and a candidate should never really be in a situation where they are asking their interviewer to do work. Even work as trivial as looking up your email or phone number. That information should be included with every contact in my opinion. Asking them to fork the repos in your portfolio is way beyond that.

Secondly, not using standard tools like Bitbucket for example sends a message to me that you are a maverick and by extension unlikely to want to use my choice of repo, platform or tool chain. At this point in my life I have worked with enough brilliant jerks to have had my fill of "I wrote that feature in Elixir because I wanted to"

Finally, I would say that the novelty of being your own server admin has kind of worn off. Perhaps say 10 or 20 years ago there might have been a "cool factor" in being your own admin but for me at least that sheen has tarnished.
by onemoresoop | 2025-11-25 15:10:17+00:00
Absolutely, the OP's argument doesn't hold water. Previous dangers have been discussed and discussed (and are still discussed if you look for it), no need to linger on past things and ignore new dangers. Also since a lot of new money is being poured into AI/AI products unlike harmful past industries such as tobacco, it's probably the right thing to be skeptical of any claims this industry is making, to inspect carefully and criticize what we think is wrong.
by jameslk | 2025-11-25 15:10:39+00:00
> coconuts kill 150 people per year

This appears to be a myth or not clearly verified:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut

> The origin of the death by coconut legend was a 1984 research paper by Dr. Peter Barss, of Provincial Hospital, Alotau, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, titled "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts", published in The Journal of Trauma (now known as The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery). In his paper, Barss observed that in Papua New Guinea, where he was based, over a period of four years 2.5% of trauma admissions were for those injured by falling coconuts. None were fatal but he mentioned two anecdotal reports of deaths, one several years before. That figure of two deaths went on to be misquoted as 150 worldwide, based on the assumption that other places would have a similar rate of falling coconut deaths.
by dustfinger | 2025-11-25 15:10:58+00:00
Despite all the critisism, C++ has been my favorite language for 20+ years. Nowadays I code 99% of the time in python and previously TypeScript, but all my personal for fun projects are in C++. I just enjoy coding in it so much more. I know I will get some heat for this, but I would love to live in an idealistic world where computers were still for hackers and it was all just about fun not profit. I was so inspired by the writings of Eric S. Raymond, I always hoped I would experience some of that. ~SIGH~. Maybe in my retirement.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-25 15:11:04+00:00
But there's solutions proposed all the time; tax the rich, tax the corporations, and use that money for socialist policies, like the ones being dismantled by the US right now. Regulate the biggest expenses like health care, housing and energy, restrict how much datacenters can use as their consumption drives up the prices, etc.

You don't need to go full communist to make things better.
by Weves | 2025-11-25 15:11:30+00:00
Yes, it absolutely does! The chat UX, add-ons (deep research, code interpreter, RAG, etc.), and SSO are MIT licensed. Most deployments of Onyx are using the pure FOSS version of Onyx. Many individuals / teams have done extensive white labeling (something that OpenWebUI doesn't allow).

We have https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx-foss, for a fully MIT licensed version of the repo if you want to be safe about the license/feel freedom to modify every file.