MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grayhatter | 2025-11-10 16:49:07+00:00
Hope you can forgive this tangent, I considered posting this in the GH thread, but you asked nicely not to... So hopefully this is a middle ground, you can excuse or ignore

First, my original comment was going to ask if you're looked at what any other reputable repos are doing. Specifically popular FOSS projects that are not backed by a company looking to sell AI. Do any of them have a positive Policy, or positions that you want to include?

Second, if I was forced to take a stand on AI, I would duplicate the policy from Zig. I feel their policy hits the exact ethos FOSS should strive for. They even ban AI for translations, because the reader is just as capable a participant. And importantly, asking the author to do their best (without AI), and trust the reader to also try their best encourages human communication. It also gives the reader control and knowledge over the exact amount of uncertainty introduced by the LLM, which is critically important to understanding a poor quality bug report from a helpful users who is honestly trying to help. Lobste.rs github disallows AI contribution for an entirely different reason I haven't seen covered in your GH thread yet

Finally, you posted the Issue as an RFC. but then explicitly excluded, HN from commenting on the issue. I think that was a fantastic decision, and expertly written. (I also appreciate that lesson in tactfulness :) ) That said, if you're actually interested in requesting comments or thoughts you wouldn't have considered, I would encourage you to make a top level RFC comment this thread. There will likely be a lot of human slop to wade through, but occasionally I'll uncover a genuinely great comment on HN that improves my understanding. Here I think the smart pro-AI crowd that might have an argument I want to consider, but would be unlikely to on my own because of my bias on the quality of AI. Such a comment might would be likely to appear on HN, but the smart people who I'd want to learn from, would never comment on the GH thread now, and I appreciate it when smart people I disagree with, contribute to my understanding.

PS Thanks for working on opencontainers, and caring enough to keep trying to make it better, and healthier! I like having good quality software to work with :)
by dataflow | 2025-11-10 16:49:21+00:00
You almost have to wonder whether the past decisions to avoid this were based on the merits of the situation, or just based on the default hate of Microsoft. If it had been called "-fgnu-extensions" instead, would it have taken this long to enable?

"Almost", because -std=gnu11 is already used, so the answer seems to be right there.
by latexr | 2025-11-10 16:49:23+00:00
> This is some data about US

Which, by definition, is incomplete when we’re talking about the world. If we examined by country, it would fluctuate wildly. For example, in any country with soccer as the national sport, Ronaldo would crush Zuckerberg in popularity.

Either way, the point (in which I think we’re all mostly in agreement) is that Zuckerberg’s comment falls somewhere between the absurd and the delusional. If you want to pick a different list of names, go right ahead. I’d say Tailor Swift is indisputable, though.
by entropicdrifter | 2025-11-10 16:49:25+00:00
But we do want that, right? We want people in the future with their unknowable future digital-experience-providing devices to be able to experience the video games of the past/today, right?

So in the interest of making older games future compatible we (those interested in preservation) do need to pursue those things.

How else can we guarantee they'll run on future devices? Emulators are one good way to make things run on newer devices, but emulators will in turn need the features to be able to run on 4K/8K screens, XR devices, etc.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-10 16:49:38+00:00
Not as many easy paths anymore for a British worker, tech or otherwise, thanks to The Foolishness.

And the most popular choice -- the USA -- is off the table for the majority of Brits, I think, who cannot comprehend The Other Foolishness. (Mind you, the ones it encourages... I hope they follow their hearts)
by jkantola | 2025-11-10 16:49:51+00:00
https://www.athilio.com/ Currently finishing up garmin integration and a mobile port of the app. The app is aimed at people with goals related to their wellness or sports / training. Somewhat similar to training peaks but more focused on integrating different metrics, like sleep and readiness from oura and training data from garmin. Also user has more control. 0 focus on social features. Pricing aims to be affordable (1/4 - 1/2th of similar services), this is hopefully possible with local first approach for the data(sqlite). Saves tons of money on the backend costs when only the syncing from integrations + oauth is on the backend and no storage. Also I think this is more friendly for the users privacy and I would prefer to not store the users datas on my servers for GDPR reasons. Syncing between user devices can be done similarly as Obsidian with icloud. The user experience is a bit influenced by software observability.
by nradov | 2025-11-10 16:50:07+00:00
There's no class warfare grand conspiracy going on. Like any businesses, colleges charge more because they can. Customers have been willing to pay, and the availability of government subsidized student loans made those customers relatively price insensitive. That model is finally starting to break.

To be fair to colleges, their costs have also increased somewhat. Baumol’s Cost Disease means that it's impossible to achieve significant productivity gains in education and so labor costs continuously increase. But that only accounts for a fraction of the total increase in college tuitions and fees.

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/diagnosing-william-baumo...
by Pxtl | 2025-11-10 16:50:14+00:00
Imho the web and SQL brought us to the ridiculous point that the most obvious way to "modularize" was to use fully separate isolated apps and servers.

This is because web and SQL are both dominant platforms for enterprise and are both allergic to modularization. Everything is global, everything is shared. Isolation and private interfaces are either impossible or late-added afterthoughts on a global-first platform.

So faced with this, it made sense that the only way to provide modularization was to use isolated computers that only talk over sluggish HTTP.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-10 16:50:48+00:00
> which is the suspicion that there's Chinese government-accessible backdoors that can cripple infrastructure.

Which is real rich coming from the US after the Snowden leaks showed Cisco was willingly cooperating with the NSA and planting NSA backdoors in their hardware destined for overseas.

Them wanting to ban TP-Link (and Huawei) have nothing to do with cybersecurity and more to do with "We don't want to allow anyone else to play the same game we are playing."
by mrgaro | 2025-11-10 16:52:07+00:00
I used to have a very common name (before getting married and took my wife's last name). Imagine that I have firstname.lastname@gmail and somebody was genius to take firstname.lastnam@gmail.

I felt this was so stupid, that i quickly lost any willingness to try to relay the emails to their original owner, as the other person had zero interest to change their address to be harder to mistype.
by cedws | 2025-11-10 16:53:07+00:00
I want to frame this and put it on my wall.

Coming up with a greenfield microservice design with arbitrary responsibilities and intercommunication feels so stupid to me. Why not build the thing as a monolith and split parts out when you actually have scaling problems, instead of solving theoretical problems? Development velocity is going to be way higher and it gives developers a chance to discover problems without having to deal with the mental overhead of shipping N services all at once.

The value of fast iteration cannot be overstated. Build the minimum viable version of the project first, then stress test it and break parts out when needed. This is much easier if you write modular code.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-10 16:53:31+00:00
I feel similarly... I spent about a year with Budgie and really liked it... I had it mostly tweaked to my liking. In the end, I felt better just going back with Pop and keeping it close to defaults. I don't really tweak my mac or windows settings that much either.

In the end, I just want a pretty solid foundation to get work done.
by ecshafer | 2025-11-10 16:53:45+00:00
I feel like this misses too much real world context and caveats.

What is the problem with Monoliths? Nothing. Until there is. The problem with monoliths is when you have a million LoC Java application that is on Java 6, and will take months of work to get up to date, take 20 minutes to load on a dev machine, starts to fail because its getting too big for a dev machine to handle, can't bring in any new dependencies because of how old the Java version is, and has an old bespoke Ant + Maven + Jenkins + Bash + Perl build and deploy system that has been built up over the last 30 years.

So what do you do? Breaking off pieces of the code into microservices that can run on a new Spring boot and can run on a newer nice IaC set up is an easy win. Sure you basically have a microlith, but it increases your dev velocity.

I think Monolith issues are typically a symptom of a few other things: 1. accumulated deferred maintenance and tech debt 2. Inadequate developer tooling 3. Inadequate CICD tooling 4. Rarely scale until you really start to hit the size of like Google, Uber, Facebook, etc.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-10 16:54:18+00:00
These are good questions. Let's enumerate the essential ones.

1. Is harvesting cells in the manner of the HeLa cell line morally licit?

2. Is killing such cells morally licit?

3. Is Henrietta Lacks still alive through this cell line?

4. How are the cells in this line different from an embryo?

(1) No, I would not say this is immoral. First, these are cancer cells. If removing cancer cells from a human body is immoral, then it would follow that removing tumors would be immoral, which it isn't, because a tumor is a defect - it deviates from the norm of a healthy, functioning body and interferes with its operation. Removing such cells is a corrective procedure. It restores the body's healthy function, which is the entire point of medicine.

Now, what if the cells were healthy? Here, it would depend on the aim of doing so as well as the impact. For example, removing cells from a healthy heart because you wish to diagnose a patient with a minor illness would be bad if doing so also damaged the heart in some way surpassing the good enabled by such extraction and diagnosis.

However, say the person in question is suffering from a serious illness, and the damage or resulting risks of such an extraction is proportionately less than the good of the life-saving effect it would enable, then this would be morally licit.

(2) No, I would not find killing such cells immoral either, because...

(3) ...Henrietta Lacks is not alive anymore than a hand severed from my body and kept alive artificially is still me. Indeed, that hand is no longer a hand, because a hand is only a hand when it is a integral part of an organism and functioning as part of that organism. If you reattached that hand to my body while I am still alive, then it would be my hand.

(4) These are not embryonic cells. They will not develop into a human being.

Now, even if we ignore that they are cancerous, you may say that such cells can be modified or "reprogrammed" into embryonic cells. Yes, they can, but that involves modification. The result of that modification would not be Henrietta Lacks, but a clone, or a distinct person with the same DNA. I would reject such cloning as immoral.

--

Now, developing cell lines derived from adult cells is different from developing cell lines from the destruction of embryos, which brings us back full circle. It's the destruction of a human being in the embryonic stage that is categorically immoral.
by nickwrb | 2025-11-10 16:54:19+00:00
https://auth-email.com

OAuth is here to stay for major email providers (Outlook, Gmail, etc). Microsoft is dropping support for standard/basic authorization in April 2026, and Google has already done this. But plenty of devices and systems don't (and may never) support OAuth.

Auth-Email is a relay that lets you continue using traditional email auth methods even when your provider requires OAuth. Lots of other more advanced features too: all OAuth grant types, add-ins to modify behavior and lots more.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-10 16:54:24+00:00
There's something to say for languages like Python and Clojure were plain ordinary math might involve ordinary integers, arbitrary precision integers, floats or even rationals.

In grad school it was drilled into me to use floats instead of doubles wherever I could which cuts your memory consumption of big arrays in half. (It was odd that Intel chips in the 1990s were about the same speed for floats and doubles but all the RISC competitors had floats about twice the speed of doubles, something that Intel caught up with in the 2000s)

Old books on numerical analysis, particularly Foreman Acton's

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Computing-Made-Engineering-Calcu...

teach the art of how to formulate calculations to minimize the effect of rounding errors which resolves some of the need for deep precision. For that matter, modern neural networks use specialized formats like FP4 because these save memory and are effectively faster in SIMD.

---

Personally when it comes to general purpose programming languages I've watched a lot of people have experiences that lead them to thinking that "programming is not for them", I think

>>> 0.1+0.2 0.30000000000000004

is one of them. Accountants, for instance, expect certain invariants to be true and if they see some nonsense like

>>> 0.1+0.2==0.3 False

it is not unusual for them to refuse to work or leave the room or have a sit-down strike until you can present them numbers that respect the invariants. You have a lot of people who could be productive lay programmers and put their skills on wheels and if you are using the trash floats that we usually use instead of DEC64 you are hitting them in the face with pepper spray as soon as they start.
by benrutter | 2025-11-10 16:54:32+00:00
> When Mark and Priscilla commit to giving away 99% of their wealth during their lifetimes

I hadn't heard this before but googling it seems like a genuine commitment at the time[0]. I mostly feel like Zuck isn't making the world a better place, but this sounds really impressive as a commitment - any idea if this commitments been stuck to now we're around 10 years on?

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34978249
by fwip | 2025-11-10 16:54:37+00:00
If you google it with the words next to it, 'Home Office TCN' (no quotes necessary), the proper definition comes right up.

It's written for a UK technical audience, who is likely familiar with these terms. An American article doesn't bother to define "FBI" or "USDA," and an article about breaking Python news doesn't expand "PEP" or "RFC."
by vvpan | 2025-11-10 16:54:47+00:00
If it was not a guy who regularly engages with and thus gives platform to neo-Nazi accounts on X I might've considered giving him the benefit of doubt.

It is very easy to find specific accounts that Musk brings readers to (or you can just be on X and follow him):

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-x-blocked-journalists-...

https://www.sacurrent.com/news/revealed-the-operators-behind...
by giorgioz | 2025-11-10 16:54:48+00:00
It's true the shipbuilders were not critized but they were also not praised in this very specific article. Good and bad results should be both noticed. Times in the articles countries are mentioned: Japan 17x Germany 6x USA 4x China 3x France 3x Italy 1x South Korea 1x

compare that with the current tonnage of shipbuilding production: 1 China 32,859,862 51% 2 South Korea 18,317,886 28% 3 Japan 9,965,182 15% 4 Philippines 805,938 1% 5 Italy 402,164 0.62% 6 France 326,680 0.50% 7 Germany 289,666 0.45% 8 Finland 261,654 0.40% 9 Taiwan 187,558 0.29% 10 Russia 177,571 0.27% 11 Netherlands 90,596 0.14% 12 Türkiye 79,032 0.12% 13 Indonesia 75,979 0.12% 14 U.S. 64,809 0.10% 15 Iran 64,760 0.09%

Italy produces 2x ships than Germany but Germany is mentioned 6x. Stereotypical bias of German being engineers and Italian being funny/pizza makers.
by sdasdas | 2025-11-10 16:54:52+00:00
I’ve been building Eigen Robotics — a Python-first, ML-native robotics framework designed to unify simulation and real-world control under one clean, config-driven API. Think of it as PyTorch meets robotics infra — focused on simplicity, composability, and machine learning integration from day one.

Modern robotics development is fragmented: Every simulator and robot driver lives in its own ecosystem. “Train in Sim A → validate in Sim B → deploy on hardware” usually means rewriting your code. Integrating ML pipelines (RL, IL, vision models) is brittle and non-standard. ROS is powerful, but often overkill for lightweight experimentation or ML research. What Eigen Does Eigen focuses on lightweight modularity and YAML-based configuration, so you can define robots, sensors, and simulators declaratively — no boilerplate. Unified config + runtime system using OmegaConf Cross-simulator API (PyBullet, MuJoCo, Genesis) Real-world bridge layer tested with Franka and Unitree Lightweight LCM-based communication (ROS-like, but faster and simpler) CLI and Python APIs for launching and managing nodes Built-in RL and data collection loops Everything can be imported and used directly from Python (import eigen), or launched via CLI (eigen launch viper.yaml).

We’re preparing our next release focused on: Better sim-to-real transfer tools Plugin system for new robots/sensors API and documentation polish

We’re looking for researchers, engineers, and roboticists interested in trying Eigen and giving feedback on real-world workflows — especially around ML integration and multi-simulator setups. If this sounds relevant to your work, I’d love to chat or share early access. Feedback is super welcome — especially around pain points with ROS, sim-real transfer, or existing infra.
by rpdillon | 2025-11-10 16:55:52+00:00
I understand what you're saying, and appreciate your patience. I think it boils down to the fact that I just don't see this as a problem. Some people see ads that others don't. Not all opportunities are spread equally. There's a lot of unfairness just built-in by the roll of the dice. Banning demographic targeting of Facebook job ads isn't going to be a significant contributor here, in my estimation.
by sokoloff | 2025-11-10 16:55:52+00:00
I probably agree more than this comment might suggest, but I think that you run into organizational dynamics limits before you run out of vertical scaling limits.

Shipping a monolith worked on by 250+ devs in 30 teams is slow due to the coordination needed as compared to 30 teams shipping 50-75 services.

Vertical scaling can take you really, really far operationally.
by etruong42 | 2025-11-10 16:55:54+00:00
I am finding this to be the new "meta" for the software development lifecycle. Given this new reality, it's getting harder and harder to actually invest in ambitious, green-field projects. In this new meta, individual contributors and leadership don't trust each other, leading to a vicious feedback loop of making it harder and harder to jumpstart ambitious projects.

It's hard to commit to a green-field project that is predicated on a level of risk that leaders are hesitant to take on as they would also take on the "counterparty risk" of the expert individual contributors holding them over the barrel to finish the project. The expert individual contributors are likewise hesitant to devote themselves to the task knowing that once leadership considers the "hard bits" to be done, leadership's aversion to risk will try to swap out the expert-individual-contributor roles with much more replaceable roles and ultimately replace the expert individual contributors.

P.S. The parallels between this cycle of mistrust and the modern dating crisis (in the US) does not elude me.
by sedatk | 2025-11-10 16:56:07+00:00
> You need to start that because, as we recently learned, at some point in the very near future Apple is withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature from the UK altogether as a result of the Home Office TCN through the Investigatory Powers Act.

So, a UK-only advice, and it strangely assumes that any other service in UK wouldn’t be bound by the same laws.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-10 16:56:58+00:00
> This is because web and SQL are both dominant platforms for enterprise and are both allergic to modularization. Everything is global, everything is shared. Isolation and private interfaces are either impossible or late-added afterthoughts on a global-first platform.

That's not actually true of SQL-based RDBMSs (except embedded ones like SQLite), and hasn't been for longer than the median developer has been alive, but it is probably fairly accurate of the average app developers understanding of SQL.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-11-10 16:57:20+00:00
I was about to upgrade my router. Should I buy it now before it's banned, or not buy one that's about to be banned cause support/updates will be difficult?

tp-link routers are consistently the wirecutter consumer pick. They've always done me fine, although it's time to upgrade my 6-year-old one. (which prob demonstrates i'm not a router power user).
by hearsathought | 2025-11-10 16:57:33+00:00
That Meta/facebook had a special role in the lives of his generation is not up for debate. It's a fact. Also, zuckerburg probably meant he was the "most well-known person in tech" of his generation, which is true. But expanding it beyond tech, he definitely is as well-known as anyone else in his generation. Everyone in his generation knows what facebook is. Everyone in his generation knows zuckerburg.

The guy may be arrogant, but nothing about his statement was arrogant. He was stating facts.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-10 16:57:40+00:00
No, not remotely? I don’t know why folks jump to that (wrongest) conclusion whenever someone mentions ethernet being made a requirement in construction or use.

Can tablets and phones use ethernet? Yes! Should they? Perhaps for a fixed installation, but otherwise no, because that’s not their primary role? Same goes for laptops: if it’s stationary, plug it in; if not, WiFi is fine.

The goal is to shift traffic where reasonable and practical onto wired networks. Desktops, laptops, set top boxes, streaming rigs, control panels, SBCs, game consoles, the list goes on. The only “Wi-Fi required” devices are really just laptops, phones, tablets, watches, and similarly high-mobility devices.

Otherwise, ethernet should be the norm.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-10 16:57:52+00:00
Short version: The processes of applying for a job at a Creepy-Spooky Agency, getting hired by a C-SA, and getting ahead at a C-SA are all biased toward people with "more is better" attitudes toward doing creepy & spooky stuff. And biases against any sort of pesky oversight for such stuff. Let alone telling the truth about doing such stuff, or the actual public utility of it.
by almosthere | 2025-11-10 16:58:20+00:00
Most non-free software is marketed to companies these days, except for games. Most of it is to support putting non-software products in front of people.

So in that framing, a company can pay for recurring prices for software, and this benefits (obviously) the seller. It benefits the buyer because no software is useful forever. If a company makes a very expensive one-time purchase of Slack, they may have wasted their money if they get acquired and everyone is moved to Teams instead. So it makes sense for a company like Slack to charge a "low" price for each user per month.

And no individual consumer would purchase slack for 9-18 dollars per month. No, they are interested in buying a new toilet seat - that can only exist because large companies making toilet seats needing software like slack to internally discuss if they should add padding to all their toilet seats.