MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by input_sh | 2025-11-28 09:11:31+00:00
From the top of https://pocketbase.io/faq/

> If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!

It's a niche little product that's alpha-level quality and changes frequently, I don't know why you would expect LLMs to be good at it.
by wltr | 2025-11-28 09:12:01+00:00
As a pro user of Flash (pre-Adobe) I don’t even surprised Animate is dead. ‘Why bother renaming it?’ was my initial thought back then. I was very good at the instrument, but the instrument was so bad (imo it got even worse when Adobe bought Macromedia), that I was among those who expected the inevitable death of the instrument. I’m happily using open source instruments these days, and while not everything is as easy as it was with the Flash (here I mean rather the web, not animation as a whole), the ability to work comfortably and pick my instruments as much as I like, it makes all the difference in the world.
by anonymousiam | 2025-11-28 09:12:06+00:00
Satellite operators are still required to comply with the Federal Wiretap Act (and equivalent in every other country of the world).

The result is a less-than-optimal network that requires routing communications through a ground station (where it can be intercepted) even when it's technically feasible (and optimal) to use point-to-point communications.

The resulting technical solutions (at least) double the bandwidth and processing required by the network, and bandwidth/processing are critical resources for communications satellites. These requirements can make or break the economic feasibility of a proposed system.
by eviks | 2025-11-28 09:12:33+00:00
> It’s a guideline ... Pick a number

It's using a parameter of secondary importance as a primary, so it's wrong with any number. The comment even has a helpful analogy to LOCs. People need to stop freaking out over reasonable, well-intentioned criticism of guidelines as if they were arguing something else like misundertstanding of that strictness of rules.
by jakubmazanec | 2025-11-28 09:14:32+00:00
> Do it right the first time: Take the time to design and implement solutions correctly from the start.

Doing good design is off course important, but on the other hand software design is a lot of times iterative because of unknown unknown s. Sometimes it can be better to create quick prototype(s) to see which direction is the best to actually "do it right", instead of spending effort designing something that in the end won't be build.
by febusravenga | 2025-11-28 09:16:31+00:00
this, this, this

All our tokens should be in is protected keychain and there are no proper cross-platform solutions for this. All gclouds, was aww sdks, gh and other tools just store them in dotfile.

And worst thing, afaik there is no way do do it correctly in MacOS for example. I'd like to be corrected though.
by anal_reactor | 2025-11-28 09:16:32+00:00
That's not exactly true. Social engineering at scale is becoming better and better. You don't need to remove dangerous opinions, you simply need to make sure nobody cares about them. And the fun thing is, most people say that they support freedom of speech, but when they see an opinion they dislike, they say the opinion should be blocked. This is why all the laws restricting freedom of speech pass without major issues.
by dominicrose | 2025-11-28 09:16:58+00:00
Yes and a freezer that is only a bit larger, taller or deeper has a lot more liters of storage. Not just because it's in 3D but also because a smaller freezer still needs big sides. So, a lot more liters but only a tiny bit more energy consumption.

ps: living in an area with a high price per square meter goes against this strategy unless you manage to share a freezer
by yorwba | 2025-11-28 09:17:07+00:00
Fortunately it's not true. GrapheneOS seem https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1993061892324311480#m to be reacting to news coverage https://archive.ph/UrlvK saying that although legitimate uses exist, if GrapheneOS have connections to a criminal organization and refuse to cooperate with law enforcement, they could be prosecuted nonetheless:

« il existe pour une certaine partie des utilisateurs une réelle légitimité dans la volonté de protéger ses échanges. L’approche est donc différente. Mais ça ne nous empêchera pas de poursuivre les éditeurs, si des liens sont découverts avec une organisation criminelle et qu’ils ne coopèrent pas avec la justice. »

Charitably, GrapheneOS are not in fact a front for organized crime, but merely paranoid, assuming that the news coverage is laying the groundwork for prosecution on trumped-up charges. Notably, there doesn't appear to have been direct communication from law enforcement yet.
by happymellon | 2025-11-28 09:17:46+00:00
My comment was more about this

> In practice there's a case where a defendant is being held in contempt (jailed) for years now

They are not still being held due to contempt, they were released. Now if he was convicted then thats different and the correct reason to be imprisoned.

> she

It was not a she.

The ruling showed that you can only be held for 18 months in the US for refusal. They would need to actually charge them with a crime if the government wanted more than that.
by Hamuko | 2025-11-28 09:18:15+00:00
Most likely not solar since there’s almost no solar during the winter months. Sun comes up at 0900 and goes down at 1500 in the south. In the north it’s worse.

It's currently noon in Finland and solar accounts for 6 MW in the grid. That's about 0.05% of the total production. Nuclear is 3863 MW (~31%) and wind is 6281 MW (~50%).

What might be plentiful is wind, especially during the nights.
by M95D | 2025-11-28 09:19:12+00:00
> And the plan to make this the consensus view is to ban Apple-style curated app stores.

Nobody is banning Apple-style curated app stores. They're banning the monopoly of only one app store.

> If the Europeans had any idea how to manage this sort of ecosystem they'd still be running the show.

Maybe Europeans won't engage in immoral profit-making practices? Also, Nokia didn't "sorta died". It was killed by Microsoft.
by bmacho | 2025-11-28 09:19:12+00:00
When I was toying with Haskell I was unable to get GHCi to interpret multiline definitions (Haskell is declarative, which means you don't make commands, but you declare commands which then get executed).

Jupyter+conda/anaconda is almost always not installable and broken for most of its kernels (it was for Haskell), so I ended up piping GHCi to a websocket server that I found on GitHub and a minimal HTML/JS frontend to talk to it: a reorderable list of textareas.

Then I added some security in the form of passing and verifying long random strings (via files, URL arguments and the user, that one is annoying). GHCi is capable of shelling out, so letting every browser tab on my computer talking to it is not ideal.

AFAIK Jupyter does not have any advanced features like dependency tracking between cells, or tracking variables, data, etc. So if you want Haskell in the browser, I recommend my approach, it is small, fast, the UI is configurable, and the whole process is hackable with hooks and transformations at any place.
by ad_hockey | 2025-11-28 09:19:38+00:00
A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout is often recommended, and is very good.

There was an interesting debate between John and Uncle Bob on their differences in style recently[1], with a related HN discussion[2].

[1] https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code/blob/m...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43166362
by tibbydudeza | 2025-11-28 09:20:32+00:00
Payback - I never factored that in or even thought about that.

I was more concerned about having reliable power and reducing my electricity bill.

The daily 2-hour power cuts were getting out of hand, and I was running my business from my home office, so the tax incentives helped slightly.

The grid is more stable now as new power units became available but a big chunk of middle-class consumers using solar are using way less power now, so the local town councils are having problems balancing their books (town councils re-sells electricity from the national operator).
by Barooahn | 2025-11-28 09:20:36+00:00
The jump in writing quality between GPT-4 and GPT-5.1 is hugely noticeable if you're specific with prompting (requires a bit of trial and error).

I've been using it to generate children's stories and reading comprehension questions for a UK curriculum app. The difference:

• GPT-4: Generic questions, often not engaging enough for 7-year-olds • GPT-5.1: Adapts tone, vocabulary, and complexity when you give it curriculum constraints

I realised the model isn't "smart enough" just to throw in a prompt like "write a story about..." - I needed structured prompts with specific examples of the target style.

It's still not perfect, but it's a massive improvement and can be called genuinely useful vs. just a novelty.
by raphman | 2025-11-28 09:21:31+00:00
My personal opinion (based in part on HN):

- In a nutshell: everyone should know about UML and how some relevant diagram types look. Nobody should use it religiously.

- Diagrams are great tools for communicating ideas and implementations on an abstract level, and for interactively thinking about ideas that can be drawn in some way. A diagram can also visually highlight problem areas (e.g., components with many dependencies).

- Good use cases for diagrams in SE are e.g., explaining high-level architecture to someone, thinking about and refining database schemas, documenting interaction flows, or giving an overview of class structure in automatically generated code documentation

- It is nice to have visual consistency - it makes parsing a diagram so much faster and less error-prone. UML provides sensible guidelines or inspiration on how to draw e.g., a sequence diagram or a class diagram. There is no need to re-invent the wheel.

- In most cases, knowing about the diagram types and their approximate design is enough. As probably very few people know what the different styles of arrows or boxes might mean, it is a good idea to annotate important elements with their meaning.

- For thinking/communication, drawing diagrams by hand is the best way. Excalidraw/tldraw are nice for stuff that should go into static documents.

- Documenting the state of a system with manually generated diagrams is tedious and requires constant updates. A better way is to auto-generate e.g., class diagrams using PlantUML or Mermaid.

- Nobody uses UML for designing complex systems and then auto-generating code.
by griffzhowl | 2025-11-28 09:22:00+00:00
You could say they exist as concepts, that are necessary to use for some reasoning processes, without having any kind of independent existence.

It's similar for the case of programs or algorithms. We can say that a sorting algorithm exists, or a chess-playing program or whatever, which means we know how to implement the logical process in some physical system, but it doesn't mean that they have some kind of existence which is independent of the physical systems. It's just a way of talking about patterns that can be common to many physical systems
by testdelacc1 | 2025-11-28 09:22:01+00:00
This is harder than it sounds. Look at the amount of effort it took to standardise temporal (new time library) and then for all the runtimes to implement it. It’s a lot of work.

And what’s more, people have proposed a standard library through tc39 without success - https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules

Of course any large company could create a massive standard library on their own without going through the standards process but it might not be adopted by developers.
by rerdavies | 2025-11-28 09:22:51+00:00
I don't really see anything in it that particularly difficult our counter-productive. Or, to be honest, anything that isn't just plain good coding practice. All suitably given as guidelines not hard and fast rules.

The real joy of having coding standards, is that it sets a good baseline when training junior programmers. These are the minimum things you need to know about good coding practice before we start training you up to be a real programmer.

If you are anything other than a junior programmer, and have a problem with it, I would not hire you.
by skylurk | 2025-11-28 09:24:07+00:00
Coming from Python, I get the feeling Java tooling is ripe for an astral-shaped astroid.

Am I just a Java rookie, or would Java benefit from equivalents for Python's ruff/uv/ty?

Obviously, lots of tooling already exists (Python's did too). But distilling all the lore and xml into a handful of fast opinionated cli tools seems useful to me anyway.
by p2detar | 2025-11-28 09:24:46+00:00
I tried to use LLMs to help me with server-side pb coding, but it was mostly a flop. LLMs don't have an up-to-date state of pb's API. 2 out of 3 times the LLM would give at least a hint how to go about something and the rest is me manually editing the code, reading the docs or looking at pb's source code. All in all, I consider it a nice "pair-programming" type of experience but one can't rely on LLMs to do the pb work for you.
by HaZeust | 2025-11-28 09:24:50+00:00
I appreciate the apology, and I want to apologize if "people like you" came off as prickly. I genuinely didn't mean *you* as a person, but rather "someone like you" as an entity that took an action I had expected to see; I knew that someone was going to leave a one-liner criticizing GP's choice to give their child a certain level of digital autonomy, and advocated for GP on their behalf. I should have said "someone" rather than "people like you".

That said, "arguing against things I don't represent" is generally how debates and newfound perspectives go, and I wish we could have continued. I certainly don't think I assigned any opinions to you, let me know if I'm amiss.
by igogq425 | 2025-11-28 09:24:58+00:00
This is a balancing act between conflicting requirements. It is understandable that you don't want to jump back and forth between countless small subfunctions in order to meticulously trace a computation. But conceptually, the overall process still breaks down into subprocesses. Wouldn't it make sense to move these sub-processes into separate functions and name them accordingly? I have a colleague who has produced code blocks that are 6000 lines long. It is then almost impossible to get a quick overview of what the code actually does. So why not increase high-level readability by making the conceptual structure visible in this way?

A ReverseList function, for example, is useful not only because it can be used in many different places, but also because the same code would be more disruptive than helpful for understanding the overall process if it were inline. Of course, I understand that code does not always break down into such neat semantic building blocks.

> Focus on separating pure code from stateful code, that's the key to large maintainable software! And choose composability over inheritance.

100%!
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-28 09:25:14+00:00
> Shouldn't we stand up against Oppressive governments and Corporations.

How? Governments have the monopoly on violence through their control of the police and military, and corporations bribe the governments in power to do their bidding and also control the media apparatus via which the voting population makes their democratic decisions, so you get this corrupt symbiotic relationship between the first and second estate (the government and wealthy elite private sector) to keep the third estate (common population) oppressed.

So how do you actually coordinate hundreds of millions of people towards a single goal to "fight" against and apparatus of oppression with an order of magnitude more kinetic strike, intelligence gathering and propaganda capabilities than the common folk?

People keep fantasizing about the French revolution and guillotines, but King Louis XVI didn't have Air Force One, doomsday bunkers in New Zeeland, AC-130s, Predator, Reaper and Anduril drones to protect him. The force disparity between the ruling elite and peasantry is now like that meme of hydrogen bomb versus coughing baby.
by p-e-w | 2025-11-28 09:25:31+00:00
Every time I read about smart glasses I wonder the same thing. Obviously the technology isn’t perfect, but it seems that even a basic pair of smart glasses with primitive image processing could be life-changing for a completely blind person. Yet as far as I can tell, most blind people don’t use technology at all for this purpose.

Unfortunately, the HN website is extremely unfriendly to users relying on assistive technologies (lack of ARIA tags, semantic elements etc.), otherwise there might be more blind people commenting here who could shed light on such things, no pun intended.
by kaashif | 2025-11-28 09:27:17+00:00
The anthropic principle doesn't imply that our entire observable universe has to contain only matter.

Why shouldn't we observe clouds of anti matter and matter annihilating millions or billions of light years away? Why does the annihilation have to have happened so early on that we can't see any evidence anywhere?

I think there does need to be an explanation and it can't be an anthropic principle cop out.
by dzaima | 2025-11-28 09:28:26+00:00
The most difficult parts of getting readable code would be dealing with inlined functions and otherwise-duplicated code from macros or similar, and dealing with in-memory structure layouts; both pretty complicated very-global tasks. (never mind naming things, but perhaps LLMs have a good shot at that)

That said, chatgpt currently seems to fail even basic things - completely missed the `thrM` path being possible here: https://chatgpt.com/share/69296a8e-d620-800b-8c25-15f4260c78... https://dzaima.github.io/paste/#0jZJNTsMwEIX3OcWoSFWCqrhN0wb... and that's only basic bog-standard branching, no in-memory structures or stack usage (such trivial problems could be handled by using an actual proper disassembler before throwing an LLM at that wall, but of course that only solves the easy part)
by reify | 2025-11-28 09:28:55+00:00
Metro is owned by Daily Mail and General Trust plc (DMGT), part of the same media group as the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, its a free newspaper spreading its usual right wing driven propaganda.

I will block that shit.

Rather than focussing on a Russian/Putin click bait spy pigeon.

How about they focus on real issues, like the slow creep of Facial Recognition, CCTV, ANPR and the general intrusion onto people's daily lives by modenr tech.

I used to very rarely read this shit on my daily commute into central London.
by VimEscapeArtist | 2025-11-28 09:29:28+00:00
I'm old enough to remember all of these. Under the link below, you can still find old screenshots from deathmatch games we played in clans back in 1998. On dial-up modems with pings sometimes exceeding 400ms. It was terrible, but we played anyway :) That unplugged icon would appear when there were connection issues (not lag) and sometimes just for a moment. https://archive.quake.world/clans/ol-team/walki.zip
by corimaith | 2025-11-28 09:29:42+00:00
Postmodernism itself by its nature is slippery to define, but it's functional result is endless, ontological deconstruction which is corrosive to any ideology reliant on grand narratives, just as to liberalism, authoritarianism and "historical continuity" is no exception. To properly "defend" yourself against it requires certain ontological structures that are fundamentally at odds with the authoritarian worldview, partly because authoritarianism is quite postmodern. They use it to attack liberalism, but at semantic level they aren't any better protected.

Furthermore on the more real side of thing, the postmodern condition is precisely what many authoritarians, namely China are wary of, yet it's probably true that the postmodern condition has already entered Chinese society with degrading social trust, increasing atomization, excessive materialism, influencers running amok, "bread and circuses" with gacha addiction - everything they critique of liberalism at a social level has come to them regardless.
by StrangeSound | 2025-11-28 09:29:56+00:00
"We never demonized Europe and our server in France moved to Switzerland, not North America. Most of our servers with OVH were in Beauharnois, Canada. Multiple of those Canadian OVH servers are now retired and the remaining 5 are going to be moved elsewhere too."

https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1994332742411022336#m
by whitenoises | 2025-11-28 09:30:08+00:00
Hey all,

I'm currently creating an e2ee framework for securing webapps in regard with data breaches. One of the components is a secure transfer of the key material out of the browser into a smartphone with secure storage. To this end i have devised a short-authenticaiton-string based cryptographic protocol and proven it secure (you can find more about it here https://whitenoise.systems/blog/eprint-2025-1598/).

Then i thought that maybe this protocol is usable in a more broad context and identified that the current e2ee file-transfer solutions sleep on PQC and sometimes even on proper e2ee protocol design. So i implemented the key transfer as a rather general file-transfer tool and created some NPM packages that modularize the funcitonalitites for re-usability (https://whitenoise.systems/tools/)

Would like to hear some usage feedback and ux feedback on the short-authentication-string approach. I hope to find the time to develop an actual webapp for this transfer in the future. But most likely the webapp will be based rather on PAKEs, because the PAKE concept UX just works better in asynchronous settings.

Kind regards, Wasilij Beskorovajnov White Noise Systems
by bell-cot | 2025-11-28 09:30:12+00:00
> [...] The contrail persists and spreads into full-fledged contrail cirrus.

> Decades of work has shown these clouds should, on the whole, cause warming. It’s a simple effect: The wispy veils of ice let most of the Sun’s energy pass through. But like CO2, they are very effective at absorbing infrared heat emitted by Earth’s surface. The effect is biggest at night, when the contrail clouds reflect no sunlight and only trap heat.

In the few days after 9/11, when all commercial flights in the US were grounded, US weather data clearly showed the effects of contrail-free skies. Google easily finds old research articles on that.

The article makes no mention of the de facto by-far-largest experiment ever conducted in this area.

Is the post-9/11 grounding now "too hot to touch" for culture wars reasons? Is Science magazine circling the Scientific American drain?

Anyone familiar with this?
by greatgib | 2025-11-28 09:31:00+00:00
"Google Cloud Platform (GCP) credentials were the most leaked secret type on GitLab repositories"

Not surprising, Google SDK are sucking so much in term of authentication. It's never something simple like an API key, always a shitty iam like opaque function based on an opaque sdk needing to be installed that in the end requires a huge json. And most of the time, it is a pain in the ass to provide the token "as-is" in a buffer but the sdk expects that you give a file path to it. So, I easily guess that a lot of lazy devs will just store the credential json file in their project and consider it a job done.
by ffsm8 | 2025-11-28 09:31:20+00:00
Really? I couldn't really see anything wrt degraded performance from my casual glance.

To me, It looks like there are just best effort events with literally no constraints or handling for delays etc

And again, I didn't see how you'd even implement such without being on both sides of the networked connection

I guess I just have to accept that the term has lost it's meaning at this point and can be used for whatever whoever wants to use it for