MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ronsor | 2025-11-19 22:05:04+00:00
Community forums/support from big companies like Microsoft and Adobe tend to be completely useless. In most cases, all threads follow the same flow:

* Question with reasonable amount of detail.

* A reply from some "Community Helper" (Rank: Gold): "did you try reading the help files?"

* Another person with a "Staff" badge: "this isn't our department"

[Thread closed.]
by Zak | 2025-11-19 22:05:54+00:00
Ignoring pride, WhatsApp has major advantages over SMS/MMS, including high-quality media, group chats that actually work, free international messaging, video calls, and (unless they're lying) encryption.

I would be pleased if everyone who uses SMS with me switched to WhatsApp. I would be more pleased if they switched to Signal, but the UX benefits of either one are significant.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-19 22:06:01+00:00
> In a well engineered control system, any single failure will not result in a loss of control over the system

That's true in this case, as well. There was a long cascade of failures including an automatic switchover that had been disabled and set to manual mode.

The headlines about a loose wire are the media's way of reducing it to an understandable headline.
by unethical_ban | 2025-11-19 22:06:34+00:00
I'll have to dive in and take a look. I'm not arguing, but here is how I naively see it:

It seems there is a gap between "how things are" and "how things should be".

"Transiting the internet" vs. "Cost-free intra-region transit" is an entirely different question than "This EC2 has access to S3 bucket X" or "This EC2 does not have access to S3 bucket X".

Somewhere, somehow, that fact should be exposed in the design of the configuration of roles/permissions/etc. so that enabling cost-free intra-region S3 access does not implicitly affect security controls.
by tonymet | 2025-11-19 22:07:01+00:00
Any technical minds care to explain how the "agentic Windows" actually functions?

Based on the marketing it seems to run a sandboxed copilot instance that can impersonate the user to take actions, with their permission?

Something like "hey copilot install Putty"? and it does it?

I can relate to the reluctance to adopt AI features into the OS -- but I would also like to understand how they work and any utility they might provide.
by crote | 2025-11-19 22:07:15+00:00
The problem is that they are legally doing nothing wrong. Everything is done according to the rules, so they can't be held accountable for not following them. After all, they are taking all reasonable precautions, what more could be expected of them?

The fact that the situation on the ground isn't safe in practice is irrelevant to the law. Legally the hedge is doing everything, so the blame falls on the driver. At best a "tragic accident" will result in a "recommendation" to whatever board is responsible for the rules to review them.
by treis | 2025-11-19 22:07:35+00:00
IMHO the fundamental problem is that the world wanted dollars so they gave the US gold or stuff for those dollars. If that flow ever reverses then there's problems. Bretton woods solved the gold issue. The plaza accords solved it when Japan was the problem.

Today the solution is that foreign countries but government debt. That will last as long as everyone is willing to roll it over. It's not clear how or why that stops. But if/when it does it's not going to involve the US sending out trillions worth of stuff
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-11-19 22:08:17+00:00
Hmm so I read this today. By happen chance someone sent it to me, it applies aptly to our conversation. It made me think a little differently about your argument and the luddite pursuasion all together. And why we shouldnt call people luddites (in a negative connotation)!!

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
by toast0 | 2025-11-19 22:09:26+00:00
IMHO, it might be worthwhile for NGINX to default to sendfile+kTLS enabled where appropriate. Maybe the potential for negative experience is too high.

I know sendfile originally had some sharp edges, but I'm not sure how sharp it still is? You would need to use sendfile only for plain http or https with kTLS, and maybe that's too complex? Apache lists some issues [1] with sendfile and defaults to off as well; but I don't know how many sites are still serving 2GB+ files on Itanium. :P AFAIK, lighttpd added SSL_sendfile support on by default 3 years ago, and you can turn it off if you want.

I think there's also some complexity with kTLS on implementations of kTLS that limit protocol version and cipher choices, if it's on by choice it makes sense to refuse to operate with cipher selection and kTLS cipher availability that conflict, but if kTLS is on by default, you probably need to use traditional TLS for connections where the client selects a cipher that's not eligible for kTLS. Maybe that's extra code that nobody wants to write; maybe the inconsistency of performance depending on client cipher choice is unacceptable. But it seems like a worthwhile thing to me (but I didn't make a PR, did I?)

[1] https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#enablesendfi...
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-19 22:10:03+00:00
That's what I understand. It basically spins up a windows VM, you grant it access to specific files or folders, and it runs the actions in the VM.

From the MS support doc:

> "An agent workspace is a separate, contained space in Windows where you can grant agents access to your apps and files so they can complete tasks for you in the background while you continue to use your device. Each agent operates using its own account, distinct from your personal user account. This dedicated agent account establishes clear boundaries between agent activity and your own, enabling scoped authorization and runtime isolation. As a result, you can delegate tasks to agents while retaining full control, visibility into agent actions, and the ability to manage access at any time."

MS showed a little bit of something like it at Ignite yesterday, but for enterprise automations, the AI spun up a Windows 365 instance, did some stuff on the web, then disposed of it when it was done.
Show HN: Uncited
by dogancan | 2025-11-19 22:10:09+00:00
I built a a specialized RSS reader for researchers. It aggregates papers from 3000+ journals (Nature, Science, arXiv, etc.) into a clean, unified feed. It's in beta.

I found it difficult to keep up with the flood of new papers across different journals and arXiv categories. Existing RSS readers felt clunky for this specific use case, and I wanted something faster and more focused (more than Twitter/Bluesky)

Let me know what you think!
by lenerdenator | 2025-11-19 22:10:24+00:00
> This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.

Why would it be?

Cable TV (which was just YouTube for the 80s and 90s) figured this out early: the attraction isn't the user experience, it's the content. They started off without ads, because, hey, you're paying. Then they introduced ads, because they wanted both your subscription fee and advertising dollars.

Did people cancel their subscriptions because of the ads? Hell no. They ordered the premium package to watch Cinemax, HBO, and pro sports. They paid for Pay-Per-View boxing bouts and rented movies. Then they bought the DVR and digital cable subscription, because HDTV was the new hotness.

Your kid's head will explode if he doesn't get to watch Mr. Beast like his friends at school get to, so you keep putting up with whatever enshittification Google carries out on YouTube. You won't stop, I won't stop, no one will, and they know that.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-19 22:10:58+00:00
Sometimes I think Android is just a zombie operating system that exists to keep Apple out of antitrust court. Like there is some kind if quid pro quo that Google is doing Apple is a favor which Apple returns somehow.

With a couple of different carriers and phones I was never able to get voicemail working with an Android phone, maybe I could do what they say to activate my mailbox but next week I’d hear from people that they’re hearing a message about how “their voice mail hasn’t been set up yet” which is the same message I hear every time any friend of mine with Android doesn’t pick up. When I got an iPhone it was the first cell I had where voicemail worked at all.
by tapppi | 2025-11-19 22:11:27+00:00
Both the web interface and connections are down now. Was just fiddling with my private DNS serving both my local network and tailnet, when I lost access to the device listing around 20 minutes ago. Now I also cannot connect through tailnet IPs anymore. EDIT: took me a good minute to realise this too, as I thought I'd just screwed up something in my Pi's ipv6 configuration for the 3rd time in an hour.

P.S. you beat me to posting by 1 minute! Happy to see there was an option to hide my submission, never needed that before.
by DREDREG | 2025-11-19 22:11:42+00:00
Hey HN,

Just released v0.1.1 of GravOptAdaptiveE – a weird physics-inspired optimizer that’s absolutely crushing small-to-medium combinatorial problems.

Reproducible 9-line script that hits 99.9999% on a random 12-node Erdos-Renyi graph (vs the famous 0.878 Goemans-Williamson guarantee):

pip install gravopt

from gravopt import GravOptAdaptiveE_QV import torch, networkx as nx G = nx.erdos_renyi_graph(12, 0.5, seed=42) params = torch.nn.Parameter(torch.randn(12)0.1) opt = GravOptAdaptiveE_QV([params], lr=0.02) for _ in range(100): opt.zero_grad() loss = sum(0.5(1-torch.cos(params[i]-params[j])) for i,j in G.edges()) loss.backward() opt.step() ratio = (len(G.edges()) - loss.item()) / len(G.edges()) print(f"MAX-CUT: {ratio:.6%}") # → 99.9999% in ~1.6s on CPU

Already live on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/gravopt/ 22 clones in first 24h.

Would love brutal feedback – especially on bigger graphs (Gset, Beasley, etc.).

arXiv preprint pending endorsement (code AYD7IS).
by catapart | 2025-11-19 22:12:15+00:00
Sorry it seems naive to you. But if someone is going into business with me (a part of the public), I expect to be able to see EVERYTHING that business has communicated with "the public" (which includes me). Like the other commenter said: I do need to know where the government plans to allow the next gigafactory or falcon 9 launchpad.

As far as whistleblowers and other such information, it's a nice deflection, but it's obviously irrelevant to this topic. I didn't claim anything about how the government should publicize everything, I made claims about what the government should share regarding business deals. Steelman, don't strawman.

And as far as your fear-mongering about everyone suddenly insisting on off-the-record conversations, A) it's a laughable premise; most people don't mind their business with the government being public on account of knowing what "public" means and B) anyone who tried to use off-the-record interaction as a means to circumvent public scrutiny would leave a trail of their behavior that could be relied upon in trial or legislative debate to evidence a law broken or a loophole to be made illegal. Simple as.
by renewiltord | 2025-11-19 22:12:18+00:00
A thing to remember is that Chamath Palihapitiya is a billionaire but spends his time on Twitter trying to convince people he has a big dick[0].

> i'll bet your entire net worth x 10. the anaconda is the worst kept secret of silicon valley...

I think the truth is probably that insecurity does not prevent success. Some argue that it might be the source of it. But probably the truth is there are secure billionaires and insecure billionaires and the latter are very obviously insecure because despite their success they do things like this.

0: https://x.com/chamath/status/1931039584672186651?s=20
by ash_091 | 2025-11-19 22:12:18+00:00
> most people in my life react negatively if I express emotion that what they are doing is upsetting

Right. I guess they feel accused, as though you're attacking their behaviour rather than sharing how it makes you feel, and instinctively become defensive in response?

It's wonderful to meet people who don't think this way. My partner is incredible at this, I can tell her "when you X I feel Y" and know without a doubt her reaction will come from a place of trying to work together to understand whether the problem and solution exist in X, Y or both.
by Eisenstein | 2025-11-19 22:12:30+00:00
Saying that I am 'trying to mirror your posts' is not an insult? What is it then?

Your entire tone is disdainful and dismissive, and your constant need to insist that I am missing something when you refuse to acknowledge my basic point is tedious.

Yes, you acknowledged 'social indicators'. No, you did not acknowledge that 'people who stick around in clubs filled with other people they vehemently disagree with about core issues tend to be rare'.
by oblio | 2025-11-19 22:12:33+00:00
I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people?

There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts.

Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps developed primarily with AI by smaller companies? I'm excluding big companies because in their case it's impossible to prove the productivity, the could be throwing more bodies at the problem and we'd never know.
by Atomic_Torrfisk | 2025-11-19 22:12:51+00:00
> Actually, I think problem 1 is exacerbating problem 2 by a lot

100%, the fear mongering is just to trigger rallies of investment both in stock and funding. What bad sounding to us "AI took my jerb!" sounds great to the c-suite.

I think you might overestimating the power of AI, a little. It's really good at creating flashy things, nice looking videos and code, but the reasoning and logic is still lacking. I don't see it replacing human oversight anytime soon.
by Fokamul | 2025-11-19 22:13:32+00:00
Oh my god, we are forbidden from reverse engineering Arduino SW. That's it, forbidden, we cannot literally do it, because some C-suit buffoon said so.

See, open their SW in Ghidra or IDA and see for yourself, big pop-up and blank PE decompilation.

"By Qualcomm CEO buffoon, you cannot reverse engineer my software, muhahaha."

Qualcomm should sell this idea, VMProtect and others will go broke over night.
by dylan604 | 2025-11-19 22:13:39+00:00
"Metadata — or the invisible descriptive data attached to files that describe facts like the file’s origin, date of creation and date of modification — could be a key defense against deepfakes in the near future. "

great, so instead of trying to get away from all of the pervasive tracking our devices/apps to, we're going to come to depend on it to prove someone's fake evidence is fake. of course, they'll say that metadata is easier to fake than the alleged deep-fake.

I'm really not enjoying this timeline
by unethical_ban | 2025-11-19 22:13:42+00:00
Anyone have experience with CachyOS or Bazzite here? I'm using Fedora KDE standard, never toyed with Arch distros, and don't know much about Bazzite/Kinoite. Regular Fedora seems pretty usable to me.

In any case, it's really great to see Linux overcoming its final major hurdle for a lot of technical people to dump Windows: Gaming compatibility.
by zippyman55 | 2025-11-19 22:13:57+00:00
I sure hope there are no bailouts. The tax breaks or support extended to the community utilities to support the infrastructure buildouts will be problematic enough. I do not see getting around that, but that may not be all that large. I still see the data centers in peoples backyards as being similar to communities that felt they needed to have a sports stadium and they bent over backwards, only to be held captive by a team that did not care about the sponsoring community.
by vacuity | 2025-11-19 22:14:09+00:00
The sad thing is that I saw that standardized tests were being blamed based on a certain ideology, when the proponents of the ideology should've realized that their own goals are better served by using standardized tests.

It shouldn't be controversial, and in some sense it isn't (in another sense it is, because people confuse themselves), that everyone should be given the opportunity to develop and perform at their full potential. I could name multiple different ideologies that oppose this in some way, though.
by perihelions | 2025-11-19 22:14:34+00:00
> "In other exchanges, Mr. Summers appeared to ask Mr. Epstein’s advice on how to pursue a romantic relationship"

That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the woman into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...

> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”"

I think it remarkable how the NYT buries (far down on the page), and CNBC omits altogether, the underlying story about what Larry Summers was actually doing. CNBC euphemizes the whole thing away to vapor (there were mails—the end). These aren't good expositions.

(Speaking of the NYT' coverage, there's a new revelation one of their reporters actually helped Epstein evade scrutiny—it's another bit from the recently-disclosed email tranches. Their reporter Landon Thomas secretly tipped off Epstein that one of his NYT coworkers was "digging around" into Epstein—even gave Epstein the guy's name).

https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3m5hn... ("Fall 2017: Then-NYT reporter literally warning Epstein that someone is "digging around again.")
by LexiMax | 2025-11-19 22:14:49+00:00
I will never forget Mercurial's postmortem on their experience with the Python 3 transition. They had very few kind words to say about the process.

https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/13/mercurial's-journey...

Part of me even wonders if the transition had any role to play in why Mercurial gradually lost whatever foothold it had in the DVCS ecosystem.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-11-19 22:14:52+00:00
Thanks for the reply.

I took the "this sounds like Crowdstrike" tack for two reasons. The write-up characterized this update as an every five minutes process. The update, being a file of rules, felt analogous in format to the Crowdstrike signature database.

I appreciate the OSPF analogy. I recognize there are portions of these large systems that operate more like a routing protocol (with updates being unpredictable in velocity or time of occurrence). The write-up didn't make this seem like one of those. This seemed a lot more like a traditional daemon process receiving regular configuration updates and crashing on a bad configuration file.
by everybodyknows | 2025-11-19 22:15:28+00:00
> increase number of students, which then increases their pay and job security ...

Someone who knows how the world works! Qui bene --

https://ucsdguardian.org/2025/09/29/uc-regents-greenlight-uc...

> The expansion anticipates 13,600 new students in the next 15 years
by ignoramous | 2025-11-19 22:15:30+00:00
> Several distros are above the 90% mark of all packages being byte-for-byte reproducible, and one or two have hit the 99% mark.

Simply incredible.

Explains F-Droid's recent success with Reproducible Builds (as some F-Droid maintainers are also active in the Debian scene): https://f-droid.org/en/2025/05/21/making-reproducible-builds...
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-19 22:15:32+00:00
"How it actually functions" is too much of a moving target. The book of "best practices for building AI agent functionality into your OS" is still being written. But "sandboxed envs for AI to do things in" is one approach MS is currently trying for.

I agree that a "good" implementation of agentic AI can have a lot of benefits, to casual users and power users both. But do I have any trust in Microsoft being the company to ship a "good" implementation? Hell no.

Windows has been getting more and more user hostile for years now, to casual users and power users both. If there's anyone at Microsoft who still cares about good UX, they sure don't have any decision-making power. And getting AI integration right is as much a UX issue as it is a foundation model issue or an integration hook issue.
by righthand | 2025-11-19 22:15:54+00:00
This is a response to you and the other Y people that confuse short videos with autoplay and user engagement techniques.

There are people that autoplay long videos, in fact people stream random Simpson’s (or other favorite tv show, podcast, music, books on tape, etc) episodes in the background while they work. Classic TV has autoplay with no opportunity to decide. Autoplay is not an exclusive short form video feature. I can make a short video on my computer and it will not autoplay other content.
by fakedang | 2025-11-19 22:16:00+00:00
On what basis do you say that Epstein was pretty talented at finance? This guy was a math teacher with no actual degree. The only reason he got his gig in finance was by schmoozing up the dad of one of his students, who was CEO of Bear Stearns.

The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now).
by kazinator | 2025-11-19 22:16:14+00:00
Git hashes have nothing whatsoever to do with whether you can do a clean build of the same tree twice with the same results, bit for bit.

Git hashes or tags can help identify what was built: the inputs.

You only need to know that for traceability: when you hold the released outputs, but do not hold (or are not sure you hold) the matching inputs.

If builds are reproducible, the traceability becomes more meaningful.

In the TXR project, have a ./configure option called --build-id. This sets an ID that is appended to the version, which is in the executable. It is nothing by default; not used. It is meant to be useful for people who interact with the code, so they can check what they are running (things can get confusing when you are going back and forth among versions, or making local changes).

If you set the build ID it to the word "git", then it is calculated using:

git describe --tags --dirty

that's probably what this author should be using. It gives you a meaningful ID that is related to the most recent release tag, and whether the repo was dirty.

$ git describe --tags --dirty txr-302-20-g77c99b74e-dirty

We are (sadly, only) 20 commits after 302, at a commit whose short hash is 77c99b74e, and the repo is in a modified state.

I have it rigged in the Makefile that it actually keeps track of the most recent build ID in a little .build_id file. If the build ID changes relative to what is in that file, the Makefile will force a rebuild of the .o files which incorporate the build ID.

Also, there is no need to be generating dynamic #include material just for this. A simple -Dsymbol=var option in the CFLAGS will define a preprocessor symbol:

CFLAGS += -DMY_BUILD_ID=\"$(my_build_id)\"
by dekhn | 2025-11-19 22:16:16+00:00
Arduino and related technologies have revolutionzed scientific instrument making. Things that were either "too hard" or "too expensive" are now straightforward for hobbyist and non-technical scientists.

For example, I build automated microscopes as a hobby and I use arduino products (well, used- now I use ESP32 with micropython, but that still depends on the Arduino API) and it's been tremendous for building high speed interfaces (I need to blink an LED at the same rate/in sync with a camera shutter opening/closing) . Even when I do photography, I'm still building arduino and other related things to help automate the tedious bits. And when that gets boring, I take out my guitar and use arduino or similar products to do audio processing in realtime.

For many of the things I want to do, there is no product on Amazon, or it's obscenely expensive (XY stages typically cost $10K and up).