MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mitchellh | 2025-12-07 15:12:51+00:00
> while that shown in blue is the stapled notarisation ticket (optional)

This is correct, but practically speaking non-notarized apps are pretty terrible to use for a user enough so that this isn't optional and you're going to pay your $99/yr Apple tax.

(This only applies to distributed software, if you are only building and running apps for your own personal use, its not bad because macOS lets you do that without the scary warnings)

For users who aren't aware of notarization, your app looks straight up broken. See screenshots in the Apple support site here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102445

For users who are aware, you used to be able to right click and "run" apps and nowadays you need to actually go all the way into system settings to allow it: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=saqachfa

I'm generally a fan of what Apple does for security but I think notarization specifically for apps outside the App Store has been a net negative for all parties involved. I'd love to hear a refutation to that because I've tried to find concrete evidence that notarization has helped prevent real issues and haven't been able to yet.
by hylaride | 2025-12-07 15:13:01+00:00
> Why did it have to take over the world anyway?

Because it was there, mostly. In a UNIX world where text was everything, it was well suited to quick and dirty solutions (that then morphed into long-term technical debt). Most alternatives at the time were not there by default as they either were commercial or otherwise didn't have any ecosystem to expand it's utility (like CPAN - without it Perl would likely be like awk - a fully capable language, but only used for one-liners 99.999% of the time).
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-07 15:13:49+00:00
> but also chilled in comparison to the modern stressful average job, where you constantly have to do things

I don't know if you mean "office work" as "modern stressful average job" or "food delivery as a freelancer and barely getting paid", but almost any physical job would be more taxing both mentally and physically than sitting in an office all day. Maybe my experience of only becoming a office worker after ~50% of my working life and before that doing other things, but I think most people (especially here on HN) don't realize how taxing physical labor is, even for the brain and the head.
by moomoo11 | 2025-12-07 15:13:52+00:00
Tech went from solving problems for the Everyman or for every day things, to all in on gambling and other perverse shit.

I honestly believe that 2008-2019 was the Golden Age.

There were apps for so many things popping up. Services for making life better. People got paid. Dev tools for actual work. Etc.

Fast forward to 2025. Betting on stupid shit. Buy now, get fucked. People who actually unironically want to live in cyberpunk 2077.

In 2018 I felt like a million dollars meant something. Today I feel like nothing when someone mentions they made 100M or even 50B. I genuinely loved my Tesla when I first got it. I thought my iPhone was amazing.

Now it’s like how can I extract more money from you or enslave you to my platform.

It’s all wack. I hope there’s such a massive financial crash that all these assholes are wiped.

The only nice thing has been agentic coding. It’s like having an on demand rubber duck for when I’m solo working.
by tuhgdetzhh | 2025-12-07 15:13:59+00:00
I'm always a bit shocked how casual people people wget and execute shell scripts as part of their install process.

This is the equivalent of giving an author of a website remote code execution (RCE) on your computer.

I get the idea that you can download the script first and carefully read it, but I think that 99% of people won't.
by lateforwork | 2025-12-07 15:14:53+00:00
If you have only one copy of the code then you only have to fix the bug in one place, as opposed to a dozen. So there is significant cost savings. But there is a problem: when you make a bug fix you have to test all the different places it is used. If you don't then you could be breaking something while fixing something. If you have comprehensive automated tests then you can have just one copy of the code--if you introduce a bug while fixing a bug the automated tests will catch it.

If you don't have comprehensive test automation then you have to consider whether you can manually test all the places it is used. If the code is used in multiple products at your company--and you aren't even familiar with some of those products then you can't manually test all the places it is used. Under such circumstances it may be preferable for each team to have duplicate copies of some code. Not ideal, but practical.
Show HN: Free espresso/pourover tool with interactive WCR Flavor Wheel
by FrankNy | 2025-12-07 15:14:59+00:00
Hi HN! I've been deep in the specialty coffee rabbit hole for a few years and built this tool to help me dial in espresso and pourover more systematically.

*What it does:*

• Extraction Compass – click where your shot lands (sour/bitter × weak/strong), get diagnosis and adjustments. It factors in your bean's origin, processing method, roast level, and variety.

• Pourover recipes from Hoffmann, Rao, Hedrick, Kasuya (4:6) with step-by-step timer. Water amounts auto-calculate based on your dose.

• Interactive WCR Flavor Wheel based on the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon 2.0. Click a flavor → see why you taste it and what beans to look for.

• Coffee database: 30+ origins, 60+ varieties, 20+ processing methods with brewing tips for each.

*Tech:* - React + TypeScript + Vite - Tailwind CSS - Hosted on Netlify - PWA (works offline) - Privacy-friendly: Umami analytics, no cookies, no tracking

*Why I built it:* When I started with espresso, I'd pull a sour shot and have no idea if I should grind finer, change dose, or adjust temperature. The compass gives you a systematic approach instead of random guessing.

The flavor wheel was because I kept seeing "jasmine, bergamot" on bags and had no idea what beans to buy if I wanted those flavors.

Completely free, no account needed, no ads. Feedback welcome – especially if you spot errors in the coffee data.
by Isamu | 2025-12-07 15:15:28+00:00
Someone commented here that hallucination is what LLMs do, it’s the designed mode of selecting statistically relevant model data that was built on the training set and then mashing it up for an output. The outcome is something that statistically resembles a real citation.

Creating a real citation is totally doable by a machine though, it is just selecting relevant text, looking up the title, authors, pages etc and putting that in canonical form. It’s just that LLMs are not currently doing the work we ask for, but instead something similar in form that may be good enough.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-07 15:15:34+00:00
This is my concern with all those "success" stories about Linux as an enterprise desktop OS. Run it for 10 years and show me the actual cost savings/improved productivity.

Microsoft is trash and is getting worse day by day, but at the very least it's the same trash everyone has to deal with, so people mostly got used to the smell, and you can get economies of scale in tools used to deal with said smell. MS is trash because of incompetence.

Linux is dozens of different flavors of trash, so you don't even get economies of scale dealing with it. It's trash because of ideology - the people involved would often reject the functionality you mentioned for ideological reasons, and even for those who do accept them, won't agree on the implementation meaning you now have a dozen of different flavors, and will take up arms if someone tries to unify things (just look at the reaction to systemd).

Linux works well for careers where shoveling trash is already part of your work, in which case all the effort doubles as training for the job and experience makes this a non-issue. But for non-IT careers where the computer is just a tool that is expected to work properly, it's nowhere near there, and will never get there because everyone's instead arguing on the definition of "there" and which mode of transportation to use getting there.
by nlh | 2025-12-07 15:16:00+00:00
“In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.””

Sorry—-what? Isn’t that one of the fundamental basic jobs to be done and expectations of a retailer? You put physical things on display for sale, you mark prices on them, and you sell them. When the prices change, you send one of your employees to the appropriate shelves and you change the tag.

When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?
by al_borland | 2025-12-07 15:16:09+00:00
The thought was that the government would effectively become the largest employer of OSS developers who would then be compelled to follow directions or be out of a job. Would there be enough independent developers to review millions of lines of code, patch out any back doors, or fork and maintain an entirely separate projects, since none of the government protects can be trusted?

Could the government also dictate the operating system and software people use to make sure it is the state sponsored one? If I’m not mistaken some similar actions have happened in N Korea and China.

I’m not saying this is an inevitable outcome, but just trying to think of worst case scenarios. A lot of terrible things have started with good intentions.
by fkdk | 2025-12-07 15:16:13+00:00
Including women would have been a legal nonstarter.

The german constitution restricts drafting to men[0] and would have to be changed before such a law could even be considered.

Before you ask, yes, the constitution also says that men and women need to be treated equally[1]

[0] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_12a.html

[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_3.html
by stefan_ | 2025-12-07 15:16:40+00:00
Is it quite critical? Peer review is not checking homework, it's about the novel contribution presented. Papers will frequently cite related notable experiments or introduce a problem that as a peer reviewer in the field I'm already well familiar with. These paragraphs generate many citations but are the least important part of a peer review.

(People submitting AI slop should still be ostracized of course, if you can't be bothered to read it, why would you think I should)
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-12-07 15:16:50+00:00
Quoting myself from just last night because this comes up every time and doesn't always need a new write-up.

> You also don't need gunpowder to kill someone with projectiles, but gunpowder changed things in important ways. All I ever see are the most specious knee-jerk defenses of AI that immediately fall apart.
by 1123581321 | 2025-12-07 15:17:12+00:00
This is poor behavior by the stores. The solution will be conversion to eink shelf labels that sync like registers do. Realistically, the fines will not be increased to the point where increasing store staffing and training is cheaper. I don’t know where Dollar General is in this process, but many other c-stores and grocery stores have implemented digital labels. Digital labels come with the temptation to experiment with more dynamic pricing which would also make it harder to shop on a budget. However, high staffing or fines also increases prices. I wish we had better retail in more of the United States, especially needier areas.
by CerryuDu | 2025-12-07 15:17:21+00:00
I must agree, unfortunately, and do so due to a reason that's way more mundane than "custom formulas": UI.

Language, form, muscle memory (call it what you will) is difficult to separate from thinking and working. I'm very picky when it comes to desktop UI: I use Linux exclusively, and I can't tolerate most Linux distros' default desktop environments. Someone who's been productive for a decade or more with Windows applications -- well, to the extent we're willing to ascribe "UI stability" to those applications' own updates -- will probably hate Linux with a passion.

I don't think such a transition can be made seamless. They should have thought about becoming Microsoft's hostage two decades ago (I guess).
by grandpanda | 2025-12-07 15:17:59+00:00
A genetic algorithm was used to explore two-dimensional cellular automata, and the results turned out far more surprising than expected. Even though the rule space is astronomically large (more rules than atoms in the observable universe), evolution consistently "tunes" through the noise - like adjusting an old TV - until structured patterns suddenly appear.

When asked to reproduce a simple shape, different automata often solve it in completely unexpected ways, each discovering its own strange mechanism for generating the pattern. Despite the scale of the search space, evolution locks onto meaningful structure with the ease of a well-tuned signal.
by ilitirit | 2025-12-07 15:18:15+00:00
I had a lengthy argument about this in our architecture forum. I argued that "re-use" shouldn't be included as an Enterprise (keyword here) Architecture principle because they are clear use-cases where duplication is preferable to alternatives. e.g. deployment and testing decoupling etc etc. I had a lot of resistance, and eventually we just ended up with an EA principle with a ton of needless caveats.

It's unfortunate that so many people end up parroting fanciful ideas without fully appreciating the different contexts around software development.
by the_af | 2025-12-07 15:18:25+00:00
LLM are a force multiplier of this kind of errors though. It's not easy to hallucinate papers out of whole cloth, but LLMs can easily and confidently do it, quote paragraphs that don't exist, and do it tirelessly and at a pace unmatched by humans.

Humans can do all of the above but it costs them more, and they do it more slowly. LLMs generate spam at a much faster rate.
by 6510 | 2025-12-07 15:18:49+00:00
I like the joke where windows 9,..10,..11 would eventually give us windows 1995 again.

HP is like they assigned good people to the right task, had everyone make a draft, pulled it from their hands and declared it finished. The combined drafts do not resemble a product so they also have someone make a draft solution for that problem.
by dclowd9901 | 2025-12-07 15:19:13+00:00
To me, this is exactly what LLMs are good for. It would be exhausting double checking for valid citations in a research paper. Fuzzy comparison and rote lookup seem primed for usage with LLMs.

Writing academic papers is exactly the _wrong_ usage for LLMs. So here we have a clear cut case for their usage and a clear cut case for their avoidance.
by Konnstann | 2025-12-07 15:19:49+00:00
The immune response to diseases has to be developed over time, not to mention the fact that the introduction of those drugs drastically accelerated the evolution of the bacteria, viruses, etc. I can't speculate as to the health of hunter gatherer civilizations but modern diets and until recently the prevalence of antibacterial soaps and products in homes have definitely changed immune systems. Just look at covid, where in just a period of a few years the amount of infections due to other common diseases like influenza or strep have shot up due to kids not being exposed to germs during the lockdowns.
by dan-robertson | 2025-12-07 15:20:01+00:00
I think 1700 is not the best year to use, depending on the place. Rural people in 1700 England were quite different from most peasants who have ever lived – they were in a relatively advanced monetary economy, literacy rates were high, secular books were affordable (much less so than today of course), the price of linen cloth had perhaps halved in the last 200 years. Feudalism was going away, agricultural productivity was rising.

Life of a medieval peasant was quite different. Productivity was basically static, literacy was low, the economy would have been local and mostly based on barter or paying with labour. You would likely be growing your own linen to spin and weave and make into clothes for your own family. I think there was a little more specialisation and a little less subsistence agriculture by 1700.
by hyperpape | 2025-12-07 15:21:21+00:00
It's awful that there are these hallucinated citations, and the researchers who submitted them ought to be ashamed. I also put some of the blame on the boneheaded culture of academic citations.

"Compression has been widely used in columnar databases and has had an increasing importance over time.[1][2][3][4][5][6]"

Ok, literally everyone in the field already knows this. Are citations 1-6 useful? Well, hopefully one of them is an actually useful survey paper, but odds are that 4-5 of them are arbitrarily chosen papers by you or your friends. Good for a little bit of h-index bumping!

So many citations are not an integral part of the paper, but instead randomly sprinkled on to give an air of authority and completeness that isn't deserved.

I actually have a lot of respect for the academic world, probably more than most HN posters, but this particular practice has always struck me as silly. Outside of survey papers (which are extremely under-provided), most papers need many fewer citations than they have, for the specific claims where the paper is relying on prior work or showing an advance over it.
by twodave | 2025-12-07 15:21:30+00:00
I usually make coffee at home, but the baristas are remarkably stable in my area. When I do go to a coffee shop (there are 2-3 that I might go to) there’s a good chance I’ll recognize the barista and that they’ll also remember me. In one such case I’ve been seeing the same one for close to a decade, and we always chat for a bit.

I think most baristas who do it for more than a year or two learn to not primarily be a coffee factory but first to make a positive impact on the people they see. The coffee is something that can be made consistent (and in a way, boring) through practice, but personal connection, especially when it is genuine, has a real draw.
by sigwinch | 2025-12-07 15:21:45+00:00
I’m not sure the paper or the character Satoshi himself matter anymore. Once you have a preeminent coin with fiat power behind it, the details of a paper and the wherewithal to reinvent that coin more purely are irrelevant. Once a particular political family signaled that control starting in Sept 2024, keeping close to that family reassured you of a bailout or pardon.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-07 15:21:53+00:00
Interesting... To poke at that definition a bit more:

Would that also mean that C++ only became a GC language with the release of C++11? Or would C++98 also be considered a GC language due to auto_ptr?

Are no_std Rust and freestanding C++ GC languages?

Does the existence of Fil-C change anything about whether C is a GC language?
by UncleMeat | 2025-12-07 15:23:10+00:00
Nah see he only calls for it for "violent crime." Crime by the wealthy, even if it steals more money from people and even kills more people, is a super special kind of crime that doesn't count in the same way.

He is so generous towards the poor, advocating for faster trials and extreme punishment. We've definitely never seen overpolicing lead to any problems there. Nobody has ever got life in prison on a three-strikes law for stealing golf clubs. What the poor definitely do not need is for their bosses to stop engaging in wage theft and for their landlords to stop violating the law. That's not a problem at all.
by coopierez | 2025-12-07 15:23:17+00:00
This is interesting to me, as someone moving from a company that uses C++ to one that uses Rust. It feels like the whole culture of the former company is built similarly - no guardrails, no required testing, or code review, minimal "red-tape".

In effect, the core principles of the company (or at least, the development team of the company) end up informing which programming language to use.
by bena | 2025-12-07 15:23:26+00:00
Eight years ago was 2017.

Everything you figured out about crypto was known then. You had to choose to disregard that information and continue on. And you did, and it took you eight years to figure it out. And now that you have money, you think you have special insight others did not. Sorry, you don’t. There’s going to be a significant portion of people reading this saying, “No shit”. But congrats on winning at the casino I guess.
by moomoo11 | 2025-12-07 15:24:05+00:00
Not to be that guy (honestly idc) but a11y is cool but it’s just a tick box.

Maybe for a Netflix or some other widely used consumer app it is essential because the # of affected users might be significant.

For a 2ish million user SaaS I used to work on, nobody ever cared enough because the chance that someone is going to use a11y features to do their work was extraordinarily rare, in fact probably zero considering the domain. We did enough to cover our bases, maybe 80-90% of the way there, but that’s it.

I mean emotionally I get it. But it’s a business at the end of the day. For a popular consumer app it makes sense to invest the time and effort. For others, it really is not.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-07 15:24:47+00:00
They will become pinky promises, once Microsoft gets ordered to do something by orange man or some three letters. There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US. It basically doesn't matter what they have in contracts, as US law or just political power with access to enforce that power trumps (ha) any contracts they can sign.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-07 15:24:49+00:00
I think this comes primarily from trying to add a separate management tool on top, instead of leveraging the OS structure themself. There is a reason, why most directories are specified to be readonly. Also writable XOR persistent is mostly true. The only things required to be writable are /tmp, /var and /home. /tmp is wiped at least on every boot or is even just a ramdisk. /var can be cached or reset to the predefined settings on boot. /home needs to be managed, that is true. But you wouldn't want every users directory on every host anyway, instead you want to populate them on login. That is typically done by libpam.

/usr is expected to be shared among hosts, host-specific stuff goes into /usr/local for a reason, and as a sysadmin you can decide to simply not have host specific software.

EDR/AV is basically unnecessary, when you only mount things either writable or executable. And you don't want the users to start random software or mount random USB-sticks anyway.

> Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the hype was coming from home users who had no idea what herding boxen was actually like.

Unix has over 50 years of history of being primarily managed by sysadmins instead of home users. While Linux is not Unix, it has inherited a lot. The whole system is basically designed to run a bunch of admin configured software and is actually less suitable for home users. I would say the primary problem was accessing it with a Windows mindset.
by graemep | 2025-12-07 15:25:07+00:00
That does not really much much difference. The US can still sanction people working for the ICC very effectively:

https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall...

and it can demand access do data:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/microsoft_admits_it_c...
by theandrewbailey | 2025-12-07 15:25:44+00:00
A 10G NIC is unnecessary. I've used iVentoy with a dozen laptops installing Linux simultaneously with no obvious slowdowns hosted from a Dell Optiplex Micro 7050 (7th gen i5, 1G NIC, SSD).

https://www.iventoy.com/en/index.html