MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dabockster | 2025-12-01 02:01:17+00:00
> Arch based

Lately, I've been going the opposite route and using RHEL more and more. I've had a couple breaking changes lately that have been caused by software under rolling release practices, which has made me begin to appreciate operating systems where their APIs and stuff get sort of frozen in time for up to a decade. In fact, this is still a big feature of Microsoft Windows.

I mean, if a server distro can be made to be "LTS" for 5-10 years, then why can't we have a decent desktop Linux OS be like that as well (besides Ubuntu)?
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-01 02:01:33+00:00
Related:

DNA testing firm 23andMe fined £2.3m by UK regulator for 2023 data hack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44300220 - June 2025 (1 comment)

23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856412 - January 2024 (368 comments)
by safeshare | 2025-12-01 02:01:34+00:00
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful comment.

You’re right that for many HN folks the interesting part is not just “make the URL shorter”, but understanding what is being removed and being able to keep / edit specific bits. Right now SafeShare is deliberately “dumb & small”: it only sees the URL string in the address bar and strips parameters that match a simple list/heuristic (UTM, gclid, fbclid, some obvious redirect params etc.). It doesn’t look at the request method – so it’s really working on query strings, not HTTP POST bodies.

I like your idea of an attribution / explanation layer, e.g.: • parse the URL and list detected tracking params, • show a short label for each (utm_source → source, campaign attribution, etc.), • let the user tick which ones to keep/remove, maybe even edit values, • then regenerate the final URL.

That would probably live as an “advanced” or “details” view so that the default flow stays as simple as: paste → clean → copy/open.

I’ll experiment with a prototype of that – even just a “show what was removed and why” panel would already be a useful first step. Thanks again for pushing me in that direction.
by skydhash | 2025-12-01 02:01:37+00:00
On OpenBSD right now with a Dell Latitude 7490. Works fine.

The reason I like the BSD is that they are easily understood. Have you tried to troubleshoot ALSA? Or use libvirt? Linux has a lot of features, but most of them are not really useful to to general computer user. It felt like a B2B SaaS, lot of little stuff that you wonder why they are included in the design or why they're even here in the first place.
by bitwize | 2025-12-01 02:01:43+00:00
More of a Net/Open guy myself, but the Qotom network appliance I mentioned a few posts back runs FreeBSD. I use it as a wifi bridge to provide backhaul for my office's wired LAN over the house wifi. There are gadgets you can buy for this, but I like my solution running stock FreeBSD + some configuration.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-01 02:01:51+00:00
> The comment about using a good SERVER mobo like supermicro is on point --- I managed many supermicro fbsd colo ack servers for almost 15 years and those boards worked well with it.

I completely agree.

Supermicro mobo's with server-grade components combined with aggressive cooling fans/heat sinks running FreeBSD in a AAA data center resulted in two prod servers having uptimes of over 3000+ days. This included dozens of app/jails/ports updates (pretty much everything other than the kernel).
by amywangyx | 2025-12-01 02:02:11+00:00
A bit more context: This started as a vibe coding class' project and evolved into a real product. Built with React Native and Supabase.

Some things on the roadmap:

More tools: FIRE calculator, mortgage calculator.

Brokerage integration: Connect all your accounts in one place.

AI-powered portfolio insights: Personalized optimization suggestions
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-01 02:02:22+00:00
> Up to $10,000 for Extraordinary Claims; > Up to $165 for Health Information Claims; > An estimated $100 for Statutory Cash Claims; and > 5 years of Privacy & Medical Shield + Genetic Monitoring

None of these make the victims whole. The typical customer would rather pay $1000 to not have their private medical records stolen. Giving them just $165 or a few years of monitoring is insulting. What does that monitoring even achieve?
by Hizonner | 2025-12-01 02:02:27+00:00
"Never scan public QR codes" is functionally equivalent to "never type in a URL and never click on a link". Other than the smallish scan-specific attack surface that you mention and then largely dismiss, there's nothing that makes QR codes more dangerous than any other way of delivering links.

It's somewhere between impractical and impossible to evaluate a URL and know anything about its "safety". So if you can't make your Web browser impervious enough to tolerate basically any crap a server may send back to your satisfaction, then your only answer is a total walled garden.
by senordevnyc | 2025-12-01 02:02:27+00:00
One of the main points is literally “50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life”. The rest are a mix of either more excited than concerned, or equally excited and concerned. Which again, very different from your story.

This discussion is already way beyond fruitful, was just curious because your anecdote doesn’t match the actual data I’ve seen, and thus far you haven’t actually answered my question, so I’m going to move on.
by coldtea | 2025-12-01 02:03:01+00:00
Seems more possible that you failed to understand Palahniuk.

What the parent wrote is spot on.

>And then diagnosing his suicide as a result of your apparent culture war grievances over sex jokes is just revolting behavior.

This quote is a fine example of the cultural decline the parent talks about, and which weighted heavily upon many people. Bourdain lamented this changes and celebrated the past rebellions time and again. So did others, including DFW.
by toast0 | 2025-12-01 02:03:09+00:00
> As much as I love FreeBSD, the release schedule is a real challenge in production: each point release is only supported for about three months. Since every release includes all ports and packages, you end up having to recertify your main application constantly.

How much support do you plan on getting? The old releases don't really turn into pumpkins. Yes, every two or three major releases, they end up with a minor release that adds something to libc where binary packages from X.2 won't run on X.1 or X.0. But this isn't usually a huge deal for servers if you follow this plan:

Use FreeBSD as your stable base, but build your own binaries for your main service / language runtimes. If you build once and distribute binaries, keep your build machine / build root on the oldest minor revision you have in your fleet. When you install a new system, use an OS version that's in support and install any FreeBSD built binary packages then.

You do have to be prepared to review updates to confirm if they need you to take action (many to most won't if you are careful about what is enabled), backport fixes, build packages yourself, or upgrade in a hurry when necessary, but you don't often actually need to.

I don't think this strategy works for a desktop deployment; there's too many moving pieces. But it works well for a server. Most of my FreeBSD servers for work got installed and never needed an OS upgrade until they were replaced by better hardware. I did have an upgrade process, and I did use it sometimes: there were a couple kernel bugs that needed fixes, and sometimes new kernels would have much better performance so it was foolish to leave things as-is. And a couple bugs in the packages we installed; usually those didn't need an OS upgrade too, but sometimes it was easier to upgrade the handful of old servers rather than fight everything; choosing battles is important.

Or you can go like Netflix and just run as close to -CURRENT as you can.
by timr | 2025-12-01 02:03:16+00:00
The plot you're citing is an imaginary projection 100 years into the future given what was known up to the year on the x-axis. That is why the units are 100x larger.

The uncertainty on the rate of change is quite large (relatively), therefore, any 100 year projection has huge, compounded uncertainty. Figure 2 is not useful for determining anything about the present.
by blululu | 2025-12-01 02:04:12+00:00
The article is 100% correct that there is a fundamental political rift between a human/decentralized and AI/centralized encyclopedia. I have a personal preference for the former, but I can see the advantage of the newer approach in terms of clarity and quality on several topics as well as being more homogeneous in its bias (Wikipedia has all kinds of cliques who dominate pockets of the encyclopedia).

As a meta point, while I don't personally care for Grokipedia's agenda I am quite frankly impressed that something like Grokipedia could be stood up so quickly and this feels like a net positive. While Grokipedia is centralized Wikipedia is also a monolith in its own right and plagued by problems (cliques of editors routinely exert their authority over subdomains to the detriment of the truth). If a small group can spin up their own version of Wikipedia then there is the possibility of a more broad diverse market place of ideas.

For example, Wikipedia's math articles are notoriously abstruse and generally unsuitable for beginners. An encyclopedia that emphasizes a non-technical approach in this domain could be very helpful - though it would almost certainly not be worth the herculean effort to build such a thing as a pure wiki. As an AI wiki one could spin up an encyclopedia for a variety of skill levels (i.e. grade school, college level, graduate level).

Finally, in case anyone on Grok's team is reading this, the thing that really annoys me most about Grokipedia's UX is that it has no blue links to other articles. It would not be hard to automate this on Grokipedia, but currently there is no possibility of tunneling down some rabbit hole of human knowledge until you find yourself in a totally unfamiliar area. Politics is one thing, but a Wikipedia clone with no links is really no better than just asking ChatGPT.
by abe_m | 2025-12-01 02:04:36+00:00
Oh, I think I see what you're saying. If I'm understanding the thrust of your argument:

I do think it would be good if people would be more humble in what they think they know and be more willing to engage with the argument presented by the "other side", and not be so tribal. More introspection, and less blindly doing as they are told, while acknowledging "doctors", "scientists", "reporters", are all actually humans that have human emotions, various incentives, varying knowledge, who sometimes do stupid things, and sometimes things with malevolent intent. They are not all-being, all-seeing, all-virtuous non-humans, so don't take everything at face value.
by bigiain | 2025-12-01 02:06:38+00:00
Yeah - but where does the code doing the encryption/decryption come from? 1Password serves me the Javascript that encrypts/decrypts my vault every time I open my work 1PW webapp.

It's not reasonable to assume their server is "secure" not just from evil-hakzors and script kiddies, but also from government agencies with things like Technical Capability Notices and secret FISA warrants and NSLs with gag orders (or whatever their jurisdictional equivalents are), and also from threats like offensive cybersecurity firms with clients like disgruntled royalty in nepotistic moncharcy nations states who send bonesaw murder teams after dissident journalists.

I (mostly) trust AES (assuming it's properly implemented, and I exclude the NSA from that, and the equivalent agencies in at least a handful of other major nation states).

I have a lot less trust in owners and executives at my password vault vendor or their cloud hosting company or their software supply chain. If I were them, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to stick up for my users the way Ladar Levison and Lavabit did. There's no doubt that the right federal agency could apply enough pressure on me and my family/friends to make me give up all my users unencrypted vaults. Sorry, but true.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-01 02:06:46+00:00
Month ago talk about Grokipedia:

Grokipedia by xAI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459

Tim Bray on Grokipedia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777015

Grokipedia and the coup against reality

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737044
by dabockster | 2025-12-01 02:07:56+00:00
> All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting.

An absolute metric TON of code in general that is/was largely dependent on free $0 volunteer labor has been bit rotting for the past 5 years. The COVID pandemic and the ongoing tech layoffs have really opened our eyes to just how much tech got built for free by firms pushing "always be coding" down our throats in the 2010s. It's why the only truly stable Linux OSes right now are largely Ubuntu and RHEL (even more RHEL lately) - you get what you pay for if no one else is footing the bill.
by arp242 | 2025-12-01 02:08:33+00:00
I always stayed with GitHub because it just worked the best. GitLab was slow and janky. gitea and its various forks lacked features and felt a step backwards. Sourcehut workflow is far too opinionated for my liking. Don't even get me started on GNU Savannah.

Some parts of the Free Software/Open Source crowd has always bemoaned the rise of GitHub, "because obviously you should use Free Software, its your ethical duty!" Most people just use what works best, including many Free Software devs. There is a loud minority (even louder in bubbles like HN) but for most people it's just one factor out of many, at best.

The reason GitHub became dominant is fairly simply: it just worked the best. Doesn't mean it was perfect (remember how long it took for line numbers to not be copied from code examples?) but the alternatives were even worse.

It's interesting to see how badly they're messing it up. You'd think that making a new react-based frontend for a fairly uncomplicated issue tracker wouldn't be too hard, but seems like it is. Some initial bugs after a rewrite are normal, but ... it's been a year? I still regularly just see closed issues in my issue overview. The back button is basically just broken. These are not obscure heisenbugs: these are bugs you find after using it for five minutes. The entire experience is just so janky.

I don't think Github is dying at this moment. I do think that the regression of UX quality is a necessary pre-condition for its death. Like many things its death will happen "very gradually, and then suddenly all at once". Sourceforge once seemed omnipresent and that changed very quickly.[1] But who knows where things will end up in five or ten years?

[1]: I'd like to pre-empt the inevitable "that's because of the adware" comment that someone always seems to post: that's a false history. The adware happened well after it already lost its position and was the desperate attempt of a declining struggling platform for income.
by kazinator | 2025-12-01 02:09:02+00:00
In the Cygnal fork of the cygwin.dll, I hacked Cygwin's POSIX chdir() function, as well as the path resolution mechanism, to support the per-drive-letter name current directory concept.

A path like "f:myfile.txt" actually means f:\path\to\whatever\myfile.txt" where \path\to\whatever is the current working directory of the f drive.

This is one of the details which makes the replacement DLL more of a "native" run-time library, whose behavior is less surprising to Windows users of the applicaton based on it.

https://www.kylheku.com/cygnal/
by Zerot | 2025-12-01 02:09:21+00:00
I would recommend using it, yeah. You have limited context and it will be compacted/summarized occasionally. The compaction/summary will lose some information and it is easy for it to forget certain instructions you gave it. Afaik claude.md will be loaded into the context on every compaction which allows you to use it for instructions that should always be included in the context.
by shubhamjain | 2025-12-01 02:09:27+00:00
Just look at the article on HN[1] on Grokipedia. It's almost 5500+ words long. The Wikipedia article is not even 500 words[2]. This won't be a problem if the article contained anything of substance. It doesn't. It's written as if LLM was specifically instructed to be as verbose and as boring as possible.

> Its algorithmic ranking system, which weights recent votes more heavily to counter brigading and promote fresh, high-signal content, combined with editorial moderation to curb low-quality or off-topic posts, has cultivated a reputation for rigorous debate, though not without internal tensions over shifting cultural norms, perceived negativity in comments, and debates on whether business-oriented stories overshadow pure technical discourse

What surprises is not the fact that it exists. Elon is a man with a fragile ego and a history of cheap stunts like this. It’s the fact that he still has almost cult-like base that treats him as some kind of mankind's savior despite all of this.

[1]: https://grokipedia.com/page/Hacker_News [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News
Show HN: Scrappy Free AI Code Assistant
by UmGuys | 2025-12-01 02:09:48+00:00
I started this project 3 weeks ago with the goal of finishing before I start a new job tomorrow. I didn't meet the goal, but it's a pretty decent start. Scrappy is a CLI code assistant the runs entirely on free tier providers.

I'm sure my dev velocity will slow down now, but I'll keep at it. Please clone, fork, hack away!
by cesarb | 2025-12-01 02:10:58+00:00
> There's a weird fetishization of long uptimes. I suspect some of this dates from the bad old days when Windows would outright crash after 50 days of uptime.

My recollection is that, usually, it crashed more often than that. The 50 days thing was IIRC only the time for it to be guaranteed to crash (due to some counter overflowing).

> In the modern era, a lightly (or at least stably) loaded system lasting for hundreds or even thousands of days without crashing or needing a reboot should be a baseline unremarkable expectation -- but that implies that you don't need security updates, which means the system needs to not be exposed to the internet.

Or that the part of the system which needs the security updates not be exposed to the Internet. Other than the TCP/IP stack, most of the kernel is not directly accessible from outside the system.

> On the other hand, every time you do a software update you put the system in a weird spot that is potentially subtly different from where it would be on a fresh reboot, unless you restart all of userspace (at which point you might as well just reboot).

You don't need a software update for that. Normal use of the system is enough to make it gradually diverge from its "clean" after-boot state. For instance, if you empty /tmp on boot, any temporary file is already a subtle difference from how it would be on a fresh reboot.

Personally, I consider having to reboot due to a security fix, or even a stability fix, to be a failure. It means that, while the system didn't fail (crash or be compromised), it was vulnerable to failure (crashing or being compromised). We should aim to do better than that.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-01 02:11:08+00:00
Why would anyone trust Elon Musk with anything having to do with AI?

Just last week he was caught tuning Grok to say positive things about him, something Grok took so seriously that it said Elon would be the best piss drinker in the world, and it put Elon Musk in the top 3 of every human category, from philosophy to boxing to basketball.

If he can’t pass up the temptation to put his foot on that scale, why would you trust anything generated by an LLM under his control?

Of course, nothing matters anymore and there’s no more blowback for anything.
by bigiain | 2025-12-01 02:12:08+00:00
Phish resistant MFA is worth mentioning. You and all your staff with access to critical credentials should have something like YubiKeys, so you can't (as easily) get tricked into entering some TOTP (or email/sms) code into a fraudulent website.

At least that ups the threshold to "someone who can not only poison your dns or MITM your network, but can also generate trusted TLS certs for the website domain they're phishing for".
by eru | 2025-12-01 02:12:59+00:00
> Optimization is such a rich field and should be of interest to any computer scientist who would describe themselves as "interested in solving hard problems" rather than just applying a well known technique to a specific class of hard problems.

Yes, but even if you are only interested in pragmatically solving problems, off-the-shelf solvers for various optimisation problems are a great toolkit to bring to bear.

Reformulating your specific problem as eg a mixed integer linear programming problem can often give you a quick baseline of performance. Similar for SMT. It also teaches you not to be afraid of NP. And it teaches you a valuable lesson in separation of specification (= your formulation of the problem) and how to compute the solution (= whatever the solver does), which can be applicable in other domains, too.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-01 02:13:52+00:00
> I once upgraded a FreeBSD system from 8 to 12 with a single command.

The command you most likely used is freebsd-update[0]. There are other ways to update FreeBSD versions, but this is a well documented and commonly used one.

> I don’t recall having to reboot — might have needed to.

Updating across major versions requires a reboot. Nothing wrong with that, just clarifying is all.

> Most people who use containers a lot won’t find a home in FreeBSD, and that’s fine. I hope containers never come to the BSD family.

Strictly speaking, Linux containers are not needed in FreeBSD as jails provide similar functionality (better IMHO, but I am very biased towards FreeBSD). My preferred way to manage jails is with ezjail[1] FWIW.

> But then, most people who use FreeBSD know you don’t need containers to run multiple software stacks on the same OS, regardless of needing multiple runtimes or library versions.

I completely agree!

0 - https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/

1 - https://erdgeist.org/arts/software/ezjail/
by coldtea | 2025-12-01 02:14:28+00:00
Hunter S Thompson is a child of the 60s/70s era and his style and content and most importantly driving forces, are quite different to both Bourdain and Chuck.

Bourdain is closer to Chuck age wise and content wise. And Chuck is not just what some people think Fight Club was (after also having misread it, which is like 1/15th of his literary output anyway, or just saw the movie and only got the big quotes and talking points, not the whole sentiment).

>nless you're so reflexively contrarian and anti-establishment you missed Bourdain was actually about something

And Chuck wasn't? Or you conflate Chuck with Tyler? And maybe Bourdain with just the food show host? Read his books and memoirs? Could just as well be from Chuck's Portland's recollections and late 80s/early 90s sentiments.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-01 02:15:21+00:00
Make no mistake: Lego makes a great product but they are an evil corporation. They have been so from the day they started making bricks (they stole the design, the marketing content and even the boxes), they continued when they sued everybody and their dog for doing the same thing that they themselves did, only much worse, and finally they did it again when they acquired Bricklink and started merging accounts with the Lego website. And probably many times in between when they created incompatibilities between older and newer sets just to drive sales.
by krackers | 2025-12-01 02:15:26+00:00
>you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.

>I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week

And yet you still go to Home Depot, so from their perspective it's not an existential issue. Probably the biggest thing companies have learned recently is that they don't need 99.99% uptime, people will accept degraded performance because "that's just how technology works".