MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danudey | 2025-12-28 16:26:16+00:00
I know a lot of people who refuse to use Ubuntu outright specifically and solely because of snaps and how awful they are. Our developer laptops at work are meant to be running Ubuntu and I have some coworkers who only begrudgingly switched over after discovering how to prevent the 'fake snap firefox' package from being installed[0].

I get what they're going for - a way to ship self-contained (usually end-user-facing) applications with any dependencies they need without any risk of breaking other applications in the system. Unfortunately, it just results in breaking those applications specifically instead, in weird and stupid ways that are difficult to debug.

I think if snaps did the Flatpak thing - extract to a local directory instead of living on squashfs forever, or even storing them as an uncompressed disk image instead of squashfs - it might be more reasonable, but at that point you may as well just use Flatpaks like everyone else wants.

[0] - Add the following to `/etc/apt/preferences.d/no-ubuntu-firefox`:

Package: firefox
Pin: release l=Ubuntu
Pin-Priority: -1

Then install the apt repository as described here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w...

This will make any `firefox` package from any repository with the `Ubuntu` label (i.e. an official Ubuntu repository) have a -1 priority, or 'never install ever'.
by petterroea | 2025-12-28 16:26:49+00:00
I only watched two talks. Talks are not why you go to CCC, in my opinion. I spent most of CCC talking. I tried to have some projects, but I just got stuck in conversation all the time.

CCC was to me the first time I had ever been to a place where most people were like minded. I have been searching for a place where I can meet likeminded people for many years, that wasn't online chatrooms. Once I got there, there was an almost immediate "wow this is my crowd".

It does help to have friends that are somewhat networked and can show you the way and introduce you to people though, as many just sit and hang out with their usual crowd. For me, I ended up talking to a lot of the guys from the same country. I also hung out with internet friends and met their friends. It was great.
by evanelias | 2025-12-28 16:27:17+00:00
I didn't say a trademark isn't a form of IP. I said their application for a trademark was rejected due to "open source" being too generic/descriptive, not due to the reason you directly asserted above ("They don't hold the IP, I don't really see any way they could be granted a trademark on it").

You can read more about this at https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p... or https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/open_source_initiative... among many other sources. Or a much longer blog post from a lawyer who is active on HN: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/05/11/Open-Source-Proper...

fwiw, a non-OSI attempt to trademark "open source hardware" was also rejected for the exact same reason. https://opensource.com/law/13/5/os-hardware-trademark-reject...
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-28 16:27:50+00:00
Not trying to diminish broader trends in the software landscape, but this thread was talking about big established gnu software (like GPG) and newer rust based alternatives (like sequoia mentioned in the recording). This choice seems fairly unmediated by large corporations. Probably has more to do with the popularity of rust and how well they market, but the license doesn’t seem to matter that much to people.
by pona-a | 2025-12-28 16:28:31+00:00
I think Sourcehut is the more portable of Git forges. Everything is stored in standard formats, its workflow isn't anything bespoke but just a good automation for git send-email, and I believe the source code should be all published.

In my eyes, if this ever does become a problem, migrating elsewhere wouldn't be that much trouble. When the "cryptocurrency purge" happened, maintainers were given 2 months of advance notice, which is a little short but reasonable.

[0] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
by Anamon | 2025-12-28 16:28:31+00:00
I suspect a major way for the U.S. would be the one mentioned in the article: make it so that losing your job doesn't mean losing your health insurance. That's a major additional stressor, particularly if someone loses their job because of an illness.

Of course, there's about a negative one thousand percent chance of something like that passing in the current political climate.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-28 16:28:37+00:00
I don't know what “tarpit” you're talking about.

Every IDE I've used just worked out of the box, be it Visual Studio, Eclipse, or anything using the language server protocol.

Having the ability to have things like method auto-completion, go-to-definition and symbol renaming is a net productivity gain from the minute you start using it and I couldn't imagine this being a controversial take in 2025…
by spwa4 | 2025-12-28 16:29:26+00:00
Wait, what? This is about company executives and high-paid consultants who essentially stayed in Dubai just enough to be tax-domiciled there. Or even just their companies with just a mailbox at a lawyer office in Dubai.

No, the EU rich very much physically stayed inside the EU, fully enjoying the benefits of those countries without paying tax.

Doesn't work for US citizens because global income is taxed in the US.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-28 16:29:33+00:00
Another thing to keep in mind with MacBook Pro models or any other device that has fans... if you have cats, dogs or other heavily shedding animals, you must regularly (for me, once a year, for people with German Shedders more like once a quarter) open them up and thoroughly clean them.

The amount of fur that manages to squeeze everywhere is insane.
by signed-log | 2025-12-28 16:29:38+00:00
Most countries will throw you in jail for years if you refuse to give the password to encrypted devices they want. [1]

And that's even if you are innocent on the underlying charge or search.

Encryption in this political climate, is a pick your poison.

- Either you go to jail for years but you know your gov and other actors has no access to your data.

- or you store on remote/proprietary apps, stay free, but your gov or other actors may or may not have access to it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law
by strogonoff | 2025-12-28 16:29:42+00:00
In early societies authorship was implicitly recognized. If you invented something cool, all of the dozen people you know most likely knew you did it; me trying to pass it as my own would be silly since anyone would see through it and laugh me out of the cave.

It’s not unlike theft, murder, etc.—when societies grow, their ways of dealing with PvP harm (blood feud, honour culture, sacrifice, etc.) can’t scale sufficiently (or have other drawbacks), and that’s when there is a need to codify certain behaviours and punishments in law.

(I wouldn’t claim that respective legal code is perfect and implementation-wise it’s all good today—but to say “there was no law against X back when we lived in tribes and didn’t have writing, therefore we shouldn’t need that law now” seems a bit ridiculous, unless you propose that we drastically and fundamentally reconfigure human communities in a number of ways.)
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-28 16:29:45+00:00
>that's from the reporter, but I don't have faith that "transmit traits" is at all accurate

It is pretty accurate, even if we don't understand all details yet. Here's a review article of the current research that's not from a popsci journalist: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37820-2
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-28 16:30:13+00:00
M2 MBP here. Definitely skipping Tahoe. Sequoia is already just terrible, not only is the UX clunky and hostile, but Apple seems to have flat out broken its Bluetooth and networking stacks in multiple ways, and in general the system is extremely unstable.

Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days.

And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-28 16:30:54+00:00
We have this write-up on the "soul" and how it was discovered and extracted, straight from the source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vpNG99GhbBoLov9og/claude-4-5...

There are many pragmatic reasons to take this "soul data" approach, but we don't know exactly what Anthropic's reasoning was in this case. We just know enough to say that it's likely to improve LLM behavior overall.

Now, on consistency drive and compounding errors in LLM behavior: sadly, no really good overview papers that come to mind?

The topic was investigated the most in the early days of chatbot LLMs, in part because some believed it to be a fundamental issue that would halt LLM progress. A lot of those early papers revolve around this "showstopper" assumption, which is why I can't recommend them.

Reasoning training has proven the "showstopper" notion wrong. It doesn't delete the issue outright - but it demonstrates that this issue, like many other "fundamental" limitations of LLMs, can be mitigated with better training.

Before modern RLVR training, we had things like "LLM makes an error -> LLM sees its own error in its context -> LLM builds erroneous reasoning on top of it -> LLM makes more errors like it on the next task" happen quite often. Now, we get less of that - but the issue isn't truly gone. "Consistency drive" is too foundational to LLM behavior, and it shows itself everywhere, including in things like in-context learning, sycophancy or multi-turn jailbreaks. Some of which are very desirable and some of which aren't.

Off the top of my head - here's one of the earlier papers on consistency-induced hallucinations: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13534
by rayiner | 2025-12-28 16:31:13+00:00
> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again.

I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-28 16:31:16+00:00
I agree that if you're going to do coding, using LLMs will become as commonplace as using a text editor, and it's valuable to help people upskill.

And as much as I find CC useful in my own work, I'm unhappy because I believe that AI -- actually not AI itself, which has its place, but the race to use AI to enrich corporations by replacing human labor, and to control what will become the most powerful tool ever known for informing, entertaining, monitoring, and controlling, the human race -- is very much a net negative for humanity and even our planet.
by bitwize | 2025-12-28 16:31:18+00:00
AOL is not the internet we lost. It's literally what bigtech is trying to turn the rest of the internet into. Online service as centralized marketing platform for bigcos. Remember "Visit us at www.blah.com or use AOL keyword 'Blah'"? The real internet was much more amorphous and chaotic.

Pretending that AOL represents the pre-enshittified internet is like pretending that Clippy represents the idealized past of desktop computing when he was a prototype of what Microsoft is building now.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-28 16:31:20+00:00
I've never met a designer who cares how it gets done but I have hard time believing they were OK with the corners not being rounded as per the design. They may agree on shipping without the rounded corner, as long as the ticket to round that corner is registered.

I suppose though that we have just had very different life experiences, as that is what the HN guidelines would require of us.
by stefanfisk | 2025-12-28 16:32:14+00:00
I’ve combined my MacBook with a Linux desktop for about five years now. Linux has its pros as a developer, but IMHO daily driving it is like walking around with pebbles in my shoes.

Something as basic as scrolling feels slightly inconsistent in just about every app and keybindings are all over the place. There’s always the allure of getting the config ”just right” but after a while I swear I start seeing Sisyphus’ reflection in my screen.
by 112233 | 2025-12-28 16:32:18+00:00
Your site is for people familiar with SQLite. Imagine a person, who knows about vtable, wal, vfs, json1, fts5 and even blockcachevfsd, reading your page. It is between AI slop domain parking and a targeted phishing campaign. The first reaction is either to report scam or block spam. 90% of your comments here do not discuss your project but give assurance sqlite name is not being used unlawfully. Back when it was just vector extension, it at least made some sense, but this new web page is a complete assault on anyone familiar with sqlite internals. Please tune your messaging! Currently your prized "sqlite" trademark is being used like "with a computer", left and right.
by ricardonunez | 2025-12-28 16:32:45+00:00
I have similar findings. I fast regularly and take cold showers. Another thing is one meal days are far easier after you do it couple of times. You don’t even think about food which is harder if you have two to three meals per day.

Edit: for those wanting to try this lifestyle, everybody is different. do your own research before jumping into regular fasting or even cold showers. Max time without food I did was 6 days, since then t it he max is 72 hours. Do blood work regularly and if you drink coffee be aware that caffeine withdraws are painful.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-28 16:33:14+00:00
> You can't make the mistake of forgetting to close the file.

But you can make a few mistakes that can be hard to see. For example, if you put a mutex in an object you can accidentally hold it open for longer than you expect since you've now bound the life of the mutex to the life of the object you attached it to. Or you can hold a connection to a DB or a file open for longer than you expected by merely leaking out the file handle and not promptly closing it when you are finished with it.

Trying to keep resource open and close in the same scope is an ownership thing. Even for C++ or Rust, I'd consider it not great to leak out RAII resources from out of the scope that acquired them. When you spread that sort of ownership throughout the code it becomes hard to conceptualize what the state of a program would be at any given location.

The exception is memory.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-28 16:33:23+00:00
> but what are you able to do about it?

Depends on the environment, back when I had a MacBook, they still had fans, but the new ones are all passive, I think. So then the surface (or lack of it) below it would matter the most. If you keep it in your lap, on top of a hairy blanket, it'll be a lot effective at getting rid of the heat compared to if you have it sitting on a stone table, as just one example.
by omnimus | 2025-12-28 16:33:24+00:00
Looking at popularity of similar design on iOS it would be surprising “non-technical” users like it. People HATE new iOS. Low contrast, not clear layering and focus, things being moved around for unknown reasons.

Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Majority are creative prosumers in arts/design and they are even more annoyed by messed up designs. What you are left with are lawyers, writers, students? I guess they might like it.
by vunderba | 2025-12-28 16:33:34+00:00
I've been using Macs-Fan-Control since I picked up a Mac M1 a few years back and it works great. It lets you control the fan RPM based on CPU Core values.

I adjusted it to ramp the fans up at more conservative values because otherwise during intense usage periods it would hit 90C+.

https://github.com/crystalidea/macs-fan-control
Show HN: Listen to Any GitHub README
by OfflineSergio | 2025-12-28 16:33:46+00:00
*On first use it can download up to 300MB into your borwser storage, but does it only once.*

The TTS part runs 100% in your browser, so the audio quality is much better on Desktop devices using Safari or Chrome compared to Android and iOS.

https://desktop.with.audio/reader/new?github

It also works for any link as long as the backend can fetch the content.

Check it out and let me know what you think. If you are interested in more details there is also a blog post about this: https://blog.with.audio/posts/web-reader-tts
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-28 16:34:20+00:00
RMS' vision depended on as much adoption of Free Software as possible to both starve proprietary software businesses and to get contributions of copyleft source code rolling back in to the FOSS ecosystem to make it unstoppable and he knew full well that most software is produced and consumed by businesses. So, yes, RMS fits the mold; he needed capitalists to adopt Free Software wholesale but failed to foresee how one-sidedly exploitative the relationship would eventually be.

If you disagree, please explain how RMS and/or Perens do not fit the mold.
by GabriDaFirenze | 2025-12-28 16:34:26+00:00
In today's day and age I definitely would. That's my perspective though and we don't have to have the same expectations from the tada list.

"Today I meditated through drawing" is an accomplishment to me worth my personal tada list. Might not be for everyone though, I can understand that.

Someone else was making a good point that a daily tada list might be unnecessary pressure and a weekly one feels more balanced.

To add more color though, I personally would expect this to compound into an overall tada list similar to OP. At the end of the year I could amount to a lot of drawings and notice improvements over time. But again, AI has nothing to do with it.

If we give up on personal accomplishments because "AI can do it" we would go nowhere. But that's my 2c.
by bitwize | 2025-12-28 16:34:51+00:00
AOL was an "online service", internet connectivity was provided starting in the mid-90s but the real value was in their proprietary members-only services. An online service was more or less a large BBS you dialed into via modem, the first of which could be accessed with an ordinary telecoms program but later ones like AOL and Prodigy required special client software that could decode the proprietary protocol allowing the service to send graphics, menus, and other information to present a UI to the user.
by nacozarina | 2025-12-28 16:35:18+00:00
The different flavors of non-determinism are interesting.

There’s chat-vs-api; same model answers differently depending on input channel.

There’s also statistical. Once in a rare while, a response will be gibberish. Same prompt, same model, same input mode. 70% of the time, sane and similar answers. 0.01% of the time, gibberish. In-between, a sliding-scale — with a ‘cursed middle’ of answers that are mostly viable except for one poisoned thing that’s hard to auto-detect…
by commandersaki | 2025-12-28 16:35:19+00:00
I have had many accomplishments, and I've forgotten them all. When it comes to interviewing, I've forgotten most things or can't do easy recall that I can't even speak to them. I have no desire to change though; as long as I made those accomplishments is all that matters, it's kind of like giving gifts - I don't bother remembering what I did for whom.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-28 16:35:27+00:00
> "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control)

Why though? I generally don't care about the specific temperatures of my CPU and GPU, just that they don't get too warm, so for the CPU (AIO) I basically have "0% up until 45C, then increment up to 100% when it hits 90C" and the same for the GPU except it's always at 10%.

I guess I could figure out target temperatures, and do it the other way, but I'm not sure what the added complexity is for? The end results (I need at least) remains the same, cool down the hardware when it gets hotter, and for me, the simpler the better.

I also have two ambient temperature sensors in the chassi itself, right at the intake and the outtake. The intake one is just for monitoring if my room gets too warm so the computer won't be effective at cooling (as the summers here get really warm) and the outtake one is to check overall temperature and control the intake fans. In reality, I don't think I need to do even this, just the CPU+GPU temperature + set fan speed based on that feels simple enough to solve 99% of the things you'd like to be able to do here.
by jstimpfle | 2025-12-28 16:36:07+00:00
I'm not worried about expensive copies. I'm worried about being able to understand my systems code. The solution isn't adding more abstractions (like move semantics on top). I don't want to move anything. I want to be clear about taking a reference or making an actual copy, these are deeply, semantically, different. This difference is important for single threaded code but also for concurrency -- not only with mutable data types but also with immutable ones.

Performance is mostly a consequence of clear and direct code. You mostly don't achieve performance by saving individual copies, but by being in control of the code and architecture.
by pendenthistory | 2025-12-28 16:36:09+00:00
My problem is I have non-competes and clauses in my contract which makes it difficult to talk about and publish stuff that I might want to turn into a product. So I'm sort of in a catch 22. I want to talk about what I'm building but I can't, not until I can convince myself that I can turn it into something real and I can quit and focus on it, and that's difficult to do without ever putting it out there to see if people want it enough.
by mc32 | 2025-12-28 16:36:33+00:00
That sounds similar to what some ex-Soviets relate. The system was bad, but by and large had understandable rules that you could use to your advantage, if you had the right standing. Once that system collapsed, they were left to fend for themselves --so even though they had more freedom, they had less certainty in today and tomorrow. Like a 13 year old suddenly becoming an orphan.
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-12-28 16:36:59+00:00
Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.

NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-28 16:37:02+00:00
The comment you quoted was me paraphrasing what I saw as the implied idea that I was reading into the comment I was replying to. It's not what I personally suspect is going on here at all, but I can't dismiss it out of hand.

Yes, autophagy does ramp up during fasting, but it's just one of a number of different physiological changes that occur during fasting.
by dauertewigkeit | 2025-12-28 16:37:12+00:00
The Rest is History is good, depending on the topic. Both guests have a bit of bias which you have to sort of take into account, not that different from The Rest is Politics.
Mishal Husain has a new podcast on Bloomberg TV which so far was excellent.
Also from Bloomberg TV, Big Take is often interesting.
I still enjoy Lex Fridman, again depending on the guest. Dwarkesh Patel same shit as Lex, but he pretends he knows something about AI.