MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exasperaited | 2025-12-14 15:41:04+00:00
I once had to threaten to resign from a job (in the EU, pre-Data Protection Act) over the data handling of evidence of one of the things in your comment.

I think this has been something people have had an instinct about forever, and the only reason I had to threaten to quit was because of a misunderstanding of the level of data safety involved; put simply it was not common knowledge that socket connections could be snooped and that targeting a popular service would be easy for a malicious person to do. (This was before SSL was efficient or easy to manage, and in the days when only payment screens were encrypted).

Once the message was across, everyone's objectives were aligned again.

Health information is deeply private because disease is entangled with shame/weakness/vulnerability/taboo/intimacy.
by kragen | 2025-12-14 15:42:13+00:00
That is not correct. Objective-C has a completely different OO system from C++. All they have in common is that they're both extended subsets of C. Retain/release are also not smart pointers; Objective-C doesn't have the C++ features needed to implement smart pointers.

Objective-C++ is a different matter, but it was written many years after the time we are discussing.
by zkmon | 2025-12-14 15:42:43+00:00
That's right. Infact, I see more outsourcing to happen, due to risk delegation and complexity management. AI would only make humans lazier and risk averse. Complexity of regulations, government reach, security risks would only increase. Risk can't distributed to AI employees (agents). A supervisor of AI agent populations can't be held responsible for all the bugs and complexity in a AI-generated product.
by chrsw | 2025-12-14 15:42:43+00:00
Some of favorite desktop environments: NeXTSTEP BeOS/Haiku ChromeOS Raspberry PI macOS CDE I like uniformity, simplicity and consistency, stability, few surprises, little guessing. I want to use the computer. I don't need to become an expert in computer interfaces. Like cars. I just want to drive the car. I don't want to have to build or customize my own automobile ergonomics. Much of my time is spent on the command line anyway, but when I have to use the GUI, please make it very simple.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-14 15:43:29+00:00
I think this article goes a bit overboard with the negative language ('lies', 'fools'), especially since (auto)VACUUM and indexes really don’t have that much to do with each other: the former is indeed critical on PostgreSQL to ensure availability, but something of a niche feature for most other databases, while index maintenance is important regardless of platform.

For a certain class of applications ('SQLite level'), there’s not even much of that, though, other than ensuring there are no missing or obsolete indexes, which you can take care of with 15 minutes of quality time with the EXPLAIN statement every now and then.

When using a database with persistent index statistics (like SQL Server and Oracle and, yeah, PostgreSQL), it’s important to at least ensure those get updated on a regular basis (but that’s almost always automatic and sufficient unless you're prone to not-usually-done bulk operations) and to optimize or rebuild the underlying tree on a semi-regular basis. This does require some additional non-default setup and monitoring, and can be surprising when you first encounter it.

But it’s not exactly an obscure-slash-secret bit of DBA lore either, unlike what's suggested here...
by brazukadev | 2025-12-14 15:43:49+00:00
You see, although what you say makes sense, paid software can also be extremely brittle systems. The only benefit is you can put the blame on someone else, which for the corporate life is a great hack. But that is not good engineering, much less use NextJS which is the same problem.

Customized software is as good as the team developing them are and trusting others to do that is proven to not work all the time, React proving it to all of us the last days with 4 different CVEs.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-14 15:44:56+00:00
MIT students have different loyalty than to a fascist government like Trump's administration. The political situation in USA is also not like the one in Israel (which country is a direct result of the outcome of WWII and hatred by nazi-Germany, who are in constant fight with their neighbors). It isn't a fair comparison. One should also take into account that Mossad's way of operating is aggressive.

The English article doesn't mention this, but vulnerabilities were found in Zivver. See my comment elsewhere in the thread referring to the Dutch version of the article.
by xp84 | 2025-12-14 15:45:44+00:00
Un-redeemed GC aren’t profit. You can’t book the revenue, rather the balances count as a liability (because you owe all the random cardholders valuable goods/services) and, at least in my state, after a certain period of inactivity, you’re obligated to give that money to the State as unclaimed property. Google “escheatment”
by quotemstr | 2025-12-14 15:45:47+00:00
Exactly. I agree that this specific problem is hard to exploit.

> Seems perhaps fixable by making pointer equality require that capabilities are also equal

You'd need 128-bit atomics or something. You'd ruin performance. I think Fil-C is actually making the right engineering tradeoff here.

My point is that the way Pizlo communicates about this issue and others makes me disinclined to trust his system.

- His incorrect claims about the JVM worry me.

- His schtick about how Fil-C is safer than Rust because the latter has the "unsafe" keyword and the former does not is more definitional shenanigans. Both Fil-C and Rust have unsafe code: it's just that in the Fil-C case, only Pizlo gets to write unsafe code and he calls it a runtime.

What other caveats are hiding behind Pizlo's broadly confident but narrowly true assertions?

I really want to like Fil-C. It's good technology and something like it can really improve the baseline level of information security in society. But Pizlo is either going to have to learn to be less grandiose and knock it off with the word games. If he doesn't, he'll be remembered not as the guy who finally fixed C security but merely as an inspiration for the guy who does.
by rk06 | 2025-12-14 15:46:00+00:00
the problem with technical software names is that they are either too long, too pointless, do not die when underlying tool goes through re-incarnation(looking at you angular) or worse, too important to be wasted on a lesser quality project (looking at you react-router).

in my company, we have a tool whose technical name was four word long, and has just as much cognitive load as any technical name.

one of my biggest contribution to that project was to Name it.i gave it a simple name, with zero relation to tech or any software

and suddenly our PMs, Managers, Users can pronounce it and can actually type it correctly and of course recall it's name flawlessly.

so, at least from my experience, having a small, easy to pronounce name is more important than having technical name.

Moreover having a name with all of the qualities is definitely desirable, but there are many projects in world and not that great names. and many Great names (looking at you, Vue.js) are either already taken or beyond my naming skills
by spopejoy | 2025-12-14 15:46:07+00:00
Since this is turning into a DDG AMA thread of sorts --

I love DDG! However it's search term autocorrect is really broken when DDG decides for me I must not be looking for exactly what I typed.

It seems to assume that if there isn't a lot of results then it's my fault for typing a "bad" query? Sometimes it makes up a new search out of whole cloth in this case with terms not even close to what I typed.

I get the utility for detecting+correcting typos but DDG often takes this way too far. Posting this in friendly criticism, happy user otherwise!
by wat10000 | 2025-12-14 15:46:48+00:00
Housing is all messed up because land is a limited resource and regulation artificially limits it even further.

I live in a high demand area. A perfectly cromulent house on a particularly good lot will sell for $1.5 million as a teardown. The new house will be 6,000+ sqft and be inhabited by a family of four. Builders won’t build smaller because the land price sets a hard floor. The most profitable and economically productive thing would be to split the lot and build several smaller houses, or build a small apartment building, housing several times more people for the same cost. But this isn’t legal. Construction costs don’t make a difference. If construction costs doubled, the new houses would just get smaller. Some of these teardowns would stop being torn down. The cost of living in the area would stay about the same.
by hagbard_c | 2025-12-14 15:47:17+00:00
There is, however, a marked reduction in the amount of nuclear waste in need of storage as well as a marked increase in the amount of available fissionable material. Given that one of the arguments against nuclear fission is the amount of waste which needs to be stored for a very long period this in itself is worth the effort of reprocessing spent fuel pellets. Do this at a large enough scale and the price of reprocessing will come down as well. As long as nuclear fusion is still 10 to 30 years away nuclear fission is one of the few reliable day-and-night hell-or-high-water power sources which doesn't (or, let's rephrase it, shouldn't) scare those who believe in the CO₂ scare nor does it (or, also rephrased, should it) rely on resources from politically volatile regions.
by ogogmad | 2025-12-14 15:47:29+00:00
Given the amount of progress in AI coding in the last 3 years, are you seriously confident that AI won't increase programming productivity in the next three?

This reminds me of the people who said that we shouldn't raise the alarm when only a few hundred people in this country (the UK) got Covid. What's a few hundred people? A few weeks later, everyone knew somebody who did.
by gfdvgfffv | 2025-12-14 15:48:06+00:00
The thing is that also empowering individuals to do specialized activities by way of a tool (instead of themselves having to specialize) is a hallmark of progress? Like I don’t need a “professional” to wash my clothes, I don’t need to wash my clothes myself. I use a washing machine.

I don’t need to hire a programmer. I don’t need to be a programmer. I can use a tool to program for me.

(We sure as hell aren’t there yet, but that’s a possibility).
by delichon | 2025-12-14 15:48:12+00:00
> Fanfic reading is not like novel reading in that you don't need to really understand new, unfamiliar characters though.

So the Lord of the Rings series counts as one book? I'd believe diminishing returns, but not one and done.

Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-12-14 15:48:14+00:00
Extremely simple washing machines already exist, and I suspect on the order of 30-40 dollars. They are top-loading. No pumps. Turn one dial to let water in through the inlet. Turn another dial to let water out through the outlet valve. All manual, no pumps. Then flip switch to start spinning with electric motor, flip it back to stop spinning (no timers).

What you do is fill it with water. Add soap. Then put in first load of clothes and run it for 15 minutes. Then take out the clothes and put them in a tub. Repeat with second load of clothes in same soapy water. Once, all loads are done, then put in fresh water. Run all loads through it to get the soap out. You are done.

(Relatively) richer people might have another machine that acts as a spinner. Otherwise, you just hang up the wet clothes outside.
by theamk | 2025-12-14 15:48:26+00:00
That's no excuse for disbelieving GPS for extended periods of time.

Google Maps gets it right: it tried to keep you on road, but only for a few tens of seconds. After that, if you are in the middle of uncharted territory, it'll show the marker there.

(This is probably because Google Maps can be used for walking/biking too)
by Aurornis | 2025-12-14 15:48:28+00:00
> You never know what the future will bring, AI will be enshittified and so will hubs like huggingface.

If anyone wants to bet that future cloud hosted AI models will get worse than they are now, I will take the opposite side of that bet.

> It’s useful to have an off grid solution that isn’t subject to VCs wanting to see their capital returned.

You can pay cloud providers for access to the same models that you can run locally, though. You don’t need a local setup even for this unlikely future scenario where all of the mainstream LLM providers simultaneously decided to make their LLMs poor quality and none of them sees this as market opportunity to provide good service.

But even if we ignore all of that and assume that all of the cloud inference everywhere becomes bad at the same time at some point in the future, you would still be better off buying your own inference hardware at that point in time. Spending the money to buy two M3 Ultras right now to prepare for an unlikely future event is illogical.

The only reason to run local LLMs is if you have privacy requirements or you want to do it as a hobby.
by pmonte | 2025-12-14 15:48:52+00:00
I'm building Sentialytics (https://www.sentialytics.com/), a tool to help managers improve team performance by monitoring well-being via short, weekly surveys.

It's built on three principles: - Simple Listening: Short, anonymous weekly surveys that take less than 60 seconds for the team to complete. - Actionable Insights: AI analyzes comments to identify recurring themes, so you don't have to read hundreds of open-ended responses. - Performance-Focused: The goal isn't just to measure 'happiness', but to provide suggestions that help managers make better decisions.

I was inspired to build it after my own experience as a manager, where I realized I wasn't monitoring my team's well-being closely enough and it was starting to impact our performance.

It's still very early days, and I'm looking for a few first users to give honest, brutal feedback on the concept and the product.

Any feedback on the idea or the product is appreciated.
by pxc | 2025-12-14 15:48:56+00:00
One thing that I liked about switching from a Docker-based solution like Dagger to Nix is that it relaxed the infrastructure requirements to getting good caching properties.

We used Dagger, and later Nix, mostly to implement various kinds of security scans on our codebases using a mix of open-source tools and clients for proprietary ones that my employer purchases. We've been using Nix for years now, and still haven't set up any of our own binary cache. But we still have mostly-cached builds thanks to the public NixOS binary cache, and we hit that relatively sparingly because we run those jobs on bare metal in self-hosted CI runners. Each scan job typically finishes in less than 15 seconds once the cache is warm, and takes up to 3 minutes when the local cache is cold (in case we build a custom dependency).

Some time in the next quarter or two I'll finish our containerization effort for this so that all the jobs on a runner will share a /nix/store and Nix daemon socket bind-mounted from the host, so we can have relatively safe "multi-tenant" runners where all jobs run under different users in rootless Podman containers while still sharing a global cache for all Nix-provided dependencies. Then we get a bit more isolation and free cleanup for all our jobs but we can still keep our pipelines running fast.

We only have a few thousand codebases, so a few big CI boxes should be fine, but if we ever want to autoscale down, it should be possible to convert such EC2 boxes into Kubernetes nodes, which would be a fun learning project for me. Maybe we could get wider sharing that way and stand up fewer runner VMs.

Somewhere on my backlog is experimenting with Cachix, so we should get per-derivation caching as well, which is finer-grained than Docker's layers.
by anovick | 2025-12-14 15:49:37+00:00
Already-established top-of-the-market apps will not be dethroned overnight.

For them, it will be a slow death (e.g. similar to how Figma unseated Adobe in the digital design art space).

As for new app markets, you will surely see (compared to past generations) smaller organizations being able to achieve market dominance, often against much more endowed competitors. And this will be the new normal.
Show HN: I made a live UK Bus Map from open data (and you can, too)
by mrwizrd | 2025-12-14 15:50:01+00:00
I've had a bit more spare time lately, so I put together this live map of UK buses using data from the Department for Transport and open-sourced it.

It's got rough edges and is practically running on a hamster wheel, but you can try it. I'm too excited not to post.

https://busmap.tail5c8e3.ts.net/
by chneu | 2025-12-14 15:50:15+00:00
They absolutely work.

I'm a vegan and its insane the number of bots, who the meat industry pays for, that promote really weird anti-vegan ideas on social media.

This stuff spreads into real life. I run into folks IRL who repeat the same lines the bots do.

What online bots are amazing for is amplification. They take an idea that already exists and blast opposition with comments promoting their misinformation. This then lends some credence to their idea so when grandma Google's it there is discourse on it, or Fox can use online quotes to say "Hey, people are talking!!"

A lot of the weird shit Trump talks about is bot-promoted misinformation. Like, A LOT.

There have been whole subreddits that are just bots and paid PR folks promoting weird stuff or they try to "disprove" things like solar panels or vegan diets.

With online bot stuff it isn't about quality. It's about repetition until the ideas land with someone. It's very cheap to blast people with negativity. Eventually it lands.

So, it totally works when used correctly. I think to most people that's pretty obvious.

The fact countries(state sanctioned) pour a good amount of money and resources into these bot farms proves they work.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-14 15:51:04+00:00
I think I'm an independent thinker. One symptom is that I repeatedly find myself observing that other people do things because they're copying other people. This is one symptom, but there's more.

> Do you think it’s a competitive advantage

> I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships

> most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns

Don't care, I'm not optimizing for being competitive, being successful, or any of the other things you mentioned.

See, another symptom of being an independent thinker: I've thought about it on my own and I've concluded I'm not interested in your targets.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-14 15:51:33+00:00
We merely bought the honeypot, Your Honor! We didn't know what we were buying!

Perfect cover story /slowclap

Secret services use companies as cover all the time. Nothing new there.

The conspiracy is that it is a dragnet for the data, and given the data is first send plaintext to Zivver (see the Dutch FTM article I already linked), it isn't far-fetched.

Looking at the current geopolitical situation, it also isn't far-fetched. It even fits in the Israeli secret services' M.O.

Actually, anyone who uses Zivver can find these vulnerabilities. I was worried about this, and reported it to my former employer (while still employed), but alas I did not have a PoC and they had a lot of other security related incidents so this was low priority. Also, this was at a time when the company was still privately owned by the Dutch founders. My hypothesis is that someone working for such an organization passed it to the Israeli secret service, who then got motivated to buy this honeypot.

Chinese do something similar: release some piece of technology, never provide any meaningful updates to the product, and voila it is insecure as hell (yet 'we didn't know' provides plausible deniability). I saw this first-hand with KRACK vulnerability.

Also... Kiteworks [1] is the name of the company. Not sure why you keep calling it Kitenet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiteworks
by lugao | 2025-12-14 15:51:49+00:00
Not really, if you had every grain of sand in the way it would diverge to a much bigger value. The problem is that the roads have >1 dimension at that scale, apple maps is definitely adding up to many details along the way, it's not a straight line and it ends up being 10x the actual distance. No Biggie.

The "fix" is to smooth those details as the straight line distance grows bigger.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-14 15:51:53+00:00
A practical issue is that GPS can be spoofed relatively easily. If autonomous driving became a thing, and ubiquitous, with vehicles that prioritized remote over local consistency, then a single GPS spoof could cause some interesting things to happen. This is probably a concern that does drive decisions, at least to a degree. It creates a weird scenario where you kind of need to trust GPS, but you simultaneously also can't treat it as authoritative.

OTOH creating a dumb user experience for a fairly common scenario, to try to preempt a hypothetical scenario is probably not a great idea. A fun problem to think about, though it may be completely unrelated to this issue.
by asielen | 2025-12-14 15:51:54+00:00
The way you put that makes be think of the current challenge younger generations are having with technology in general. Kids who were raised on touch screen interfaces vs kids in older generations who were raised on computers that required more technical skill to figure out.

In the same way, when everything just works, there will be no difference, but when something goes wrong, the person who learned the skills before will have a distinct advantage.

The question is if AI gets good enough that slowing down occasionally to find a specialist is tenable. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be predicably not perfect.

Expertw will always be needed, but they may be more like car mechanics, there to fix hopefully rare issues and provide a tune up, rather than building the cars themselves.
by mellosouls | 2025-12-14 15:52:02+00:00
If somebody is going to have the conceit to name an argument after themselves - and imply some sort of equivalence with a great physicist they could at least make some effort with the details.

How do they know there aren't apps and services with significant AI contributions? Any closed source app is by definition a black box in regard to the composition.

We decry AI slop but this article shows no AI is needed for that.
by dundarious | 2025-12-14 15:52:12+00:00
They do more than cybersecurity, they collect and analyze signals intelligence. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan in the CIA would be in Unit 8200 if he was Israeli -- the unit is not at all purely "techy" in nature. They are also significantly responsible for "analysis" such as target selection, as covered here https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
by digdugdirk | 2025-12-14 15:52:19+00:00
Do you have any examples of your Devenv workflow you can share? I took a look at Dagger and really like the concept, but I'm trying to figure out the limitations/why there's so much negativity in this thread.

I currently manage my development environments via NixOS and Devenv, so if I could just keep that and achieve the same functionality, that sounds good to me.