MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IshKebab | 2025-12-18 15:51:14+00:00
Not a joke. I knew they used to use a pile of janky shell scripts for their init system. I didn't know they still do. That's disappointing.

And cesarb is correct - the issue isn't scripts; it's shell scripts, especially Bash and similar. Something like Deno/Typescript would be a decent option for example. Nushell is probably acceptable.

Even Python - while a terrible choice - is a better option than shell scripts.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-12-18 15:51:22+00:00
The job, in the modern world, is to close tickets. The code quality is negotiable, because the entire automated software process doesn't measure code quality, just statistics.

That's why I refuse to take part in it. But I'm an old-world craftsman by now, and I understand nobody wants to pay for working, well-thought-out code any more. They don't want a Chesterfield; they want plywood and glue.
by rogutkuba | 2025-12-18 15:51:43+00:00
I run a couple projects, only one makes money at the moment:

SFX Engine: https://sfxengine.com/ - ~1.2k MRR

I launched another two and hoping to get these scaled up as well

Sparkpod.ai: https://sparkpod.ai/ - $20 MRR

Disstrack AI: https://aidisstrackgenerator.com/ - $0 MRR
by TomasBM | 2025-12-18 15:51:58+00:00
I agree. OpenReview is a good initiative, and while it has its own flaws, it's definitely a step in the right direction.

The arXiv and the derivative preprint repositories (e.g., bioRxiv) are other good initiatives.

However, I don't think it's enough to leave the content review completely to the community. There's are known issues with researchers using arXiv, for example, to stake claims on novel things, or readers jumping on the claims made by well-known institutions in preprints, which may turn out to be overconfident or bogus.

I believe that a number of checks (beyond plagiarism) need to happen before the paper is endorsed by a journal or a conference. Some of these can and should be done in a peer review-like format, but it needs to be heavily redesigned to support review quality without sacrificing speed. Also, there are things that we have good tools for (e.g., checking citation formatting), so this part should be integrated.

Plus, time may be one of the bottlenecks, but that's partly because publishers take money from academic institutions, yet expect voluntary service. There's no reason for this asymmetry, IMO.
by eduction | 2025-12-18 15:52:14+00:00
Apple only sees the credit card if you buy from them, if you buy from a retailer they don’t get that info.

To be clear, this is their problem, not the customers.

Still, I’m curious what the scammer did in this case. If a retail worker just stole the card number it would merely be used up, not flagged as fraud. Maybe someone in the supply chain obtained the number and reported it lost/stolen? And used that to obtain a new card no one would complain about once it was used? Vs the original number which would result in a customer complaint. Idk.
by liampulles | 2025-12-18 15:52:19+00:00
I like HTMX, I use it on my blog. But I will say, in the niche where I need some dynamic DOM changes without needing a full-blown SPA, raw JavaScript with some basic utilities like jQuery is not so bad.

The issue with htmx is that it is fairly prescriptive of how one should go about building dynamic interactions, and it becomes complex quickly if the dynamic interaction is more than trivial. I don't disagree with its philosophy at all (as I say, I use it for my own site) but it becomes an issue when my product owner tells me that I need to do some funny dynamic thing because it will make the business or clients happy (for some reason), and then it becomes a mission to wrangle it with htmx attributes. And I have to follow that, because as much as it pains me to say it, making stuff pretty and dynamic on the UI is an easy way to score points. It is one of those areas of enterprise software development which seems like a huge upgrade to non-technical people whilst not requiring too much effort.

The one thing raw JavaScript is quite well suited for is hacking together some DOM manipulation. I dislike JavaScript in every other domain except this - its in this arena where its leniency is very useful.
by thrance | 2025-12-18 15:52:21+00:00
Without wanting to go too far out of my depth, I have read a few times now that a lot of the perceived growth in autism rates could be attributed to our society pushing people into adopting behaviors previously attributed to "actual" autism. Spending time on the computer as a kid (playing video games, etc.) is still mostly a boy activity, because of societal reasons, and can certainly lead to adopting these behaviors later in life in some cases (not making any value judgment here). I would be willing to bet that, had programming stayed a women-dominated position, we'd have more women than men on the spectrum today.
by oblio | 2025-12-18 15:52:25+00:00
Nope, it was solved with Visual Basic in 1991. And with Nextstep in 1989. And with...

I really dislike people comparing GenAI with compilers. Compilers largely do mechanic transformations, they do almost 0 logic changes (and if they do, they're bugs).

We are in an industry that's great at throwing (developing) and really bad at catching (QA) and we've just invented the machine gun. For some reason people expect the machine gun to be great at catching, or worse, they expect to just throw things continuously and have things working as before.

There is a lot of software for which bugs (especially data handling bugs) don't meaningfully affect its users. BUT there isn't a lot of software we use daily and rely on for which that's the case.

I know that GenAI can help with QA, but I don't really see a world where using GenAI for both coding and QA gets us to where we want to go, unless as some people say, we start using formal verification (or other very rigorous and hopefully automatable advanced verification), at which point we'll have invented a new category of programmers (and we will need to train all of them since the vast majority of current developers don't know about or use formal verification).
by ben_s | 2025-12-18 15:52:34+00:00
Thanks for the comment! You're right that a lot of the mechanics apply more generally. On point (3) specifically: we handle this by allocating at the IOMMU-group level rather than individual devices. Our allocator selects an IOMMU group and passes through all devices in that group (e.g., GPU video + audio), which avoids the partial-passthrough wonkiness you mentioned. For reference: https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud/blob/main/scheduling/al...
by DaSHacka | 2025-12-18 15:52:39+00:00
Same here, I'm surprised most linux users I know like to install firewalld, UFW, or some other overlaying firewall rather than just editing the nftables config directly. It's not very difficult, although I've never really dug deep into the weeds of iptables. I suspect many people who have used iptables long ago in the past assume nftables is samilar and avoid interacting with it directly out of habit.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-18 15:52:46+00:00
> The ties are so strong that in 2023 the American Heart Association grouped the conditions under one name: cardio-kidney-metabolic syndrome (CKM), with “metabolic syndrome” referring to diabetes and obesity.

Seems like this is mostly an extension of the previously existing label of metabolic syndrome, now including kidney. Ozempic is mentioned and I take that to mean obesity is the cause. But are some of these ailments like diabetes reversible?
by kelnos | 2025-12-18 15:53:03+00:00
> Now, do you want all of your web accounts be linked to your government ID?

No, but I don't think that's actually necessary. My cloud storage account with Google could be linked to my government ID, and... that might be ok? This sort of plan wouldn't require, e.g., my HN account to be linked to my ID.

Yes, that would mean that some people (e.g. activists under repressive regimes) shouldn't be storing stuff that could get them in trouble in Google Docs or iCloud Photos, but... they probably shouldn't be doing that now anyway.

But this would still require governments passing laws to prevent arbitrary account closures. Linking an account with an ID doesn't automatically make Apple/Google behave. The legally-mandated process would need to be something like: automated system detects fraud, they call the police, police investigate, and either a) they see nothing and drop it, and Google/Apple are required to drop it, or b) they investigate, prosecutors bring charges, and the outcome of the court proceedings is binding on Google/Apple (conviction = account terminated, exoneration = no retaliation allowed).
by elktown | 2025-12-18 15:53:18+00:00
If I have a horse and plow and you show up with a tractor, I will no doubt get a tractor asap. But if you show up with novel amphetamines for you and your horse and scream "Look how productive I am! We'll figure out the long-term downsides, don't you worry! Just more amphetamines probably!", I'm happy to be a late adopter.
by xzjis | 2025-12-18 15:53:38+00:00
Google already has dedicated hardware for running private LLMs: just look at what they're doing on the Google Pixel. The main limiting factor right now is access to hardware that's powerful enough, and especially has enough memory, to run a good LLM, which will happen eventually. Normally, by 2031 we should have devices with 400 GB of RAM, but the current RAM crisis could throw off my calculations...
by dylan604 | 2025-12-18 15:53:51+00:00
I know you're just trying to pull something out of thin air that sounds plausible, but...this would be simple to prove with a request for valid death certificates, marriage license, and a birth certificate to prove you were married, the child is yours, and that both are in fact deceased. Oh, and of course, you'll have to prove who you are as well.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-12-18 15:53:58+00:00
I see it this way: simpler code can be smaller, say half the size. It takes half the time to write (at the most), half the time to read, half the time to compile and execute. That already gives it an eight-fold advantage.

You better have a good reason for spending the time and money to do more that the simple solution. Engineering is all about money spent for results. Not cleverness, except indirectly.
How do you reliably prove when data existed?
by timeproofs | 2025-12-18 15:54:15+00:00
I keep running into the same problem across many domains (documents, AI outputs, datasets, code, logs).

Storage tells me what I have now. Versioning tells me what changed.

But when a dispute happens, the real question is often simpler: When did this data actually exist?

Screenshots, PDFs, dashboards, emails… they mostly rely on trust in a system or platform.

In many cases, storing or sharing the original data isn’t even an option (privacy, compliance, scale).

I’m curious how others handle this today. What approaches have you seen work in practice?
by adrian_b | 2025-12-18 15:54:20+00:00
There is a language enforced difference.

Fortran functions correspond to "pure" functions in C/C++ and other languages, i.e. idempotent functions that do not modify arguments or global variables.

If a C/C++ function is converted to Fortran, it must be rewritten as a subroutine, unless it is a pure function.

Not all C/C++ compilers support the language extension of marking functions as pure, and even with such compilers many programmers are lazy, so they forget to mark as pure the functions where this is applicable, even if this is recommended for improving program optimization and verification.

Fortran function were pure functions because this is the mathematical sense of the term "function". The extension of the meaning of the word "function" for any kind of procedure happened decades after the creation of Fortran.

The distinction between a "void" function and other functions has negligible importance. On the other hand the distinction between "functions" in the C language sense and "pure functions" is very important and programmers should better mark as "pure" all the functions for which this is true. This is at least as important for program optimization and for checking program correctness as declaring a variable with the correct type.
by NeutralCrane | 2025-12-18 15:54:20+00:00
You are missing their point. They are saying they start with relatively benign views, and the intense overreaction to those views drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.

I can't speak for Blow, but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 15:54:21+00:00
In large parts of Spain, that is still true. Entire rural villages for sale in some cases even.

Problem is that it's in areas where people don't want to live. In the areas people want to live, the problem is the opposite, there isn't nearly enough housing, so you end up with some of the highest population densities in EU (#2 and #3 are both in Spain at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_... in "density per km2" for example, 50% of top 10 on that list is in Spain!) and prices keep going up.

Add in that salaries are pretty low so cost of living is subsequently low, so you end up with a ton of "expats" and other fun folks like "foreign investors" who purchase up all the livable/rentable properties with their "higher value" money, because everything is so cheap for them.

Owners realize this, and while the government is (now at least) trying to put a stop to all of this with limiting rent increases and more, owners still try to take advantage of it as much as they can.

Personally, I think we need to temporarily put a complete halt to non-residents buying any sort of properties or even land here, at least for a short period of time so the people who actually live and work here can recover from the situation.

For the average person with a normal job here and not working for foreign companies with a higher salary, it's short of impossible to be able to afford to eventually buy a house.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-18 15:54:24+00:00
> as they are both in the advertisement business

Apple isn't. Just sayin'. They are trying to do it, but they aren't really anywhere near the scale of Google and Facebook. They make money (lots of money) by selling high-margin hardware, and, to some extent, digital media, on that hardware.

Currently, Apple is genuinely serious about preserving user privacy. I realize that can change, in the future, but it's the way it is, now. I get the feeling that a lot of folks on HN are having difficulty understanding businesses that make a profit by doing stuff other than harvesting and selling PiD, but that's not what has made Apple a 4 trillion-dollar company. They make that money the old-fashioned way; but with a modern twist.

That said, this situation is unforgivable, and I hope that Apple leads by example, by preventing this all-too-common type of dumpster fire from happening in the future.
by 0x3f | 2025-12-18 15:54:26+00:00
The thing is most of us have jobs where we can't unilaterally switch to the 'cooler' solution, and I value my own context-switching overhead much more than I value a slightly smaller bundle or dep tree. I'll much sooner optimize the former than the latter and so the general purpose solution that will solve both my own projects and the work ones typically wins.
by Jensson | 2025-12-18 15:54:34+00:00
> Then if someone is slow to solve the same problems, it's actually a signal that they have the opposite bias, to consider more paths.

No this isn't true, most of the time they just don't consider any paths at all and are just dumb.

And the bias towards novelty doesn't make you slow, ADHD is biased towards novelty and people wouldn't call those slow.
by thmsths | 2025-12-18 15:55:01+00:00
I don't believe there is an easy fix though. The government will prioritize retention because it promotes institutional stability while at the same time offering low pay (and not just low pay but often a complete lack of flexibility regarding pay) because the electorate demands it.

Which means that the truly good people are basically quirky people with strong work ethic/believe in the mission that happened to join the organization for some reason.
by shermantanktop | 2025-12-18 15:55:16+00:00
“The reason I’m totally misleading you with a speculative example is because of scholarship.”

No way. When they engage the public, they are not longer exclusively scholars. They responsible for conveying the best truth they can to non-experts.

A journal paper can be misunderstood when the reader lacks the context to interpret it. Out in the public square, that is not the reader’s fault anymore.
by pqtyw | 2025-12-18 15:55:18+00:00
We do have a non insignificant amount of ancient frescoes, mosaics and even a handful of paintings. As the author has pointed out they generally seem much more appealing to modern aesthetic sensibilities. That seems like reasonably strong evidence than whatever thought processing went into making these so called. "reconstructions".

> To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."

Which I agree is not a reasonably view IF we had no other data. Imposing the garrish 5-yeard old colouring book style is no less biased.
by earthnail | 2025-12-18 15:55:49+00:00
I’d argue it’s not as simple as that. A city like Lisbon with a sudden influx of expats risks moving to a very unhealthy economic environment.

Expats come, locals are pushed out, existing business is replaced by business catering towards expats. But an economy built on being a trendy expat location is not sustainable. Expats will leave to a new place eventually, and then the city is dead. This dynamic is accelerated by the fact that locals are forced out when expacts come, but the city was attractive in the first place because of how charming locals made it.

If you run the city - and imagine it’s a company, and you’re the CEO - you can see that your city is falling for a hype train that will eventually kill it. The smart thing is to not let that hype train happen.

Because expat purchase power is a mutliple of your locals, you need to find other levers. Every company would do the same thing.
by jacobsenscott | 2025-12-18 15:55:50+00:00
I haven't used htmx, but I've given turbo a fair shake. I've only worked on server side rendered apps for my whole career, and they are generally they way to go. But just like react, or anything else, you throw enough engineers at it and it becomes a mess. But also you'll only find a handful of engineers who understand it compared to react, so that makes it worse. I think the bottom line is creating web UI is just as unsolved today as it was 20+ years ago, and nobody can make any headway - it suggests the fundamentals are totally wrong - after all - this isn't what http and html were even built for.

Given sufficient time and money (20+ years, and billions (trillions?) of dollars - which is what we've thrown at web apps) you could build GUI apps using the IRC protocol, but it will never work well.

LLM generated code probably tips the scales toward using react though. You can have the bots churn through all that boiler plate, it won't be any worse than what human react devs write, and keep the bots away from your mission critical code because it isn't all munged together like in a SSR app.
by TCSoft | 2025-12-18 15:56:01+00:00
https://www.condoally.com/ and https://www.hoaally.org/ - Simple yet powerful tools for running small/self-managed HOAs.

The site is 15 years old now and pretty solid. I dreamed much more for it, but I still can't figure out the marketing.

The front-end is open-source: https://github.com/CommunityAlly/CommunityAllyWebApp
by dubcanada | 2025-12-18 15:56:02+00:00
Just to be completely clear... you do not need React just so you can turn JSON into HTML. HTMX can 100% can do that.

You're argument is fine assuming you wish to become another react frontend in a sea of react frontends.

But the documentation example is a terrible argument, the benefit of HTMX is it is easy to understand what is actually happening. There is no magic, you don't need to dive through millions of lines of code to figure out what this is doing like react. It's very basic javascript. Just read the library, frankly you don't even need any documentation. Just take 15 mins and read the entire library.
by azemetre | 2025-12-18 15:56:05+00:00
No because programmers aren't the ones pushing the wares, it's business magnates and sales people. The two core groups software developers should never trust.

Maybe if this LLM craze was being pushed by democratic groups where citizens are allowed to state their objections to such system, where such objections are taken seriously, but what we currently have are business magnates that just want to get richer with no democratic controls.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-18 15:56:09+00:00
And yet they continue to sell these cards. Why?

It's simple: they're essentially free money. The worst case for them is that the recipient of the card uses the full amount of the card. In that case, the issuer "only" makes the full profit on those sales. Often they do better: the card is used partially or not at all, then lost or forgotten about.

You can see how lucrative they are by looking at promotions. You can often find deals where you can buy a $100 card for $90, or similar. Why would you sell a dollar for 90 cents? Because you know that on average you're selling quite a bit less than a dollar.

As for the fraud risk... do they even care? When gift cards are used for crime, the issuer doesn't suffer. Maybe they have to deal with upset customers, but that's hardly new. Most of the time, the gift card is bought legitimately, given to criminals, resold, used by the secondary buyer, and the only one who suffers is the unfortunate scam victim who bought it.

It would be so easy to make gift cards more secure. Modern technology can do a lot better than an alphanumeric code under a sticky cover. The fact that they don't bother should tell you everything you need to know about how important fraud is for them.
by igogq425 | 2025-12-18 15:56:41+00:00
Due to the sanctions, Russia has shifted its economic focus away from the West. This has given BRICS a massive boost. BRICS+ now controls over 40% of global GDP and over half of global oil exports. I don't know how much the sanctions are affecting people's everyday lives in Russia itself. In 2023, there were newspaper articles here in Germany about how we are still importing Russian oil, just not directly from Russia, but indirectly via India.
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-18 15:56:44+00:00
Probably a human could put a copyright on a prompt (that would be the "source" and the LLM would be a compiler or interpreter) and the generated code would be derivative of the prompt and any inputs.

It would probably get into whether the prompt itself is considered copyrightable. There is some threshold for that since I have heard some patches are considered insignificant and uncopyrightable.
by elevation | 2025-12-18 15:56:57+00:00
> it polluted my codebase

HTMX is less noisy if you integrate it into your backend framework.

A contact of mine build a python/flask app. To simplify coding, he wrote a file to extend the flask framework to support the HTMX patterns he needed with just a single line of boilerplate. Took him about a day, his team is happy with the results.
by stackskipton | 2025-12-18 15:57:43+00:00
As someone who worked in fraud, sometimes the $10 transaction is primer for 10k transaction that will really cost the company. When you don't know what's going on, you don't give a shit about end user and primary objective is prevent the company from losing money, shut it down and sort it out is easiest way.

Furthermore, without physical presence where you could sit down with someone, this becomes more difficult to deal with. Truth is, Apple should have option where someone could go to Apple Store, verify ID and talk to someone with power but they don't want to spend that money so here we are.