MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TZubiri | 2026-01-31 22:50:42+00:00
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Whether the original comment knows it or not, Stallman greatly influenced the very definition of Source Code, and the claim being made here is very close to Stallman's freedom to study.

>"You don't actually need code to evaluate security, you can analyze a binary"

Correct

>"just as well"

No, of course analyzing source code is easier and analyzing binaries is harder. But it's still possible (feasible is the word used by the original comment)

>Steelman for my current understanding is limited to "you can check if it writes files/accesses network, and if it doesn't, then by definition the chats are private and its secure",

I didn't say anything about that? I mean those are valid tactics as part of a wider toolset, but I specifically said binaries, because it maps one to one with the source code. If you can find something in the source code, you can find it in the binary and viceversa. Analyzing file accesses and networks, or runtime analysis of any kind, is going to mostly be orthogonal to source code/binary static analysis, the only difference being whether you have a debug map to source code or to the machine code.

This is a very central conflict of Free Software, what I want to make clear is that Free Software refuses to study closed source software, not because it is impossible, but because it is unjustly hard. Free Software never claims it is impossible to study closed source software, it claims that source code access is a right, and they prefer rejecting to use closed source software, and thus never need to perform binary analysis.
by gemmarate | 2026-01-31 22:51:56+00:00
Brooks’s law was about humans, but the spirit still applies: the real bottleneck is how much of the system a human can keep in their head at once. Most agent setups I’ve seen don’t reduce that load, they increase it: more surface area, more glue code, more boilerplate that nobody fully understands.

The only places they’ve worked well for me are roles where you can afford to throw away 80% of the output (migrations, test stubs, scaffolding) and keep a tight human-owned core. Treat agents like interns you fire every night, not teammates you trust with the architecture.
by internet2000 | 2026-01-31 22:52:35+00:00
If you're not letting Claude at least criticize your product/API/library choices you're probably holding yourself back.

Super basic example: I've asked Claude to write a throwaway Python script following the same patterns as some existing scripts, and it used requests. I asked a separate instance to choose the best tools and it used httpx. I asked why it picked httpx over requests, and it gave me a few good reasons. That was Claude deciding.
by nomel | 2026-01-31 22:53:55+00:00
First sentence of the wiki page [1]:

> Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. and maintained by the open-source community.

As the article repeats, it is not Apple specific.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)
by phippsytech | 2026-01-31 22:54:36+00:00
I am mostly imagining using the radio while driving, so I would not be able to actually act on anything in the moment. For me, “listen later” or “read later” only really works when I am in a curious or exploratory headspace.

That headspace is not always there. A good example is when I sit down to watch something on a streaming service and end up browsing for ages instead of committing to anything. In theory, that would be a perfect moment to actively review things I have saved, but in practice I am not convinced my neurodiverse brain would reliably cooperate.

So to your question, I think I would lean much more toward a context-based mode than a time-based one. A fixed daily slot would quickly turn into another obligation. A lightweight “I am in curiosity mode right now” switch feels closer to how my brain actually works, especially if the radio-style playback keeps the cost of re-entry low.
by arikrahman | 2026-01-31 22:54:36+00:00
I don't know, dank-material-shell fills the same niche, and works better on NixOS out of the box, making it easier to setup while highly configurable. It seems broader than Noctalia in scope as well, so there are more components and they play nicer with each other.

Noctalia seems like it would fit more slimmer builds that want to move away from waybar.
by nate_meurer | 2026-01-31 22:55:59+00:00
What do you mean by "Democrat failures"? The Democratic party doesn't believe Biden's immigration policy was a failure, and in fact the official party position seems to be that Biden didn't open the border enough. Democrat politicians have committed to more of the same, and dozens of cities and states controlled by progressives have put sanctuary policies in place that almost completely forbid immigration control of any kind.

Help me out here. Its not clear to me what the Left considers a failure.
by kibwen | 2026-01-31 22:56:11+00:00
Apple was the primary and only major sponsor of Objective-C, used it as the core foundation of their entire platform, and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony. Yes, being tied so closely to Apple is an existential risk for Swift. One need only look at the quality and trajectory of MacOS to see that Apple isn't a software company, let alone a company that cares about developer experience (Xcode, anyone?). As far as modern Apple is concerned, the primary benefit of Swift is that it produces a tiny bit extra lock-in for iOS apps, by making cross-platform development more difficult.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-31 22:56:33+00:00
> If you have all the tones messed up, you can hardly communicate in Mandarin.

> To a considerable extent, Mandarin exists because of tones. You cannot communicate in it with messed up tones.

These statements are false. If they were true, it would be impossible to understand written tone-free pinyin; in reality, it's not just possible but easy.
by rchaud | 2026-01-31 22:56:34+00:00
Name recognition only gets you so far. "Just Google it" happened because Google was better than Hotbot/Altavista/Yahoo! etc by orders of magnitude. Nobody even bothered to launch a competing search engine in the 2000s because of this (until Microsoft w/ Bing in 2009). There is no such parallel with ChatGPT; Google, Bing, even DuckDuckGo has AI search.

First mover advantage matters only if it has long-lasting network effects. American schools are run on Chromebooks and Google Docs/Slides, but these have no penetration in enterprise, as college students have been discovering when they enter their first jobs.
by JackYoustra | 2026-01-31 22:56:47+00:00
Broadly agree but, as is most things, the devil is in the details!

- Xcode. A really rough ide that has a hard time at scale, choking on package refreshes, many targets, and more. It has a special entitlement so you can't even binary patch it if you want to fix it!

- Build systems. Cargo is _much_ easier to work with than SPM.

- Macros support, codegen is still largely done outside of the macro system, which should indicate its use.

- Linter / format support. Yeah, it exists, last I checked it's just a good bit worse.

- Performance. There are MANY performance cliffs in Swift; most can be fixed by a sufficiently determined compiler developer, but at this point we've kinda departed talking about the language as-is.

- Type inference time. Swift's bidirectional type inference causes a ton of choking on complex expressions, which is a real problem with its number one use case, SwiftUI.

- An exacerbating factor on the above, imports are all implicitly module-scoped, meaning that changing a single file means recomputing the types for all files in the module. And because SPM and Xcode have such a rough time with multiple targets, that usually means that a single change can lead to recompiling all Swift files.

- Weirdness around classes and structs? I understand that they had to do it for objc compatibility, but I would've found it much cleaner if they'd just from the start had something replacing class, like a fully-sugared `final class Box<T>` that replaces all uses of class.

I agree that for the most part it _could_ be an easier rust, but between including bidirectional type inference without a cut operator and poor tooling I struggle to find where it's actually easier in cases that you can't just use typescript and dodge all the non-typecheck compilation headaches entirely.
by tallytarik | 2026-01-31 22:57:22+00:00
Great post and a great little tool. Some of my experience using these techniques in production:

1. Trilateration mostly doesn't work with internet routing, unlike GPS. Other commenters have covered this in more detail. So the approach described here - to take the closest single measurement - is often the best you can do without prior data. This means you need a crazy high distribution of nodes across cities to get useful data at scale. We run our own servers and also sponsor Globalping and use RIPE Atlas for some measurements (I work for a geo data provider), yet even with thousands of available probes, we can only accurately infer latency-based location for IPs very close to those probes.

2. As such, latency/traceroute measurements are most useful for verifying existing location data. That means for the vast majority of IP space, we rely on having something to compare against.

3. Traceroute hops are good; the caveat being that you're geolocating a router. RIPE IPmap already locates most public routers with good precision.

4. Overall these techniques work quite well for infrastructure and server IP addresses but less so for eyeball networks.

https://ping.sx is also a nice comparison tool
by lovlar | 2026-01-31 22:57:26+00:00
It’s going to be interesting to see how these types of bans play out.

One alternative to bans could perhaps be if the EU created an IdP or something similar, with a fee for each authentication request, and then forced all commercial services within Europe to use it. I’m not sure if the fee should go back to the user or be paid as tax to the government, but either way, it would change the incentives around connecting traffic to you and making profit from it by harvesting data or steering recommendation engines.

Because I do think there’s nothing wrong with the government doing this, just like in the physical world.

And in some cases, we might prefer cheap authentications… like when posting comments, to avoid trolling/manipulation/bullying. Perhaps when doing “writes” on the internet, if there’s a robust way to identify that type of traffic.
by bccdee | 2026-01-31 22:57:39+00:00
Suffering is painful and uncomfortable. The pain and discomfort are what make it suffering.

It's not a question of moral virtue. There's no moral virtue in cooking with spices, either. Watching a movie at 2x may make it worse, but it's not immoral.

> That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.

Unhelpful to what? What's the goal here? Simply getting to the end of the movie? They put middles in movies for a reason; they're a load-bearing part of the experience. Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good? Of course, if you're fast-forwarding through pieces of everything, this doesn't work, but that's a red flag in and of itself. It should prompt you to ask yourself why you can't sit through movies. Do they all have unacceptably slow pacing? Or is there a problem with your expectations?

I should point out, also, that I don't mean this in a black-and-white sense. I'm not saying that fast-forwarding through one scene one time is some sort of mark against you. But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end? The point of holding yourself to standards isn't finger-wagging; it's to give yourself an objective lens to view yourself through. How would you know if you did have a problem with your attention span?
by internet2000 | 2026-01-31 22:57:56+00:00
This is kind of an insane take, and I doubt the year predictions will age well. But I REALLY agree with it and hope it is true.

"Talk to Sales for pricing" is bullshit and has always been bullshit. Shitty web UIs with no bulk change capabilities, but that you can script using the internal API from the Dev Tools Network tab are bullshit. If AI helps drag this industry into the future away from that, I welcome it.
by bandrami | 2026-01-31 22:58:02+00:00
I'm really losing patience with AI fluff pieces mostly because I'm a sysadmin and the guys in dev cannot stop talking about how much they're producing with their agents or MCPs or whatever they're called this week and yet they're simply not getting me software to put into production any faster (it's actually slowed down slightly but that's consistent with previous product lifecycles). Neither are any of our vendors, at least as far as I can tell. Even Agile a quarter of a century ago actually produced software at a somewhat faster rate than the team had before (at the cost of more breakage, but there's a business case to be made for that) but I'm literally just not seeing an uptick here.
by willio58 | 2026-01-31 22:58:03+00:00
As someone with a 4k tv and an Apple TV 4K, I thought that all of my streamed content was in 4k.

When I recently switched to self-hosting, I was almost certain since I was so used to 4k that I’d need to self-host all 4k content.

I realized the whole time most of the streaming services I used barely even gave me 4k content, and when they did it was so low bitrate it was basically comparable to 1080p.

So now I specifically download 4k movies for ones that I really care about being 4k (e.g nature documentaries) and for the rest 1080p is more convenient space/time wise.
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-31 22:59:25+00:00
Yeah, Tesla gets it, except they’ve been promising actual FSD for a decade now, and have yet to deliver. Their “robotaxi” service has like 30 cars, all with humans, and still crashes all the time. They’re a total fucking joke.

Meanwhile Waymo (the LiDAR wankers) are doing hundreds of thousands of paid rides every week.
by rubenflamshep | 2026-01-31 22:59:28+00:00
> It’s like an echo chamber of the same mannerisms

Hmm, I imagine that a forum made up of slightly different versions of yourself would probably be a variation of this!

> Would be interesting to see the first “non-standard” response to see how far out the tails go on the sycophancy-argumentative spectrum.

100% though I do suspect there are human-thumbs on the scale for these non-standard responses that I've been seeing
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-31 22:59:29+00:00
No. There's no conspiracy relating location services to the removal of the headphone jack: The latter is just a dumb design decision from a famous fruit company that ultimately wants their products to be completely featureless rounded rectangles.

Besides: Phones move. That's kind of their whole point.

And this kind of trilateration relies on beacons that don't move around (much).

Fortunately for location data, there's a ton of them: Google used to give them away for businesses to use, but things like smart TVs, speakers, and game consoles are all pretty chatty about broadcasting their presence over Bluetooth to anyone in earshot. (And it's easy enough to observe with any app that displays nearby Bluetooth beacons. I see over a dozen right now where I sit, in my suburban home.)
by bronlund | 2026-01-31 22:59:36+00:00
I have watched it multiple times, and I do understand that in order to understand what is great art, you have to be familiar with art history.

That being said, blaming the kids for a failed education system, is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It is not their attention which is the problem, but the out-dated methods used to grab it. Being bitter and blaming everything, but themselves, is just showing how irrelevant they have all become.
Show HN: Monodev – A CLI to overlay dev files in large monorepos
by danieljhkim | 2026-01-31 22:59:59+00:00
I frequently work with large mono-repos, and I faced a recurring problem: difficulties of managing local-only dev files (scripts, configs, agent instructions, etc) across different sessions and branches.

So I created a CLI tool that lets you overlay/remove local-only dev files on top of a repo, without modifying the repo itself.
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-31 23:00:14+00:00
LLMs can write extremely fast, know esoteric facts, and speak multiple languages fluently. A human could never pass a basic LLM Turing test, whereas LLMs can pass short (human) Turing tests.

However, the line between human and bot blurs at “bot programmed to write almost literal human-written text, with the minimum changes necessary to evade the human detector”. I strongly suspect that in practice, any “authentic” (i.e. not intentionally prompted) LLM filter would have many false positives and true negatives; determining true authenticity is too hard. Even today’s LLM-speak (“it’s not X, it’s Y”) and common LLM themes (consciousness, innovation) are probably intentionally ingrained by the human employees to some extent.
by toyg | 2026-01-31 23:00:16+00:00
This is an unrealistic argumentation, usually deployed to paint contemporaries in a bad light by comparing them to "saints" who are, conveniently, always dead. And it's particularly funny that Borsellino is now in the "saints" category, when he was explicitly namechecked by Sciascia himself in the newspaper column that originated the term "anti-mafia professional". Falcone also got extremely close to becoming the national anti-mafia czar, because his career had been defined by that very subject. Both were killed precisely because they specialised in this area and refused to move elsewhere.

Sciascia was 67 when he wrote that column, and was likely just aggrieved by the fact that national response to the mafia was escalating to levels before unseen (for a number of reasons). He might have had a point about another name-checked personality, the politician Leoluca Orlando, who survived those terrible times and ended up ruling Palermo for more than 20 years - something a lot of people see as realistically incompatible with actually being the anti-mafia hardliner he is supposed to be.

Saviano, however, is just a specialized journalist.
by JackYoustra | 2026-01-31 23:01:06+00:00
You can develop Swift without it. I assume you mean SwiftUI / apple's sdk, which is what most people assume (a note, I'd say, to advocates of Swift who wish not to address SwiftUI: it's the biggest target, and its poor performance on it should speak volumes about the language).

You can also sometimes avoid xcode, see https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool

although, at this point, just use expo!
by ZenoArrow | 2026-01-31 23:02:58+00:00
> Because there isn't room for reputation here. The RAM works, or it doesn't. It costs a certain price. Do you want to spend more money, or less money?

RAM from China already works and as Chinese RAM manufacturers scale up there's no reason they can't be competitive on price. Furthermore, it's more than possible for China to catch up technologically as well. Micron is likely to regret pissing off the majority of their customers if Chinese RAM manufacturers start aggressively targeting the market Micron have left behind, how bad this gets for Micron depends on how quickly they pivot back to the general consumer market.
by ameliaquining | 2026-01-31 23:03:33+00:00
If this is right, then I'd consider it probably a good thing, as it'd serve as a wake-up call that could result in calls for more regulatory action and/or greater demand for safety, before anything really catastrophic happens. That said, there are lots of ways it could fail to work out that way.

(Note that I'm primarily talking about the "lots of people are running highly privileged agents that could be vulnerable to a mass prompt injection" angle, not the "human psychology is the exploit" thing, which I think is not a particularly novel feature of the present situation. Nor the "Reddit data implicitly teaches multi-agent collaboration" thing, which strikes me as a dubious claim.)
by the_fall | 2026-01-31 23:04:03+00:00
FWIW, this is a fairly common problem on Wikipedia in political articles, predating AI. I encourage you to give it a try and verify some citations. A lot of them turn out to be more or less bogus.

I'm not saying that AI isn't making it worse, but bad-faith editing is commonplace when it comes to hot-button topics.
by bccdee | 2026-01-31 23:05:26+00:00
That's why I'm "pro-boredom," in a sense. If you let yourself dismiss a scene when you're not enjoying it, you may never discover what's enjoyable about it. Putting in the work of paying attention pays dividends. Of course, sometimes it yields nothing, but that's why you need to get good at it. If paying attention to something boring feels like pulling teeth, you'll never do it, and you'll miss a lot of great stuff.

And it's not like you're "wasting your time" by properly paying attention to ten minutes of atmospheric scene-setting in a two-hour movie. You've set aside two hours already. Make the most of them.
by roenxi | 2026-01-31 23:06:22+00:00
That would have devastating consequences in the pre-LLM era, yes. What is less obvious is whether it'll be an advantage or disadvantage going forward. It is like observing that cars will make people fat and lazy and have devastating consequences on health outcomes - that is exactly what happened but the net impact was still positive because cars boost wealth, lifestyles and access to healthcare so much that the net impact is probably positive even if people get less exercise.

It is unclear that a human thinking about things is going to be an advantage in 10, 20 years. Might be, might not be. In 50 years people will probably be outraged if a human makes an important decision without deferring to an LLM's opinion. I'm quite excited that we seem to be building scaleable superintelligences that can patiently and empathetically explain why people are making stupid political choices and what policy prescriptions would actually get a good outcome based on reading all the available statistical and theoretical literature. Screw people primarily thinking for themselves on that topic, the public has no idea.
by toyg | 2026-01-31 23:06:41+00:00
> aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime?

Check out the Japanese Yakuza. Yes, they are in decline, but even at the peak of their powers they didn't really do that sort of thing. Gangsters can be pretty private.

Besides, gangsters are not stupid. By now, Hollywood has produced tons of material about the rise and fall of criminals, with increasing realism; effectively, they educated the newer generations into not being as stupid as Tony Montana.
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-31 23:07:27+00:00
Sure. But we usually didn't need it: We kept the phone numbers for our friends, family, and our favorite pizza place memorized.

And if the phone rang, it was answered. It was almost certainly a real person calling; spam calls were infrequent to the point of almost never happening.

It was a different time, and it is lost to us now.

(We do still have public name-to-address databases, though. For instance: In my state of Ohio, that part of a person's voter registration is public information that anybody can access. Everyone is still effectively doxxed and it's still not a security issue.)