MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xp84 | 2026-02-02 09:09:07+00:00
> "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is perfectly fine for the end user

That's okay, but in say, 2 years when Mac OS 28 completely bricks the app, the developer will not be there to give you an updated one (even if you're willing to pay), since most of the addressible market already bought the app in 2025, and after 2 years with almost no revenue, the developer stopped working on it, deleted the repo and moved onto another project. The developer can't even rely on a future OS update "encouraging" people to buy "App (N+1)" since it might be "ain't broke" for 1 year, or for 5.

The point of a subscription is not to rip you off, it's to acknowledge a few realities:

1. For reasons beyond developers' control, platform vendors do not provide a "permanent" platform, but a shifting one without any long-term guarantees. You can put a 100-year certificate into your app, but the OS vendor might decide that only certs with expiration less than 45 days are okay and your app no longer works unless you're around to (A) keep abreast of the platform's rules and changes, and (B) ship an update.

2. Many software offerings need to provide a server-side component, which is never a one-time cost.

3. Relying on upgrade purchases to sustain a product gives developers perverse incentives to shove a ton of new features just to be able to pitch "Upgrade to Appitron 2!" with a ton of bullet points, whereas subscription pricing incentivizes them simply to keep users loving the app forever, including adopting new technologies but also just improving the core experience.

Due to 1 and 2, it makes sense to let users who stop using the program after a short time pay very little, and to let users who rely on the continued operation of the program, pay a little bit each year, instead of paying $500 once and using it for a few years, and maybe upgrading for $250.
by alkonaut | 2026-02-02 09:09:17+00:00
I still develop software requiring hardware dongles. We moved from parallel to USB-A about 15 years ago and we're still on USB-A, much to the annoyance of anyone who has bought a new laptop in recent years.

The crack is a little bit harder these days as there is a special compiler that encrypts the binary using an on-dongle key, decrypting it after it's loaded.

A big reason for the dongle is to regionally control features (e.g. users in country A must not have feature X but users in country B should) and able to "expire" offline desktop software.
by gambiting | 2026-02-02 09:09:28+00:00
>> If you happen to come across any part of HS2 in some random village you've never heard of it's quite incredible the impact it's having on the locals. Locals who live miles away from the nearest station and therefore unable to use the line, by the way.

Because people inherently misunderstand the benefit of HS2, and how could they not if it's constantlty being misrepresented by our media and politicans.

UK has one of the highest proportion of freight transported by road in Europe. That is fundamentally because our rail infrastructure is overloaded and unable to take any more freight. All non-perishable stuff that in other countries just goes on rail, in the UK is moved by trucks on our roads. Which as you can imagine, is causing tens of billions of pounds worth of damage to our roads, which we - taxpayers - pay for. All of these locals that live miles away from the train station are already affected by the lack of rail infrastructure - because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go. If HS2 is ever finished, it will reduce congestion and our roads and reduce the wear and tear which again, is costing us billions in upkeep every year.

But according to our media, it's all about saving london commuters 2 minutes on a train from Birmingham, so every Dick and Harry is against it, because like you said - they live miles from the nearest station, why would they care?
by GJim | 2026-02-02 09:09:34+00:00
> people use their goddamn fireplaces too much and it’s kinda impossible to get fresh air in winter evenings

Not a problem with a properly designed HEATAS approved wood burning stove and properly seasoned beach wood.

Being daft enough to buy an inefficient, unapproved stove and/or and burn unseasoned green wood is simply beyond me. Not to mention its illegal to sell small quantities of unseasoned firewood in Blighty; large amounts to season yourself are fine.
by oblio | 2026-02-02 09:09:34+00:00
It's at most self loathing. I'm on HN, so I'm a tech bro. Or I'm bigoted against my own people, which I'm perfectly fine with.

> Why should we consider Ai access differently?

Because people with money, let's call them "capitalists", are using the internet and AI to consolidate power while putting nothing in the place of the things they're replacing. They need a lot of fellow travelers, which are abundant, anyway.

What's different about the internet? Mobile devices, AI? They're everywhere and being used as part of a surveillance network that has absolutely nothing in common with the printing press and literacy.

I hope you're right and we all end with our smart, super capable, private AI. I don't see it happening. Everyone uses Gmail, WhatsApp, Discord, Uber, etc. I don't f** care about 1% that don't, they have no power, no influence. At large, they don't exist.
by EagnaIonat | 2026-02-02 09:10:21+00:00
> just to have the exact same output, exact same time, but now "nicer".

The majority of code work is maintaining someone else's code. That's the reason it is "nicer".

There is also the matter of performance and reducing redundancy.

Two recent pulls I saw where it was AI generated did neither. Both attempted to recreate from scratch rather than using industry tested modules. One was using csv instead of polars for the intensive work.

So while they worked, they became an unmaintainable mess.
by trumbitta2 | 2026-02-02 09:11:36+00:00
I actually did this with my teenage neighbor.
He was learning electric guitar at hours the building had rules against. Hours I was studying throughout because of said building rules.

Whenever he switched his amp on, his landline would ring.
Whenever he loudly stomped toward the phone, his landline would stop ringing.

Took three afternoons, but he learned it.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-02 09:11:37+00:00
I don't think this is a great argument. The reason is that Rubella/German measels is in the majority of cases very mild, in many - people will not even know they had caught it. If you take a large enough sample you'll absolutely find people winning a lottery that they really don't want to win, but the exact same logic is used to by people to avoid vaccinating. For instance the MMR vaccine can cause all sorts of nasty things in extreme cases, but in the average case it's believed to be mostly harmless. Though of course we're always discovering new things about medicines. There's even new side effects in e.g. tylenol still regularly being discovered and published about.
by moontear | 2026-02-02 09:13:10+00:00
It is not only a reverse proxy (which is actually just traefik), see this blog post https://pangolin.net/blog/posts/1-15-0-release

Pangolin is a hub-and-spoke style network. They actually have some comparisons between Netbird and Pangolin https://pangolin.net/blog/posts/pangolin-v-netbird and Pangolin and Tailscale https://pangolin.net/blog/posts/pangolin-v-tailscale
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-02 09:13:52+00:00
Yes, I know, but the intended audience can't read 大海.

The chart and the article are both created by Wired; it's strange for them to refer to him one way in the chart and another way in the article.

I'm curious about the ethnic makeup of the "team leader" level. One of them is called "Ted", and seems to also be called 特德 ["te de"]. The 特德 could just be because everyone in the upper levels is Chinese, but the English-language post from Ted shown in the article doesn't really suggest a native English speaker.

Amani doesn't sound like a Chinese name or like the English name of a Chinese person.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-02 09:14:02+00:00
If your employees reject black loan applicants because they're black, that's a winnable lawsuit. If they reject black loan applicants because it happens the black loan applicants had bad credit, not so much.

Why are we treating AI like something different? If it's given the race of the applicants and that causes it to reject black applicants, it's doing something objectionable. If it's given the race of the applicants but that doesn't significantly change its determinations, or it isn't given their race to begin with, it's not.

The trouble is people have come up with this ploy where they demand no racial disparity in outcomes even when there are non-racial factors (e.g. income, credit score) that correlate with race and innately result in a disparity.

A cynic would say that plaintiff lawyers don't like algorithms that reduce human bias because filing lawsuits over human bias is how they get paid.
by gambiting | 2026-02-02 09:15:17+00:00
>>though, which is why they used Compulsory Purchase to force farmers to sell their land for pennies. Because obviously "undeveloped" land without any sort of planning consent is worth very little.

Did you ever look into any of it? Because it's 100000% nonsense. One of the reasons why HS2 is over budget so much is because farmers are being paid absolutely through the nose for smallest chunks of land taken for it. Compulsory purchase has to pay the market rate, and in most cases it pays well above that.

>>No, they're being sold for thousands of times the purchase price to property developers run by the people who donate the most to the government.

I'd love to see an example of any piece of land being sold for "thousands of times the purchase price", it would be quite incredible. And the land goes back to auction, anyone can bid on it so not sure how exactly is it sold to "people who donate the most" - care to explain? Or better yet, give an example?

>>It's a land grab, same as the "inheritance tax on farms" thing.

Yes, nothing to do with people like the Percy family owning half of Northumerland for the last 700 years and never paying any inheritance tax on it because they farm on some of it. Nuh huh.
Ask HN: Why do users mute apps instead of deleting them?
by kajolshah_bt | 2026-02-02 09:15:55+00:00
Users don’t delete immediately.
They mute notifications first.

By the time deletion happens, it’s weeks later.

For people building mobile products:
– What usually triggers the mute?
– Is it notification volume, relevance, timing… or something else?
– Have you found reliable signals before this happens?

Genuinely curious what others have seen.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-02 09:16:49+00:00
Another method (much more common for software that asks for two pieces of information, like a name and a key) is to take a memdump of the process at the "your key is invalid" dialog, find the invalid key you just typed, and hope that a valid key is somewhere nearby in memory. Unlike the assembly trick, this requires 0 programming expertise beyond the ability to type `strings` on the command line.

This works because some programs use a hashing algorithm to calculate the key based on the name, do a strcmp, and pop a messagebox if the keys don't match, without zeroizing the valid key buffer first. If the key buffers are on the stack (or if the two mallocs just happen to use the same region in memory), it is often easy to find a valid key if you know where the invalid one is.

I guess software that derives keys this way is far less common than it once was, but I know of somebody who cracked something using this method just a few years ago, so it still pops up from time to time.
by alkonaut | 2026-02-02 09:17:21+00:00
> I don't condone piracy, but I also don't condone SaaS.

What's wrong with SaaS?

If we didn't sell our desktop software to ~1000 companies as a SaaS then few would afford it. We could sell one-off/perpetual licenses for maybe $1M but only our biggest customers would manage that expense, while smaller competitors would not. And if that means we sold only 300 licenses, then the price would be even higher because the number of licenses sold would be even smaller. The SaaS is basically what the customers ask for. They can cancel and switch to competing software when they want to. In fact, customers who use the software rarely feel the SaaS yearly cost is too high so ask for even more SaaS-y functionality such as paying by minute of use or per specific action like "run simulation", instead of having a yearly subscription. Because they might just use it a few days per year so they feel that (say) $10/yr is too much.
by sarreph | 2026-02-02 09:17:26+00:00
I recall comments about this last week on the BBC website where people made the points that:

1. Surely the long term plan is to not keep these relics in a gargantuan warehouse but instead to put them in a museum(s) — with free entry no less — so that the tax paying public can enjoy them.

2. Further, collections of relics that relate to the site of each station on the line could be displayed in each.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-02 09:17:31+00:00
GPLv2 was clearly intended to let you change the software on your devices. In some countries, GPLv2 already prohibits tivoization.

However, big tech found an exploit: In some countries, GPLv2 allows tivoization. This was not intended by the authors of the GPLv2. There was another exploit involving patent licenses, and a reverse exploit about license termination that allowed some developers to extort some users. They fixed these and made it the GPLv3. It's a bugfix release, not anything new. You only don't like it if you relied on the bugs.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2026-02-02 09:17:46+00:00
I'm not adding a+b. It will be more like, "Calculate the following nontrivial physical quantity from this catalog of measurements, reproject the measurements to this coordinate system, calculate the average and standard deviation using this pixelization scheme, estimate the power spectrum, and then make the following 3 plots."

This would have taken me an hour previously. It now takes a few minutes at most.

I feel like many AI skeptics are disconnected from reality at this point.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-02 09:17:57+00:00
Now I feel a bit more justified for over-engineering my automatic restic backup to not run as root, but to instead use "capabilities" to read files it doesn't own.

Namely, CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH [0] and related systemd settings. The only problem is that it inhibits using a convenience/wrapper script.

[0] https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/capabilities.7.htm...
by nunobrito | 2026-02-02 09:18:10+00:00
From that perspective the operating system are a few apps on the browser since that is that users see and get their dopamine rush.

In my opinion users won't choose a future where sovereignity matters. It is a future forced upon them, because they will simply pick whatever methods are still available for communicating.

We used to see this only in a few edge countries like NK and Cuba. Now it is becoming the norm on Russia, Iran, China, Japan and more recently even Europe if you follow the most recent developments. What was once an open garden is becoming quite fenced.
by 3D30497420 | 2026-02-02 09:18:18+00:00
As I reread the original post, I'm not actually not sure which group I fall into. I think there's a bunch of overlap depending on perspective/how you read it:

> Group 1: intern/boring task executor

Yup, that makes sense I'm in group 1.

> Group 2: "outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are interested only in results"

Also me (in this case), as I'm outsourcing the software development part and just want the final app.

Soo... I probably have thought too much about the original proposed groups. I'm not sure they are as clear as the original suggests.
by enricozb | 2026-02-02 09:18:29+00:00
Perhaps I overstated how related the two were. I was pulling mostly from the Lean documentation on Universes [0]

> The formal argument for this is known as Girard's Paradox. It is related to a better-known paradox known as Russell's Paradox, which was used to show that early versions of set theory were inconsistent. In these set theories, a set can be defined by a property.

[0]: https://lean-lang.org/functional_programming_in_lean/Functor...
by alexhans | 2026-02-02 09:18:46+00:00
Agreed.

Even in the case of a single agent, the compounding of errors [1] can easily make your "flow" unacceptable for your use case. The deterministic where possibe/decoupled/well tested approach is key.

With such a fast moving space I'm always wary of adopting optimization techniques that I can't easily prove and pivot from (which means measuring/evals are necessary).

Slowly but surely, abstractions allow us to use others' deep investments in the matter of coordination without losing control (e.g. pyspark worker/driver coordination) and we can invest on friction removal and direct value generation in our domains (e.g. banking/retail/legal payments, etc)

- [1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/error-compound...
by palata | 2026-02-02 09:19:04+00:00
> the EU will have more to worry about than Windows

The US can, right now, crash pretty much the entire western industry/economy by disconnecting their digital services.

The US already threatens the western world with that power. They already use it.

Of course the EU has to care about that. The reason they accepted the dependency was that for a long time they were looking up to the US, and couldn't imagine that the US could become an enemy in the space of a few weeks.

Now the US has proven that they could realistically go from this state that the western world trusted to declaring war to allies in a matter of weeks. Of course everybody is scared.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-02 09:19:24+00:00
> That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority

Sure you do, if:

1) your neighbour is an absolute cunt

2) their parents failed to raise a responsible human being

3) law won’t protect you

4) you can’t easily move

5) you don’t use violence

Then you have all the rights to teach the cunt some manners.
by mchaver | 2026-02-02 09:19:30+00:00
> There should never have been an "artisan era".

Firm no. There should be and there will continue to be. Maybe for you all code is business/money-making code, but that is not true for everyone.

> We use computers to solve problems.

We can use computers for lots of things like having fun, making art, and even creating problems for other people.

> You get paid to get stuff done, period.

That is a strange assumption. Plenty of people are writing code without being paid for it.
by moontear | 2026-02-02 09:20:26+00:00
They are not only a wrapper for Wireguard even though people keep saying that.

Each of the tools gives different benefits and yes, you can roll all of that on your own, but let's take Tailscale as an example: You have custom ACLs to secure your network on a client/user/device basis with tagging of devices. You have your own tailscale SSH connection, the possibility to create private-public tunnels (just like Cloudflare tunnels). The hole punching using DERP servers and native IPv6/IPv4 interoperability means it really connects any device on any network type to all other devices. And of course the management pane and GUI you talked about.

This is not supposed to be a marketing ploy for Tailscale, but saying "they are just a wrapper for Wireguard" is plain wrong.
by alkonaut | 2026-02-02 09:20:37+00:00
If you were given the choice of buying a fridge for $0 and paying $10/mo for using it, or paying $1k and $0/mo those are both entirely valid pricing models. If you are a homeowner you probably don't want the hassle of managing subscriptions but if you are starting a business where you need fridges but don't have a lot of capital it might be worth looking into. It's basically just financing + service etc.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-02 09:22:02+00:00
You do realize, that the fully generic robot will need tools, just like humans. You can't put everything into the robot. So it can be used to supply power to the tools, but then it is just a large walking battery. But we already have power outlets. That leaves the robot to just control the tools. But you can also just send the signals over wifi instead of letting the robot walk to the tool. So a central home automation server is what your endgame will look like.

It's not like I can't think of a single use, I do: an army. Sure wheels get you faster, but when you have an army, them being able to climb or move along larger steps is an advantage. A long stick (arm) is ideal for mounting and directing a weapon to fire missiles. Then you only need a observation unit, ideally at the top and maybe some communication tools also at the top, et voila you have a "head". The human form is ideal for fighting and that is what it evolved for (hunting). But I don't know if we want that wannabe dictators aka. billionaires to have a large army, which also doesn't even have moral, so they could revolt. They sure would like that.
by My_Name | 2026-02-02 09:22:31+00:00
This is happening right now with cars. Regular payments or some features on the car you bought outright stop working.

Mercedes restricts the performance of some cars if you don't pay $1200 a year for the “Acceleration Increase”. You have to pay more if you want to use the power you already paid for.

BMW offer heated seats for £10 a month. The car has heated seats that work fine, and you paid for the hardware already, but they are turned off if you don't pay more.

Neither of these are anything to do with ongoing costs to the company, like support or mobile connection, they just want ongoing revenue.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-02 09:23:38+00:00
>And, to be honest, if the EU would get off its ass and at least try to foster some alternatives, even those of us in the US would benefit.

What exactly do you want the EU, the Brussels based institution, to do here? Because AWS didn't come into existence because Uncle sam came in and twisted Bezo's hand telling him to invent a hyperscaler that will conquer the world.

EU's lack of comparable domestic alternatives is a consequence of the failure of its entrepreneurship and free market in the SW private sector, and nothing that EU institution can do about it to magically fix this since the solution is not MORE regulatory interference form government bureaucrats who don't know how the internet works.

You might be able to force innovation if the governments can throw money at the problem if the VC sector is lacking, but they can't force economies of scale and mass adoption without a China style great firewall, in which case you'd then have even bigger issues.
by ndr | 2026-02-02 09:23:49+00:00
If you have trouble with toe nail trauma (all chipped for instance) check out heel lock lacing. It will prevent your toes to hit against the front of the shoes.

One example here [0] for running shoes but it's useful also for normal walking. Ian of course has his own entry about this [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBbc6TackDQ&t=68s
[1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/locklacing.htm
by Orygin | 2026-02-02 09:24:46+00:00
This closely matches the way a few of my "apolitical" friends behave.

They mostly think their opinion is the right one, and others are just flailing around not understanding the real "objective" "truth". But they never spent more than a minute thinking things through and re-evaluating their biases and "objective reality"...

They then spend quite some time ranting about things that are obviously political, but on the same breath say they are proud not to vote...