skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Senior developers – how are you learning new languages in the age of AI?
I'm a senior software engineer with 14 years of Python experience, now on a year-long sabbatical focused on learning Elixir and functional programming. My current approach is the traditional one: I rely on high-quality books and hands-on coding—much like the intensive, immersive study I experienced in college.

Detailed my syllabus for those interested in specifics:
https://flaviuspopan.com/elixir-year-technical-sabbatical/

That said, lots has changed in our world lately. I’m using LLMs as tutors to discuss concepts and clarify doubts—rather than to spoon-feed me code—but I sometimes wonder if waiting to fully grasp a language before using these tools is the optimal strategy.

Are you embracing traditional methods, or have you jumped straight into AI-assisted learning? What mix of deep study and AI guidance has worked best for you?
> The most likely outcome, I would guess, is that Apple just stop offering Advanced Data Protection as a service in the UK rather than create some kind of backdoor.

First, these are the same thing.

Second, ADP is already off by default so approximately nobody uses it. It is irrelevant from a privacy standpoint whether or not they offer it.
Static analysis of the DeepSeek Android app
tl;dr it does aggressive device fingerprinting, root detection, has anti-tampering mechanisms, bundles native code and has dynamic code loading and execution facilities.

IMO, none of which should be necessary for an app like this

A dynamic analysis is still needed to confirm what it actually does.

I decided to do this after a researcher found obfuscated surveillance code in the web app
https://apnews.com/article/deepseek-china-generative-ai-inte...

NowSecure found similar not great runtime behavior in the iOS mobile app
https://www.nowsecure.com/press-releases/nowsecure-urges-ent...
What's wrong with 3DES?
SWAG: you should be right > 96%-98% of the time if you're good.

That doesn't mean your code works the first time, just that it works eventually because you were right about the issue and how to deal with it.

The other 2-4% is the interesting stuff IMO. Being wrong is fun, that means you get to learn something.
I feel like Rust has a different development culture than Java and Java devs are more likely to want to build some abstraction that does everything and loads classes from the network into the runtime.
Show HN: Transductive regular expressions for text editing
An extension of regular expressions for text editing, with a grep-like command-line tool. If you, like me, struggle with group logic in regular expressions, you might find it useful.

I wanted to do this for a very long time. It is more of a sketch or prototype. I'd really appreciate your feedback!
Isn't there a "fruit of the poisoned tree" kind of thing? Sounds to me quite similar to the situation where you would murder your parent and get to keep the inheritance, even if you are convicted of murder. Inheriting stuff isn't illegal, yet, I think most jurisdictions would not allow you to keep it in this case.

There should be a problem with stuff obtained through illegal means, even if having that stuff is in principle legal. In this case, copyrighted material.

Obviously they would argue that having the data is only a consequence of the download part, and that part is legal. What I see is that these situations are always complicated, and if you're rich enough, you get to litigate the complications and come out with a slap on the wrist or maybe even clean hands, while if you are an ordinary citizen, you can't afford to delve into the complexities and get punished.

These days I'm starting to give up on the whole concept of the legal system being fair. They're not even pretending anymore.
What Are Some Underrated Programming Tools or Libraries You Use?
Hey there,

I’ve been thinking about how fast the developer ecosystem evolves, and it always seems like new tools or libraries pop up every week. But sometimes, there are those hidden gems that not everyone knows about—tools that can make a huge difference but don’t get the attention they deserve.

What are some lesser-known programming tools, libraries, or frameworks that you’ve found to be incredibly useful but seem to fly under the radar? I’d love to hear about them and why you think more developers should be using them.
It's about Christian Haigh, who co-founded Compound Planning.
It seems like perfect case to make multi-container encryption as default. That is different data will be revealed using different key and there is no way of knowing how many containers there are in the blob of data and not possible to prove someone is hiding a key.
He wrote excellent, non-blowhardy books. I never met the gentleman.
Any examples maybe?
Got any sources to back that up?
US tariffs: how Trump's tax is hitting Big Tech and beyond
I wrote a notes app in react native just for myself a few years ago (out of frustration after changing notes apps every year or so) that does /exactly/ what I want and it has been the most used app on my phone for a few years now.

It's offline-first but syncs reliably, uses the exact interpretation and display of markdown I like, searches and sorts the way I like, integrates with AI only in the ways I want it to (specific search capabilities, summarizing), uses on-device dictation via whisper so speech-to-text works when I'm away from a data connection, tracks location... I could go on and on since I add a new feature every month or so from a note (inside the app!) where I keep track of little things I wish it had.

But most importantly nothing ever gets added to it that I don't want... ever. No one else ever updates the terms of service, the UI layout, the retention period, the formatting, the shortcuts... there isn't some subscription I have to keep track of, or "pro" modes, or popups telling me about new features I should check out.

And since I have access to the backing db I can do all kinds of fun stuff with the data-- I've been playing way more with local LLMs lately with it.

I think it's healthy to remember that not everything has to be a startup or a public github repo.
I don't know that this will happen, but it does open the door more for Ukraine to target Russia's grid, without worrying about taking down the grid for Baltic NATO members who they would not wish to anger.
If you arrive at the point of being able to buy that book, it means it has passed the publisher's hands and I would think, that the publisher was OK with those terms then, and limiting the usage of the text may in fact be effective.
If it was self-published, then even more so.
Why would app store reviewers care about your encryption choices?
I think you'll find that censorship is actually quite popular. The censors and censorship-hungry know the connotations of the word "censorship." Nobody will say it with their chest they believe censorship is a societal good straight up and make a robust case for it. It's all coy fuckery to lie to us and themselves that they're not censors.
Show HN: Unify – A single file Python CLI Tool port of repomix
I built Unify – a simple CLI tool that consolidates entire code repositories into a single AI-friendly file. generates structured output for LLMs.

Custom file inclusion/exclusion via .unify
<100 LOC, can replace repomix for smaller projects
LFP batteries are 5x larger than li-ion

This is completely wrong. Anyone who has bought a single LFP cell knows they are close but not quite as energy dense for the weight as regular lithium ion batteries. They are very common in all sorts of applications like medical devices and cars at the very least.

You won't find LFP batteries in cars

This is also not true at all. Here is a list of 42 car models with LFP batteries including telsa model 3, model Y and the ford mustang.

https://evdb.nz/ev-battery

Where were you seeing your information?
Aaron committed suicide and FBI going after him was meant more as a lesson to the other kids at MIT than anything.

MegaUpload did the same, kim dotcom got raided in his sleep by FBI in New Zealand! So no I don't buy your reductionist argument, there are forces at play that allow companies with founders with the likes of Google to get away with it but not others.
If it can call tools, then it could be used to download a larger, more useful model. Or send API requests to another model.
Last summer I looked a lot at "print on demand" services of which I'd call out

https://www.contrado.com/print-on-demand

and something I found amusing was that almost all of them will only take files in sRGB format even though they actually support a gamut which covers some colors better than sRGB and other colors worse. My monitor supports Adobe RGB and covers both spaces pretty well.

I think, however, that they have more quality problems if people send files that have different color profiles so they just take sRGB.

I had some print jobs go terribly bad, turns out yellow flowers are out of gamut for my camera, for sRGB and CMYK, If you try to print something that has out of gamut colors, the printer will do something to put them into the gamut and you might not like it. I learned to turn on the gamut warning for Photoshop and bring the colors into the CMYK gamut before I print, even if I am sending in an sRGB file. It didn't bother me so much when I was printing 'cards' with my Epson ET-8550, but once I had orders come back ruined, I figured it all out.
We're talking about US citizens -- who are protected by the first amendment -- who have never set foot on UK soil being threatened with extradition to the UK! This is not justifiable.
It's called systemd, all lowercase, no punctuation :)
Very doubtful. The maintainer was clear and nothing in there is sufficient to address his criticism: polyglot is unmaintainable and Rust people should write a whole new OS as a separate effort.
> isn't this a slam dunk case? Meta literally published a paper where they said "We trained this AI on Intellectual Property which we knew had been obtained without the owners' consent."

Making/receiving copies without authorization of the rightsholder can be permissible - it'll come down to a fair use analysis. Purpose to me seems highly transformative (and "The more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors"), but the other factors could swing the other way.

Worth noting that when Google Books was determined to be fair use, the amount/substantiality factor didn't weigh against them despite storing full copies of millions of books, because "what matters in such cases is not so much "the amount and substantiality of the portion used" in making a copy, but rather the amount and substantiality of what is thereby made accessible to a public". That could be seen here as the amount present in generated responses, opposed to everything the model was trained on.

> I suspect we're about to hear some arguments from AI-maximalists that LLaMA is sentient and that deleting it would be akin to murder - and wiping out AIs trained on stolen property is literally genocide.

Not sure if I can call this a strawman since there will inevitably be someone somewhere making an argument like this, but it's not a defense being used in the lawsuits in question.

My primary issues with "wiping out AIs trained on stolen property" are:

1. It's not just LLMs that are trained like this. If you're making a model to segment material defects or detect tumors, you typically first pre-train on a dataset like ImageNet before fine-tuning on the (far smaller) task-specific dataset. Even if you believe LLMs are mostly hype, there's a whole lot else - much of which fairly uncontroversially beneficial - that you'd be inhibiting

2. Copyright's basis is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Wiping out existing models, and likely stifling future ones, seems hard to justify under this basis. Ensuring rightsholders profit is intended as a means to achieve such progress, not a goal in and of itself to which progress can take a back seat

3. I do not believe stricter copyright law would help individuals. Realistically, developers training models would go to Reddit/X/Github/Getty/etc. selling licensed (by ToS agreement) user content, and there's little incentive for those companies to pass on the profit beyond maybe some temporary PR moves. Much of what's possible for open-source or academic communities may no longer be, on account of licensing fees

4. It doesn't seem politically viable to demand models are wiped out. Leading in the field, and staying ahead of China, is currently seen as a big important issue - we're not going to erase our best models because NYT asked so. Could hope for mandatory licensing - I think it'd still likely be a negative for open-source development, but it's more plausible than deleting models trained on copyrighted material
Yes “collude” contains exactly the right connotations. Slimy, sneaky, against the interests of the public.
Awesome comment, thanks. I agree with pretty much everything you said.

> tempts me in the direction of the XML syntax (which, to many people’s surprise, is absolutely still a thing—save a local file with extension .xhtml, or serve over HTTP with MIME type application/xhtml+xml)

I am one of the very few people who serves content in XHTML mode in practice, and also wrote a detailed guide on what it entails: https://www.nayuki.io/page/practical-guide-to-xhtml

> The offered solution, “quote your strings”, is what almost all programming languages tend to do.

Correct, except for shell scripts. In shell, by default everything is a literal string passed into the program, unless it has designators such as a prefix dollar sign. As you can imagine, this causes all sorts of escaping nightmares. And don't get me started about array handling. That's why I find myself reaching for Python instead of Bash, because it's so much easier to build sane, composable, debuggable programs in the former.

> I would genuinely make something to change it to <nobr>C++</nobr>

I didn't know about the <nobr> element. I looked it up and it's deprecated. However, it can be simulated with CSS white-space:no-wrap. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/no...

> I’m also the kind of guy who types actual no-break spaces in Bible references where the book has an ordinal, e.g. “1 John 2:3” will have one NBSP and one SPACE.

Similarly, I am one of the few people who uses NBSP between a number and a unit symbol: 10&nbsp;kg.
The level of casual criminality in this industry is astounding sometimes.
Is this a flaw or feature that allows government spying?
Why do creators think AI is different from any other creator who learned the craft via "consuming" their content? I have learned many aspects of song writing from various artists. Do I owe them compensation for using their content to hone my craft?
Also check out the follow up: https://nickmcd.me/2023/12/12/meandering-rivers-in-particle-...
It’s interesting to think what in people’s personal perception makes them find strange thing interesting or scary or boring. Especially when it comes to grapheme.
The point is about the hypocrisy and double-standards evinced by this behavior.
Corruption. But also Russia has a nuclear plant project in Hungary as hostage.

I believe Bulgaria should generally not be lumped together with Slovakia and Hungary though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria%E2%80%93Russia_relati...
No, it goes beyond that. There's "arithmetic," the applied usage of addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division to permute numbers, and then there's Arithmetic, the set of theorems and axioms that give rise to that system of applied arithmetic. Memorization only works for the applied part, and children aren't usually taught that there is a system of reasoning behind those rules. Without that, no amount of mathematical dexterity in pushing symbols across a page will help them understand anything past the 100 level, and sometimes not even that.

I also think there's a huge undercurrent of resistance from adults to having children learn that system of reasoning because adults don't understand why it's useful, and in my experience when people don't understand something they dismiss it.

Edit: A nice example of another axiomatic system that might be more approachable is Euclid's Elements, in which five postulates are used to develop a system of geometry using an unmarked straightedge and a collapsible compass that you could, if you were careful, use to build bridges and other large buildings.
Rheinmetall Italia S.p.A.| Software Engineer Data Scientist |Full Time ONSITE | Rome|

As a Software Engineer – Data Scientist, you will be part of a high-performing team focused on AI development and advanced data analysis, playing a strategic and mission-critical role across various domains. You will collaborate closely with engineers and industry professionals in multidisciplinary teams, leveraging Agile methodologies to design and implement data processing models and pipelines.

Key Responsibilities

Collecting, processing, and modeling data
Developing and implementing high-quality Machine Learning/Deep Learning solutions
Validating and maintaining AI models
Documenting work to ensure the delivery of efficient and functional products
Continuously learning new AI practices, frameworks, and algorithms
Designing and implementing predictive models and data processing pipelines that ensure reliability, efficiency, security, and maintainability
Managing the full AI project lifecycle, from requirements analysis and data quality assessment to model validation and deployment on on-premise or cloud infrastructures.

Main Activities

System requirement analysis and feasibility studies
Development and design of Data Science applications
Building data pipelines (ETL/ELT), scripting, and automation for data cleaning and feature engineering
Preparing technical documentation in line with corporate standards and best practices
Designing test suites for validating Machine Learning/Deep Learning models
Optimizing performance, tuning algorithms, and improving data processing pipelines using profiling and performance analysis tools
Utilizing software lifecycle management tools and Continuous Integration/Delivery (CI/CD) processes
Ensuring product quality according to corporate standards

Thank you for applying to: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4132858188/?alternateChan...
Not Ireland -- Ireland so far has been immune to any global veering to the right. There are efforts though -- just not successful.
Devil's advocate: we accept compromise of people's basic freedom of movement (via arrest) when under investigation. Even though we know a non-negligible amount are innocent, virtually everyone considers it a necessary compromise

Perhaps part of the difference is that the public acknowledge this as a necessary _evil_ and get rightly outraged when they hear of people being detained without good cause. But with privacy, especially electronic privacy, almost nobody cares when "we will only allow a small number of agents to use this for imminent terrorist danger" inevitably turns to "we will let any random council worker casually pull up every website you've been to with no warrant"
Imo it’s not about you accessing things you want for free. If your family purchased a disc copy of the goonies before you were born and you watched it as a kid, your accessing of that content you wanted for free has no moral bearing. The core question is what impact does your consumption have, and I don’t think that participating in the streaming landscape is making things any better for anyone but their ceos.
I think human written, compelling, deep content will survive. Fluff content sites will likely be squashed by search engines favoring brands and authority over linkage stats because there is so much AI generated content that's mediocre, the search engines have to weed thru that to have relevant results.

Often now though before you see results, you see AI summaries. This is perfectly fine if someone is casually searching something like ratio of oil and vinegar for salad dressing. That person likely is making a salad right now and needs to know and does not care about reading through 5 screens of scrolling content, ads, popups, etc. to get a recipe.

Now if someone is researching the history of salad dressings and wants to go deep into types of oils, vinegars, mixture ratios, pairing with different lettuce types, fruits, nuts, etc. having content that provides that level of information is helpful, but to a smaller audience. That audience is more likely to click links to products or ads than someone just looking for a ratio right now.

The human impression counts for content sites is likely to go down, a lot for fluff content, but those sites are likely losing impressions from people that weren't clicking the ads or buying products anyhow.

I'm not in advertising/marketing so I don't know what impacts that has ... maybe for some time period, ad revenues will go down because sites lose the fluff visitors and number of visitors carries weight in advertising processes, right? Then maybe the processes catch up and realize that the good content sites have higher "stickyness" factor so conversion rates and length of users visit are much more important than page impression counts?
> They have this power precisely because you have given up.

I've not given up, I just don't follow outdated methods of means to take back power. I use my wallet, I don't shop at amazon.

Stop being a consumer and supporting a ego who supports the wars, causes your protesting against. That would be the next greatest thing but we are too convenienced by these services.

Contradiction much? One where we would rather go and protest, head home and then go and support companies that do the opposite of what your fighting for. That is why protests are flawed. I'd rather be out on a Saturday picking up litter (like I do) than be at a protest and that's not just because I don't support the cause.

I just see the it as a old-fashioned method that doesn't apply to today’s new powers. You can't fight for power and then oppositely go and do the opposite nor can you fight when the power is to corrupt. Level the playing field is all you can do.

Innovate, create and throw it back in their faces and don't sell out when the FANG bites you with your cheque.

> Collective action does work and always will, but it needs to be coordinated.

Of course, but who wants to coordinate it. Why not yourself, adding to who wants to be put on a hit list? I get executed and then what, It all goes back to how it was. The Boeing whistleblowers ended up dead, any recourse from that?
Is there an alternative to Youtube? Even something with a subscription?
Even a Democratic majority in Congress will not help, these people have already demonstrated they do not care about Congress. The only thing that would help is a large enough majority to impeach and remove the president, which is obviously not going to happen.
This is fuelled by notion that law enforcement is incompetent and doesn't work.

If law enforcement won't catch criminal even if you had them all the details, evidence, witnesses, then average person thinks there laws are dead anyway as there is no one competent to enforce them.