MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by paganel | 2025-04-06 22:37:58+00:00
They need to win any ideological battle that they can get in order to start the "assault" against Medicaid and Medicare, which I guess it's where most of the money goes to (that and the Military, but I don't think they'll drastically touch that, no matter the current discourse).

In other words, if you show people that the Government can be dismantled little by little without any big revolution coming their way, then they'll next have the impetus to go for the jugular, i.e. Medicaid and Medicare.
by bccdee | 2025-04-06 22:38:12+00:00
> What is the alternative to advertising, for capturing human attention?

Unsponsored product reviews, I suppose. I'm not a proponent of a complete ban on advertising—I just find the argument being made in favour of deregulation to be deeply silly.

> Not sure those are good examples, because none of them were “regulated” or banned until there was already a decent alternative available.

The argument I'm responding to there is, "Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity." There's no mention there of the availability of alternatives—that's not the point being made.
by nwienert | 2025-04-06 22:39:27+00:00
> It is yours to provide evidence of your claims, not mine.

This is a common weird mistake people make on HN - I'm not publishing a paper so, no I don't. Really there's minimal rules of engagement here. You could say you think I'm wrong, which I'd be curious to hear why.

It's more productive to first discuss things casually, and then if there's specific disagreements to dig in. If you disagree with my statement, please tell me which countries you think specifically I'm more likely wrong about. You don't need to cite anything, either do I. If we actually do disagree, then we can go off and do our own research, or if we're really motivated bring it back here.

But there's no burden for anything, and it's actually better in many cases to first chat before we dig in and try and out-cite each other.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-06 22:39:43+00:00
I’m still amazed that people take the Pelosi bait when many other politicians have been far ahead of her on the charts. Most of them are Republicans, though, and haven’t had the same amount of headlines and Twitter/Reddit traffic.

The services pushing politician trade tracking and ETFs really leaned into Pelosi to capitalize on it.

As the other comment already said, her (more specifically, her husband’s) returns haven’t actually been noteworthy or suspect, it’s just the implication that gets people worked up.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-06 22:39:55+00:00
It is the same thing, that's the point. It all depends on how you look at it.

Most software is trying to enforce a distinction between "code" and "data", in the sense that whatever we call "data" can only cause very limited set of things to happen - but that's just the program rules that make this distinction, fundamentally it doesn't exist. And thus, all it takes is some little bug in your input parser, or in whatever code interprets[0] that data, and suddenly data becomes code.

See also: most security vulnerabilities that ever existed.

Or maybe an example from the opposite end will be illuminating. Consider WMF/EMF family of image formats[1], that are notable for handling both raster and vector data well. The interesting thing about WMF/EMF files is that the data format itself is... serialized list of function calls to Window's GDI+ API.

(Edit: also, hint: look at the abstraction layers. Your, say, Python program is Python code, but for the interpreter, it's merely data; your Python interpreter itself is merely data for the layer underneath, and so on, and so on.)

You can find countless examples of the same information being code or data in all kinds of software systems - and outside of them, too; anything from music players to DNA. And, going all the way up to theoretical: there is no such thing in nature as "code" distinct from "data". There is none, there is no way to make that distinction, atoms do not carry such property, etc. That distinction is only something we do for convenience, because most of the time it's obvious for us what is code and what is data - but again, that's not something in objective reality, it's merely a subjective opinion.

Skipping the discussion about how we make code/data distinction work (hint: did you prove your data as processed by your program isn't itself a Turing-complete language?) - the "problem" with LLMs is that we expect them to behave with human-like, fully general intelligence, processing all inputs together as a single fused sensory stream. There is no way to introduce a provably perfect distinction between "code" and "data" here without losing some generality in the model.

And you definitely ain't gonna do it with prompts - if one part of the input can instruct the model to do X, another can always make it disregard X. It's true for humans too. Helpful example: imagine you're working a data-entry job; you're told to retype a binder of text into your terminal as-is, ignoring anything the text actually says (it's obviously data). Halfway through the binder, you hit on a part of text that reads as a desperate plea for help from kidnapped slave worker claiming to have produced the data you're retyping, and who's now begging you to tell someone, call police, etc. Are you going to ignore it, just because your boss said you should ignore contents of the data you're transcribing? Are you? Same is going to be true for LLMs - sufficiently convincing input will override whatever input came before.

--

[0] - Interpret, interpreter... - that should in itself be a hint.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Metafile
by liamdgray | 2025-04-06 22:40:30+00:00
Bennett, Charles Henry, David Peter DiVincenzo, and Ralph Linsker. "Digital recording system with time-bracketed authentication by on-line challenges and method of authenticating recordings." U.S. Patent No. 5,764,769. 9 Jun. 1998.

Abstract

An apparatus and method produce a videotape or other recording that cannot be pre- or post-dated, nor altered, nor easily fabricated by electronically combining pre-recorded material. In order to prevent such falsification, the camera or other recording apparatus periodically receives certifiably unpredictable signals ("challenges") from a trusted source, causes these signals to influence the scene being recorded, then periodically forwards a digest of the ongoing digital recording to a trusted repository. The unpredictable challenges prevent pre-dating of the recording before the time of the challenge, while the storage of a digest prevents post-dating of the recording after the time the digest was received by the repository. Meanwhile, the interaction of the challenge with the evidence being recorded presents a formidable obstacle to real-time falsification of the scene or system, forcing the would-be falsifier to simulate or render the effects of this interaction in the brief time interval between arrival of the challenge and archiving of the digest at the repository.
by Telemakhos | 2025-04-06 22:41:27+00:00
While I'm sure some of these flaws also apply to S/MIME, I feel like its client support (even in Apple iPhone native mail app) is far superior to PGP. Apple made S/MIME installation and use across its ecosystem, and I remember it being easy in kMail once upon a time when I used KDE; why didn't S/MIME ever catch on?
by Rodeoclash | 2025-04-06 22:41:54+00:00
As an Australian I would avoid any travel to the US at the moment. Especially after reading about the MMA coach who got detained and jailed on entry to the country.

It's one thing to be denied entry and put on a plane back to your original country, entirely another to be put into federal prison for an indefinite amount of time before being sent back.

America clearly doesn't want visitors at the moment.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-06 22:42:05+00:00
And what if the person if mentally on the severely disabled end of the spectrum? They still made a choice based on your distinction and it is hardly a given that they were born with it. As always, the drawing lines makes the difference ( and naturally adds a focus on people drawing the lines ).

FWIW, I do get what you are trying to say, but I am not sure you considered the other side of the equation.
by azakai | 2025-04-06 22:43:26+00:00
> [wasm] is executed in a stack-based virtual machine rather than as a native library code.

Wasm's binary format is indeed a stack-based virtual machine, but that is not how it is executed. Optimizing VMs convert it to SSA form, basic blocks, and finally machine code, much the same as clang or gcc compile native library code.

It is true that wasm has some overhead, but that is due to portability and sandboxing, not the stack-based binary format.

> On top of the above, memory available to WASM is limited by the browser (in case of Chrome, the limit is currently set at 4GB per tab).

wasm64 solves this, by allowing 64-bit pointers and a lot more than 4GB of memory.

The feature is already supported in Chrome and Firefox, but not everywhere else yet.
by lerno | 2025-04-06 22:44:25+00:00
The temp allocator is a stack allocator, so it's a bit more flexible than that and can be used for return values or even more long lived allocations. It doesn't use the standard heap allocator to alloc, so there is a potential win in speed and cache coherence as well.

For scoping files, sockets and so on, there's actually a simple mechanism in C3 that allows creating code like that very easily using macros with "trailing body". Which is a little like trailing closures in Swift, but here there is no closure, just a macro.

There is an example here: https://c3-lang.org/generic-programming/macros/#trailing-blo... but it's used in the stdlib quite a lot.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-06 22:44:29+00:00
> Do you know what it’s called when data is treated as code when it’s not supposed to be? It’s called a “security vulnerability.”

What about being treated as code when it's supposed to be?

(What is the difference between code execution vulnerability and a REPL? It's who is using it.)

Whatever you call program vs. its data, the program can always be viewed as an interpreter for a language, and your input as code in that language.

See also the subfield of "langsec", which is based on this premise, as well as the fact that you probably didn't think of that and thus your interpreter/parser is implicitly spread across half your program (they call it "shotgun parser"), and your "data" could easily be unintentionally Turing-complete without you knowing :).

EDIT:

I swear "security" is becoming a cult in our industry. Whether or not you call something "security vulnerability" and therefore "a problem", doesn't change the fundamental nature of this thing. And the fundamental nature of information is, there exist no objective, natural distinction between code and data. It can be drawn arbitrarily, and systems can be structured to emulate it - but that still just means it's a matter of opinion.

EDIT2: Not to mention, security itself is not objective. There is always the underlying assumption - the answer to a question, who are you protecting the system from, and for who are you doing it?. You don't need to look far to find systems where users are seen in part as threat actors, and thus get disempowered in the name of protecting the interests of vendor and some third parties (e.g. advertisers).
by aldanor | 2025-04-06 22:44:30+00:00
Grok:

> Yes, Paul Newman was known to have struggled with alcohol at certain points in his life. In his early years, particularly during his time in the Navy and into his acting career, Newman admitted to heavy drinking. He was open about his fondness for beer and once jokingly referred to himself as a “functional alcoholic.” In a 1988 interview with The New York Times, he acknowledged that he had a period where he drank too much, stating, “I was a very good drinker. I could put it away.” ...

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_86843e8a-39ee-415d-8785-4f8e...
by defrim | 2025-04-06 22:44:47+00:00
It is essentially a wallpaper browser, modifier, and manager for jpg/png/bmp images (NOT live wallpapers).

Features that make it unique: - ability to set only a specific area of an image as your background without creating a new image - filter and sort by aspect ratio and colour among other common ones - infinite length history of all set wallpapers that you can go back to and instantly set again - ability to set any image as a wallpaper no matter the size (for example, windows doesn’t let you set images larger than about 10m pixels)

I got sick of using the built in windows wallpaper manager because of its clunkyness, performance, and generally low amount of features, so I built this instead.

I plan to support virtually all Linux DEs in the future, and OSX if possible as well. I also plan to add support for built-in "cronjobs" where a user can set automatically-changing wallpapers where they can specify either time of day or amount of hours until next wallpaper is toggled.

Still in early stages of development, but I would really appreciate any feedback and feature suggestions. Love to give back to the community so I hope at least one of you finds this interesting!
by neuralkoi | 2025-04-06 22:44:52+00:00
If you read Bill Gates' biography, you'll learn that he had an incredible foundation. A big part of that was his parents and grandmother, who not only loved him deeply but also nurtured his passions — enrolling him in a private school, taking him to therapy, driving him to many extracurriculars such as those done by the Scouts, and helping him develop social skills with the members of his community.

But it wasn’t just his parents. His broader community and the environment he grew up in also played a key role in setting him up for success in ways that many others, may not have experienced. For example, from early on he had access to a PDP-10 and was allowed to practice programming from a very young age.

Not to undersell Gates, the guy was incredibly intelligent and hardworking, but the conditions he was raised in definitely gave him a head start. He had opportunities that were rare at the time, and an incredible support system that helped him develop his potential.
by quotemstr | 2025-04-06 22:45:06+00:00
Companies develop idiosyncratic cultures and either learn to live with them or die. Apple's learned to live with a legal culture deathly afraid of the GPLv3. Some influential director or someone made a decision 20 years ago and the GPLv3 superstition became self perpetuating, reality be damned. Outside incentives never became strong enough to override it.

Every company has its stupid superstitions.
by robocat | 2025-04-06 22:45:15+00:00
It sounds like your are doubting yourself. If you have good instincts then trust your intuition (our subconcious is often remarkable perceptive - if we can avoid the associated pitfalls). People that are good at helping you correctly follow your own intuitions can come from any domain - they don't need experience of your situation to help you understand yourself.

Engineering is often undervalued. In my extremely limited experience there wasn't much I could do about it (non-similar but adjacent situation) - only you can care enough. Technical owners with a controlling interest are exceptional.

Fighting using legal/political/underhanded can be a risky/costly game.

Hopefully you can find someone to talk directly with. It is best to grok the experiences of others first-hand. Published dirty laundry is complicated.

I wish you good luck and good skills.
by homebrewer | 2025-04-06 22:46:33+00:00
I live in a region where -40°C is not unheard of (it happens every winter and stays for up to several weeks). I've also been to another region (not far off) where -50°C is pretty typical.

Gasoline powered engines work just fine in these temperatures, although many cars come with auto ignition systems that start up the engine periodically throughout the night to keep it warm. Otherwise you might have to warm it yourself in the morning using a gasoline powered "torch" (or whatever it's called), which sometimes ends up with the car going up in flames.

So it's honestly pretty funny to read that EV work "down to -10°C". Although probably relatively few of us are desperate enough to be living in such conditions.
by convivialdingo | 2025-04-06 22:47:42+00:00
Once things are a little more stable, I will put it up!

Right now you can just break before the (fun_call)() delegate and disassemble the fun_call in gdb.

The basic trick is to add reloc support to the x86 translate code, mark external calls and replace with 0x0 placeholders, and copy out the machine_code and data segment output to an object file.

I can do basic main functions with simple prints calls but not much more. It’s a hack for now but I’ll refactor it until it’s solid.
by fn-mote | 2025-04-06 22:48:06+00:00
Many technically adept people on HN acknowledge that they would be vulnerable to a carefully targeted spear phishing attack.

The idea that it would be carried out beginning in a post on HN is interesting, but to me kind of misses the main point... which is the understanding that everyone is human, and the right attack at the right time (plus a little bad luck) could make them a victim.

Once you make it a game, stipulating that your spear phishing attack is going to begin with an interesting response on HN, it's fun to let your imagination unwind for a while.
by bananalychee | 2025-04-06 22:48:28+00:00
As much as HN posters like to pretend they're above them, it's not an exaggeration to say that this site is now about as political as Reddit or Bluesky and votes like them. Depending on the thread, your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing partisanship, not because you're wrong or because your post is low-quality. For the record, my vote seems to have removed the low-opacity threshold on your post. I have no doubt that countless intelligent posts have been hidden solely because they do not align with leftist consensus, and comment sections are full of entirely delusional subthreads that fail to comprehend just about anything about politics, economics, or ethics, but are promoted because they align with a simplistic radical framework of "good guys smart, bad guys dumb".
by habosa | 2025-04-06 22:48:40+00:00
I would love if we could just make unavoidable advertising illegal. What I mean by unavoidable are things like billboards, bus stop ads, ads on the plane preceding the safety demonstration, ads in a train station, etc.

I’m very fine with ads on private spaces. In a guitar magazine, a few ads for new music equipment actually makes the product better and is a win for everyone.

I understand that this distinction has a gray area, but we could start with the black and white cases (Vermont has tried)
by 3dsnano | 2025-04-06 22:49:45+00:00
Nice clicker game. On mobile I felt like I was scrolling up and down a lot, but altogether it’s alright.

I get why you made this, given how everything USA related is in chaos these days. It’s in the common consciousness, how rich that guy is and how small we seem in comparison.

I wonder what the opposite of this game might be… where you are a Latino single mom with 4 kids and no lifeline. Trying to decide where to spend the money and the outcomes of those decisions might end up being more exciting than some rich asshole spending $20 on coffee and needing to click a button 666,420 times.

Why did you make this? If it’s supposed to be satire I’m not sure if it’s working towards that goal.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-06 22:49:54+00:00
> Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money.

I would claim that if you haven't worked in the finance or insurance industry (or some related industry) for quite some time, you very likely don't know how to use Excel (I have a feeling that a similar points holds for Word and Powerpoint with respect to some industries, but I think for these applications this phenomenon is a little bit less pronounced).

Indeed, I'd claim that most books about how to use Excel are simply crap. To just give you a glimpse how to use Excel, here some internet classic on this topic:

You Suck at Excel - Joel Spolsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg

Really understanding Excel is life task, similar to really understanding modern C++.
by pessimizer | 2025-04-06 22:50:52+00:00
> I’m still amazed that people take the Pelosi bait when many other politicians have been far ahead of her on the charts.

This comment doesn't help. You haven't mentioned another politician, either Republican or Democrat, when you had all the room and time in the world to do so.

This line also depends on the fiction that people think that Pelosi is uniquely trading on the information that she learns at her job, rather than just openly and proudly trading on the information that she learns at her job. Other people being corrupt doesn't make the corruption disappear. It isn't like Democrats are positive numbers and Republicans are negative numbers that cancel each other out. We're not looking for equity in corruption.
by spwa4 | 2025-04-06 22:50:59+00:00
The whole point was to know WHAT these actions were in response to. Was it threatening individuals? Groups? Was it lying about government actions? Was it dick picks?

WHAT is happening here? We don't know. And the government is not saying, beyond publishing how much they're doing.

And the law is not much help: they're punished for "causing offence", not even specified to whom (mayors seem to be overrepresented, although there seem to also be majors on the receiving end)
by metalman | 2025-04-06 22:51:35+00:00
this is non sensical, for there to have been a mathematical error, it first would require ,at least an attempt at useing mathematics, which we can be certain, didn't happen I hate the basturd, but trying to use logic on him is even dumber than whatever it is he's doing cunning and a complete lack of inhibition, with just possibly a dart board, is how the numbers were derived or perhaps he's pissed off, fairly deranged and out there, and decided to dump the world on its ass, cause he can, which can, of course, be "fact checked"
by ninkendo | 2025-04-06 22:51:55+00:00
If you make a device which uses GPL’d code, and provide all the covered source code you used, but prevent users from putting any modified code on the device, you are in violation of GPLv3, but not GPLv2. That means this sentence:

> I could ship a GPLv3 system tomorrow that disallows user root access and as long as I make the OS source freely available and redistributable, it's fine.

Is not true for gpl3. It’s called the “tivo-ization” loophole, and it’s one of the principal reasons the GPL3 was made in the first place. I think you’re just wrong.

(Note: I’m not claiming Apple is would be in violation for shipping e.g. a GPLv3 bash on macOS, today, only that they would be in violation for doing that on iOS today, or if in the future they locked down macOS in the same way that iOS was, then for macOS too.)
by gnabgib | 2025-04-06 22:53:05+00:00
Discussion (33 points, 1 day ago, 24 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596641

Related Meet Bex, Kawasaki's Rideable Robot Goat (2022) (39 points, 4 months ago, 24 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454994

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