MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nmz | 2025-04-16 05:10:27+00:00
For starters, It's not really a linux thing, Xorg runs everywhere, from BSDs to even windows.

Secondly, XDG is a much better standard than FHS and actually supports normal users, needing to be root to install a random application is a security vulnerability waiting to happen.

Lastly XDG is not complicated at all. its around 10 envvars pointing to directories that you have to mkdir, its preferable that you put these paths in your .login as a shellscript so they're static, that's it, that's all.

And its well supported, nearly everyone is moving and using $XDG_CONFIG_HOME which is $HOME/.config instead of throwing their configuration files into $HOME/.MYPROGRAM

FWIW I would love if Everyone just used $HOME/.local/$FHS that way everything is reused

But then again a /tmp/usr/$USER or /var/cache/usr/ should also exist, nobody cares.
by 9rx | 2025-04-16 05:11:39+00:00
But, assuming a democracy, the law is to the will of the people. The very people who you say don't care about animals. After all, if they did care about animals that efficient market that you speak of would force the farmer to comply to animal welfare by market force.

Minimum standards remain useful to weed out scammers and whatnot who still try go against the grain after the market has shifted, but the general consensus has to be on board first, and when that is the case most farmers will have no choice but to comply. Agricultural markets are, as you say, mostly efficient. Far more efficient than most realize.

Of course, the world isn't limited to democracies, so perhaps you are imagining China or something?
by amy_petrik | 2025-04-16 05:11:48+00:00
>This tilts the balance on the whole enough to maintain the health of the network. If you change these, you'd need to introduce other mechanisms to preserve the network incentives.

This is the real key point here. In the P2P wars, only bittorrent was the winner (though the old networks still live on and you can find interesting stuff in them...) - the timeless lesson is leeches need to be getting the short end of the stick, people who give back, the prize bonus. It's a fundamental characteristic of human nature here, tragedy of the common leech or something like that
by JackYoustra | 2025-04-16 05:11:58+00:00
There are quite a few threads on hackernews that were cautiously optimistic about doge with, frankly, pretty naive libertarian takes about how the government works.

The government is not particular (in the sense of particularism) and cannot be easily tuned to fix particular problems; rather, its best solutions come through institutional procedure and design, such as the tension between the FAA and the NTSB that, at a first glance, would seem like obviously needless duplication and waste.

It is a broad, blunt, wasteful instrument to solve broad, blunt problems in a way that may not be the best but that work far, far better than alternatives that have been tried.

That the effort to treat government like a personal budget has ended up destroying important things is a sad inevitability of such efforts. I hope it goes remembered.
by BenjiWiebe | 2025-04-16 05:12:17+00:00
We have one DeLaval robot. It works without internet, except our phones no longer receive the "stop alarms" (something broke, need human) if the robot is offline.

There so far haven't been serious software bugs, only minor/annoying ones. Hardware, on the other hand... Things break, and then it's number one priority to fix it, even if it's 2am Sunday morning. Our poor dealer has received a number of calls in the middle of the night and/or on a weekend.

We're fairly handy though, so a decent number of problems are things we can either fix or invent a workaround for.

Most recent example: the hydraulic pump motor bearing spun in the aluminum housing, and developed so much play that the rotor actually jammed against the stator/armature. Turns out JB Kwik (faster JB Weld, epoxy) actually works to hold a bearing in place. The rotor shaft naturally tended to stay in the center (the other bearing was fine), so the epoxy cured with the bearing in the right spot, and then we were good to go.

The replacement motor has arrived but has not yet been installed.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-16 05:12:51+00:00
I think there will be more elections, but I think they will be fraudulent, because I think Trump has shown he is adept at turning things around and then trying to pretend that what he's doing is analogous to what the other side has done.

For example, a lot of people have forgotten, but the phrase "fake news" originally came about in the wake of the 2016 election about all the (actually false) misinformation that was spread on social media in the run up to the election. Trump adeptly then co-opted the term, so any news he didn't like he could just call it "fake news", and who was to say any news he called fake was any less fake than what people were calling fake before?

My guess is the 2028 elections will be marked by fraud, and then when people protest or object, Trump and the Republicans will just say "Hey, you called all those Jan 6 protesters traitors and said the election was secure, how is now any different? Now you're all the traitors."

The only belief that gives me hope these days is "History will judge the complicit."
by chris_wot | 2025-04-16 05:14:07+00:00
I'm an Australian. We have a guy called Clive Palmer, who has formed a party called (no joke) the "Trumpet of Patriots". It's certain nobody will vote for him. The opposition leader married himself to MAGA (and close to Trump) and now it appears like this will prevent him from winning.

The rest of the world is mostly against Trump.
by seabird | 2025-04-16 05:14:32+00:00
I never said that code review was useless, I said "yes, I do" to your question as to whether or not I "trust other developers to write good code without mistakes without getting it reviewed by others". Of course I can trust them to do the right thing even when nobody's looking, and review it anyway in the off-chance they overlooked something. I can't trust AI to do that.

The purpose of the review is to find and fix occasional small details before it goes to physical testing. It does not involve constant babysitting of the developer. It's a little silly to bring up honesty when you spent that entire comment dancing around the reality that AI makes an inordinately large number of mistakes. I will pick the domain expert who refuses to touch AI over a generic programmer with access to it ten times out of ten.

The entire team as it is now (me included) were juniors. It's a traditional engineering environment in a location where people don't aggressively move between jobs at the drop of a hat. You don't need to constantly train younger developers when you can retain people.
by breppp | 2025-04-16 05:14:50+00:00
I read the Nature article, and I read the seminal work on the subject Orientalism by Said. The context of the article is post-colonialism, a very established philosophical movement. This is shown when they mention whether mathematics is socially constructed and in the actual title "decolonization". I then proceeded to criticize that movement and explain why it is a problem for mathematics.

You and the other poster responded with anger, I do not agree I am the one who is not meaningfully contributing
by namaria | 2025-04-16 05:15:26+00:00
No, mental models matter. This has nothing to do with AGI doomerism.

Knowing implies reasoning. LLMs don't "know" things. These statistical models continuate text. Having a mental model that they "know" things, that they can "reason" or "follow instructions" is driving all sorts of poor decisions.

Software has an abstraction fetish. So much of the material available for learners is riddled with analogies and "you don't need to know that" attitude. That is counter productive and I think having accurate mental models matters.
by panny | 2025-04-16 05:15:43+00:00
>4chan is a reflection of the depraved, extreme side of humanity.

I think moderated forums like this one are the reflection of depraved and extreme. After all, you need to be a depraved and extreme host to try to micromanage what everyone says. People who run sites in such a way must have depraved power fantasies.

Just set up a host and allow people to speak their minds? That sounds like someone who believes the good of humanity will triumph, and the right to speak freely is a fundamental one. Section 230 exists and puts the responsiblity of what is said directly on the poster, not the host. So there really seems no reason not to do this... unless you have depraved and extreme power fantasies about controlling what other people say and think.
by Detrytus | 2025-04-16 05:17:12+00:00
But the point of "living in the forrest is not an option" isn't that the person in question is incapable of surviving there. It is that the society claims ownership of the forrest an will punish you for trying to live there. I mean, try sleeping in your own car in California, or some other US states...

That's just the nature of almost any society: they are actively hostile towards such outliers.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-04-16 05:17:35+00:00
> the most recent C standard was supposed to mandate two’s complement.

While that's true, overflows are not automatically wrapping because they instead may trap for several reasons. (C++ does require wrapping now in comparison. [1])

[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2412.pdf

> memcpy is allowed to start reading early as a performance optimization, [...]

Most modern memcpy implementations would branch on the length anyway, because word-based copying is generally faster than byte-based copying whenever possible. Also many would try SIMD when the copy size exceeds some threshold for the same reason.

>> read an unitialized object, even if I "don't care" what value I get

> You are probably doing something wrong if you do this.

The GP meant the case like this. Consider `struct foo { bool avail; int value; } foos[100];` where `value` would be only set when `avail` is true. If we are summing all available `value`s, we may want to avoid a branch misprediction by something like `accum += foos[i].avail * foos[i].value;` for each `foos[i]`, since the actual `value` shouldn't matter when `avail` is false. But the current specification prohibits this construction because it considers that each read from `foos[i].value` may be different from each other (!). In reality, this kind of issues is so widespread that LLVM has a special "poison" value which gets resolved to some fixed value after the first use.
Ask HN: How can sending emails cost Let's Encrypt five figures?
by rrr_oh_man | 2025-04-16 05:17:48+00:00
https://letsencrypt.org/2025/01/22/ending-expiration-emails/

Quote:

> Providing expiration notifications costs Let’s Encrypt tens of thousands of dollars per year, money that we believe can be better spent on other aspects of our infrastructure.

I'm trying to come up with a scenario in my head where sending, let's say, 2M emails per month at scale with an essentially fully automated service infrastructure can cost more than a grand per month. I'm failing to do so.

My calc: SES pricing is around $0.1 per 1,000 emails. LE has around 550M active certificates. Let's say 5% receive an expiration notice (I never got one?), that's just over 2M emails per month on average.

How can that be? Am I missing something?
by lars_francke | 2025-04-16 05:18:49+00:00
The CVE program was started over 25 years ago. It is very reputable (until yesterday) and it was very much in the interest of the US to be seen as the stewards of this.

The funding requirements can't be that high and I'm willing to bet that other countries and entities would have happily stepped up if they had the chance.

Up until recently CVE was very centralized and only in the last few years have there been steps in more decentralization with CNAs taking more responsibility, Red Hat as a CNA of last-resort etc. So, the cost of doing all of this work has already been shifted partially (!) away from the US but I have not seen any movement towards e.g. moving the program to a foundation which could have been done.

Personally I would conclude that it was the responsibility of the US to pay for this because they wanted to and it was in their best interest to control this program.
by ako | 2025-04-16 05:19:18+00:00
Sounds like it is capable of thinking in abstract concepts instead of words that are related/connected? So that training material in different languages would all add to knowledge on the same concepts?

It is like a student in school that is really brilliant in learning by heart, and repeating the words it studied, but not understanding the concept versus a student that actually understands the topic and can reason about the concepts.
by Wilfred | 2025-04-16 05:19:44+00:00
> Rust's users find the module system even more difficult than the borrow checker. I've tried to figure out why, and figure out how to explain it better, for years now.

The module system in Rust is conceptually huge, and I feel it needs a 'Rust modules: the good parts' resource to guide people.

(1) There are five different ways to use `pub`. That's pretty overwhelming, and in practice I almost never see `pub(in foo)` used.

(2) It's possible to have nested modules in a single file, or across multiple files. I almost never see modules with braces, except `mod tests`.

(3) It's possible to have either foo.rs or foo/mod.rs. It's also possible to have both foo.rs and foo/bar.rs, which feels inconsistent.

(4) `use` order doesn't matter, which can make imports hard to reason about. Here's a silly example:

use foo::bar; use bar::foo;

(Huge fan of your writing, by the way!)
by bruce511 | 2025-04-16 05:20:29+00:00
>>They thought they voted for something different

Like what exactly? I mean the guy ran on cutting the budget by 2 trillion. In his last term he gave tax breaks yo the rich. Where did they think the cuts were coming from?

He ran very hard on raising tarrifs. Which demonstrably raise prices (thats literally their goal.) But now people claim "I didn't vote for this."

In truth they voted for him because he was the Republican on offer and they're die-hard Republican. The Republican party has made no secret of its agenda for decades.

I get it, people are good at cognitive dissonance. But this is the place for blunt truth. They voted for this. I'm not letting Republicans got off the hook here. They voted for this.

Just like to my Republican friends who are upset that CVE is cut. You voted for this. The general public benefit from CVE even though they dont know it exists. Just like you benefitted from dozens of other programs you didn't know existed, but have also been cut.

That's the problem with cuts. They ultimately end up hurting everyone.

Now clearly there's some fat that could be trimmed. Companies do it all the time. Done well its good. Swinging a hatchet in a crowded elevator does not seem like "Done well".
by 2ton_jeff | 2025-04-16 05:20:37+00:00
Very cool and I like the idea of a "meta-assembler." The most-recent version of flatassembler (fasm 2) is built with fasmg which is also a "meta-assembler" of sorts, in that it also doesn't directly support a specific instruction set and instead is a very powerful macro assembler. I'm keen to check out functionality overlaps between the two implementations.

https://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=19389

https://flatassembler.net/download.php
by mjevans | 2025-04-16 05:22:56+00:00
It seems phrasing it in the form of a joke was too much.

I was trying to convey (with levity/humor) WHY it should continue to be funded as well as the argument that should be made to the one currently in control of the spineless US Congress.

Yes, fixing the vulnerabilities is important. However what the government probably does gain from it is an inside advantage in the lead time for vulnerabilities to protect against, as well as to exploit on adversaries.
by aaaja | 2025-04-16 05:23:40+00:00
As any other readers of this thread will be able to observe, your response is a useful example of how misogynistic attitudes stifle discussion on women's issues.

Instead of engaging with curiosity and open-mindedness towards an expert UN report on this issue adversely affecting women and girls, you chose shallow, snarky dismissal and sarcastic quips.

Your reflexive refusal to take women's safety and fairness in sport seriously speaks volumes about your view of women more generally.

Thanks for linking the report though, even if it was just to cherry-pick bits of it to lazily sneer at. It gives other readers an easier way to click through and engage with the content thoughtfully.
by ngneer | 2025-04-16 05:24:20+00:00
Spot on. Vulnerability scanners that make up an organizational Security Score (TM) tend to operate at the wrong level of abstraction, flagging some library somewhere that never runs and has nothing to do with your production flow or architecture, or some test keys with zero security impact. Go explain that to management, because obviously the security tools are right and you are wrong. This sad state of affairs is unfortunately the best that the security industry has been able to deliver. Trying to wrangle complexity by adding more complexity is the craziest notion to me. Yes, no scoring scheme is perfect, but when the scheme introduces more noise, what have we gained (well, security vendors gain, but what have organizations gained).
by drivingmenuts | 2025-04-16 05:24:26+00:00
I don't think the people running the FTC care what happens so long as they land a huge sum of money to satisfy their boss. I suspect the FTC is not long for this world anyway and after this, it'll be a much more direct threat. Maybe I'm too paranoid and pessimistic, but a year ago that wouldn't even have been a consideration. Now, it's a possibility.
by karel-3d | 2025-04-16 05:24:30+00:00
Newer Ghostscript versions are Affero GPL, that might be problem for some people, although probably not for 4chan (they don't modify it so it should be fine)

(incidentally I am now working on compiling this old GPL ghostscript to webassembly with file isolation... it works fine... but the compilation is kind of annoying)
by mikeyouse | 2025-04-16 05:24:42+00:00
There’s lots of fascism before the goose stepping but in the past week the President confirmed he’d like to send US citizens to a foreign gulag, he continues to ignore a Supreme Court ruling to bring home a previously and illegally deported man, he threatened Harvard that he’d strip their nonprofit status since they resisted his inane demands for conservative-DEI, he initiated several investigations using the state security apparatus of former government employees he deemed enemies and the richest man in the world (who donated 9 figures to get the President elected) continues to illegally impound funding from across the government including every organization that regulates the companies he runs. Oh and they’re planning a $100M military parade for the president’s birthday. Things aren’t great!
Reverse Engineering ps2 slim in 2025
by alvinliju44 | 2025-04-16 05:25:32+00:00
i got a ps2 from a front the first thought when i got the thing in my hand was if i can port linux on it or not, I know people have done it and i am 20yr s late but i still wanna figure out how to reverse engineer this piece of tech and understand in and outs of it.

For past 2 days i'm running on 3 cans of redbull trying to do the same thing due to a faulty mod chip which was installed on the board it wasnt booting properly so i sat down with my multimeter going through every pin to see if every component is working and realised the whole video processing chip is bad but i still stayed up last night talking to diffrent reapir man i found from google trying to figure out whats the issue and one guy told me he would send me on for dirt cheap.

So how to do this properly this time? How to learn proper reverse engineering? How to understand how the CPU works? how to understand how the EE works? how can i port linux or DOOM into it..
by lars_francke | 2025-04-16 05:26:27+00:00
ENISA in Europe has the mandate of building a EU vulnerability database for the NIS 2 directive anyway and it's coming soon...

And CIRCL in Luxembourg are providing vulnerability-lookup which can also assign IDs but in a more decentralized way: https://www.vulnerability-lookup.org/documentation/

VulnerableCode can help with discovery etc. https://vulnerablecode.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction...

So, parts of this are already in place and I assume this will be a big boost towards a new vulnerability ecosystem.
by duskwuff | 2025-04-16 05:27:45+00:00
> With the AGPL license being legal kryptonite I wonder if license compatibility drove the decision

Unlikely. There's a number of other strong indications that basic maintenance was being neglected, including shell transcripts showing that at least one server was running FreeBSD 10.1 (released in 2014, end-of-life in 2018), and PHP code using the mysql extension (which was deprecated in PHP 5.6 = 2014 and removed in PHP 7.0 = 2015).

It's probably not a coincidence that 4chan was sold to a new owner in 2015.
by markhahn | 2025-04-16 05:29:55+00:00
I'm curious by what means you think Trump can be bargained with.

Do you mean things like handsfull of like-minded countries selling t-bonds? No one in the R party has any leverage, and it's not clear that even a few US billionaires could exert any influence.

Do you really think Trump has ever heard of "CVE" or could comprehend them?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-16 05:30:09+00:00
> otherwise ö would always come after z

Really? Wouldn't that depend on how you spelled it and what kind of Unicode ordering you specified?

Which comes first?

'\u0047\u00f6\u0064\u0065\u006c' '\u0047\u006f\u0308\u0064\u0065\u006c'
by bamboozled | 2025-04-16 05:30:11+00:00
Maybe there was more demand for cheaper stuff in the US because wages had been rather stagnant in relation to production efficiency for decades?

There is absolutely no way people with money just choose to pay more for goods, it just doesn't happen. People with money are shrewd.

People choose to buy cheaper because they can get more with their money. It's really as simple as that.

I personally buy Patagonia clothing for all sorts of reasons, but I could still get a somewhat comparable jacket for 1/5th or less of their stuff. Most people just buy a down jacket from uniqlo even though they could afford to buy from Patagonia.