MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diggernet | 2025-04-26 02:05:02+00:00
> "Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.”

> Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources.

Which permission is that, and how do you detect which apps are doing that and stop them?
by whaleofatw2022 | 2025-04-26 02:07:04+00:00
I have a few thoughts on this:

First, the tech boom of the last decade, made it REALLY EASY for a lot of folks to get into the industry. Unfortunately a lot of bad managers and the like got their tendrils in during the process and boondoggles are a lot more frequent, leading to less room for productive devs.

Second, the change in tax rules has led to having to manage developer cash flow differently.

As far as bifurcation, if anything we are regressing in that regard. More than one company I've seen has tried to get rid of QA by turning them into another role, typically engineer (and guess what, that usually means engineers now also double as QAs)
by alnwlsn | 2025-04-26 02:07:19+00:00
A lot of deserved criticism in the comments here tonight, but more generally, I have to ask - what's the deal with all these code/text to CAD/PCB things?

There's a half dozen of them in any category, they are all different, they all seem to struggle badly with anything outside of simple examples, none of them appear to consider how things fit together in the real world, you almost never see any of them used for anything more complicated than a keyboard layout or an LED matrix, they all have reinvented the wheel instead of using industry standard formats, and they all talk about the "difficulty of using traditional tools" as though placing each XY point in space in your head is easier than dragging things around the screen like in MS Paint. You also never see any serious hardware people use them. Every one wants to do it all from keyboard to finished product instead of being satisfied as a intermediate tool that does one thing well.

But, they all have very polished documentation, they come with examples, they have nice looking websites, and it's obvious someone put a decent amount of thought into making them. It's not like they are useless either. Making a big grid of things? It's nice to be able to write an algorithm to do that instead of entering them by hand.

I brought this up in that post about the LLM to CAD thing the other day. It's like people keep saying "hardware is hard" but then keep trying to solve it like they would work on software problems.
by otterley | 2025-04-26 02:07:26+00:00
That math doesn’t add up. If I buy a $100,000 car for $80,000, and I sell it to someone for $60,000, the recipient still gets a $40,000 discount.

And if you pretend that there is no subsidy, and the original owner paid $80,000 just because it cost that much unsubsidized, the second buyer still gets the same discount off the original purchase price.

So the fact that the car was originally subsidized isn’t relevant.
by michaelmrose | 2025-04-26 02:09:49+00:00
The sum of those small slices is already great. There is no logical reason to react only to each individual event and not the sum of them or better yet the sum or what has been openly planned.

In the face of obvious fascism those who would be "turned against" their fellows by dint of honest and justified alarm are already "against" them now. They can only be opposed not convinced. They are either honest villains or live virtually entirely in their fantasy wholly disconnected from reality.
by anenefan | 2025-04-26 02:09:51+00:00
My younger bro is convinced phones are eavesdropping on conversations and got particularly paranoid (I thought) a year or so back in regard to talking in earshot of his phone.

His evidence is empirical - Apparently he gets pretty high with friends and shit talks - but when when the search started to suggest some pretty way out things along the same lines, he landed that their conversations weren't private any more.

So I have an understanding of how much tracking is going on so I pressed him on that. But he assured me it was stuff he would not even bother to look up in a clearer mindset and of course smoking recreationally for a very long time knows not to go near some tools that could land himself trouble or awkward explanations. That's probably true he says a lot of stuff that a half decent search would put him straight. In the end I just figured loose permissions of one of the many apps he's installed and that's how they (the app) make their money, selling illegally obtained data to more legal sources.

Permissions are the problem with android phones - there needs to be a specific install route for users, one that the app starts asking for things it should not need have access to, the installer refuses to install and suggests the user look for something better. Camera apps for example really don't need access to communication channels, if it's updates it's need, it can ask - one time access.
by viraptor | 2025-04-26 02:09:57+00:00
It's a bit of a balance once you get bigger dependencies. A generic autoconf is annoying to write, but rarely an issue when packaging for a distro. Most issues I've had to fix in nixpkgs were for custom builds unfortunately.

But if you don't plan to distribute things widely (or have no deps).. Whatever, just do what works for you.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-26 02:10:06+00:00
Curry is very recognisably the functional programmer's conception of what logic programing is, which is the way it's described in the SICP book. Nothing to do with Resolution, Horn clauses, or even unification, instead it's all about DFS with backtracking. Sometimes dictionaries (!) have something to do with it [1].

I'm speaking from personal experience here. DFS with backtracking has always featured very prominently in discussions I've had with functional programming folks about logic programming and Prolog and for a while I didn't understand why. Well it's because they have an extremely simplified, reductive model of logic programming in mind. As a consequence there's a certain tendency to dismiss logic programming as overly simplistic. I remember a guy telling me the simplest exercise in some or other of the classic functional programming books is implementing Prolog in (some kind of) Lisp and it's so simple! I told him the simplest exercise in Prolog is implementing Prolog in Prolog but I don't think he got what I meant because what the hell is a Prolog meta-interpreter anyway [2]?

I've also noticed that functional programmers are scared of unification - weird pattern matching on both sides, why would anyone ever need that? They're also freaked out by the concept of logic varibles and what they call "patterns with holes" like [a,b,C,D,_,E] which are magickal and mysterious, presumably because you have to jump through hoops to do something like that in Lisp. Like you have to jump through hoops to treat your code as data, as you say.

And of course if you drop Resolution, you drop SLD-Resolution, and if you drop SLD-Resolution you drop the Horn clauses, whose big advantage is that they make SLD-Resolution a piece of cake. Hence the monstrous abomination of "logic programming" languages that look like ... Haskell. Or sometimes like Scheme.

Beh, rant over. It's late. Go to sleep grandma. yes yes you did it all with Horn clauses in your time yadda yadda...

___________

[1] Like in this MIT lecture by H. Abelson, I believe with G. Sussman looking on:

https://youtu.be/rCqMiPk1BJE?si=VBOWeS-K62qeWax8

[2] It's a Prolog interpreter written in Prolog. Like this:

prove(true):- !. %OMG prove((Literal,Literals):- prove(Literal) ,prove(Literals). prove(Literal):- Literal \= (_,_) ,clause(Literal,Body) ,prove(Body).

Doubles as a programmatic definition of SLD-Resolution.
by casey2 | 2025-04-26 02:10:50+00:00
It's exactly this kind of structuralism induced fatalism that makes more towns than ought shit.

If you know a town is shit, it's your moral obligation to tell them so that their kids and smart residents move out. Post 2000s progressive seem to think that Towns, religions and culture can form opinions. They are trying to be "empathetic" and so get tricked by scammers who personally benefit from these horrible situations.
Show HN: Telert – Telegram/Slack/Desktop alerts when terminal commands finish
by mihirkhandekar | 2025-04-26 02:12:01+00:00
I created a small tool called telert that notifies you when your terminal commands complete. It is lightweight, easy to install, and simple to plug into your daily workflow.

Key features: - Command-line utility and Python hook - Cross-platform support (Telegram, Teams, Slack, desktop notifications, and audio alerts) - Customizable messages with status codes and output - Auto-notify when a command takes longer to complete

Quick start: pip install telert telert config audio (to enable audio alerts) sleep 3 | telert (get notified when the command finishes)

GitHub repository: https://github.com/navig-me/telert

I originally built this to get quick alerts for myself while running long bash or Python scripts, and thought it might help others too. Would love any feedback, suggestions, or ideas to improve it.
by hyfgfh | 2025-04-26 02:12:43+00:00
People have the notion that tech workers are overpaid man-children that have to be babysat by their companies

The reality is, we're constantly dealing with increasingly tighter deadlines and unreasonable demands to deliver products that, even if they make it to market, are likely to be shut down within five years. We're basically glorified sandcastle builders

With AI, things have gotten even worse, people now believe everything is easy just because they can build a to-do app with a prompt
by simonw | 2025-04-26 02:13:04+00:00
I don't think this is just about RSS:

> So, how do we decide and filter for ourselves? My favored approach is fairly old fashioned: Chains of trust. We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we're looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention.

This goes for any form of social media beyond just blogs. Find people who have good taste, good judgement and demonstrate their credibility in the subjects that matter to you. Collect those people - follow them on social media, hang out with them on Discord, attend events that they go to, subscribe to their blogs and their newsletters, read their papers (for academia), pay attention to the people THEY respect.

Repeat that a bunch of times and you can become incredibly well informed on almost any topic.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-26 02:13:20+00:00
> Permissions are the problem with android phones - there needs to be a specific install route for users, one that the app starts asking for things it should not need have access to, the installer refuses to install and suggests the user look for something better. Camera apps for example really don't need access to communication channels, if it's updates it's need, it can ask - one time access.

I definitely don't want my phone making those decisions for me; I want my phone enabling me to make decisions. The app asks for permissions, I say no, and, rather than ratting me out to the app, my phone does its best to pretend to the app that it (the app) has the permission it wants, say by giving an empty contact book or whatever. (I know rooted phones can do this, but it shouldn't have to be something I have to fight my phone for.)
by jhanschoo | 2025-04-26 02:13:26+00:00
Yes, you can't prove important properties of the class of all programs, but you can prove properties of smaller, limited classes of programs that you are interested in.

So the Java IDE had been able to recognize an infinite loop of the kind you wrote by an algorithm, that can be proven to be correct for a limited class.

On the other hand, you can loop infinitely deciding to exit on the return value of opaque calls to some entity external to your analyzer, and your IDE shouldn't be able to catch that.
by hsuduebc2 | 2025-04-26 02:14:13+00:00
That’s an absolutely valid point — it’s important to prevent discussions from devolving into chaotic political battles. But there is a clear limit to how far you can go. When moderation starts suppressing or de-emphasizing information simply because it doesn’t align with a certain viewpoint — even when that information is objectively true — it’s no longer moderation, it’s censorship. What’s happening around Wikipedia shows how quickly the protection of truth can turn into political pressure: when a platform is accused of "propaganda" simply because its content is inconvenient for certain groups. I really hope we are not yet at the point where mere disagreement automatically makes someone a propagandist who must be silenced by force.
by rpgwaiter | 2025-04-26 02:14:34+00:00
“People on the left think this is good because it makes giving social services easier”

Source? I’d like to meet a single person that feels this way. People on the left in my experience would much rather just give money directly to people, UBI-style. Adding stipulations and verification and administration costs so much money that could just be cash in people’s pockets.

Like, the whole idea of food stamps is that “these poor people are too stupid or deviant to spend money on the ‘correct’ products and services. Daddy government knows best and will restrict the benefits to processed cold food at approved chain supermarkets and gas stations”
by michaelmrose | 2025-04-26 02:15:10+00:00
Be clear what over reactions are you talking about in the context of rise of the nazis and what overreactions do you see here?

Building a personal army and pissing in the woods whilst you drill and prepare for civil war 2.0 electric boogaloo would be an overreaction, this is a strongly worded letter against arresting judges. This is the absolute minimum anyone could possibly be expected to do.
by lelandbatey | 2025-04-26 02:15:29+00:00
"Manufacturing jobs" doesn't mean doing the same job as in the 60s. Human productivity improves by offloading more to machines/tools/processes while having the humans manage other things. A human making cars now is not moving their limbs twice as fast as humans in the 60s, they're using tools that get the job done 3x faster than the person in the 60s. The jobs are actually quite different across time, but we colloquially call both "manufacturing jobs".
by MaxLeiter | 2025-04-26 02:21:01+00:00
That’s all Gemini, I did very little prompting

I’m just using Geminis rate limits, because its pretty ridiculously cheap. You can get pretty far on just their free tier last I checked (when I made this the image model was 100% free)

I wrote about it a little bit here: https://x.com/max_leiter/status/1906492622551884187
by marcusb | 2025-04-26 02:24:01+00:00
> Apparently he gets pretty high with friends and shit talks - but when when the search started to suggest some pretty way out things along the same lines, he landed that their conversations weren't private any more.

I had an experience like this several years ago. I was having dinner with a customer, and one of the guys brought up this story about how he went to school with someone who got caught cheating on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Later, back at my hotel, I pulled up YouTube and the first recommended video was of the guy who got caught cheating on the game show. I had not searched for this during the conversation (or prior) nor do I watch game show videos on YouTube, or cheating scandal videos on YouTube.

Here's what I think happened: somebody at the dinner googled it, and the video got recommended based either on geo-location data (we were in close proximity) or because the person who googled it was in my phone contacts, or maybe both. But, I don't think Google/Youtube was recording anyone's conversation to make that recommendation.
by smeeger | 2025-04-26 02:24:19+00:00
it is extremely important that you read this comment: a company called edison motors out of canada is making a conversion kit that can turn any pickup into a hybrid using a drop-in motor and a really powerful generator. imagine something that costs less than this truck, has a range of many hundreds of miles, and can be used to tow more than ten thousand pounds. and you never have to turn on the generator if you dont need to. groceries on all electric. they are posting videos on youtube about this, its real. i personally believe that these work trucks will be the best in history. the most reliable, the most utility, the best cost.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-26 02:24:26+00:00
You can just ignore the license since the existence of these models is based on piracy at a scale never before seen. Aaron Swartz couldn’t have even imagined violating copyright that hard.

If you live in a glass house, you won’t throw stones. No one in the LLM space wants to be litigious

It’s an open secret that DeepSeek used a ton of OpenAI continuations both in pre training and in the distillation. That totally violates openAI TOS. No one cares.
by ag_21 | 2025-04-26 02:25:50+00:00
Hey HN,

We just open-sourced Octagon VC Agents.

It’s an MCP server that lets you run AI-driven simulations of VCs like Fred Wilson, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Reid Hoffman — designed for real research tasks like pitch feedback, diligence drills, and term sheet practice.

It’s powered by OpenAI’s new Agents SDK, so you get true agentic workflows out of the box:

Multi-agent reasoning

Context handoff

Tool use orchestration

Easy persona customization via markdown

Each agent is continuously enriched with real private markets data from Octagon (startup deals, valuations, founder profiles), so the answers stay grounded — not just hallucinated LLM output.

Use cases:

Side-by-side deal critiques from different VC perspectives

Reality-check startup metrics before fundraising

Simulate partner meeting debates or warm intro strategies

Create new investor personas tuned to your fund’s style

Agents can be extended easily — just modify their investment philosophy, cognitive biases, or communication styles in the persona files. You can also plug in your own orchestration logic if you want more complex decision chains.

You can also checkout a hosted custom gpt version here:

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-680c1eddd1448191bb4ed7e09485270f-vc-...

Would love feedback, ideas, or if anyone wants to collaborate on expanding multi-agent debate flows or new use cases!

Repo: https://github.com/OctagonAI/octagon-vc-agents
by kazinator | 2025-04-26 02:26:32+00:00
In a "reasonably well-behaved program", if you have the artifacts from a current configure, like a "config.h" header, they are compatible with older commits, even if configurations changed, as long as the configuration changes were additive: introducing some new test, along with a new symbol in "config.h".

It's possible to skip some of the ./configure steps. Especially for someone who knows the program very well.
by o11c | 2025-04-26 02:28:04+00:00
There is the `-C` option of course. It's supposedly good for the standard tests that waste all the time, but not so much for the ad-hoc tests various projects use, which have an unfortunate chance of being buggy or varying across time.

... I wonder if it's possible to manually seed a cache file with only known-safe test results and let it still perform the unsafe tests? Be sure to copy the cache file to a temporary name ...

---

I've thought about rewriting `./configure` in C (I did it in Python once but Python's portability turned out to be poor - Python2 was bug-free but killed; Python3 was unfixably buggy for a decade or so). Still have a stub shell script that reads HOSTCC etc. then quickly builds and executes `./configure.bin`.
by creatonez | 2025-04-26 02:28:22+00:00
Noticed an easter egg in this article. The text below "I'm sorry, but in the year 2025, this is ridiculous:" is animated entirely without Javascript or .gif files. It's pure CSS.

This is how it was done: https://github.com/tavianator/tavianator.com/blob/cf0e4ef26d...
by petesergeant | 2025-04-26 02:30:05+00:00
> but mainly because when I read the comments on there about incels and chavs and carbuncles and brutalism it all just seems grubby. Maybe even cruel.

There we go. People shift from being the out-group to being more sympathetic and unfortunate, and humour that targeted them moves into being punching down. I was shocked at how less funny Bill Hicks feels 20 years on, because now it just sounds like he's being an asshole about people who are struggling.
by joshvm | 2025-04-26 02:33:06+00:00
This is a really good use case, though I'd be surprised if there aren't macros to do simple grid layout already in Altium or KiCad. It's the sort of thing you'd find in a badly documented Eagle userscript. I recently made a smaller PCB with 30 LEDs in a specific colour arrangement and even that was a pain by hand.
by mmaunder | 2025-04-26 02:33:23+00:00
Great article with links to others, like this one:

https://arena.org.au/stay-in-your-lane-the-oxymoron-of-authe...

With quotes (re cultural appropriation) like “the ultimate endpoint of keeping our mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction… All that’s left is memoir”

We’ve been suffering under the yoke of the intellectualization of deliberalization, censorship and oppression of ideas via our leading thinkers, institutions and platforms who have been acting out of fear. Fear of being strung up on the town square and fear that not signaling support for what has been happening signals disapproval.

What I find infuriating is that our youth have been driving this conformist, enforcement, rule making and rule following mentality and trend. Our youth should be questioning the rules, not forming up as a conformist jack booted militia and persecuting those who don’t follow the rules. History has shown that the latter ends in tears.

We saw this in Germany in the 30s, in China in the 60s and 70s where the red guards in the cultural revolution were mostly teens, under the Khmer Rouge in the 70s where kids were police, and with the Young Pioneers and Komsomol in the early and mid 20th century Soviet Union.

When youth stop questioning and start enforcing, it often marks the end of a healthy society and the beginning of something much darker.
by xracy | 2025-04-26 02:34:46+00:00
I think the concern is that this on its face seems like a pretty egregious thing for an administration to do in a politically motivated fashion.

It seems like they are pushing the bounds of what the public is willing to put up with. I think that trying to rationalize the best argument of their case, is doing their work for them, and the administration has regularly demonstrated themselves to be bad-faith actors.

All of this is to say, that my knee-jerk is to say the administration is wrong, and let cooler heads prevail in the follow-up if that's not the case. Because I have yet to see the case where the administration wasn't overstepping their authority WRT ICE.
by Am4TIfIsER0ppos | 2025-04-26 02:35:37+00:00
I seem to recall that state of the art audio encoding can compress voice to 8kbit/s which is a single packet per second, insignificant compared to how chatty your device is. Trivial to buffer and send during a period of activity. It sums to 1.7MB over the 30 minute window in the article graphs which should be visible if it is actually counted. Why would apple or google actually make it count though? They want to spy on you either for their own benefit or because the government forces them to. You say you found it taking screenshots and phoning them home. Of course! It is a surveillance device. Is it worse? Maybe. You should consider it sends everything home. Every keystroke, every touch of the screen, every sample of the accelerometers, every sample of audio. Perhaps only the sheer quantity of data in video prevents them from sending it all. Might be "remedied" with 5G bandwidth.