MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmstr | 2025-04-06 20:33:28+00:00
From the article:

"The discovery of the backdoor was made by cybersecurity specialists Andreas Makris (aka Bin4ry) and Kevin Finisterre (aka d0tslash), who published their findings in a detailed technical report late last week. The duo reverse-engineered firmware and conducted a hands-on analysis of the Unitree Go1 robot dog, revealing that each device ships with a preconfigured tunnel client that initiates a connection to CloudSail — a remote access platform developed by Zhexi Technology, based in China.

The researchers demonstrated that upon gaining access to the CloudSail API, which they did using a recovered API key, they could:

List all connected devices and their IP addresses Establish remote tunnels to those devices Access the robot dog’s web interface with no authentication Use the robot’s cameras for live surveillance Log in via SSH using default credentials (pi/123) Move laterally within internal networks to which the robot is connected

Makris and Finisterre identified a total of 1,919 unique Unitree Go1 units that had connected to the CloudSail network. While most connections originated from Chinese IP addresses, a significant number were traced to academic and corporate networks abroad. Notable institutions included MIT, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Waterloo, among others. The researchers even observed some units connecting via Starlink, suggesting use in mobile or remote environments."
by xtiansimon | 2025-04-06 20:33:42+00:00
Pants on fire just doesn't seem to cover it.

It's just that Google Voice app on iPhone did something weird in a recent call. I hadn't been using it very much at all, and about a month ago I got a notice from Google saying, Use it or lose it. Ok. So I use it and the suggestion thing threw me for a loop.

On my phone's 120 mm screen, if you switch to the keypad, but before you type a number, the top of the screen says "Suggestions". But I didn't see that. I'm looking back and forth between a phone number in an email signature and the on screen keypad. Once you start typing the number, "Suggestions" goes away. So I finish typing and look up to see the name of a personal contact (never called from Google Voice, btw). I had to type the number again I was so confused.

I was thinking, that's what you get for free IP phone number and free app. Now I read the OP and think, now my iPhone is going to start acting like crap too?

Funny to think it, but I wonder if these Gov peeps are using the free versions or if they pay for these services?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-06 20:33:48+00:00
> Zoning needs to be a little more nuanced than "build whatever you want."

Why? It worked. People didn’t build plants near houses as soon as transportation technology let factories be built on cheap, remote land.

Also, I suggested deregulating residential permitting. If people build houses by ammonia plants and people still choose to live in them, that’s sort of a striking damnation of the current system, isn’t it?
by dreamcompiler | 2025-04-06 20:34:05+00:00
Related question: Why is welding pretty mainstream while blacksmithing is a much more niche craft? Blacksmithing is a more overarching skill: After all every blacksmith knows how to weld but relatively few welders can forge effectively.

Possible answers:

1. Blacksmiths enjoy making custom tools for each domain while welders just want to get on with solving their domain problem.

2. Blacksmithing is harder to learn. Welding using modern techniques is easy to learn. (Caveat: Welding well is quite difficult. But learning to weld good enough to repair a broken hitch on your tractor is easy.)

3. Welding can solve a very large chunk of metalwork problems. Not all of them--and not always with elegance--but it gets the job done quickly. Blacksmithing can solve a larger set of metalwork problems with more elegance but it also takes more time and skill.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-06 20:35:00+00:00
Depends what region of the country you are in.

In much of the western US, especially Arizona, there are enormous farms growing water-intensive crops, in particular alfalfa. These farms are owned by assorted entities in the Middle East, and the crops are shipped overseas.

This is an enormous problem. The Colorado River basin is already over-allocated and there is not enough water to go around. But due to how water rights work, any entity can purchase an open-ended amount of our already endangered water supply and do as they please with it.

At this moment it isn't a critical problem, because we do have enough other agriculture and water to support ourselves. But with the direction the climate is heading, eventually we will have a drought of such severity that the water used by those farms makes or breaks us.

During the Great Famine in Ireland, the island consistently produced more than enough food to feed its citizens; it was all simply sent overseas.
by Stwerner | 2025-04-06 20:35:23+00:00
Yeah, totally agree that something related to this will likely be the next paradigm. I've been putting together experiments in different directions trying to find that thing that's missing but haven't really found a killer use case yet to pull it all together.

That's a really cool idea that once you can get something somewhat reliably consistent generated, you can kind of let your A/B tests start to run themselves with just rough guidelines on what you're trying to optimize for...
Ask HN: What happened after LK-99?
by colesantiago | 2025-04-06 20:35:28+00:00
There was a time where there was frothy hype around LK-99, the superconductor that 'worked' at room temperature.

VCs and angel investors were hyping on the socials about a dawn of a new era, committing to fund and pour billions into startups trying to capitalise on LK-99 and superconducting startups, material science was the new thing they all said.

And then everyone suddenly forgot about it?

Did more research go into this area as promised by the VCs?

What happened after LK-99?
by oersted | 2025-04-06 20:36:06+00:00
> Until the middle of the 20th Century, cartography was more an art than a science.

Strange perspective, accurate nautical charts were critical infrastructure in the age of sail, making them and using them was a very technical endeavor backed by significant financing. The brightest scientists of the period spent a lot energy on the longitude problem and similar navigation bottlenecks. Accurate land maps were also important for military and state finance purposes. Much of early mathematics and astronomy were focused on measuring the Earth and pinpointing your location.

I’m not sure if map-making was a science explicitly, there was no UX academia like there is now, but it was certainly a serious engineering field rather than an “art”, and dismissing that rich history of know-how seems like a poor foundation for a review of map-making theory.
by MrJohz | 2025-04-06 20:36:27+00:00
Python 3 is not that different from Python 2. Yes, if you're a mindless interpreter designed to specifically parse and evaluate Python 2 code, you're going to have a hard time with Python 3. Thankfully, software developers are humans and should not have this issue.

The number of shells that are relevant to any workplace I have worked in have been two, possibly three if you're working somewhere heavily Apple-based. All three of these shells are POSIX-compatible. Other shells exist, but are entirely optional and rarely used (I say this as someone using one of those other shells).

Linux has changed more, and is probably the biggest source of change in the list that the previous poster described, but as they point out, most of these changes make managing Linux systems simpler, and shouldn't really cause significant problems.

I think you're strongly exaggerating the scale of changes here.

> My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge, they want an easily slottable asset. You need to know their tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are so in demand.

I'm a frontend developer. Every job I've had, I was not familiar with the specific framework they were using when I went in for that job. In every case, that's not been a problem at all, because I've been able to clearly demonstrate that I understand the foundation of frontend development, which is far more important than the precise technologies used in the company's framework of choice. My experiences in general are the complete opposite of what you describe here: every single employer that I've worked for has wanted primarily deeper general knowledge rather than specific knowledge of their specific stack.

Maybe this is a market thing — maybe things really are that different here in Europe — but your descriptions do not ring true at all for me.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-04-06 20:36:55+00:00
I’ve read some exchanges from an American friend with their other American friends on social media years ago. I noticed that many of the people were very against the idea of people they don’t think are deserving from benefiting from them. Even in abstract ways. For example people getting welfare who are actually scamming the system. Or having an outside benefit, like poor people getting free healthcare even if they can’t pay taxes. Trails would have been a good example for this group, “why am I paying for trails I don’t use?”.

I have a hypothesis that Americans are so scared of others benefitting from themselves that they miss that many, many more people are deserving and it makes for a better society. But they don’t see that and would rather punish the deserving and themselves, if it means the undeserving will hurt more. I think this thinking also bleeds into your social justice movements.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-06 20:37:06+00:00
Man, I'm impressed by the quality of the responses my offhand comments have received in this thread. I keep getting corrected and find myself agreeing with the corrections.

You're absolutely right that female characters are, uh, not his strength, and mostly I think you must be right about characterization in his work as a whole. That being said, when I ignore the male characters who seem like wish fulfillment of some adolescent power fantasy (Nigel Sheldon -- immortal genius, intergalactic industrialist, undisputed patriarch, and virile keeper of the harem? Please.) and the female characters who are, you know, young, "nubile," and hyper-sexual, the remaining roster is, I think, solid. Even the characters who are archetypes worked for me.

(Edit: sorry, I confused Children of Ruin and Children of Memory.)

And I find myself agreeing with your assessment of Children of Ruin. In some ways I think it's not well constructed, sort of stumbling through the mystery, winding up much longer than it needed to be, but the main character (no spoilers) has a psychological richness that I can't recall encountering in his other books and is the only of his characters to whose fate I've felt emotionally attached. The ending, too, is among the best and most affecting I've read in quite a while.

And, yes, the antagonist and setting is, I think, incredibly well conceived and well drawn.

So maybe I've changed my mind. Despite some structural issues that, I think, weaken the novel (and I think recall feeling that the 'reveal' came too early or just that the clues leading up to it were too obvious), it may be my favorite book in the series. Its more modest cosmic stakes and narrower field of view, than a lot of the other work of his that I've read, enable Tschaikovsky to develop it into something quite special.
by wredcoll | 2025-04-06 20:37:07+00:00
I'm actually making the argument that people should be held more accountable for solving problems the more power they have.

It's easy to say "both sides" committed immoral actions, but that doesn't really get us anywhere useful, other than perhaps some moral superiority.

If we want to actually solve problems, i.e. prevent those bad things from happening in the future, the practical suggestion is to start with those people who have the most power to effect change.
by MegaButts | 2025-04-06 20:37:07+00:00
An ability to answer questions with a train of thought showing how the answer was derived, or the self-awareness to recognize you do not have the ability to answer the question and declare as much. More than half the time I've used LLMs they will simply make answers up, and when I point out the answer is wrong it simply regurgitates another incorrect answer ad nauseum (regularly cycling through answers I've already pointed out are incorrect).

Rather than give you a technical answer - if I ever feel like an LLM can recognize its limitations rather than make something up, I would say it understands. In my experience LLMs are just algorithmic bullshitters. I would consider a function that just returns "I do not understand" to be an improvement, since most of the time I get confidently incorrect answers instead.

Yes, I read Anthropic's paper from a few days ago. I remain unimpressed until talking to an LLM isn't a profoundly frustrating experience.
by StanislavPetrov | 2025-04-06 20:37:49+00:00
It's amazing more people don't understand this. In a free society people have the right to say things that are stupid, wrong, toxic and just plain false. If you live in a society where the government assumes the power to control what you are allowed to say you no longer live in a free society, period. This holds true whether you're talking about the EU's assault on free speech or the Trump administration's assault on free speech when it comes to criticizing Israel. It's amazing so many are willing (and eager!) to surrender their freedoms to what they perceive as benevolent overlords with their best interest at heart. What they fail to understand is that once you have lost the ability to speak freely, you inevitably lose all of the other freedoms that go along with it. Your benevolent overlords now possess the power to arbitrarily classify anything they don't like (especially that which threatens their power) as "misinformation" or "dangerous speech" or whatever other euphemism they invent to silence you. Just because you may today happen to agree with the people who decide what you are allowed to say doesn't mean you will agree with them tomorrow. And tomorrow you won't be able to object, because your ability to speak freely will be gone.
by ampere22 | 2025-04-06 20:37:53+00:00
If a C++ developer decides to use purely containers and smart pointers when starting a new project, how are they going to develop unsafe code?

Containers like std::vector and smart pointers like std::unique_ptr seem to offer all of the same statically checked guarantees that Rust does.

I just do not see how Rust is a superior language compared to modern C++
by EGreg | 2025-04-06 20:38:37+00:00
That's a bit like when people like their abusers. "I like that they're strict, they have my best interests in mind, they restrict me for my own good." Don't worry, it also happens with large corporations of all kinds, including Facebook, Google, X, etc.

Well, it's really not that difficult for Apple to provide simple way to install an app on the home screen. Or enable notifications. Or manage notifications. Or get rid of that stupid bar on the bottom of the phone, without going into "guided access mode". They just won't. They lock you down and you like it. You can't trust yourself to manage your own notifications.

Also, email is not notifications. And it's full of spam, because unlike notifications which give a capability only to a specific private key, email addresses can be shared with others who spam you.
by mikrl | 2025-04-06 20:38:39+00:00
That Adams quote is nice, and has a similar historical flavour to some of Milton Friedman’s arguments.

That said, choosing a field of study only has the risk of bankrupting yourself.

The excesses of the 21st century, whether that’s blowing up the supply chains that got you out of stagflation, or injecting Maoist rhetoric into academia, will have a much larger and more destructive blowback.
by almog | 2025-04-06 20:40:12+00:00
If you searched for "Arizona Trail southern terminus" you'll see what the terminus looks like today: a beautiful* monument shadowed by a half built useless wall that cost way more than the government spending to maintain some of the most beautiful trails in the world.

These cuts would not just put trail users (which aren't just hikers but also firefighters, hunters) in danger but also cause damage to national parks and national forests as trail users would have to find alternate routes that go off trail.

* It is, in my opinion, the most scenic terminus of all national scenic trails. The (half built) ugliness of the looming wall is an insult to the beauty of the American West.
by lolinder | 2025-04-06 20:41:36+00:00
This is the story:

> The story is about DOGE, but it points out something curious:

> > On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.

> Who’s Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO of Gumroad!

The rest of TFA is a frame around this single paragraph from the original Wired story [0] and doesn't really add anything meaningful to it. The connection to the not-really-Open-Source release is tenuous at best, the heart of it is just "turns out Sahil is in DOGE, DOGE is bad, so boycott Gumroad".

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
by 0xdade | 2025-04-06 20:41:39+00:00
The share button I have uses the navigator.share API if it's available, or tries to fall back to navigator.clipboard. Unfortunately I think I didn't do adequate testing to make sure the clipboard feature works in whatever edge cases you might have the clipboard API but not the Share API, so I'm pretty sure _that_ is broken.

I really just put the URL at the end of the page with a `user-select: all;` to make it easy to copy _after_ you've read the content. It's also rendered server-side so even if I used utm or some other tracking things, the query params would automatically not be included in the server-rendered share link, just the permalink to the post.

But to the original authors point, I also do find myself often just copying from the address bar and then manually deleting a bunch of the garbage at the end of URLs. Maybe that's why I thought it nice for a simple "copy this link" when JS is disabled.
by samtheDamned | 2025-04-06 20:41:43+00:00
> because your hate is so totally different from their kind of hate

I just want to suggest that there may be a difference between hating a person for something they were born with, or for an uncontrollable feature of a person, compared to hating someone for explicit choices they have made.

Not saying that hating people for any reason is necessarily okay, but I think an argument can be made that there is a difference between those two cases of hatred.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-04-06 20:42:20+00:00
I think the surprising aspect is rather how people are praising 80-90% accuracy as the next leap in technological advancement. Quality is already in decline, despite LLMs, and programming was always a discipline where correctness and predictability mattered. It's an advancement for efficiency, sure, but on the yet unknown cost of stability. I'm thinking about all simulations based on applied mathematical concepts and all the accumulated hours fixing bugs - there's now this certain aftertaste, sweet for some living their lives efficiently, but very bitter for the ones relying on stability.
by zero-ground-445 | 2025-04-06 20:44:12+00:00
I'm using Rust at my full time job, but I think it would be insane to go with it to an interview. It's so much overhead. Compare to almost any popular language, not only Python. My choice for now is Go. Many companies actually use it, it easy to learn and use. There are issues with it as well, but they are easy to overcome.
by MrJohz | 2025-04-06 20:44:17+00:00
This has the advantage compared to OP's solution that it will also work if JS doesn't load correctly (as opposed to if it is blocked/deliberately not loaded). You can add this line to the end of the main JS file that you're including on your page, and it will ensure that the JS "switch" will only get triggered if that file could be downloaded and parsed.
by jj_knitis | 2025-04-06 20:45:07+00:00
I built a custom GPT prompt that helps you discover TV shows based on creative structure, emotional tone, and who made them — not just genre tags or “because you watched” algorithms.

It’s called TV Vibes, and it works like this: You enter a show name, a mood word (chaotic, auteur, feminist), or even a vague memory (“that Japanese diner show with the sad regulars”)

It breaks down the narrative tone and pacing of the show

Then it connects you to other shows through story structure or creator lineage

Each connection is shared in a “vibe block,” which is a small, copyable text capsule (a code block) you can paste into any TV Vibes thread on ChatGPT (or send to your partner, roommate, or whoever’s choosing what to watch).

It’s kind of zine-like in tone, but built for people who trust their own tastes.

Try it here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67f183af3e1c8191a3a0f2832c71a833-tv-... Use the ChatGPT mobile app or web version.

It is AI, so it will do some funny things, like a bad friend would. I would love feedback, ideas, and vibe trails from fellow TV nerds.
by XorNot | 2025-04-06 20:45:42+00:00
The anti-establishment fervor of open source crypto developers is the reason this is a problem though.

Most people, for most things, don't need to verify trust outside of normal government channels.

i.e. any business I correspond with, trust is via the government that they are a business bound by the relevant legal system I live in.

Same story with communicating with basically anyone: if their GPG key was signed by the common government key, then hey, good enough for anyone.

The problem is...we don't have the infrastructure for any of this. And GPG key servers are inadequate for maintaining suitable privacy for people if they were used at this scale.

But we certainly could provide the means by existing technologies: e.g. nothing stops us making drivers licenses and other forms of ID smart cards.
by filoleg | 2025-04-06 20:45:46+00:00
That’s a fair point, but I am not sure how it is relevant, unless devs at mom&pop shops/legacy businesses/etc. and those outside of the US work more than the US lawyers (or any other highly-paid white collar job) or have barriers to entry similar to those. From those I know working at those places (and from working at a legacy business myself at one point, a big bank), that didn’t seem to be the case at all. At startups, sure, but that’s just a high risk/high reward type of a deal, and they still don’t have almost any barriers to entry either.

Is it the case outside of the US? Genuine question, because I am not super familiar with close reality dev jobs outside of the US. But from what I saw, it didn’t strike me as an obvious thing that they get ground to the bone or have high barriers to entry (as opposed to other highly-paid white collar jobs).
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-06 20:45:50+00:00
Autofocus systems are designed to stop race cars in travel today already. And besides, why argue hypotheticals here when I look out my window and I see teslas self driving just fine? The system is proven despite your feelings about it. And if it was truly unsafe or compromised we'd have seen a good deal of evidence a this point what with the amount of users self driving and the mileage they've been traveling, not to mention how many people in the media are so desperate to find such evidence and publish some pulitzer attempt about it given the sentiment around Musk these days.