MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chias | 2025-04-07 22:00:30+00:00
As someone who has recently had to start managing a fleet of macbooks: amusingly, this may very well be what happened.

Modern macs are not like a PC where you can just wipe it, due to a need to lock down on the secondary market for stolen macbooks. Assuming your old employer does not have an Apple Business Manager account and/or didn't purchase the laptop through it, then if the Recovery Lock gets triggered, then it is for all intents and purposes bricked unless you can provide an Activation Lock Bypass Key or have the user either log in or provide their AppleID password. I think every company goes through a phase of having to call a few ex employees and ask them to please pretty-please let them know their AppleID password before realizing that if you're going to have a Macbook fleet, you had better start doing Apple Business Manager.

I don't know if this is how things were in 2012, but at least these days: if they needed your password, and you never gave it to them, they probably did have to discard the device.
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-07 22:00:39+00:00
Good step.

It doesn't distrust the developers of the software though, so does not fix the biggest hole. Multiparty reproduction does not fix it either, that only distrusts the build system.

The bigger the project, the higher the chance something slips through, if even an exploitable bug. Maybe it's the developer themselves being compromised, or their maintainer.

Reviews are done on what, you have someone reviewing clang code? Binutils?
by forthwall | 2025-04-07 22:00:41+00:00
I had a similar but different run in with bad AI use in interviewing earlier this month. I was interviewing a candidate during a technical screen, and I had earlier noted that it was ok to use AI, as that was how modern development is going forward, I would just observe how someone would develop with it. In my technical product screens I try to tell the developer, it's time for them to show off what skills they feel the most comfortable at.

What happened though was the candidate decided to paste the entire challenge prompt into cursor and I watched cursor fail at completing the assignment. I tried to nudge them to use their own skills or research abilities, but alas did not come to fruition, and had to end the interview.

The crazy part was they had 8 years of experience, so definitely have worked before not using AI, so it was very strange they did that, especially since they remarked that the challenge was going to be easy
by eterm | 2025-04-07 22:00:44+00:00
Any version control where you had to manually (and globally) "check out" (lock) files for editing was terrible and near unusable above about 3 people.

Version control systems where you didn't have shallow branches ( and thus each "branch" took a full copy / disk space of files) were awful.

version control systems which would have corruption data-bases (Here's to you Visual source safe) were awful.

Subversion managed to do better on all those issues, but it still didn't adequately solve distributed working issues.

It also didn't help that people often configured SVN to run with the option to add global locks back in, because they didn't understand the benefit of letting two people edit the same file at the same time.

I have a soft-spot for SVN. It was a lot better than it got credit for, but git very much stole the wind from under its sails by solving distributed (and critically, disconnected/offline) workflows just a bit better that developers could overlook the much worse UX, which remains bad to this day.
by neptunecovarian | 2025-04-07 22:01:05+00:00
I made this little tool I’ve been working on — the URL Unshortener App — and wanted to share it here in case anyone finds it useful.

What it does: It reveals the original link behind any shortened URL (think bit.ly, t.co, etc.) and checks it for safety using VirusTotal. No more guessing where a sketchy-looking link might take you.

Key features:

Instant unshortening – Paste a shortened link and get the full URL in seconds. Safety check – Integrates with VirusTotal to scan links before you click. Clipboard integration – Auto-detects URLs from your clipboard for quick pasting. History – Saves your last 10 unshortened URLs for easy access or removal. Daily security tip – Learn something new about staying safe online, every day. Totally free. No ads. No usage limits.

I’d love any feedback, suggestions, or ideas for improvement. Thanks for checking it out!
by zone411 | 2025-04-07 22:01:10+00:00
Yes, predefined strategies are very interesting to examine. I have two simple ones in another multi-agent benchmark, https://github.com/lechmazur/step_game (SilentGreedyPlayer and SilentRandomPlayer), and it's fascinating to see LLMs detect and respond to them. The only issue with including them here is that the cost of running a large set of games isn't trivial.

Another multi-agent benchmark I'm currently developing, which involves buying and selling, will also feature many predefined strategies.
by jordigh | 2025-04-07 22:01:19+00:00
There’s something that bothers me about these sorts of recollections that make git seem… inevitable.

There’s this whole creation myth of how Git came to be that kind of paints Linus as some prophet reading from golden tablets written by the CS gods themselves.

Granted, this particular narrative in the blog post does humanise a bit more, remembering the stumbling steps, how Linus never intended for git itself to be the UI, how there wasn’t even a git commit command in the beginning, but it still paints the whole thing in somewhat romantic tones, as if the blob-tree-commit-ref data structure were the perfect representation of data.

One particular aspect that often gets left out of this creation myth, especially by the author of Github is that Mercurial had a prominent role. It was created by Olivia Mackall, another kernel hacker, at the same time as git, for the same purpose as git. Olivia offered Mercurial to Linus, but Linus didn’t look upon favour with it, and stuck to his guns. Unlike git, Mercurial had a UI at the very start. Its UI was very similar to Subversion, which at the time was the dominant VCS, so Mercurial always aimed for familiarity without sacrificing user flexibility. In the beginning, both VCSes had mind share, and even today, the mindshare of Mercurial lives on in hg itself as well as in worthy git successors such as jujutsu.

And the git data structure isn’t the only thing that could have ever possibly worked. It falls apart for large files. There are workaround and things you can patch on top, but there are also completely different data structures that would be appropriate for larger bits of data.

Git isn’t just plain wonderful, and in my view, it’s not inevitable either. I still look forward to a world beyond git, whether jujutsu or whatever else may come.
by edoceo | 2025-04-07 22:01:21+00:00
One of my struggles is to get docker to lockdown which images it loads. I'd like to only pull from my own blessed registry and it seems Docker wants to always go back to theirs.

For other "package" managers (eg: CPAN, Debian) I can point to my own archive and be sure everything I manage down stream gets the blessed bits.

I basically have a huge archive/mirror for the supply chain for my perl, PHP, JavaScript, etc.

If anyone has pro tips on how to "lock" docker to one registry that would be cool.
by adamddev1 | 2025-04-07 22:01:42+00:00
But then we lose the ability to do anything offline. Offline web apps are still valuable. Some people want to turn their data off sometimes. Many people live in places where internet access is spotty.

I also love the simplicity of SSR/vanilla web for some things. But I say keep offline-first SPA/PWAs alive. Cross-plaftorm. Freedom from the app stores. Freedom from needing to be tied online all the time.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-07 22:02:25+00:00
Well, yes. I do really hate opinionated software (e.g. Apple, or GNOME). I do tend to find the weird niches that work for me. I'm currently using KDE and I've totally worked it over. Which is great because I can be much more productive if I'm not constantly fighting against the UI. But yeah such tools with millions of niche features are great for me.

The software packages I really value the most are the ones where a situation causes something really weird I need to do, and I read in the documentation to try to find some workaround, and then I discover that it already has exactly that feature that I need hidden in there somewhere. It's like the developer read my mind :) There's been very few packages that I truly cherished (and very few in this day and age, software in the early PC days was often more powerful IMO).

One of them was SP (SK Packet Radio), where this happened several times. That was truly amazing software, there was so much it could do and it all worked on an 8088 together with a TSR-based softmodem (connected to a radio not a phone line). Wow. Even the insanest stuff that popped into my head I could make happen with just some settings.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-07 22:02:34+00:00
I'm someone who generally can't tune out music - but I really struggle with repetitive plays.

Hit songs are simplistic and they get embedded in me after a few listens. The next time I hear it, it will feel like I just heard it.

Clearchannel legacy rock playlists are pure torture. Every song hits me like I've been listening to it for hours.
by js2 | 2025-04-07 22:02:37+00:00
> I started using Git for something you might not imagine it was intended for, only a few months after it’s first commit

I started using git around 2007 or so because that company I worked for at the time used ClearCase, without a doubt the most painful version manager I have ever used (especially running it from a Linux workstation). So I wrote a few scripts that would let me mirror a directory into a git repo, do all my committing in git, then replay those commits back to ClearCase.

I can't recall how Git came to me attention in the first place, but by late 2008 I was contributing patches to Git itself. Junio was a kind but exacting maintainer, and I learned a lot about contributing to open source from his stewardship. I even attended one of the early GitTogethers.

As far as I can recall, I've never really struggled with git. I think that's because I like to dissect how things work, and under the covers git is quite simple. So I never had too much trouble with its terribly baroque CLI.

At my next job, I was at a startup that was building upon a fork of Chromium. At the time, Chromium was using subversion. But at this startup, we were using git, and I was responsible for keeping our git mirror up-to-date. I also had the terrible tedious job of rebasing our fork with Chromium's upstream changes. But boy did I get good at resolving merge conflicts.

Git may be the CLI I've used most consistently for nearly two decades. I'm disappointed that GitHub became the main code-review tool for Git, but I'll never be disappointed that Git beat out Mercurial, which I always found overly ridged and was never able to adapt it to my workflow.
by gnarlynarwhal42 | 2025-04-07 22:02:48+00:00
I started with a second-hand Canon 20D back in like 2004 or something, only upgraded when I got a deal on an old 7D and only recently bought a new R6II and the autofocus is NIGHT AND DAY

I started buying the EF mount superfast primes because they're affordable now, but the 7D (more likely it was me) couldn't get the focus just right with such a shallow DOF

The R6 just doesn't miss. Low light/high ISO image quality is also MILES better.

Cameras are not in a death spiral. Artistically speaking, phones can't do what even a low end slr/mirrorless can do, its just that phones are good enough for the low-effort content 95% of people are interested in producing. Standalone cameras are inconvenient, bulky and require some level of artistic intention.

>Does any know how much volume there would be if cameras could be used in manufacturing processes for machine vision, on robots / drones, in self-driving cars, on building for security, as webcams for video conferencing, for remote education, and everywhere else imaging is exploding?

I don't know about the manufacturing or drone stuff, but for video conferencing and remote education, the point of the video really isn't image quality or "art" but just good enough picture to not get in the way of the real purpose of the interaction, so a whole camera kit is just added complexity/annoyance for no benefit.

IMO
by neuroelectron | 2025-04-07 22:02:52+00:00
Besides full source boostrapping which could adopt progressive verification of hardware features and assumption of untrusted hardware, integration of Formal Verification into the lowest levels of boostrapping is a must. Bootstap security with the compiler.

This won't protect against more complex attacks like RoP or unverified state. For that we need to implement simple artifacts that are verifiable and mapped. Return to more simple return states (pass/error). Do error handling external to the compiled binaries. Automate state mapping and combine with targeted fuzzing. Systemd is a perfect example of this kind of thing, what not to do: internal logs and error states being handled by a web of interdependent systems.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-07 22:03:12+00:00
> - Yes, it also works with LuaJIT, either via pkg-config or by installing LuaJIT headers using the `luajit_src` crate.

Are there any documentation on this?

luarocks works with luajit after I run that specific command, I expect something like that as it is very easy, so I wonder if running "lx path bin" would work.
by tkiolp4 | 2025-04-07 22:03:13+00:00
I don’t know. I have never referred anyone, but then in my 10+ years of experience in the software industry I have never found extremely talented or extremely untalented software engineers. Most of them, including myself, were between a 4 and a 6 or so (in a scale of 1 to 10). So, I always thought about offering referrals to strangers just by looking at their linkedin profiles/cvs/blogs. Chances are, they are also between 4 and a 6.

This whole “we hire the best of the best” and interviews with 5+ rounds should be eradicated asap.
by crooked-v | 2025-04-07 22:03:25+00:00
I'm not looking for eye contact, and if that person had been just the same but with their eyes closed I would have thought much better of them. I would have still rejected them anyway, because the whole performance wasn't great, but it obviously wouldn't be any ChatGPT thing.

But this was a case of someone staring at a specific place off-camera while "thinking" while their eyes very visibly went rapidly left and right for 20-30 seconds, and repeating the same thing for literally every question, even the ones that were intentional freebies based on their resume that they should have been able to instantly answer.
by mrcjkb | 2025-04-07 22:03:58+00:00
With Lua, it becomes near impossible for a program like lux to edit the manifest.

For example, how would I `lx add <dependency@version>` if the `dependencies` table might be generated by a Lua function?

Lux defaults to TOML, but if you really want Lua, it also supports an `extra.rockspec` in the project root, which shares the same format as the luarocks RockSpec format.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-04-07 22:04:32+00:00
Agree that other people could well have vanished by the time we randomly wander into their signals. The same is true for our radio.

But I'm trying to focus on something else, the existence of other intelligent life is the key thing I hope to see. And we could destroy ourselves this afternoon of course.

I don't care as much about do they exist still - that's icing on the cake. It's the idea that we aren't alone, that's the key to me. I'm certain there have been other intelligent civilizations in the universe because of the size, etc. We need evidence to know for sure.
by eek2121 | 2025-04-07 22:04:47+00:00
That letter was written decades ago lol. I am a bit upset that you didn’t say that and made some of us look it up.

Gates has many faults, but his current life consists of mostly positive stuff (such as fighting climate change, global hunger, diseases, lack of clean water) that I and others support.

I will absolutely never support his past actions, but currently? I can name a whole bunch of billionaires that are doing worse. Like nearly all of them.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-04-07 22:05:00+00:00
To me, the state -> UI paradigm isn't simple in the sense "oh, that was one click, simple". It's simple in the sense "anyone can do it if you just understand/follow these 10-15 simple rules". Once you know these simple rules, you can jump straight into 95% of react projects and be productive fairly quickly.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-07 22:05:29+00:00
> Given the tremendous shortage of mental health providers, " I don't think humans need to be concerned that they're going to be put out of business," she says.

I'd also be willing to bet that a not insignificant number of people would simply be unwilling to use AI for this purpose. I know I wouldn't. For those people, there will always be a demand for human therapists.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-07 22:06:41+00:00
See, not so intuitive, and you would have known this by reading the documentation.

> To me "first one wins" might be intuitive TO YOU, but to me "last one wins" is.

What I mean is that "first one wins" might be intuitive to you, but to me "last one wins" is, and apparently I was wrong, but I would have known at least, because I do read documentation.

It does make sense, indeed, that "first one wins", though.
by timka | 2025-04-07 22:07:06+00:00
Britain was never rich in natural resources (coal was an exception, but its importance faded). Its strength always lay in:

* Naval and trade dominance (a legacy of Venetian methods, transferred through the Netherlands). * Financial systems (London as the hub of insurance, lending, and later offshore banking). * Intelligence networks and manipulation (from the East India Company to MI6). * Colonial exploitation (enclosures, the Opium Wars, the Bengal famine of 1943, suppression of the Sepoy Rebellion, the exploitation of Ireland, etc.).

This wasn’t "honest" wealth but the result of systemic plunder and control over global flows. And the British elite has never prioritized the well-being of its people:

* Enclosures (16th–18th centuries) – Peasants driven off the land for landlord profits. * The Irish Famine (1845–1849) – Grain was exported to England while millions starved. * "Divide and rule" policies – From India to Northern Ireland, preventing unity among the oppressed. * Austerity – Post-2008 budget cuts

Some may say this is in "distant path" but I think this is the root cause while the author focuses just on modern symptoms. The current crisis is the inevitable result of a model where wealth was built not on labor and innovation, but on exploitation and manipulation.
by JohnJayStanley | 2025-04-07 22:07:07+00:00
Location: Ben Lomond, CA, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No but can travel Technologies: Postgresql (Sr. DBA+Developer), Linux, Oracle, AWS, GCP, perl5, python3, HTML, shells++ Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-jay-stanley/ Email: beansboy@cruzio.com
by mlinhares | 2025-04-07 22:07:26+00:00
BuT iT CoUlD Be, cAn YoU PrOvE ThAT IT is NOt?

I'm having a great experience using Cursor, but i don't feel like trying to overhype it, it just makes me tired to see all this hype. Its a great tool, makes me more productive, nothing beyond that.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-04-07 22:07:35+00:00
In general, many staffing agencies already take a percentage to fill roles without the applicants knowledge, and as such often suppress fair market value for defined roles.

Always apply directly to the company you are interested in attending. Once you are in a staffing agencies database the hiring firms are often contractually obligated not to directly hire you.

If an agency asks for money, free labor, or other stupid scams... than you probably don't want to work there anyway. =3

This company was legitimate at one time, but YMMV with these types of services:

https://www.aerotek.com/
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-07 22:07:50+00:00
> Why not? We have that for a bunch of professions already … > Engineers should already be data-aware by default

Most businesses in this world are not run by software engineers. Engaging with people for whatever reasons via digital channels is not a profession. I don’t really understand your point: as I said already several times, the law can and should be improved. Do you disagree with that? Do you insist that every plumber or relocation business should be an expert in GDPR?
by shalmanese | 2025-04-07 22:07:50+00:00
One fun one is that in a lot of year on year change reporting for China specifically, Jan-Feb is considered a single month and then all the other 10 months are seperate. Reason is:

[spoiler]

*

*

*

*

*

The dates of Chinese New Year move around across the year and they have such a big effect on the stats that it's easier just to lump the two months together.

[/spoiler]
by asimpletune | 2025-04-07 22:08:24+00:00
That is a great question. In the original trilogy, without prequel context, he often makes overtures to Luke about them ruling the galaxy together. Otherwise I don’t think we see a lot about what Vader wants until later when he’s dying. I think then he says something about Luke having given him hope or something, I don’t remember perfectly.

So from the original trilogy alone I think it’s not 100% clear what Vader wants, but there are strong indicators.
by flanbiscuit | 2025-04-07 22:08:33+00:00
I was living in Australia in 2000 and texting was more common than calling because it was cheaper to text than call. But in the US it was the opposite. You had unlimited calling, but plans around that time had a different pricing scheme for texting (can't remember the exact details) so could be one reason why it took the US a bit longer to finally pick up texting. I remember it was about a year or 2 later that I felt texting started to become more common in the US.
by ilrwbwrkhv | 2025-04-07 22:09:38+00:00
Wow Shopify has fallen so far down now it's just a trashy dumb company. No longer a tech company doing elite things. I wish companies didn't become mid so soon. Tobi really needs to step down and resign. It's a horrible look and tremendously bad for morale. And he seems to be feeling the pressure. When you have to expect people will spread it in bad faith, you really have some skeletons in your closet.
by bbor | 2025-04-07 22:10:08+00:00
I'm guessing you know this, but for those new to the terms: what this post describes as the "VC route" and the "bootstrap route" are usually referred to as "growth businesses" and "lifestyle businesses" (i.e. pays for the lifestyle of the founders).

As a big believer in the need for syndicated worker's coops, I think this basic distinction is a pretty great radicalization tool against the current system ;)
by greycol | 2025-04-07 22:10:46+00:00
Because tariffs can be applied on specific goods rather than the current blanket tariffs.

i.e. You could place a tariff on steel to ensure local manufactures use American steel while placing a tariff that includes cocoa does not necessarily mean American chocolate producers can buy more from American cocoa producers so it only injures the local chocolate producers (and downstream consumers) without protecting or improving another local industry.

You could still argue that the steel tariff is not a net positive but at least the positives and negatives of tariffs are arguable.

To your second question three (inexhaustive) possible reasons are that the industry has large political sway, or it's part of a plan to stop the quick collapse of an industry while the economy develops other industries, or it's a defense against the artificial short term lowering of external prices (i.e. foreign government subsidies either to grow an industry in their country or to destroy the industry in other countries).