MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryukafalz | 2025-05-13 20:44:11+00:00
Ah, thanks for the reference! Yes, there are a lot of very old capability systems in computing history.

I've got a copy of Capability-Based Computer Systems on my shelf that I've been meaning to read for a while, and it covers the Plessey System 250: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/

Very much not a new concept! Though note that this book was published in 1984 and there have been several newer developments in the capability literature since then. (Revocation for example, which is mentioned as an issue in chapter 10 but has since been addressed with some capability design patterns.)
by mettamage | 2025-05-13 20:45:16+00:00
No, but last time I checked you can be a contracted student for 1200 euro's.

If I knew what I was getting into at the time, I'd do it. I did pay for extra, but in my case it was the low Dutch rate, so for me it was 400 euro's to follow hardware security, since I already graduated.

But I can give a rough outline of what they taught. It has been years ago but here you go.

Hardware security:

* Flush/Reload

* Cache eviction

* Spectre

* Rowhammer

* Implement research paper

* Read all kinds of research papers of our choosing (just use VUSEC as your seed and you'll be good to go)

Binary & Malware Analysis:

* Using IDA Pro to find the exact assembly line where the unpacker software we had to analyze unpacked its software fully into memory. Also we had to disable GDB debug protections. Something to do with ptrace and nopping some instructions out, if I recall correctly (look, I only low level programmed in my security courses and it was years ago - I'm a bit flabbergasted I remember the rough course outlines relatively well).

* Being able to dump the unpacked binary program from memory onto disk. Understanding page alignment was rough. Because even if you got it, there were a few gotcha's. I've looked at so many hexdumps it was insane.

* Taint analysis: watching user input "taint" other variables

* Instrumenting a binary with Intel PIN

* Cracking some program with Triton. I think Triton helped to instrument your binary with the help of Intel PIN by putting certain things (like xor's) into an SMT equation or something and you had this SMT/Z3 solver thingy and then you cracked it. I don't remember got a 6 out of 10 for this assignment, had a hard time cracking the real thing.

Computer & Network Security:

* Web securtiy: think XSS, CSRF, SQLi and reflected SQLi

* Application security: see binary and malware analysis

* Network security: we had to create our own packet sniffer and we enacted a Kevin Mitnick attack (it's an old school one) where we had to spoof our IP addresses, figure out the algorithm to create TCP packet numbers - all in the blind without feedback. Kevin in '97 I believe attacked the San Diego super computer (might be wrong about the details here). He noticed that the super computer S trusted a specific computer T. So the assignment was to spoof the address of T and pretend we were sending packets from that location. I think... writing this packet sniffer was my first C program. My prof. thought I was crazy that this was my first time writing C. I was, I also had 80 hours of time and motivation per week. So that helped.

* Finding vulnerabilities in C programs. I remember: stack overflows, heap overflows and format strings bugs.

-----

For binary & malware analsys + computer & network security I highly recommend hackthebox.eu

For hardware security, I haven't seen an alternative. To be fair, I'm not looking. I like to dive deep into security for a few months out of the year and then I can't stand it for a while.
by NunoSempere | 2025-05-13 20:45:32+00:00
> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.

To give some color, here: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/how-likely-are-various-prec... is a list of a few things that could kill over 1M people in one year. Maybe your statement is not the case for solar storms in particular.
by dekhn | 2025-05-13 20:45:38+00:00
I have a phd in a related field and I can't understand exactly what is being said here. From what I can tell, the author claims a protein was engineered, where the protein sequence maps (through a chosen translation table) to a human text. But at the same time, the protein folds into a well-defined shape (predicted, then experimentally determined), and somehow also enciphers... another poem?
by Kwpolska | 2025-05-13 20:45:46+00:00
The "drag it to Applications, move to Trash to remove" flow was invented decades ago, possibly even back in NeXTStep [0]. Application bundles are not meant to be writeable, user data cannot be written there. If Apple envisions a future change, they’re really terrible in implementing it.

[0] https://www.nextcomputers.org/files/manuals/nd/Concepts/Inst...
by pjmlp | 2025-05-13 20:45:48+00:00
That was optional, it just turned out too many people liked to enable custom rendering.

That is exactly the reason why many of us dislike MFC, its low level wrapping of Windows APIs.

With OWL you could already have a kind of C# like experience, but in Windows 3.x, that is how far ahead the experience was versus MFC.

This is the tragedy of C++ frameworks, the tooling could be as good as VB, Delphi, Java, .NET, but then we have a big chunk of developers that insist in pushing for low level Cisms instead.

Honestly I never see much uptake on WTL, especially because dealing with ATL was already bad enough.

From the outside it feels like the chain of command at Microsoft has some big issue with producing great GUI development experiences for C++ developers.

When they finally nailed it, having a C++ Builder like experience, it was killed in the name of extensions by a rebel group, that nowadays is having fun writing Rust bindings for Windows APIs.
by shawnfrompdx | 2025-05-13 20:45:58+00:00
this is a factor for me. I've always had to pick up new languages frameworks and skills on-the-job. but today hirers are seeking only really niched down specific experts, and i suspect i am filtered out automatically by not matching that, with no regard to the fact that it's not that big of a deal for an experienced engineer to pick up something new
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-13 20:46:36+00:00
> The democratic process can only work if citizens are fully informed on the issues, which is precisely what censorship prevents.

Ah yes, if only citizens could speak that the Holocaust didn't happens and could call black people monkeys, then they would ve fully informed to do Democracy.

> Imagine for a moment what happens that your democratic society decides that advocating against hate speech laws is itself hate speech.

This is some outlandish claim, that would need some serious argument to support how it might come to pass.

A proper democracy with functioning institutions has a lot of checks and balances to avoid outlandish bullshit to become law.
by ggariepy | 2025-05-13 20:46:49+00:00
My take: the people voting for right wing candidates don't believe in "redistribution" which IMO is not a proper function of government. The left really wants to take the nation's wealth and give it to people it deems to be deserving of it; the people voting for the right wing disagree wholeheartedly. As do I. Get your hands out of our pockets.
by quantadev | 2025-05-13 20:47:46+00:00
Ok, I see what you're doing. Your multiplying the force vector by a non unit-vector, and then dividing back out the linear amount to correct for it. You never see this in a physics book because it's a computational hack, probably because it saves you the CPU cost of not having to do the 3 division operations it takes to get each component (X,Y,Z) of the unit vector.

This makes sense to do in computer code also because if you were going to raise r_mag to a power, you might as well raise it to 3 instead of 2, because it's not extra cost, but you do avoid the three divisions, by never calculating a unit vector. Back when I was doing this work, was decades ago and I had no idea about cost of floating points. Thanks for explaining!
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-13 20:48:04+00:00
I suspect it's not AI.

> dismissing me when they find out my dinosaur age of 42

I gave up, after encountering this (at 55). It's been a thing for quite some time (more than the 2.5 years he mentions).

What's annoying, is that the very people doing the dismissing, are ones that will soon be in those shoes.

I believe ol' Bill Shakey called it "Hoist by your own petard."
by dyauspitr | 2025-05-13 20:48:10+00:00
I looked at your resume and here are my thoughts as a hiring manager for what it’s worth.

Get rid of the generative AI, VR, LLM augmented stuff from the top of the resume.

Make your typescript experience more prominent. Talk more about your experience with popular stacks and technologies in general.

Come up with a last name, the resume doesn’t have to be your legal name.
by moregrist | 2025-05-13 20:49:03+00:00
This is the original seminal work on coffee drop evaporation out of Sid Nagel’s lab, with theoretical support from Tom Witten and Todd Dupont and their students.

Like everything out of the Nagel lab, at least from that era, it combines a keen curiosity about things we take for granted with rigorous physical experiments and insight.

The Nagel/Witten collaboration was one of the many lovely things at the University of Chicago in that era, and it was always tremendous fun to see them present and get a glimpse at how they approached problems.

It was like looking over the shoulder of giants: often humbling and always educational.
by taco_emoji | 2025-05-13 20:49:38+00:00
> People really don't understand passkeys

Passkey UX is absolutely terrible. It's unclear what is happening, what is being stored where (do you have my passkey? do I? is it in my browser? is it on my phone?), how communication is happening between devices, etc. Also nobody seems to explain what exactly a passkey is. Where's the thing I can point at and say "that's your passkey"?
by pugworthy | 2025-05-13 20:49:39+00:00
> They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them.

Or they don't have the vision to know how others will accomplish what they are asking for.

This is a big struggle for me; people who want to play product owner, and make requests that are very ignorant of work required. Or think they know just what work is required and spell out development approaches despite not having any background or experience in software development.

They key really is getting to know what it is they really want to do and then deliver a solution. Which can be its own exercise in frustration.
by KapKap66 | 2025-05-13 20:49:40+00:00
Well if you believe that, start up a video game with a framerate limiter and set your game's framerate limit to 10 fps and tell me how much you enjoy the experience. By default your game will likely be running at either 60 fps or 120 fps if you're vertical synced (depends on your monitor's refresh rate). Make sure to switch back and forth between 10 and 60/120 to compare.

Even your average movie captures at 24 hz. Again, very likely you've never actually just compared these things for yourself back to back, as I mentioned originally.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-05-13 20:49:45+00:00
> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.

Wow... there are probably several ways we could lose the ability to fab semiconductors. We can look back through history at other periods where they "forgot" how to do various things. Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. They lost the knowledge of dome building. Should they have considered doing themselves in because they found themselves in the Dark Ages? We might forget how to do various very involved technical things like fab'ing chips, or we might lose the knowledge/and or ability to even build a fab, for example (just consider the supply-chain required to build a fab and consider how fragile some of those chains are). Yeah, it will mean that something really bad has likely happened, but that doesn't mean that it's the end and we should just go and kill ourselves. It will mean that there's been some kind of discontinuity, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity. People will still be able to grow crops, hunt, fish, etc (given a reasonable climate remains in enough places). Likely the population under these conditions will be much smaller but it doesn't mean that we can never recover as a species - sure, it might take 1000 years. That's ok, we go on just like ancestors before us who endured great hardship.
by mplanchard | 2025-05-13 20:49:50+00:00
This is nice, but fairly miserable to deal with in in-module unit tests, IMO.

We get around it by using conditional compilation and putting the lints in our entrypoints (`main.rs` or `lib.rs`), which is done automatically for any new entrypoint in the codebase via a Make target and some awk magic.

As an example, the following forbids print and dbg statements in release builds (all output should go through logging), allows it with a warning in debug builds, and allows it unconditionally in tests:

#![cfg_attr(not(debug_assertions), deny(clippy::dbg_macro))] #![cfg_attr(not(debug_assertions), deny(clippy::print_stdout))] #![cfg_attr(not(debug_assertions), deny(clippy::print_stderr))] #![cfg_attr(debug_assertions, warn(clippy::dbg_macro))] #![cfg_attr(debug_assertions, warn(clippy::print_stdout))] #![cfg_attr(debug_assertions, warn(clippy::print_stderr))] #![cfg_attr(test, allow(clippy::dbg_macro))] #![cfg_attr(test, allow(clippy::print_stdout))] #![cfg_attr(test, allow(clippy::print_stderr))]

AFAIK there isn't currently a way to configure per-profile lints in the top-level Cargo configs. I wish there were.
by shawnfrompdx | 2025-05-13 20:50:00+00:00
I will probably begin doing this but i will say-- in the past it was not a hurdle at all, and i got many interviews and a few jobs with this name. I have had about 10 interviews in the last year, going to 4th rounds, and nobody suggested it was a problem. my ratio of landing interviews per applications i put in parallels what I am hearing/reading from all other developers on the job market now. I don't strongly suspect my one-letter last name is a huge culprit here, but after a year on the job search and willing to try anything, i may begin applying with a pseudonym
by Padlock4543 | 2025-05-13 20:50:18+00:00
I purchased a phone in a European country without an official Apple Store, so I bought it from a "Premium Authorized Apple Retailer." After one year, the phone broke. While in a different country, I visited an Apple Store to have it repaired under warranty. However, they informed me that I needed to return to the original store where I purchased it to activate the warranty.

My experience with Apple doesn't sound so different from yours.
by teeray | 2025-05-13 20:50:34+00:00
> I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people"

That is almost certainly happening. What needs to play out for the pendulum to swing the other way is all of these companies realizing that their codebase has become a bunch of AI-generated slop that nobody can work on effectively (including the AIs). Whether that plays out or not is an open question: how much slop can the AI generate before it falls over?
by fidotron | 2025-05-13 20:50:37+00:00
> So many people I work with (in tech) were on Android for years, and all eventually switched to iOS.

There is a curious demographic of people that worked closely on/with Android in the early years that have a particularly extreme allergy to it today.

Sundar gets a lot of deserved stick, but Andy Rubin was no saint when it came to guiding development either, as demonstrated by the memory holed Skyhook fiasco. ( https://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/536913/google-android-sk... ) JBQ resigning from the AOSP really was the sign that true believers in the Android ecosystem are simply suckers.

It is such a missed opportunity it's unbelievable. iOS shouldn't be in contention at all.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-13 20:50:49+00:00
Things aren't impossible to research in industry. Managers with an R&D budget can fund whatever research they want, and it's easy to find examples of companies doing research in most of the fields you name. The fields where it's not are because you've defined them in a circular fashion e.g. "chemistry aside from industrial chemistry" is not an argument for "there are things you can't do in industry", and space research is primarily driven by the private sector now but I guess you are defining astronomy to only include study of things too far away to matter to anyone except astronomers.
by mettamage | 2025-05-13 20:51:14+00:00
Probably, I haven't had time to delve into the article yet. But ever I first learned about them I got the hunch that they'd never fully go away.

Then people say "no that's not possible, we got security in place."

So then the researchers showcase a new demo where they use their existing knowledge with the same issue (i.e. scaling-induced voltage leaks).

I suspect this will go on and on for decades to come.
by mtalantikite | 2025-05-13 20:51:15+00:00
For sure. I suggested having an eau de parfum option, but it does make things smell totally different -- much weaker, doesn't last long on the body, and can get overpowered by the alcohol carrier. Plus as a small business it'd mean having a dozen new formulations, with the associated packaging changes, inventory, etc. which makes it harder as a totally bootstrapped business. It's definitely still something to think about though, as even fragrances like a Tom Ford or Le Labo selling for $300-400 are just eau de parfums.
by MBCook | 2025-05-13 20:51:29+00:00
But is it? That’s what has me wondering.

If it’s the size of my current phone and folds out to be twice as wide, that sounds kind of nice. Except it would be so thin I worry it would be flimsy and there wouldn’t be as much space for battery (which the open screen would use faster) so wouldn’t I get worse battery life?

Unless you make it twice as thick. Then it’s twice as thick.

And so I’m not sure that bigger screen would justify any of that for me. Now if it was three times as wide that might be significantly nice because now you’re approaching like iPad mini size. But that just makes the thinness/thickness problem worse.

If it’s say half the size of my current phone and then unfolds to be the size of my current phone (game boy SP style) I’m not sure that’s really buying me anything either. My phone is fine, I don’t need a twice as thick half as tall version in my pocket that’s not really gonna help me.

I have heard they’re popular with women which makes a certain amount of sense to me. Because if you’re going to just carry your phone in your bag then the fact that it’s twice as thick doesn’t matter that much but you get the bigger screen.

I’m a phone-in-pocket person.

So I don’t know, it’s just not making a lot of sense to me. But like I said I’ve never used one and it may be one of those things where after a couple of days the light would go on and I would totally get it. I questioned the Apple Watch at first and now I love it. But that’s not always how it goes.
by yc-alt-17483 | 2025-05-13 20:51:35+00:00
Have made an alt to comment in case my dev reads this

----

Wanted to chime in as someone very minorly on the hiring side. Run a business, used a remote contract developer for a decade. They were reasonably productive, but with a communications lag due to timezones and back and forth communication. Their rate also rose in the past couple of years.

We have completely eliminated their role and I took over the dev work using ai. I learned some programming a decade ago which helps oversee the ai.

In doing so I was able to see their code wasn't up to spec. Outdated php with deprecated functions, some very inefficient functions which added multiple seconds to pageload. Refactored everything and our site is up to date and substantially faster.

I doubt this is a common case, most clients likely aren't personally replacing their developers. But at the low end of codework it's certainly possible to replace a dev with ai. Compared to our developer ai provided:

* instant feedback * Technically up to date code * More efficient methods when prompted how to approach a problem

Crucially our developer didn't want to use ai and preferred handcrafting code. Also didn't use it if they found something I wrote unclear, which could add 12-24 hours to a communications cycle.

I presume they're still doing work for their other clients. But from my perspective the opportunity cost of using them rose tremendously when they refused to try new tools.

Thinking through code architecture has tremendous value. Physically crafting the actually expression of those thoughts in lines of boilerplate code has definitely declined in utility. Don't know how many programming jobs this describes but ai is definitely nibbling at the lower end of the market.
by ryao | 2025-05-13 20:53:00+00:00
Only if they already know the concept to be able to ask about it. Otherwise, I would expect the LLM to suggest increasing the number of database connections, which punts the problem without actually fixing it. Maybe if it is being really clever, it will suggest they use a HA database and then completely fail to show them how to do it.

A LLM is basically a digital parrot. It has no intuition for what makes solutions good or bad, but it will happily parrot things that seem relevant, even when faced with evidence that they are not. It is enough to pass a number of undergraduate programming exams (especially since graders often give partial credit), but it is not enough to solve real world problems.
by didericis | 2025-05-13 20:53:03+00:00
I built an auto HQ solver with tesseract when HQ was blowing up over thanksgiving (HQ was the gameshow by the vine people with live hosts). I would take a screenshot of the app during a question, share it/send it to a little local api, do a google query for the question, see how many times each answer on the first page appeared in the results, then rank the answers by probability.

Didn't work well/was a very naive way to search for answers (which is prob good/idk what kind of trouble I'd have gotten in if it let me or anyone else who used it win all the time), but it was fun to build.
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-13 20:53:17+00:00
This is all true and, most notably, not the bank's immediate concern.

The financial sector has sheltered itself / been sheltered from the immediate consequences of fraud perpetrated upon it regarding its customers. The customers catch most of the consequences in terms of opportunity costs and some of the bookkeeping labor.

(... in the large, of course, too much fraud runs the bank out of customers and then the bank suffers. But that has to be a lot of fraud, and that's where the governmental big stick that the banks and other financial operators get to wield by proxy come back into play. Try to steal $100 via credit card fraud and you probably get away with it [once], with the cost being borne by a credit card company having to write off couch-cushion money and an individual consumer being heinously inconvenienced in having to rotate all their auto-deduction numbers. Try to steal $1,000,000? The FBI has some questions, friend, if you'd be willing to come with these nice men down to the branch office).