MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-01 08:15:06+00:00
> It is remarkable to what great lengths Hegseth went to use the Signal app, because as defense secretary he has his own communications center which is specialized in keeping him in contact with anyone he wants. This center is commonly called SecDef Cables and is part of Secretary of Defense Communications (SDC) unit.

... but unlike Signal, SDC respects laws requiring accurate record-keeping. And that's why this bunch of lawbreakers want to use Signal. They want to evade any and all accountability once this administration is over.
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-01 08:15:07+00:00
> Oh wait, doesn't this invalidate your argument?

Not really. If you can't be perfect, at least be good.

Unless you want to make an argument that searching all of your code base for UB is better than running on a relatively small subset (20-30%).

Or that Linux should use tracing GC + value types. Which I would find decent as well. But sadly LKML would probably disagree with inclusion of C# (or Java 35).
by rafaelcosta | 2025-05-01 08:15:26+00:00
Right now, yes, but there's a potential to:

- Most legit services move to a web based Apple Pay (note to the unaware reader: this is NOT In-App Purchases and has never had 30% fees) due to the ease of implementing and lower fee (easier to do cross platform + web) - Non-legit developers keep the In-App flow

Over time this would skew In-App Purchases to be scammy-only (and therefore, easier to spot). I'm sure people at Apple consider this possibility too – and therefore, now that there's actual competition, IAP flows will probably have to change to prevent this and compete for actual developer preference (and keep it a viable legit-developer choice)
by graycat | 2025-05-01 08:15:44+00:00
> Maybe this misses the point slightly?

Maybe! My thoughts were, say, tangential or incidental.

A guess is that a central issue is how much in new features should we develop and use?

I see a dilemma: (A) I mentioned the old controls that go back to early Windows and even IBM's 3270 terminals. An advantage of these controls is that lots of software tools implement them and billions of people already understand them. (B) Being too happy with the old stuff or even the present risks progress that is possible and worthwhile.

Your post seemed to illustrate (B).

But generally in the industry, with smartphones, laptops, desktops, Apple, Google's Android, Windows, browsers, apps and extrapolating, we could have an explosion of new features that would complicate work for everyone and fragment the industry.

Ah, maybe Darwin would explain: Lots of mutations with only the best lasting??

For my work, I'm thrilled with the tools and technology available now that I get to exploit.
by chneu | 2025-05-01 08:16:46+00:00
To be fair, office is also hot garbage. It's just that most people are used to that kind of hot garbage.

As someone who hasn't used office much in the last 15 years, it's nearly unusable for me. I have to Google how to do basic things because everything is confusing, ugly, and hidden(or hard to find amongst the huge number of icons).
by chrismorgan | 2025-05-01 08:17:38+00:00
Triple conjuncts are very uncommon in Indic scripts, though there are a few in common use, like stri is a single-syllable word that means woman or wife in many languages. Pick your Indic script, and that’ll be LETTER SA, SIGN VIRAMA, LETTER TA, SIGN VIRAMA, LETTER RA, VOWEL SIGN I. Most Indic syllables/grapheme clusters are a single consonant and a single vowel sign, if not the inherent vowel -a. Conjuncts use their script’s SIGN VIRAMA to suppress the inherent vowel and normally graphically join the next consonant (an orthographic choice rarely broken, a little like ß being ss in German).

I’m not so confident about Hindi, though 25% seems very low if we’re talking frequency; but in Telugu writing it’s definitely a lot more than that that specify a vowel sign and thus take at least two Unicode scalar values to represent a syllable.

My feeling (as a white fellow moved to India, with well above average knowledge of Indian languages and Unicode for a place like HN, but not yet fluent in any Indian language) is that some four-bytes-per-code-point script might conceivably get realistic existing texts above an average of 10 bytes per syllable for at least twenty syllables, and that most Indic languages could sustain it indefinitely in specific deliberate styles of writing.
by rafaelcosta | 2025-05-01 08:18:39+00:00
Easy from your point of view... This is the argument I mostly hear from Apple folks, but my experience (especially with less tech savvy folks) is that they have no idea where or how to cancel a subscription on IAP and they think that the multiple "Apple" charges are just some iCloud thing or something along those lines. With Credit Card flows the alarm bells go off waaaay earlier: when a website asks for their CC data, they immediately scrutinize more (and thus, conversion rates are lower)
by quantified | 2025-05-01 08:18:41+00:00
Each lineage is just bragging rights and ego. The species as a whole doesn't care a lot about lineages. A very long time ago, there was a population bottleneck that reduced Homo Sapiens to a few families. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487] Those few lineages are thriving.

The species could go on reducing the population for a long time. Who's to say we wouldn't be vastly better off with 500Mm overall humans? The population could shrink down, then expand again. Shrinking now is not a bad thing, it's just a change from what we had been doing.
by kmacdough | 2025-05-01 08:19:04+00:00
It appears to be purpose-trained for coding. They also have a generalist model, but that's not the one being compared.

I agree, the comparison is dated, cherry-picked and doesn't reference the thinking models people do use for coding.

But it's also a bit of a new architecture in early stages of development/testing. Comparing against other small non-thinking models is a good step. It demonstrates the strategy is viable and worth exploring. Time will tell its value. Perhaps a guiding LLM could lean on diffusion to speed up generation. Perhaps we'll see more mixed-architecture models. Perhaps diffusion beats out current LLMs, but from my armchair this seems unlikely.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-01 08:19:39+00:00
Yes I never understood why the scope of a CA was not previously declared as part of their CA certificate. The purpose is (email, website etc) but not the possible domains. I'm not very happy that the countless Chinese CAs included in Firefox can sign any valid domain I use locally. They should be limited to anything .cn only.

At least they seem to have kicked out the Russian ones now. But it's weird that such an important decision lies with arbitrary companies like OS and browser developers. On some platforms (Android) it's not even possible to add to the system CA list without root (only the user one which apps can choose to ignore)
by chneu | 2025-05-01 08:19:54+00:00
That's funny cuz my Linux boot up is so fast that multiple coworkers and even my girlfriend have commented on how much faster it is than their windows installs.

Linux is blazing fast when configured properly. But in reality we're talking about 2-3 seconds of difference here. How long a machine takes to POST is usually the biggest part of bootup nowadays.
by 0xEF | 2025-05-01 08:21:02+00:00
They're paying attention to Signal now because Hegseth doesn't know his ass from his elbow when it comes to tech and secrecy, instead acting like someone who has watched too many action films and thinks those are just like real life. The problem is not Signal. The problem is incompetence. Plain and simple. Because he blindly added persons to the group that probably didn't belong there, we now have the infamous "we have OPSEC" line, but instead of questioning why this idiot still has a job anywhere near the intelligence agencies, we're wasting our breath scrutinizing what is easily one of the best opens for secure comes if the user understands how it works.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-05-01 08:21:24+00:00
Agreed. I thought Lloyd Austin should have been fired for going into surgery without advising his deputy or any of his staff of the risks, and his deputy should have been fired for taking over for him.....without leaving her vacation in Puerto Rico.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/timeline-key-figures-found-l...

I think SecDef Hegseth is actually an even bigger disaster than SecDef Austin. That said....I think the Deep State/ military industrial complex/ Israel lobby is trying to get Hegseth fired because he's one of the Big 3 (Vance/Hegseth/Gabbard) opposed to going kinetic with Iran. But he's making it really easy for his adversaries, because he legitimately sucks at some foundational skills for management at his level.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-05-01 08:22:07+00:00
It does depend on industry, but I don’t think you should be too surprised by a 30% surcharge, and I have some math to illustrate!

Let’s assume that this 30% surcharge exactly matches the increased cost due to tariffs (I think 145%?). This would mean that 1.45*manufacturing_cost = 0.3*MSRP -> manufacturing_cost = 0.2*MSRP. The manufacturing cost is 20% of the end price. A higher surcharge would indicate that the manufacturing cost is a _higher_ percentage of the end price. Consider that they’ll also have costs due to shipping, returns, staffing, marketing, R&D, and they need profit on top. In that context, 20% seems quite reasonable to me.

Edit: you should expect to feel the highest percentage price increase in products that have become extremely commoditized, because they naturally have the tightest margins. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking toasters, microwaves, lamps, TVs, electronics cables, batteries, things like that
by herbst | 2025-05-01 08:22:35+00:00
> Secondly the money isn't lost, it goes to the state. Like a tax, but it is called differently. With this 255k more the state can now subsidise the local floodlight industry.

Is that what is planned? The US has a lot of dept internationally I assumed the additional money goes into paying that back, or at least stabilize the dollar somehow
by phartenfeller | 2025-05-01 08:23:35+00:00
I think browsers are in the best state to slow down their development rate. They have come so far, it is the most uniquitous application ecosystem nowadays. Even though there are still great developments currently, they are rather niche and it would be way more damaging if it slowed down 10 years ago. Maybe financial constraints also have a positive side. TL;DR the web ecosystem has matured a lot.
by logifail | 2025-05-01 08:23:39+00:00
> Yes, mens rea is a deeply-precedented standard that's a good default

(From the other side the pond) it does seem that legal standards such that one are applied very selectively in the USA, apparently depending heavily on the political leanings of those involved in any (potential) case.

On the other hand, at least you do actually run elections to pick your POTUS, this side of the Atlantic we get the President of the European Commission based on a back-room deal and a Soviet-style "vote" in the Parliament with no choice. To top it off, when she first got the job in 2019, VdL wasn't even a candidate for it during the immediately preceeding European elections.
by 000ooo000 | 2025-05-01 08:24:13+00:00
>If you think your workers and colleagues are too stupid to recognize good tools that will help them do their jobs better, then... you are a bad leader and should step down. Because you've created a broken culture.

This person has seemingly never worked with the kinds of tech people who are happy to point and click their way through their career, rarely taking an interest in automation or a deeper understanding of the tools they use every day. I won't say all of them are stupid, but certainly some of them are.
by terminalbraid | 2025-05-01 08:24:52+00:00
> what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness

Seriously. This is where Jetbrains went astray. Their original programmers I think were pretty high quality, but their product people are clearly so pants-on-head clueless that they wouldn't know a golden goose if it crushed them under metric tons of golden eggs. Good things don't power-law scale and "let's make 1000 forked IDEs and 50 really weird infrastructure servers" isn't a winning strategy. It's how you bury yourself in tech debt.

> I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE.

I mean, that's what launched Jetbrains in the first place. Google needed proper development tools for Android and a language more modern than Java at the time to support it. So we got Android Studio and Kotlin. They dumped a bunch of money into them and this is what we got once they started to get more independent.
by manidoraisamy | 2025-05-01 08:25:16+00:00
Finetuning is technical, but OpenAI hides things like layers, learning rates, and uses LoRA under the hood. You just upload examples - usually around 50.

But even that’s too much for most business users. Choosing input/output fields, generating and validating JSONL still feels like coding. That’s why we built PromptRepo: it turns finetuning into a guided, no-code workflow using spreadsheets.
by kovac | 2025-05-01 08:26:17+00:00
I didn't mean to sound like a hard-core BSD enthusiast, sorry. I was just very frustrated when they moved to cmake in their newer IDF, they added useless things that excluded BSDs. In its current state, it's untenable to patch it to make it work. This wasn't caused by the use of cmake. They could've moved to cmake, but done so with other OSes in mind, esp since they're already in our neighbourhood.
by lionkor | 2025-05-01 08:26:39+00:00
I worked on BeamMP[0][1], for 5 years, both as a project manager and lead developer for the server and client. BeamMP is a wildly popular multiplayer mod for BeamNG (1M registered players, always at least 3k concurrent players, also it's AGPL licensed). I left the team this year, but I can tell you: Mods, if they manage to break the sandbox in any way, can do anything, and the BeamNG sandbox will never be perfect. To their credit, the BeamNG devs have hired people from the community who do a lot of security research, and they have found numerous issues and fixed them before they could be exploited.

We have seen prototypes that can make network requests out of the sandbox, call winapi functions, and do anything else with the same privileges as the game, which, worst case, is admin because players like running things as administrator. All of those exploits are fixed, now.

The issue remains one of the largest problems in the community, and sites that are well known for distributing mods with malware (which is pretty common) are at the top of Google search results.

BeamMP allows mods on servers, which causes clients to download and then execute code from those mods. That's a huge attack vector and BeamMP has been working hard to warn users and to come up with ways to prevent problems; but without funding (BeamMP is free) there is a limit on what can be done. The infrastructure costs already are sky high for supporting the crazy amount of users they have.

Sadly, everyone involved loves NDAs - I can only hope that companies start doing writeups, but I doubt it. So that's all the inside info I can give ;)

[0] https://beammp.com

[1] https://GitHub.com/BeamMP
by botccounterplay | 2025-05-01 08:26:58+00:00
Hey HN readers!

I wanted to share the first draft of Signum, an open standard I've been putting together for labeling AI involvement in digital content.

I decided to put this standard together as I found myself wanting to display how much I'd leveraged AI when writing code, documentation, or creating digital media content.

Looking around, I couldn't find existing way to add this information to my content that was consistent and standardised, enter Signum.

What Signum Is:

Signum proposes a simple, 5-level framework (from purely Human to Fully Automated AI) with associated metadata and optional visual cues to label content based on the creation process.

The goal isn't to judge quality, but simply to provide transparency about how something was made.

Seeking Feedback & Guidance:

This is genuinely my first time attempting to build out and share a standard/project like this.

I'm fully aware it's likely naive in places and definitely incomplete.

I'm putting this draft out specifically because I'm keen to get constructive feedback, criticism, suggestions for improvement, pointers to things I've missed, and guidance from the HN community.

If you think the approach is flawed, or could be better, I'd love to hear why. Collaboration would be fantastic too!

Appreciate you taking the time to look.

Thanks,

CT
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-01 08:27:10+00:00
The two situations are also totally different: Chrome has been far better for the Web than IE ever was, and the reason Firefox is still keeping up is that it got that money from Google.

If we decide that Web innovation is done in the browser, and it all has to move to Javascript libraries again, the way we did when browser innovation stalled in the 2000s and we got jQuery, so be it, I suppose.
by chrismorgan | 2025-05-01 08:27:18+00:00
Another problem is line breaks. Have a <textarea>? Line breaks are counted as \n on the client (affecting maxlength attribute and JavaScript calculations using textarea.value.length), but submitted as \r\n. This has bitten me on “2000 character maximum” feedback forms at least twice: client says it’s fine, server says it’s too long, and promptly throws everything away.
by cynicalsecurity | 2025-05-01 08:27:20+00:00
Dropbox is scanning every file users upload. You can lose your whole paid account in a moment of seconds with years of work because they didn't like something. Their response: you can sue us in an American court, good luck. Using Dropbox, you need to have a backup of your data outside of it which pretty much negates the whole aspect of using it in the first place.

Moved to Nextcloud and never felt better.
by mickelsen | 2025-05-01 08:28:39+00:00
Yes. Very much so. We have to stand our ground against those who want to strip us of our freedoms, consolidate their monopoly on force, and leave us defenseless. This is no hypothetical situation, this happened in Chile during the 2019-2021 protests. The left tried to push like never before for drastic police reforms, including proposals to defund the police, remove their access to firearms, and dismantle units like the Carabineros’ special forces, all with daily chaos and violent riots on the streets. The outcome? It led to massive unrest, rising crime, and the erosion of public trust. Now we see a return to public outcry, with citizens demanding the restoration of law and order and reaffirming the role of police in maintaining public safety. The attempts to strip police power backfired, and now, the same progressives who pushed these reforms are facing the consequences of that political experiment. We are so back, we are coming back hard. This is the answer you wanted?
by perilunar | 2025-05-01 08:30:00+00:00
Google Maps doesn't use Mercator — it uses a 3D globe. If you zoom out you can see the whole globe and there doesn't seem to be any jump where the projection changes, or any distortion of country sizes.

Edit: I just noticed that Google Maps on Firefox and Chrome is indeed 3D, but on Safari it is 2D Mercator.
by fifilura | 2025-05-01 08:30:36+00:00
I don't get it. Can someone explain this so a child could understand?

I can understand how Google has used their dominant search engine position to push Chrome. A lot has been said about that. Also in the Microsoft case for setting IE as default browser in Windows.

But I don't understand why it should be forbidden for Google to pay other browser vendors for directing searches to them. That just seems like well functioning market economy.

Is it for paying extra to be default? Is that worth 5x the money in the contract? Or is it just that they are paying too much - more than it is worth - to allow the competition to stay, in order to not become a monopoly?
by taurath | 2025-05-01 08:31:15+00:00
As someone who was a child with autism whose parents followed these guidelines, fuck you. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

It wasn’t just the hitting. It was the threat of being hit for anything. It was the contradictory internal rules I had to come up with to try to avoid being hit. It’s the internalization that I was bad that I carried for decades of my life. It’s when it slipped, and they started using it because it was the only thing that worked, because they didn’t know how to handle their own emotions let along a child’s. Don’t recommend parents hit their kids. Don’t make it okay. Full stop. You don’t know who the parents are.

Kids don’t know that you only use hitting in certain circumstances, even if you tell them.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-01 08:32:04+00:00
Both Chromium (used for chrome, edge, brave, etc.) and Firefox are open source. They can be forked and many people/companies do that. And even Safari is based on Webkit (a fork of KHTML). And Webkit continues to be open source and provides a more or less complete browser engine that can be adapted for use in other browsers (and has been). There are a few other browser engines out there but most of them don't register in usage statistics as anywhere near significant. Fractions of a percent market share basically. But most of those are also open source. So, the good news is that essentially all browsers are mostly based on open source code bases. Those aren't going to go away.

The difference between the top three and those other engines: Google funding. Google pays for access to the user via search and advertising. And for influence over standardization. Because you don't bite the hand that feeds you.

What happens if that flow of money stops is going to be interesting. I think there are probably going to be many companies, users and developers interested in seeing development of the thing they use, depend on, or work on every day continue. And it opens up the doors for other companies with commercial interests on the web to step up and sponsor some of this stuff. Companies paying for developers is how development for a lot of widely used OSS software works after all. I'm not too worried about all this grinding to a halt just because Google is forced to stop trying to own and control all browser development and related standardization. And people forget that especially Chromium and Mozilla get a lot of external contributions to their source code from developers that aren't paid by Google.

I think it wouldn't be bad for some fresh blood in this space. Including fresh funding from other companies. Apple and MS would probably step up their funding. They have plenty of vested interest and the means to do so. As do many other companies that depend on the web for their revenue. There's plenty of money out there that hasn't been tapped into simply because Google was paying all the bills. More diverse financing will make the web more robust. It also means a more diverse set of commercial interests. And a more level playing field. Maybe there's more than just advertisement driven click bait to be had. Even Mozilla might finally stumble on a more sustainable business model than just taking Google money and wasting it mostly on things that don't matter to browser users.
by whitehexagon | 2025-05-01 08:32:06+00:00
Wow, 70% is pretty impressive. Although everywhere I go I see huge areas of farmland being converted into privately owned giant solar farms. At least the turbines are mostly non-productive land.

Of course it would be much more stable if the generation was close to consumption.

But the energy companies have fought before to limit homeowner solar installations to maintain profits. The EU broke that corruption, but the local town hall is still saying I need a permission.

The electric companies want me to conect to the grid, and pay for that privalage, but wont pay me for excess generation. Do these smart-meters even allow 'islanding' in such a crisis?

Anyway, it seems like this incident just exposed a very big single-point-of-failure, technically, and an even bigger general failure of modern politics.