MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by funvill | 2025-05-26 04:36:50+00:00
Art project. Counter Productive

A random button in a park with a countdown timer.

Instructions:

- Press the button to reset the 24-hour countdown timer.

- If the timer ever reaches zero, the project ends and the project will be removed.

- To keep the project alive — press the button

Its been running for 56 days with 820 button presses.

Write up: https://blog.abluestar.com/projects/2025-counterproductive/

Stats page https://blog.abluestar.com/other/counterproductive.html
by radsj | 2025-05-26 04:37:19+00:00
https://avrhut.com/web-clipper-to-apple-notes.html

Working on solving my own pain point, around saving web pages to apple notes. While there are workarounds like singlefile and apple shortcuts, it ends up being a multi-step process, and limited search functionality within apple notes.

Also, experimenting with using texting to manage family calendars: https://textconcierge.ai/
by Moni_Mac | 2025-05-26 04:37:29+00:00
After Microsoft's March 2024 update, EV Code signing certs don't offer instant Microsoft Defender reputation. Now, OV and EV both code signing certificates can be installed and stored on FIPS 140 Level 2 or Common Criteria EAL 4+ certified HSM, tokens, or cloud HSMs. So, you can consider EV Code Signing as higher security and higher validation with no more difference. If u want to buy code signing at affordable cost, I recommend: https://signmycode.com/cheap-code-signing-certificates
by the_black_hand | 2025-05-26 04:38:05+00:00
I'm going to get downvoted for this, but it makes sense. People live much longer than in the past. Advancements in fitness and the decline in birthrates only make it fair for us to work a little longer. Ultimately, what I hope for is AI to take care of most of the heavy work and allow us more leasiurely time, but we are still decades away from getting their.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-26 04:39:44+00:00
> Don’t look me in the eye and tell me SNOBOL is the language of the future.

Assuming the pose and lighting a big joint, inhaling deep:

"Yah, well... Snobol isn't, but have you ever heard of micralyzed Speedball...err...SpitBol!?!?"

Madly giggling putting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPITBOL in here, and vanishing into the OFF :p
by csomar | 2025-05-26 04:40:07+00:00
> The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen.

It can happen in a generation, if all of that generation decides to have zero offspring. This is why it is happening in slow motion. There are still people having kids but not enough for sustaining the current population levels.

> We're all related.

We are also related to bugs. Humans generally care for their very close relatives (kids -> parents -> cousins...) and emotionally care for the rest of humans.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-05-26 04:40:46+00:00
Zero is just as arbitrary as 32 but ever so slightly easier to remember. Anyone for whom that slight difference in remembering is actually a real impediment likely has other issues that require them to be under the care of others so it ceases to be relevant to them. At the other end, 100 vs 212 is of no practical use for anyone. Outside of the laboratory and manufacturing, people just boil water without thinking about the number associated with it. And in those settings, many other variables are tracked so the difference is of near zero consequence.
by gonzalezj | 2025-05-26 04:41:47+00:00
In line with the recent Discord message dataset and the searchcord post...

I find it a little insane that this is remotely feasible without state-level resources, but it doesn't seem like YouTube has any serious anti-scraping measures to prevent me from doing exactly what this person seems to be doing. I guess Google does not consider this a privacy boundary?

It appears to be just this one guy: https://x.com/lol_archiver/status/1924881379705454923
by const_cast | 2025-05-26 04:42:24+00:00
Here in Texas the new hotness is just building more and more toll roads and express lanes. Which are not toll roads, but even more expensive somehow.

It's to a point some major parts of DFW like Plano and Frisco are only accessible via tollway. That's the only highway - the other "highway" has a light every half mile. Meanwhile, we have some of the most dangerous interstates and highways in the country.

Where's all that toll money going? I have no idea, but maybe it'll pan out. It just sucks because it's already quite expensive to commute in DFW.
by sulikns | 2025-05-26 04:42:51+00:00
I'm 37 and live in one of those lesser-known countries whose diplomas likely don’t hold much weight elsewhere—but that’s not the point. I’ve decided to change my profession. After many trials and errors, I studied Python. I wrote some scripts and bots, but I kept feeling like something was missing—I didn’t really understand programming.

Then I discovered OSSU and, after reviewing their curriculum, I realized just how little I actually knew about computer science. I started over from scratch, even relearning math. Because of the language barrier (yes, I learned English by forcing myself to study in English), my conversational skills are still shaky, and this text was polished with the help of GPT.

I’m not thinking about a job just yet. My current goal is to get a solid academic education, and I believe OSSU is one of the best initiatives ever created—accessible to the entire world. It's not just about being free. Maybe the best universities are in the U.S., but compared to what's available in my country, the OSSU curriculum is several levels higher in both quality and structure.

As for work, I plan to contribute to the open-source world, hoping to make the world a better place, just like the creators of OSSU did. Education should be accessible to everyone—not just a privileged few.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-26 04:42:56+00:00
> Performers are not in the business of optimizing ROI, they're in the business of performing.

I have to disagree; performers are absolutely in the business of optimization. Bo Burnham was singing about metrification destroying art 10 years ago. Every standup comic is using social media as a sales funnel to figure out exactly which cities they have an audience in. Even if the performers themselves are not concerned with gaming these numbers, they almost always have someone working for them who does.

So I still don’t quite understand why the scalpers are the ones getting to eat the free lunch.

> selling out quickly is in and of itself valuable for a performer

This one seems like a more likely explanation, but the pattern with a lot of these ticket sales is that the demand is already there organically without scalpers entering the equation. I don’t really follow the space so I really don’t know, but I’d imagine the shows that get targeted the most are the performers who were going to be playing a sold out show regardless of the scalpers.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-26 04:43:06+00:00
I've been the unemployed/underemployed guy having wilderness adventures with a beautiful girlfriend before. It's great (for a time.) But we're not talking about having wilderness adventures. We're talking about moving far away from anywhere you know to live in rural poverty in far upstate New York and work at a gas station in a depressed area, in a dilapidated building on land that virtually nobody wants, for good reason.

That specific solution is what the author of this piece proposed for the woes of the young people of America, not wilderness adventures or anything else.

Only on HN would I have to explain why this might affect your romantic life, but here goes. Statistically speaking, for men aged 25-54 in the US, being poor [1] nearly halves your chances of finding a partner. Chances which, I might add, are already not great, and certainly not improved by your lack of car, reliable heat, social connections et cetera.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...

[1] men earning 150% of federal poverty level for a one-person household
by hunter2_ | 2025-05-26 04:43:22+00:00
Can a recipient be a member of multiple groups, for example, if I happen to be among coworkers and family (or whatever)? If so, hopefully I would get one newsletter containing all the posts tagged as any of my groups. But this means the potential number of different newsletters grows exponentially relative to the number of groups (although in practice, it would be extremely unlikely that a huge number of combinations actually exist) which might or might not matter, depending on whether each recipient already gets a bespoke copy (greeting them by name, click tracking, etc.) or if you're relying on listserv style distribution.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-05-26 04:43:52+00:00
For me, it was 2023, when Bazzite came out and I installed it on my ThinkPad - I loved the whole concept of immutable distros and having to never worry about updates again. It was solid enough to be used for both gaming and productivity.Regarding the latter, I loved how much KDE and the overall ecosystem matured. Eg, I was able to add my Brother printer in exactly 3 clicks - no driver was needed either. I mean, how cool is that?
by bitwize | 2025-05-26 04:43:53+00:00
Emacs was meant to be an extensible text editor.

The standard "great OS, needs decent editor" quip is just that -- a quip. If you look at the actual history of Emacs, you will see that the it was originally a collection of TECO macros. The first Lisp version was written by Dick Greenblatt for Multics -- it was not intended to be an operating system in its own right. The Lisp machines had Emacs versions of their own -- called EINE, ZWEI, and Zmacs. So Emacs was well-established on multiple operating systems before GNU Emacs even came along. You could say that the GNU system as a whole is intended to be a successor to ITS and the Lisp machine OS, but Stallman deliberately chose Unix as a basis because he wanted GNU to be popular and Unix was already widespread in 1983-1984.

In fact, GNU Emacs didn't even get some of its more powerful UI features until the 90s, after Lucid Emacs/XEmacs was developed by Lucid Inc. as a component of their Energize IDE -- they found GNU Emacs at the time to be inadequate from a UI standpoint, so they forked it and added the bits they needed. Most of those were implemented back into GNU Emacs, despite that Stallman thought that, for the most part, they weren't needed.

So no, Emacs wasn't designed to be a software Lisp-machine workstation. It just sort of slowly morphed into one over time.
by krackers | 2025-05-26 04:44:43+00:00
I don't think it's clear that human languages are context sensitive. The only consistent claim I can find is that at one point someone examined Swiss German and found that it's weakly context sensitive. Also empirically human language don't have that much recursion. You can artificially construct such examples, but beyond a certain depth people won't be able to parse it either.

I don't know whether the non-existence of papers studying whether LLMs can model context-sensitive grammar is because they can't, or because people haven't tested that hypothesis yet. But again empirically LLMs do seem to be able to reproduce human language just fine. The whole "hallucination" argument is precisely that LLMs are very good at reproducing the structure of language even if those statements don't encode things with the correct truth value. The fact that they successfully learn to parse complex CFGs is thus evidence that they can actually learn underlying generative mechanisms instead of simply parroting snippets of training data as naively assumed, and it's not a huge leap to imagine that they've learned some underlying "grammar" for English as well.

So if one argues that LLMs as a generative model cannot generate novel valid sentences in the English language, then that is easily falsifiable hypothesis. If we had examples of LLMs producing non-well formed sentences, people would have latched onto that by now, instead of "count Rs in strawbery" but I've never seen anyone arguing as such.
by adityaathalye | 2025-05-26 04:45:25+00:00
Oh, I completely forgot about your blog. I only had the JPL page bookmarked.

HN is how I heard the story many years ago, and I posted it again because (a) It's my favourite story and (b) a discussion elsewhere in HN reminded me of it. So I had to.

Didn't expect it to bubble up on the front page... that says a lot about the enduring quality of your field experience. Thanks for publishing about it!
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-26 04:45:47+00:00
> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.

Not unless you've raised 2 more workers to pick up the shovel while you're playing golf. You could, of course, rely on your neighbor's kids through taxes and pensions but when your neighbor thinks the same it becomes problematic.

On the plus side, if you did raise kids, you may negotiate your retirement with them even if the averaged government system stops working.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-26 04:45:56+00:00
They seem to be quite effective here in Norway. We have very high rates on imported food that competes with local production. The goal is to ensure we can be fairly self-sufficient when it comes to food.

So far it seems to be doing a good job at keeping cheap EU-made food out of our grocery stores.

Of course implementation matters a lot. We have no farmers growing corn in Norway, so we don't have any tariffs on corn. We do have farmers growing apples, but there's no harvesting those during our snowy winters so our tariffs on apples are just active when local apples are in season. We do produce beef all year, but not always enough so they hand out limited quotas allowing for massive reduction in duties to compensate and meet demand.
by patcon | 2025-05-26 04:48:25+00:00
A visual exploration tool for mapping large-scale public opinion data (derived from conversations hosted with the Pol.is public engagement tool), but using more advanced dimensional reduction algorithms like PaCMAP/LocalMAP:

https://patcon.github.io/polislike-opinion-map-painting/

Am also working on a python library to generalize the pipeline of Pol.is, so that more projects can use its features without recreating from scratch:

https://github.com/polis-community/red-dwarf/
by bruce511 | 2025-05-26 04:49:52+00:00
Ideas are one thing, execution is another. Based on bad execution it's possible for the cure to be worse than the disease.

Tarifs are a powerful tool to product specific industries. When implemented properly (focused on specific industries) they can change behavior, support local jobs, increase national objectives.

Applied consistently, in a predictable way, across decades, they allow rational players to predict the future, and invest accordingly. If I can see that washing machines have a floor price I can invest in a washing machine factory.

When implemented broadly (like across all industries, globally, at random percentages) they achieve none of the above. All they achieve are higher prices. Tariffs on coffee serve no domestic goals since the US has no coffee industry.

The problem is not that Trumps ideas are bad. Voters love his policies. But he's lazy. It's easiest to just slap "10% on the world" than say 10% on lumber to protect the local lumber industry. Worse, there's no stability. The here-today-gone-tomorrow approach defeats the point. I'm not investing in a new lumber mill if those 50% tarifs will be gone by July.

So to answer the post higher up, Trump takes good ideas, but executes them badly. It's not a double-standard, it's just that he's good at talking but really, really bad at doing things. Doing hard things is hard, and he's lazy.

On the other hand he's a good grifter. No one grifts like he does. If his goal in getting elected was to enrich himself, then he's doing a great job.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-26 04:50:23+00:00
Prompt injection is unlikely to be fixed. I'd stop thinking about LLMs as software where you can with enough effort just fix a SQL injection vulnerability, and start thinking about them like you'd think about insider risk from employees.

That's not to say that they are employees or perform at that level, they don't, but it's to say that LLM behaviours are fuzzy and ill-defined, like humans. You can't guarantee that your users won't click on a phishing email – you can train them, you can minimise risk, but ultimately you have to have a range of solutions applied together and some amount of trust. If we think about LLMs this way I think the conversation around security will be much more productive.
by TheChaplain | 2025-05-26 04:52:10+00:00
I don't really get the point of JWT these days with SameSite and CSP-headers available.

And from the backend perspective, most frameworks have session tracking built-in with cookies so it's super easy to dismiss one or all clients.

With JWT however, that rarely exist and you need to re-implement the whole session-shebang in order to keep track of the clients.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-26 04:52:49+00:00
> Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.

This doesn't fundamentally change the equation. Whether you save pension points or cash or ETFs it's just a coupon for your share of the economy of the future. It's a promise that the future generation will share some of their income with you.
by fakedang | 2025-05-26 04:53:14+00:00
Actually, OP has given information that proves exactly that. Maybe not in one generation, but Lebanon was in a similar situation where the Muslim population, which was firmly a minority in the 1940s, outbred the Christian population and is currently more than the latter.

I don't have a horse in this game - I'm Muslim after all. But I've experienced London pre-immigration boom and post-immigration boom and I definitely prefer the former, like some of my Muslim peers. The fabric of London has already been destroyed, especially when given the fact that London natives have been priced out of their own homes. Given what I've seen firsthand, and what's preached in the mosques of the UK by unleashed and unhinged Imams, the UK is on track to become a Muslim country in 2 or 3 generations.
by hyperadvanced | 2025-05-26 04:53:43+00:00
I agree. But it’s worth being somewhat skeptical of ASI scenarios if you can’t, for example, give a well formulated math problem to a LLM and it cannot solve it. Until we get a Reimann hypothesis calculator (or equivalent for hard/old unsolved maths) it’s kind of silly to be debating the extreme ends of AI cognition theory
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-26 04:54:21+00:00
> For the most simple use case of an client auth state; you want to be able to revoke auth straight away if an account is compromised. This means you have to check the auth database for every request anyway, and you probably could have got whatever else was in the claim there quickly.

FWIW, I built a system previously that got around this "having to check the DB on every access to check for revocations" issue that worked quite well. Two important things to realize:

1. Revocations (or what is usually basically "explicit logout") is actually quite rare in a lot of user application patterns. E.g. for many web apps users very rarely explicitly logout. It's even rarer for mobile apps.

2. You only need to keep around a list of revocations for as long as your token expiry is. For example, if your token expiration is 30 mins, and you expire a user's tokens at noon, by 12:30 PM you can drop that revocation statement, because any tokens affected by that revocation would have expired anyway.

Thus, if you have a relatively short token expiration (say, a half hour), the size of your token expiration list can almost always fit in memory. So what I built:

1. The interface to see if a token has expired is basically "getEarliestTokenIssuedAt(userId: string): Date" - essentially, what is the earliest possible issuance timestamp for a token for a particular user to be considered valid. So, revoking a user's previously issued tokens means just setting this date to Now(), then any token issued before that will be considered invalid.

2. I had a table in postgres that just stored the user ID and earliest valid token date. However, I used postgres' NOTIFY functionality to send a broadcast to all my servers whenever a row was added to this table.

3. My servers then just had what was a local copy of this table, but stored in memory. Again, remember that I could just drop entries that were older than the longest token expiration date, so this could fit in memory.

On the off-chance that somehow the current revocation list couldn't fit in memory, I build something in the system that allowed it to essentially say "memory is full" which would cause it to make a call back to postgres', but again, that situation would naturally clear up after a few minutes if revocations went back down and the token expiration window passed.

This sounds more complicated than it actually was. It has the benefits of:

1. Almost no statefulness, which was great for scalability.

2. Verifying a token could still always be done in memory, at least almost. Over a couple years of running the system I actually never hit a state when the in-memory revocation list got too big.
by user_7832 | 2025-05-26 04:54:30+00:00
> The big lesson from the AI development in the last 10 years from me has been "I guess humans really aren't so special after all"

Instead I would take the opposite take.

How wonderful is it, that with naturally evolved processes and neural structures, have we been able to create what we have. Van Gogh’s paintings came out of the human brain. The Queens of the Skies - hundreds of tons of metal and composites - flying across continents in the form of a Boeing 747 or an A380 - was designed by the human brain. We went to space, have studied nature (and have conservation programs for organisms we have found to need help), took pictures the pillars of creation that are so incredibly far… all with such a “puny” structure a few cm in diameter? I think that’s freaking amazing.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-26 04:54:34+00:00
In the United States, full-time hours are in a range.

Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there.

A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances.

Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.
by linsomniac | 2025-05-26 04:54:40+00:00
Not too hard. I came up with the idea in the shower one morning after a week of doing a lot of cert maintenance. I spent around 20 minutes writing a design document and did a couple back-and-forths with Claude Code and testing, then some refinementand improvements. Had some discussions with friends and associates looking for security issues I had missed.

Maybe 2 hours into it so far, Claude Code did all the coding so far.
by kro | 2025-05-26 04:54:55+00:00
There is a jti claim that can be used for storing a token ID, so you could enforce tracking all issued tokens server side.

Cracking 256bit by brute force is unrealistically unlikely as you said, and there are many systems that could be compromised by that compute, an isolated jwt sig seems like just a very specific example.

A nice benefit of JWT for me is that it can be asymm signed and verified (ID tokens)