MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bri3d | 2025-05-25 16:55:58+00:00
I agree with this. I also agree that there's no preferable situation. Apple have done a great job building mitigations and it shows in how difficult, expensive, and rare it is to fully exploit their platforms. I certainly wasn't intending to form a counter-argument that public exploits existing would be a positive signal, or that there's a preferable alternative situation.

My only point was that "anything public is dead is what you want to see" is not a particularly useful rubric in general. I get nervous when I see statements that suggest an absence of public exploit material or high "bid" price for grey market exploits as evidence that a platform is less vulnerable. My experience suggests this isn't really how the market works in general. There are way too many additional factors that affect both pricing and publication to use "public exploit availability" or "grey-market bid price" as a signal about a platform's security posture overall.

Anyway, reading back, I realize that you specifically weren't trying to draw that conclusion, but sibling comments are now - and it seems to be a really easy trap to fall into. See: every "security journalism" outlet every time a broker posts an Android bid that's higher than their standing iOS bid, or vendors and OEMs claiming their devices are secure because no public exploits exist.
by arewethereyeta | 2025-05-25 16:56:26+00:00
Maybe that's why people don't bother targeting Linux. Look at your comment. Why are people so easily offended these days by things that are out here, doing no harm to anyone. Like, you could just hit the back button and go on with your day. Why do you need to be so offended? If this is the sort of stuff that triggers you I can't imagine how your day looks like.
by impossiblefork | 2025-05-25 16:57:19+00:00
The problem was that he was holding Iraq together. After he fell, we ended up with a situation where there are about 1/2 as many Iraqi Christians in Sweden as there are in Iraq.

Basically, Iraq went straight to hell, and whatever minorities etc. didn't flee got murdered.

I interpret it as something along the lines of Saddam Hussein's government caring about having a strong or at least functional country enough that they only wanted to kill Kurds and Iranians.

Baathists are better than sectarian madmen, and I suspect we'll see some kind of idiot outcome in Syria as well.
by veidr | 2025-05-25 16:57:20+00:00
Yes... it can be possible to do both of those things, but it's not remotely possible to create any credible equivalency between, them:

a.) your paper refuting those claims doesn't get widespread coverage

b.) your paper refuting those claims gets you beaten to death on the streets, or imprisoned and totured to death in prison (or even just imprisoned and released some time later)

This isn't even _good_ whataboutism
by gervwyk | 2025-05-25 16:57:47+00:00
We wanted to create some animations for our site https://resonancy.io, and I’ve built them using lottielab. I must say, they have done an amazing job to create a decent editor which really works with svgs, by far better than any online tool I’ve used before. Smooth experience overall. Then comes export.

Not sure if this is only a problem with lottielab or the lottie format, but if not using their proprietary minimizing hosting the animations are so big that I consider them useless for a landing page. Their compression reduces the size by 400% on average for larger animations. We ended up paying $30 subscription just to host the animations which does not sit right with me. So will be looking for alternatives but not looking forward to recreating them..

In the past I’ve used other react based animation libs and they chore of building animations was so tedious I would not attempt anything complicated. With lottlielab you can really play and build what you can imagine with relative ease.

Have not tried Rive.. Will check it out. Any suggestions on how to better compress lottie format for libs for that would be appreciated.
by scott_w | 2025-05-25 16:58:35+00:00
This isn’t a discussion of whether you should use services or not, only what to do in the case where you do have separate services interacting with a schema. And, in this case, trying to maintain consistency with multiple apps accessing the DB directly can quickly turn into a nightmare. Better to maintain separate services interacting over some contract to insulate multiple codebases from the internals of each other.
by atvcatole | 2025-05-25 16:58:39+00:00
I believe they used Parisian variants of the french units.

They measured the distance between the Mediterranean Sea and the North Sea through Paris with platinum rulers measuring 2 Toise de Paris.

The toise was different in different parts of France, so it was specifically the Paris one they used, and the goal was to get rid of local variants of the same units with vague definitions like toise, point, line, inch, feet, mil(e) etc.

Once they had the distance in Toise de Paris and did some math they could define the circumference of the earth and define the meter at 1/40 000 000 of that.

That length was 443.44 Lignes de Paris where a ligne is 1/864 toise.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-25 16:59:08+00:00
Even a moron can write directions for how to milk a cow. It doesn't matter how poor the writing is, it matters whether a person understands it. People can (and do, regularly) understand poor writing. Even a child can write its parent a note expressing love in terrible writing that the parent will understand, and the idea remains right and true regardless of the quality or style of writing.

Historical recipes are terrible because they lack details. They don't tell you to add salt, they don't include accurate measurements (of temperature, time, ingredients, etc), they don't explain methods. Yet people of the time they were written can still follow those recipes and cook the intended dish. Writers always leave out details that are assumed by the reader. At the time those recipes were written, those people reading them would have already known all the left-out details.

If I write you a book on programming, I'm not going to explain to you what a computer is, how it works, how to copy software onto it, how to power it. You're going to already understand all that, or you probably wouldn't be reading a book on programming. Depending on what you understand, and depending on what ideas I try to convey, and how I do that, may change the end result of the information you come to understand. But they don't make the ideas less or more valid because I wrote it this way or that way.

Writing is only the communication of an idea from an author to a reader. Style, form, method, construction, etc are all inherent to writing. But the validity of the expressed idea is not. The content of the idea is completely separate from the "art" of writing. A painting of a blue sun does not affect the sun, nor does a painter's ability to depict the sun affect the sun. But a bad painter can still paint a bad painting that a viewer will understand to be the sun.

"Good writing" is like "Good art". It's subjective. As long as the recipient got what the producer intended, it's good enough.
by vkou | 2025-05-25 16:59:48+00:00
Yeah, like killing half a million people, creating an environment for ISIS to germinate, grow, and perform unspeakable atrocities in both that, and a neighbouring country (with a little bit of fun terrorism in Europe thrown in, but on the grand scheme of things, the moral weight of a few hundred murdered Europeans pales in comparison to what they were doing closer to home).

It's never a bad idea to create a power vacuum by overthrowing a dictatorship and then utterly fucking up your occupation and handling of the peace.

It's not clear if any invader and occupier could have handled that part well, but it is absolutely clear that the ghouls running the Bush regime were completely incapable of it. That those architects are still part of civilized society, and didn't spend the rest of their worthless lives breaking rocks with their teeth in a chain gang never fails to boil my blood. They put the lie to every principle of freedom and liberty that western democracies claim to stand for.

Similar horrors were inflicted on Libya by the Obama administration in particular and NATO in the general, but they were smart enough to not even sully their hands with making any effort to occupy and nationbuild after the fact. And guess what happened? Also ISIS and also a decade of civil war, and while it's died down a bit, there are still violent clashes between warlords and a humanitarian disaster nobody gives two shits about going on in the background.

Under Qadaffi, Libyans weren't free. But they weren't hungry, either.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-25 17:00:35+00:00
Yes exactly. The first text-based email clients I used that quoted the original message in a reply[1] defaulted to bottom posting. They'd include the message with the ">" prefix on each line, and your cursor would be positioned at the bottom of that. So at that time most people did inline or bottom replies.

Microsoft Email/Exchange/Outlook as best I can remember have always defaulted to quoting the message and leaving the cursor at the top. And they didn't prefix the quoted text in any way, so to do inline replies you'd have to make it clear which text was quoted and which text was new. People would use colors or different fonts when "rich" text became supported but it was more work and most people just took the easy path.

[1] Very early on, MUAs did not (at least by default) quote the original message. This was because most people were using teletypes or slow (300 baud) terminals and possibly a line-oriented editor such as 'ed' so quoting the original message could add significant extra time needed to compose a reply. Also, with a mail client that does proper threading, you can see which message is being replied to and you don't really need to include that again in the reply.
by JennyWeston | 2025-05-25 17:00:49+00:00
I thought about this topic a lot. In my humble opinion: a database is overkill.

My solution: A simple spreadsheet and a reminder The spreadsheet has "contact every 3 weeks", "contact every 2 mos", "contact every 90 days".

I have a reminder in my todoist app to look at the spreadsheet every 2 weeks.

To track birthdays I used google calendar.

I suppose if you have a who lot of friends that a database would be a better option. For me, I only track about 45 people and my system works just fine.
by jghn | 2025-05-25 17:02:19+00:00
This was a huge debate on USENET in particular, as well as in the email world until Outlook effectively made top posting the standard.

RFC 1855 [1] makes it clear that the correct way is to quote relevant text and then reply.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1855
by arp242 | 2025-05-25 17:03:12+00:00
There was the notion in certain (neo)conservative circles throughout the 90s that toppling Saddam really would be the trigger for a democratic wave throughout the middle east, kind of like an "Arab spring". This would benefit everyone in a kind of win-win situation: the US would have fewer enemies, and the people living there would benefit because freedom and democracy is good.

The "weapons of mass destruction" was kind of used as a pretext because they didn't believe such an argument would win popular support. It's somewhat abstract and rooted in a kind of ideology rather than pragmatism. They also genuinely believed that Saddam did have weapons of mass destructions, but just couldn't prove it. They would be found after invasion. Just a little white lie in the meanwhile.

That's really all there's to it. People get all cynical about "freedom and democracy", but that really was the goal, as a kind of "enlightened self-interest". After 9/11 this only became more acute: with the middle east part of the liberal hegemony, there would be no more Al-Qaeda (or they would be severely weakened).

Because they lied about the pretext, there was little to no broad discussion about any of this so they just operated in their ideological echo chamber. There was no one to really point out this entire notion was perhaps well-intentioned but also rather misguided and ignorant (to say nothing of the execution, which was profoundly misguided and ignorant).
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-25 17:03:36+00:00
*) by 2040. I hate it when titles are incomplete.

How will this work realistically? How will you convince employers to keep workers employed till 70? Especially in fast changing fields like IT where a lot of old knowledge and experience gets considered obsolete by those screening resumes. Sure, people might survive longer, but that doesn't mean all workers will be equally mentally or physically fit to still perform well at some jobs at 70 as well as a 30 year old, especially if they're mentally or physically challenging jobs.

I'm not talking about government paper pushing jobs, but private industry jobs with international competition where you need to be agile and up to speed to survive as a business. This system worked for the boomer generation in slow moving highly regulated industries like steel, rail and automotive, where you'd spend all your life at one company who'd promote you and invest in your training till retirement, but this isn't as common anymore. International companies now want things done faster and cheaper and can't be competitive keeping 70-year-olds on the payroll idling around waiting for retirement.

For example, here in Austria, if you're laid off at the age of 50, the chances of getting another job at that age for many professions are already next to zero due to rampant ageism, so workers in some professions end up on long term unemployment till retirement, yet the government agencies are not talking about this major issue and just tell the 50 year olds on long term unemployment to "make a more colorful resume to stand out"(I shit you not). You're also not allowed to take your contributions out of that pot early or all at once to fuck off out of the system and be on your own if you want, proving it is Ponzi scheme in disguise.
by johnohara | 2025-05-25 17:03:50+00:00
2,000,000 miles of roads @ $1,000,000 per mile.

Think of that the next time you drive through Arizona on I-40, avoiding the potholes, debris, and life-threatening disrepair.

I-40 runs a scant 2,556 miles from Barstow, CA to Benson, NC.
by harshitaneja | 2025-05-25 17:04:54+00:00
Everyone should obviously be able to make decisions for their own content on their own websites/blog and more power to you for exercising your agency and choice here. I browsed through your blog and with your content on vintage computing and history, I can consume the content without having to care about a date.

However, I don't find that to be the case for most of the written content I consume and knowing where some content was created temporally is important context more often than not(at least in my experience). Now, I can't nor would I want to dictate what others do on their own hosted content(where they generously share their hard meticulous work).

Comments on HN and other places lamenting lack of dates however should be fair game to desire such additional context. But then again, you commenting back is just participating in the same dialogue so I guess my entire message has been just meandering.
by belter | 2025-05-25 17:05:25+00:00
> Any platform that reaches a sufficient size will be taken over by powerful people regardless of who was originally running it.

I am not sure a social network, run buy the democratic votes and non-profit board of Swiss cantons or Danish town halls...Will be equivalent to one governed by a semi-psychotic billionaire with daddy's issues, who runs his own Lebensborn operation...
by gmzamz | 2025-05-25 17:05:42+00:00
You can't optimize for two things at the same time in the /same system/.

In your example, the best volume for the stereo will change based on how fast you're going. Noise from air going around your car will require a slightly louder volume. It technically goes the other way too, I'm sure louder music will affect your mileage slightly, reducing your MPG due to increased power draw. Realistically it won't matter, but they do exist in the same system.

You can absolutely optimize for two things at the same time in different systems. The ideal speed optimizing for MPG in different cars aren't really linked and can be found independently.
by herrherrmann | 2025-05-25 17:06:14+00:00
The library does this in during runtime, though, if I’m not mistaken? The original commenter is probably referring to a build step that extracts the Lottie content and only leaves JS and SVG in the final output (which is not the case, as the Lottie web player library itself needs to be included as well, to render the animations and provide interactivity APIs during the rendering of the web page).
by deanc | 2025-05-25 17:06:45+00:00
I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m based in the Nordics and my estimated retirement age at the moment (where I can get my state pension) is 67y 4m. Whilst I understand the burden the aging population is having on society (lifespan) it doesn’t seem like there’s much proactive government input into people’s healthspan.

Maybe instead we should try investing in this area (reducing the burden on services) instead of simply trying to reduce the quantity of folks claiming from the state pension pot.
by mykowebhn | 2025-05-25 17:06:50+00:00
Also,

> But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.

So, we have 1) Can't conclude that beautiful writing is true, and 2) Writing that is not beautiful usually has bad ideas too.

But he immediately follows this up with:

> Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two ends of the same thing.

How does this idea logically follow from the previous statement? Indeed?

I don't agree with other commenters that PG's writing here is good. The writing is bad, and so are the ideas.

What are people smoking to think PG is such a great thinker and/or writer?
by b3ing | 2025-05-25 17:07:07+00:00
The problem with Rive (competitor to Lottie) is that it’s built less artistically. You can’t just draw things with a pencil/blob tool. You have to do things a certain way which mostly means importing SVGs. Definitely doesn’t have the Flash simple artistic point of view for a UI, don’t get me wrong it does some interesting things but it’s less intuitive than Flash
by rixed | 2025-05-25 17:07:30+00:00
There is no such thing as "supporting [top/bottom] posting". You have a text editor and a cursor, the real alternative is not "top" vs "bottom" but "I care about the context of the discussion" vs "I don't care". In the first case, you edit the quoted text and then answer inline, and in the second you just type your one line answer and hit "send".

Top posting did not win anything. Lazyness did.
by codethief | 2025-05-25 17:08:46+00:00
> Generally though, while I think the passing around of state through effects can be useful it isn't the most convincing use of effects.

I actually find it quite convincing, even if it might not be the main use case. Nowadays in imperative languages there are countless popular frameworks that resort to using & manipulating global state behind the scenes because drilling context through the call stack by hand is painful. Unfortunately, this makes understanding code much more difficult and testing it even more so.
by onetimeusename | 2025-05-25 17:09:18+00:00
Regarding Mayorkas there's this: https://homeland.house.gov/2023/06/20/what-they-are-saying-h... which mentions ignoring court orders.

I am not arguing what Trump or Biden/Mayorkas did is business-as-usual. No, I think Trump messed up and he personally seems to disregard the limits of the executive branch. But, according to AI, 8 million people were encountered crossing the border under the last term so let's say at least 8 million people made the journey making it one of the largest human migrations in world history. What I am arguing is that there are people, maybe as many as half the country, who are in favor of it happening and that concerns about immigrant rights to seek asylum and due process are actually an attempt to launder an open borders agenda through legal procedures. Meaning, I think when you get to 8 million arrivals, the concerns about ensuring due process for asylum claims we can kind of tell are bogus that maybe this wasn't just an uncontrollable event and you either committed negligence or... favored it happening and worked to ensure more of it.

What happened to Garcia seems like an administrative error, sure. But it also seems like splitting hairs because he was probably going to be deported regardless so comparing the situation to a fascist dictatorship to me is disingenuous. Is it an error? yes. Were his rights denied? Yes, in a technical sense. Are we now a lawless dictatorship? No, and where was anyone saying this for other presidencies? I actually just think people are upset that the migration they favored is being reversed.
by clort | 2025-05-25 17:09:37+00:00
As I lived in HK back in the 1970's I'm pretty sure that was not flat nylon ribbon at all in those days, but simply strips of split bamboo or shavings from the surface of a broken pole. It would make sense to transition to nylon, since that could be made on a spool rather than having to be created on site.

I've got used to how scanty UK scaffolding is now but at first it worried me that it would not be robust enough.
by tossandthrow | 2025-05-25 17:09:43+00:00
In all fairness.

the housing market in Denmark is approachable - you can get houses near major cities for usd 80k.

Social security, you can go unemployed for years and still pay your bills.

Government provided education with stipend - having masters degrees are common.

And the economy is strong.

Most Danes understand that this is inevitable - the big issue is that the politicians have given themselves more favorable terms.
by Bender | 2025-05-25 17:10:10+00:00
run buy the democratic votes and non-profit board of Swiss cantons or Danish town halls

Maybe if they keep the site small enough and only influencing specific communities that share similar beliefs then it could last for a while, especially if it's locked down to people from those communities. This is just my opinion but if it is too open and inclusive there will be invasions by manipulators. Those operating it would have to be brave enough to just instantly whack the accounts belonging to agent provocateurs, spammers, trolls and shills with little or no explanation. Perhaps even require people to register at the town halls and to return to the town hall if their account is whacked. Anyone doing shenanigans would not be able to hide behind a keyboard, proxy or VPN.
by jtchang | 2025-05-25 17:10:21+00:00
Visiting the site it is easy to see why they got demoted. It's all fluff and no substance. Almost all the links I clicked through could have been generated by a LLM.

Lots of ads. I might be old school but I still hold quality to something like anandtech back in the day. Something that a real human spent time on because they were genuinely interested in the topic and decided to write about it. The bar is so low these days not sure if there even is a bar.

This site is suppose to be a men's lifestyle magazine but it barely has any content that isn't just filler and fluff.
by moomin | 2025-05-25 17:10:51+00:00
But you see, this was a bigger crime than the invasion. Because it was ideologically driven on faith, no-one was looking at the actual facts. The US military could knock over Hussein, no problem, but no-one had any plan for what happened next. No state-building, not even a plan for how the civil service was going to work. Absolutely no plan to win over hearts and minds and not create the next generation of extremists. No-one checking prisoners were treated with respect.

The Iraq invasion was wrong, but the occupation was worse.