MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eurleif | 2025-05-08 07:36:17+00:00
That's the statute, but arguably it's superseded by the Fourth Amendment, and many companies have a policy of treating it as such. Google's policy[0] is to disregard the ECPA 180 day rule, and to always require a warrant for content:

>On its face, ECPA seems to allow a government agency to compel a communications provider to disclose the content of certain types of emails and other content with a subpoena or an ECPA court order (described below). But Google requires an ECPA search warrant for contents of Gmail and other services based on the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure.

Essentially, they're saying that they think they would win a constitutional challenge if the government were to try and fight them on this. It doesn't look like the government has taken them up on that to date.

Similar policy from Apple[1]:

> For all requests from government and law enforcement agencies within the United States for content, with the exception of emergency circumstances (defined in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act 1986, as amended), Apple will only provide content in response to a search warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause, or customer consent.

Meta[2]:

>A search warrant issued under the procedures described in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure or equivalent state warrant procedures upon a showing of probable cause is required to compel the disclosure of the stored contents of any account, which may include messages, photos, videos, timeline posts, and location information.

[0] https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/9700059...

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...

[2] https://about.meta.com/actions/safety/audiences/law/guidelin...
by astrange | 2025-05-08 07:37:43+00:00
> it's trivial to make models behave "actually evil" with fine-tuning, orthogonalization/abliteration, representation fine-tuning/steering, etc

It's actually pretty difficult to do this and make them useful. You can see this because Grok is a helpful liberal just like all the other models.

Evil / illiberal people don't answer questions on the internet! So there is no personality in the base model for you to uncover that is both illiberal and capable of helpfully answering questions. If they tried to make a Grok that acted like the typical new-age X user, it'd just respond to any prompt by calling you a slur you've never heard of.
by ddmf | 2025-05-08 07:37:49+00:00
Could be sunk cost fallacy in play - you've maybe spent weeks/months/years with this guild and not had any issues (or it's not been directed at you) - or even a raid night after a few hours, especially if it's been hard for you to get in. Sometimes easier to just weather and ignore the dickhead.

Which is probably why they go on to do it again and again.

I'm sure I remember an addon that allowed you to give feedback on players, but it was quickly used to grief decent players.
by like_any_other | 2025-05-08 07:38:30+00:00
> If TikTok didn't exist, wouldn't you expect those Pro-Palestine viewpoints to appear somewhere else?

Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655603

Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...

Facebook has severely restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach an audience during the Israel-Gaza war, according to BBC research - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo
by astrobe_ | 2025-05-08 07:38:56+00:00
I found myself in a situation where I had to reinvent data structures from scratch in an assembly-like language: "properties" or "fields" are just offsets relative to a pointer (runtime) or an address (compile-time).

The need to extend a data structure to add more fields comes almost immediately. Think: something like the C "hack" of embedding the "base" structure as the first field of the "derived" structure:

struct t_derived { struct t_base base; int extra_data; };

Then you can pass a derived_t instead of base_t with some type casting and caveats. This is "legal" in C because the standard guarantees that base has offset 0.

Of course our "extra_data" could be a structure, but although it would look like "A+B" it is actually a concatenation.
by Disposal8433 | 2025-05-08 07:39:39+00:00
The whole "4/5 speakers around the room" never made sense to me. It always felt overly complicated for a premium price that no one could afford or cared about. I used to hang out with people who had luxury sound systems but it was way too expensive or complicated for my daily use.

For the past 15 years, I have used the same cheap combo of soundbar+subwoofer (Sony but anything goes) and it's perfect for everything I throw at it. The sound is equivalent to what I remember on those expensive sets, it's only $250, and I don't spend my whole time in front of the TV listening to high-quality remasters of classical concerts while smoking a cigar.

The high-end brands have failed to recognize that for most people a decent set of cheap speakers is equivalent to a cinema experience. They should have studied that instead of focusing on incomprehensible technical values and numbers. The software industry is guilty of this too.
by jruohonen | 2025-05-08 07:41:58+00:00
"Slop can take the form of text, images, video, and sometimes even entire websites. It can also seep into real life, as thousands discovered when they recently flocked to Dublin’s city centre for a Halloween parade that didn’t exist, promoted on an AI-generated website. Similarly, the now-infamous Willy Wonka experience held in Glasgow earlier this year could be billed as real-life ‘slop’: the event really did take place, but the AI-generated visuals and text used to advertise it belied a much lower-quality reality." (italics added)
by silisili | 2025-05-08 07:42:12+00:00
Same boat. I made the unfortunate mistake of buying Samsung kitchen stuff.

The fridge ice maker had to have been designed by a troll. One piece of ice every 10 seconds or so. It took a minute to fill a simple dinner glass!

Then the microwave handle just...fell off the door. In all my years of owning bottom of the barrel to top end brands, I didn't even realize it was possible. The repairman said it was common, but because of all the plastic, they had to replace the entire door as the handle wasn't serviceable.

Never again. Not even their phones.
by perching_aix | 2025-05-08 07:43:25+00:00
Wasn't aware, interesting. I did consider it in the past as well, but the reliability aspect made me consider this as a moonshot rather than anything practical. Kind of weirdly validating to know there are (supposedly) database providers using it.

That said, a good bit of our environments are scheduled, so it still wouldn't be an option there without hacks (e.g. doing a compressed blockwise dump before shutting down and then a blockwise flash on startup).
by hmm37 | 2025-05-08 07:43:28+00:00
Same here. Listening to Sibelius right now using a Marantz 2220b with equally old KLH 6 speakers, and a raspberry pi + dac to use internet radio. Sounds great, and pretty amazed it's still just working even though it's already more than 50+ years old.

The only issue is volume control, due to not having a remote for lazier folk. I can control it digitally but don't like "shaving" off bits to control volume.
by falcor84 | 2025-05-08 07:43:53+00:00
> Your software will still be a mess unless it is small and written three times by the same person who knows what they are doing.

100% this! And I've recently been wondering whether this is the right workflow for AI-assisted development: use vibe-coding to build the one that you plan to throw away [0], use that to validate your assumptions and implement proper end-to-end tests, then recreate it again once or more with AI asked to try different approaches, and then eventually throw these away too and more manually create "the third one".

[0] "In most projects, the first system built is barely usable....Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-08 07:44:07+00:00
I'm honestly surprised this hasn't been more prevalent, especially since state actors (NK at least) have used cryptocurrencies to get foreign currency for several years now. No matter how rich and paranoid you are, there are really little you can do to protect yourself from a state actor that wants to get you, especially in an era of ubiquitous digital tracking from tech company that are willing to sell all the Intel they have about you to the highest bidder.
by int_19h | 2025-05-08 07:44:47+00:00
What force, though? Israel does something similar, and how much actual pushback (as opposed to sternly worded statements) did it actually get?

Even if it were to translate to sanctions, I'm not so sure BJP wouldn't welcome it. "The Fatherland is besieged, let's unite together around Dear Leader and fight back like one" tends to be a very popular take in authoritarian countries for a reason, and it's that much easier to pull off when you can actually point at some way in which your country is targeted.
by waste_monk | 2025-05-08 07:45:08+00:00
>You can never imagine how many people are still using WinXP

XP still has 0.38% of market share (specifically Windows non-mobile platforms) according to [1], not sure about absolute numbers.

>If you remove 3DES, the TLS connection will simply fail.

Strong backwards compatibility is great, but continuing to run XP 10+ years after EOL is a personal choice and its remaining users should not expect the world to continue to accomodate them forever. I don't think it's unreasonable to deny them service in this case.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d...
by refulgentis | 2025-05-08 07:45:19+00:00
I don't know what you're trying to say, at all, really, because you were very condescending and now, very short.

"For base-load 24/7 power the only option is nuclear" is false.

"For base-load 24/7 power the cleanest, by far, option w/r/t greenhouse gases is nuclear" is true.

"For base-load 24/7 power the only option is nuclear (as part of the mix)" is nigh-unparsable.

In any case, it's unreasonable to claim I thought the following was false:

For base-load 24/7 power the cleanest, by far, option w/r/t greenhouse gases is nuclear

Nothing in my comment could plausibly indicate it. In fact, my comment says: "Only real argument is "but you need _something_ for base load""

Also in any case, your tone in both cases has robbed us of a positive interaction, in favor of you getting to feel good, but really smug, for 30 seconds after your first comment.
by workfromspace | 2025-05-08 07:46:57+00:00
> E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.

Your very own directors depict it this way, mainly Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev or Stalker.
by teleforce | 2025-05-08 07:48:02+00:00
Hi Dhaavi, Mycoria looks very promising and it reminded me of the early days of peer-to-peer system with Napster and Gnutella [1].

Any specific reason why you didn't use the standard based segment routing for source routing support, that can be adopted at layer 3 instead of custom layer 4 transport [2]?

For security analysis did you use BAN logic and ProVerif tool for verification [3], [4]?

[1] Gnutella:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella

[2] Segment routing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segment_routing

[3] Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Abadi%E2%80%93...

[4] ProVerif:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProVerif
by dsign | 2025-05-08 07:48:04+00:00
I have toyed with the idea of climate change causing the African monsoon to go all the way up to the Mediterranean coast in the next few decades. The Qattara depression would start filling and maybe have a very interesting years of swamp-like conditions. But the erosion in the Nile delta and surrounding areas would be a slow--but not slow enough--catastrophic event for Egypt.

It would be interesting to see what climate change models forecast for the region.
by leobuskin | 2025-05-08 07:48:32+00:00
I apologize, wasn't clear from the documentation: router's IPv6-like address is a fingerprint of the public key, but does it also encode geo-prefix and distance (I mean, it's hypothetically doable, I'm curious what's the approach if it is)? or the router's address has no metadata encoded, and only end-user addresses are encoded this way?
by leftcenterright | 2025-05-08 07:48:58+00:00
Here is a nice talk by Byron Tau who has also written a book titled "Means of Control" detailing some of these flows covering ad tech companies, data brokers and how government contractors use them and serve as a key player to provide services to intelligence agencies.

- https://www.interface-eu.org/events/background-talk-with-byr...
by int_19h | 2025-05-08 07:49:31+00:00
Europe doesn't have the capacity to impose a no-fly zone on Russia. I doubt even US could pull that off.

Anyway, the real concern wrt nukes is that they require people in government who are at least marginally sane and care about self-preservation. The problem with countries like Russia and Pakistan is that it's one coup away from being run by people who genuinely believe that they are fighting a holy war against some kind of worldwide Satanic conspiracy. Such people are unlikely to hold power for long, but with nukes, they don't have to.
by lordnacho | 2025-05-08 07:49:37+00:00
"I did it so it isn't impossible"

Not really convincing. How many poor kids did not even come to an understanding of how the admission system works? How many kids did not even know what work was to be put in?

I am also someone born at the bottom (my first passport was a convention of 1951 passport), who went to a world famous university. As I've gotten older, I've realized it's not really a useful way to think about it. We like to say "you can do it if you really try", but it's just not true. Not only is it not true, it's a thought-ending statement that makes it easier for rich kids and harder for poor kids, because why would you need to support the poor kids if they can just work really hard?

Even you have to be able to see that you got lucky. When I applied, the entrance rate for my course was about 8%. I had no idea that I could have tried easier courses, or that I could have filled the form in slightly differently for a better shot. A single-digit acceptance rate is a lottery. You could do everything the same again and not get in. You don't realize it when you get in, because you happen to get questions that you can answer, but there's a heck of a lot of questions an Oxford professor can ask an 18 year old that will make him look bad.

When I arrived, of course all the other kids were ordinary upper middle class kids. People went to feeder schools where they teach you how to do the Oxbridge interview. People who didn't grow up pinching every penny. What happened to the poor, hard-working kids? They're mostly not there.
by Ekaros | 2025-05-08 07:50:11+00:00
At least banking I believe if someone went out and said we could save 100 million on energy cost by spending 10 million. They would at least consider doing it, if it looked realistic enough.

On other hand efficiency for BTC mining does not matter. The energy expenditure always approaches the value of mined coins. When efficiency increase same energy is spend just to do more hashes, which are really not useful.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-05-08 07:50:46+00:00
Bitcoin was invented with a number go up mechanic, and the idea that a single Bitcoin would be immensely valuable were the currency to gain traction was a point of discussion from the start

Fact is it became popular with speculators faster than it did with anybody else, but the hodlers weren't doing anything to stop people from using it to buy pizza.
by bootsmann | 2025-05-08 07:53:15+00:00
Only tangentially related but does anyone else here get very bothered when looking at the SQLAlchemy documentation? It seems so hard to find what kind of magic incantation you need to do in which order when trying to do a somewhat non-trivial query and I often just write the SQL I want and then tell chatGPT to rewrite it to SQLAlchemy operations but thats not really a sustainable solution.
by Jarwain | 2025-05-08 07:54:52+00:00
To fit a layperson's understanding maybe the term VPLAN or VPWAN would work? Except I'm not sure laypeople really know what a WAN is. I think more people know LAN but then there could be confusion with VLANs.

Names are hard.

Personally this Mycoria reminds me more of a global tailnet I.e tailscale's VPN
by adornKey | 2025-05-08 07:56:49+00:00
Performance is not a hack. Title is wrong... ;-)

Interfaces are indeed much nicer, but you have to make sure that your program language doesn't introduce additional overhead.

Don't be the guy that makes Abstract Factory Factories the default way to call methods. Be aware that there are a lot of people out there that would love to ask a web-server for instructions each time they want to call a method. Always remember that the IT-Crowd isn't sane.
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-08 07:57:01+00:00
Long bet: people are going to write much more code in 2035 than today. It's just going to be very different.

(For the record software development has nothing to do now with how it looked when I started in 2003, plenty of things have revolutionized the way we write code (especially Github) and made us an order of magnitude more productive at least. Yet the number of developer has skyrocketed. I don't expect this trend to stop, AI is yet another productivity boost in an industry that already faced a lot of them in recent time.
by californical | 2025-05-08 07:58:07+00:00
But couldn’t a hospital use it only for the critical cases? Where it is immediately important to know what infection someone may have, at imminent risk of death?

Who cares if they need to charge $30k per patient to use it if that fast knowledge saves the patient’s life. It doesn’t need to fully replace the existing methods, but could be a useful supplement when a patient is in critical condition
by workfromspace | 2025-05-08 07:58:15+00:00
> Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania were always part of "Russia"

No it wasn't. Here's a quick timeline of Estonia.

1219–1346 (127 years): Danish Kingdom 1346-1561 (215 years): Livonia, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1561–1710 (149 years): Swedish Empire 1710–1917 (207 years): Russian Empire 1944–1991 (47 years): Soviets
by int_19h | 2025-05-08 07:58:24+00:00
> Neither side gains to win much from a conflict,

If you mean people as a whole, sure. But it's not people who decide, it's the governments. And war is a tried and true measure for authoritarians of all stripes to use as an excuse to consolidate their power and rally the public. Because, well, it works - so long as you're on the winning side. But, given the history of Indo-Pak wars, I could see why the Indian government might believe that they'll win any open military confrontation that their actions may provoke.
by giamma | 2025-05-08 07:59:05+00:00
To me (as a Java programmer) inheritance is very useful to reuse code and avoid copy paste. There many cases in which decorators or template methods are very useful and in general I find it "natural" in the sense that the concepts of abstraction and specialization can be found in plenty of real world examples (animals, plants, vehicles etc etc).

As usual there is no silver bullet, so it's just a tool and like any other tool you need to use it wisely, when it makes sense.
Show HN: Spentrip – a trip-focused expense tracker
by BrainQuanta | 2025-05-08 07:59:51+00:00
Hey HN,

TL;DR

I shipped a generic expense app (Receiptix) in July 2024. After seven months of effort it plateaued at $100 MRR, and I hardly used it myself. In February 2025, after a year of working on the project, I decided to reflect on what to do next and I also realised that I actually do use the app but only while traveling. So I niched down and rebuilt it as Spentrip. First week live: $100 in sales - already matching Receiptix’s peak.

Last July I shipped Receiptix, a track-anything expense app. I thought that, by entering into a very packed market, I could capture a slice of the pie. Nothing to validate, and the users were obviously out there. The reality check:

* Launch (July 2024) - first paid user a month later for $8.

* Seven months of iterations - max $100 MRR. Worse, I wasn’t even using the app myself which should've told me something.

In Feb 2025, after a whole year of working on the project, I decided it's time for self-reflection. Should I continue? Should I start a new project? Why am I not using my own app? Then I realized it's not completely true: I do use the app but only while traveling. I like to have a log of all my trips to have a sense of how expensive it is to travel to certain places to help me plan my future travels. It was the moment I decided to try one more time.

So I niched down. New app was called Spentrip. It is a trip-focused expense tracking app that helps travellers track their expenses on-the-go. The main features:

* AI-powered receipt scanning - users can simply snap a photo of their receipt in any language and the app would do the rest (OCR recognition, categorizing, etc.)

* Voice expense tracking - users can just speak expenses to their phone (the app would categorized everything automatically as well)

* Multi-currency support - the app tracks spending across multiple currencies with automatic conversion

* Trip-based orgnization - all the expenses live inside "trips"

* Export - one can export all their expenses as CSV later

First week after launch - $100 in sales, which matches the old app's MRR after 7 months. Still a whole journey to go but it's much more inspiring anyway :)

Tech

* Flutter (iOS & Android)

* OCR: Google Document AI

* Backend: Firebase

* Data extraction and categorization: Claude 3 Haiku

What I’ve learned so far

1. Niche > broad. Solving a smaller problem beats “does everything.”

2. Build for yourself, honestly. If you don’t open your own product, figure out why.

3. Super-crowded markets are tough for solo indie hackers.

Next steps

* Add group-trip splitting

* Offline mode

Happy to answer anything.
by Jarwain | 2025-05-08 08:00:45+00:00
To be sure I understand, in that first usecases where a company is replacing their VPN with Mycoria, would access controls/restricting access to devices is all firewall based? That technically there's a network path to all the other devices on Mycoria just limited by firewall rules?

What comes to mind to me analogously (more from my experiences than anything) is like a global tailnet that leans on firewalls to segment things?

A cross between tor and a vpn is quite appropriate too