MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by linguae | 2025-05-18 00:04:55+00:00
I understand what you're saying, but I wonder how many software products, particularly those from the early days of personal computing, have been lost to history due to nobody copying them before the media got deteriorated or destroyed. Sure, there will always be copies of WordPerfect 5.1 and MS-DOS 6.22 floating around, legal and not-so-legal. However, there is some old software that is difficult to find, often in situations where not many copies were sold.

I wish our copyright laws (I'm in the United States) were more considerate of the needs of computer historians and retrocomputing enthusiasts. 95 years is much too long of a copyright term for software that gets obsolete after 10-20 years. I can understand lengthy copyrights for video games, since they are works of art and since there is a lot of commercial value in old games. However, would Mac OS 9 and Windows 98 being in the public domain threaten sales of modern Macs and Windows 11 licenses? Would WordPerfect 5.1 for MS-DOS being in the public domain hurt Corel's business? While I do believe it's possible to get licenses to old versions of Microsoft software through certain MSDN subscription programs, many software companies don't sell licenses of older software products.

While I'm on the topic, there used to be a museum in Seattle named The Living Computer Museum where visitors could actually use old computers. I went there in 2019 and had a wonderful time; it's sad that it didn't survive the COVID-19 pandemic. I wonder, though, how much work (if any) was done with securing legal licenses for the software on these old computers, since I'd imagine that a museum would have a liability problem if it was caught using pirated software. Given that the museum was founded by the late Paul Allen, it is likely that the museum may have worked out some agreements with the copyright holders of various software tools. After all, it's not like the museum was reselling the software or the hardware.
by mrjeeves | 2025-05-18 00:05:04+00:00
The headers are included in every single downlink message after initiating a call, including the downlink SIP Invite message before 100 Trying, 180 Ringing or 183 Session Progress.

If you're quick enough (or automate this with dedicated software, like an attacker might actually do), it won't even need to ring out. It's really not good.
by econ | 2025-05-18 00:05:35+00:00
Back when systeem colors were actually cool I made some system color styles. It looked really nice but you don't know how they contrast. That one is called [say] buttonFace and another buttonText turned out to to be meaningless. Someone wrote some js for me that took getComputedStyle and calculated the contrast. If it was unacceptable it either took a second candidate color or failed back on text-shadow to darken or lighten an aura around the text sufficiently.

https://i.sstatic.net/18bQt.png

I forget the calculation but thinking about it you can probably just take the average of the 3 rgb values and compare them(?) It would produce a low value for blue and give preference to white text.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-05-18 00:06:01+00:00
> Why useless?

"This program is asking for extended permissions. It's asking:

File permissions: Read, write, and modify"

Now, is this because it allows me to select a custom avatar from the files on my device and save it after cropping it in the app? Or is it because it's going to check all my files and upload the really juicy ones to Scary Hacker Doods and change my name in all my documents to "Ima Dichwied"? I dunno! I have no way of knowing! Gosh, I guess I'll just figure out if I trust the app or not and click "sure" if I do, which means I'm in the exact same boat I'd be in before the permission prompt addicts came into vogue, except with the added annoyance of a popup (and occasionally an app which then needs to be restarted because the initial lack of access threw it into an unexpected state). This does not benefit me. It does not make my device safer. It does not make me feel safer. It does not make my experience more pleasurable. It will never do any of those things. It only serves to slightly raise my baseline level of annoyance.

And I'm someone who (sometimes) knows what I'm doing! It's even worse for people who aren't tech-savvy! The Joe Sixpack user class has split into two camps, one of which is mindlessly clicking "YES I want to run it, YES it can make changes, YES I'm sure, YES the .msi called by the .exe can also run and make changes, YES I want the free 30-day trial of Pro Premium Plus edition, YES I consent to automatic billing on day 31, YES install the browser toolbar, YES let's play Global Thermonuclear War!" because they're, surprise surprise, completely desensitized to warning prompts thanks to the over-proliferation of nattering popup nonsense, and the other of which is thrown into a state of catatonic call-a-geek terror because their GPS app is asking for permission to view their location.
by Philpax | 2025-05-18 00:06:14+00:00
The optics on the Vision Pro are... well, they're not fantastic. It's a challenge to blow up displays that small to meet your field of view. Peripheral vision on the Quest 3 is far better, but the displays are over double the size, which made the lens design problem less challenging.

Apple have since purchased at least one lens design company [0], so future iterations of the Vision Pro should hopefully be less optically-challenged.

[0]: https://mixed-news.com/en/apple-buys-lens-manufacturer-limba...
by russellbeattie | 2025-05-18 00:09:17+00:00
> Even Perl looks on in horror of the sins JS has committed.

LOL. What a great line.

It's getting pretty ridiculous, I agree. I don't understand the need for so many shorthands for one. All they do is make code illegible for the sake of saving a few keystrokes. Using the Symbol object that way is just ugly.
by alpaca128 | 2025-05-18 00:09:57+00:00
Meanwhile I haven't seen any real progress that I'd care about in a while.

Is GPT-4xyz better than the last one? I'm sure some benchmark numbers say that. But the number of applications where occasional hallucinations don't matter is very small, and where it matters nothing really changed. Companies are trying to use it for customer support but that predictably turned out to be a legal risk. Klarna went all-in on AI and regrets it now.

Some media are talking about Microsoft writing 30% of their new code with AI, but what Nadella actually said is less impressive: "maybe 20-30% of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software". Which, coincidentally, is the ratio of code that can be autocompleted by an IDE without LLM, according to Jetbrains.

I have yet to see any evidence that anything will change way faster than it ever has, aside from the readiness of many younger people to use it in everyday life for things it really shouldn't be used.
by grishka | 2025-05-18 00:10:19+00:00
I'm not sure about the speed argument. My city uses stored-value cards based on Mifare Classic and Mifare Plus (depending on the type of the ticket). If you live here and use the public transit with any regularity, you don't stop when you're going through the turnstile. The card validation isn't instant by any means, but it takes just enough time that you can plop your card on the reader as soon as you can reach it and keep walking, and it'll be done by the time you need to rotate the thingy that's in your way. On most stations, the bottleneck isn't the turnstiles, it's the escalators.

On the security side, yeah, someone did exploit those Mifare key extraction vulnerabilities and make an app to clone cards and restore dumps. The system collates all data every night so if you mess with your ticket, it'll get banned. So you're getting one day of free rides at most, and forfeit the remaining balance and the cost of the card itself.
by TuringNYC | 2025-05-18 00:11:48+00:00
On a somewhat related note, I feel any specialized device development should come hand-in-hand with a great developer experience with a well-designed simulator experience.

I was an original Google Glass developer (2013) and not allowing development via a simulator was one of their biggest mistakes ever. You had to continuously test squinting into the actual hardware. After about 25min it would overheat and you were forced into a cooldown period of about 30min. You couldnt easily put together tests or parallelize testing mundane parts of the app off-device. I ended up with the worst headaches after three months and we pivoted our business to something else soon after.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-05-18 00:12:09+00:00
HDDs are getting increasingly squeezed between SSD and tape. In the past decade or so, HDDs have gone from in ~95% of consumer computers to probably <5% (extreme low end and extreme high end). they're still common in servers, but the reduced customer marketshare means manufacturers no longer care about getting the new tech to consumers. All their sales are to enterprise.
by butterisgood | 2025-05-18 00:12:24+00:00
I use it as an example for simplicity enabling expression.

What I mean is if you pick the right primitives to begin with you don’t have to turn a system into horrid spaghetti.

Complexity costs everyone - consumers, people building products and supporting them etc.

And sometimes standardization is the enemy of the simple.

So these things will never be popular as long as committees exist to make our lives miserable.
by CSMastermind | 2025-05-18 00:12:28+00:00
I wonder if there's a market for someone figuring out how to build monetization into MCP or something similar.

Being able to offer a helpful API to the world and just getting paid whenever someone uses it would be really nice.

At the moment you have to process the payment "yourself" (even if you use a third party for that), issue an API key, etc.
by jodoking | 2025-05-18 00:12:36+00:00
We are developing an agent authentication and policy engine for the modern era. Traditional human authentication via Rails is not scalable, and the agent authentication system that requires users to input passwords is not scalable either. We are working on a solution that improves this significantly without compromising security, compliance, ownership, or speed. We envision a future where agents interact directly with each other, and the current authentication and policy systems need to evolve to handle private data use cases while meeting compliance, security, control, and interoperability requirements. Our goal is to enable resource owners (entities with private data or sensitive materials) to set agentic policies for external parties who meet the necessary requirements to access the data without the need for a user interface or user experience. We combine agentic-ready authentication, policy, and encryption. We welcome your thoughts if you would like to test it out. Our target audience is the enterprise space.
by pplewa | 2025-05-18 00:13:57+00:00
Programmer for Jira is an Atlassian Marketplace app that lives right inside your Jira issues.

it connects to your Git repository and:

- Researches the issue with the repository context to create a detailed list of subtasks for implementation.

- Implements those subtasks by writing the code and pushing a pull request for your team to review.
by Papazsazsa | 2025-05-18 00:14:38+00:00
Not sarcasm.

My comment is a reaction to this idea that a ChatGPT-generated image has the same value as one done by a Picasso. It's still art and it still can have artistic value, but it'll never possess the intangibles carried by, say, Guernica.

I think curation, in the age of procedurally-generated content, will be one of the most gratifying or at least profitable jobs to have. It already is, if you think about it; film studio heads, music producers like Rick Rubin, Anna Wintour/Vogue, and the MoMA... all wield curatorial power (for better or for worse).
by paulryanrogers | 2025-05-18 00:14:59+00:00
Demo scene and work like this is impressive. Yet I can't help but notice that it tends toward simpler more empty scenes. The kind of stuff one might expect in the background or as only a part of a game mechanic. It's as if there's just not enough resources to really make complete experiences with most of the techniques.

What I find more impressive are efforts like FastDoom or the various Mario-64 optimization projects which squeeze significantly better performance out of old hardware. Sometimes even while adding content and features. Maybe there is a connection between demo sceners and more comprehensive efforts?
by stevenwoo | 2025-05-18 00:15:02+00:00
It's very light on details on Thiel's kompromat, but we know he's gay, so wild speculation - unless they have video of him with underage boys not a lot of leverage there. In Thiel's interview with The Atlantic he speculated billionaires like authoritarian leaders because the billionaires are bored. The article does list them using drugs and women to entrap Musk but the guy admits to those things on Rogan and twitter and to a pregnancy fetish - but is the video evidence of any of that going to make him change his behavior? He just seems kind of shameless at this point, the change in his Ukraine views within past few years also aligns with his move to MAGA mindset. I don't like Musk but this is kind of weak IMHO, with just one former FBI agent claiming this and not quite as strong as multiple people claiming Trump is under Putin's thumb.

It's been speculated they have similar stuff on Trump from his trips to Russia decades ago, though Trump is so erratic on Russia lately, usually on their side, sometimes not which is kind of confounding.
by russellbeattie | 2025-05-18 00:15:52+00:00
> Genuinely: what are you talking about.

They added the get and set keywords to plain JS objects to identify getters and setters. So just add a dispose keyword. Like this:

const obj = { log: ["a", "b", "c"], get first() { return this.log[0]; }, dispose cleanup() { // close resource } };

Much cleaner.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-18 00:16:47+00:00
In that specific case, Russians needed 8 minutes out of the 10-minute decision window to rule out a nuclear attack. And the key factor was that the rocket was not headed towards Russia.

Now imagine that this is not a random peacetime incident but something that happens when both parties are expecting a war. This time the rocket is actually heading towards the capital or another strategic target. It's not a single rocket but a fleet of tens or even hundreds of rockets. And it's not a one-off incident but something that repeats a hundred times over the course of multiple wars.

What are the chances that the target never misinterprets it as a nuclear attack? And what are the chances that the attacker never chooses to use nuclear weapons, after everyone has learned that an attack like this is not a nuclear attack?
by mjevans | 2025-05-18 00:19:17+00:00
You might not be aware. After we grew up that word became somewhere vaguely in the same classification of 'radioactive' as the N word people from the 1940s used to use all the time.

It kind of tints movies like Idiocracy (a movie I fear increasingly describes a possible future rather than a satirical one) that made a joke out of someone who was only moderately not-smart as just the last 4 letters rather than all 6.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-18 00:20:37+00:00
I voted for Trump. I think the Harvard funding thing is stupid. I don't really want money going to Israel.

However, I don't think this is chilling. I would prefer more defense spending to ensure the military inferiority of China. And I would prefer to cut most social spending from the federal level and relegate it to the local level.

This is pretty consistent with most people on the right. This is not a feature of the magas. Please don't act like it's strange or alien.

Obviously social spending cuts will never happen sadly. All we'll get is more spending. The right will raise the defense budget and fail to stop recapture and overcharging by defense primes through the broken cost-plus model. The left will raise social spending. We all end up deeper in debt.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-18 00:20:41+00:00
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3159552

It was honestly a shocking finding at the time. But loss ratios (2.3%) were just within historic norms for what someone buying something rated AAA would expect [1], and to my knowledge, the losses presented as restructurings not outright defaults as is commonly imagined in popular retelling of the financial crisis.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/april-2021-dodd-...
by trealira | 2025-05-18 00:23:40+00:00
Thanks for sharing that. I've actually been learning some Forth recently and had been wondering how a parser or a compiler might actually look using Forth, and you actually already made one, which is pretty cool. I was wondering this because deterministic parsers are often already stack based (LL and LR parsers can both be implemented as imperative programs that manipulate a stack based on the input tokens, or just recursive descent).

I still can't really understand everything just from reading the code, but I had assumed it would be some kind of explicitly stack-based state machine precedence parser, like this article describes: https://h14s.p5r.org/2014/10/shiftreduce-expression-parsing-...

Kind of looks like you did that in expr.fs? Not completely sure, though.
by 1270018080 | 2025-05-18 00:23:48+00:00
One of the organizations that got completely cut off is the Undiagnosed Diseases Network. Which brings together researchers across the country in to find cures to the rarest diseases. And it may just cease to exist, setnences people with rare diseases to die. This administration is responsible for abject evil because a university didn't swear fealty to a genocidal foreign government.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-18 00:24:15+00:00
I enjoyed the clarity of that sentence. It's wild to read. Some people are choosing the hand-holding of the hallucinating robot instead of developing their skills, and simultaneously training their replacement (or so the bosses hope, anyway).

I wonder if "robot" was being used here in its original sense too of a "forced worker" rather than the more modern sense of "mechanical person". If not, I propose it.
by WalterGR | 2025-05-18 00:29:32+00:00
Because they know what an endowment is, how they're used, what a 501(c)(3) nonprofit is, and very generally the tax rules around such nonprofits.

I can provide links if you'd like to learn. I'm just on mobile right now and it's a pain.

It would help, though, if you could describe in what way people should be bothered.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-18 00:30:08+00:00
Companies paying for public transport is a matter of flooring the commute cost: (almost) nobody lives in an area with no public transportation and car commute costs more, so companies will pay the price for lowest commute and you get to decide what you do with it.

Same thing if your train transit costs 440 yens at base rate but you decide to ride first class or even one of the special luxury trains at a thousand+ yens, you'll only get the base 440 yens from your company.

On profitability, as mentioned by sister comment, they all have a realtor arm and also rent the space surrounding the stations to shopping malls and department stores, sometimes own or revenue share with the attractions in the town that will bring more visitors and they'll talk with he city planners to foster a whole ecosystem, JR famously gets a cut from every Suica transaction etc.

They don't need to make it all from the ride ticket, even if it's price appropriately. Government has little to do with most of it, subsidies only matter on the smaller, super low volume lines where rising prices would kill the traffic.
by orhmeh09 | 2025-05-18 00:30:35+00:00
They might log access in some circumstances, according to their privacy policy (https://proton.me/legal/privacy)

> 2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our Terms of Service (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against non-compliant or fraudulent activities. If you enable authentication logging for your Account or voluntarily participate in Proton's advanced security program, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account. The authentication logs feature records login attempts to your Account and does not track product-specific activity, such as VPN activity.

See also section 3, "Network traffic that may go through third-parties."
by igor47 | 2025-05-18 00:31:39+00:00
That's really not more chilling. I recommend actually reading the document. There are multi billion dollar cuts to IT programs and CISA/cyber security infrastructure, along with massive cuts to basic research, EPA protections and toxic site cleanup, and basic social services, the list goes on. Instead we're plowing extra money into military spending, but because the defense budget is already so bloated it amounts to a small percentage increase there, and huge percentage decreases in everything else.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-05-18 00:33:08+00:00
That's absolutely worth a serious debate, but that endowment falls well within existing laws for how universities are allowed to accumulate and govern their finances.

You know what doesn't fall within the rubric of existing laws (or things that anyone who respect the rule of law and controlled government should be comfortable with)? Trump unilaterally using the federal agencies under his control to vengefully, punitively attack a major public institution just because he wants it to do whatever his latest personal tantrum has dictated.

His whimsical funding cuts are indeed illegal (1) and even if you agree with the government not funding certain institutions in certain ways, i'd call it a bad fucking idea to claim that the president should break his government's own federal laws to do so.

1 https://www.thefire.org/news/faq-responding-common-questions...
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-05-18 00:34:52+00:00
For most people, a phone contains:

1. An itemized list of every account they have and their passwords and any 2FA they've used.

2. Multiple forms of payment.

3. A photo gallery that, in many (if not most) cases, will have private content.

4. The contact information of everyone they know, who have not consented to having that information distributed.

I find the entire idea that it's acceptable for any barely-educated border agent having a power trip with no probable cause to demand this under the duress of rejection, repugnant.

Especially in a country where police officers are occasionally allowed to "have sex" with people they apprehend - it seems like there's nothing that actually stops a CBP agent from just stopping any attractive woman they happen to see and demanding their phone so they can find nudes.

Say no? Get deported, no legal recourse.