MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TZubiri | 2025-05-13 00:09:48+00:00
When you have so many dependencies that you need to create complex systems to manage and "secure" the dependencies. The problem is that you have too many dependencies, you are relying on too many volunteer work, and you are demanding too many features while paying for too little.

The professional solution is to PAY for your Operating System, and rely on them to secure it. Whether it be to Microsoft or to Red Hat. You KNOW it's the right thing to do, and this is overintellectualizing your need to have a gratis operating system and charge non-gratis prices to your clients in turn.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-13 00:11:37+00:00
The jury is out on whether the accounts linked to the hiring of the 'hitmen' was exclusively under the control of Ross Ulbricht.

The 'preponderance' was found by a judge, not a jury, so it's a different threshold than say demanding a jury in a civil suit where the jury would make a finding on preponderance. You effectively have a jury of one, where that jury member is highly intertwined with the same federal government that is prosecuting the crime, in a way that would surely eliminate them in voire dire for an impartial jury.
by jchw | 2025-05-13 00:14:22+00:00
Reproducible builds are adjacent, but ultimately orthogonal, to what Nix does.

Reproducible builds provide strong evidence that a given set of inputs were used to produce a specific output. A lot of the work to be done here by each of these individual projects is beneficial to the entire ecosystem, including Nix. A lot of it is just fixing bugs and removing accidental non-determinism from builds. The main value this provides is that it allows a third-party to verify with relatively good certainty that binaries provided by some entity match the expected source code.

Nix provides a hermetic environment to build software with every single input from the bootstrap seed to the final build fully accounted for. Builds can't access the Internet or the host filesystem, they can only access files from their inputs. Impurities must go through the FODs, and the outputs from FODs have to match a prerecorded cryptographic hash, so they must be fully bit-reproducible or the build fails. When you have a reproducible Nix derivation, it is a strict superset of a reproducible package virtually everywhere else, because you can have a very high assurance that you can know and can audit individually every input to the derivation. This is useful for both auditing and reproducible builds.

Reproducible builds are important, but reproducible builds alone are not a panacea. They obviously don't tell you if your source code is free of defects, accidental or otherwise, and neither does Nix. Still, Nix does something basically nothing else does, by making the entire build process fully hermetic.

(Guix, being inspired by Nix, is, as far as I know, roughly the same, although Guix has put more effort into the bootstrap and package reproducibility. Still, Guix and Nix stand in a class of their own as far as usefulness to supply chain security go, even if they probably won't fit neatly into the compliance theater version of supply chain security.)
by romesmoke | 2025-05-13 00:16:17+00:00
I perceive a negative colouring of the "academic" notion in this post. And I totally get some of the pathologies implied: publish-or-perish is a harsh environment, lots of snobbery.

With all respect, however, this industry/academia dualism looks to me at best as a false and at worst as a harmful dichotomy. I mean, there are similarly cliché pathologies in whatever one chooses to overload "industry" with. There are successful academic projects that end up in industry (RISC-V) and successful industrial open-source (?) projects loved by academics (Rust). At the end of the day, everyone wants to build something. Tools and methods are needed. Some of them may not exist yet. The act of building one's tools and methods (or something completely new with existing tools and methods) is research regardless from where it happens or how it is labelled.

Why is this not enough? What extra benefits go with differentiating myself as either an academic or a practitioner? Honest question!

POV: CompEng PhD looking for industrial vacancies.
by josephg | 2025-05-13 00:16:38+00:00
> These experiences have been why I’ve not a big fan of “capabilities” as a concept. The UX around them is awful, and almost has to be.

I don't think the UX has to be awful. The problem is just that they're kinda half baked on macos, and bolted on, and not really a first class citizen. There's no reason you couldn't have:

- A preferences dialog showing which long-lived capabilities you've granted to which application. (Which is almost exactly what the accessibility preferences pane already is.) Ideally this UI could have a log of ways in which the application has used that capability recently and the ability to revoke it. Maybe even the ability to review the app's use of the capability. Show the review score to other users when the app asks for the permission.

- A little blob of text saying why the application is asking for the specified permission. iOS requires this from all 3rd party apps. So its kinda weird that MacOS is missing explanatory text entirely on these popups.

- Clear indication of what would happen if you said no.

- Interdiction. In a good capability systems (eg SeL4), a capability object doesn't tell you what you can do with it. Eg, you can't ask a file handle which file its actually associated with. This means you can craft your own "virtual" capability which fakes the expected behaviour and pass that to an app instead. Any calls made using the capability come to you. Whenever phone apps ask for access to my contact address book, I'd love to be able to say yes, but give them access to like 100mb of fake entries instead.

- And on top of interdiction: logging, call whitelisting, "Little snitch", etc.

- More fine grained capabilities. I don't want to give any app a "root my computer" capability. I don't want that to be a thing applications ever need or get access to.

I think macos's problem is that its trying to bolt on capabilities after the fact. POSIX isn't built around capabilities. As a result, app developers don't think in terms of capabilities, and they expect their apps (new and old) to work without them. In a real capability based OS, fopen() should probably take a capability as a parameter. But making that change would require changing just about every program ever written for the platform. And modifying the standard library of all programming languages.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-05-13 00:17:42+00:00
>>> Having a website just isn't necessary for some of the day-to-day operations vs just sending CSV/Excel files back and forth for reconciliation, settlement, accounting purposes.

>> This doesn't end well when there are hundreds of thousands of "reconciliation, settlement, accounting purposes" to support.

> It kind of does. You still have all the same backend logic, but now it doesn't have to run concurrently with a user interface.

Problem is, there is no self-administration capability when a feed file is the sole transaction mechanism. This can work when the volume is relatively small, say a few dozen customers, or if the Merchant is known to be sophisticated enough.

> You can take a queue of operations, process operations off the queue and send their results back. Isn't that a pretty reasonable way for a system to behave?

Not when there are capability requirements beyond batch processing, such as independent transaction research and/or manual corrections. Both are very common needs with Merchants lacking a dedicated system development department.

EDIT:

Consider a local bar or food truck which accepts credit/debit/gift card payments.

Even if they use host capture and a canonical credit card terminal, the Merchant will certainly want to reconcile their receipts with the end-of-day settlement.

This is not functionality "CSV/Excel" files and batch processing interfaces can provide.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-13 00:18:22+00:00
It's not just about secrets... it's about how many techniques and processes simply aren't documented. There's no need (someone knows how, and is in the business of training new hires), no capacity (they're not exactly idle), and no perception that any of this is important (things have kept working so far).

Could they eventually replicate a CMOS technology? No one doubts this, but the latest lith process took how many years to develop, and only one company makes those machines anywhere in the world? Nearly microscopic molten tin droplets being flattened mid-air so that it can radiate a particular wavelength of UV?

That's not something they'll have up and running again in 6 months, and if it were lost, regression to other technologies would be difficult or impossible too. We might have to start from scratch, so to speak.
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-13 00:19:49+00:00
eBay and Woot for off lease stuff. Micro form factor PCs and HP thin clients (t640, t530, t730)

If you want a raspberry pi type of project and don’t need gpio, the thin clients are awesome and usually smoke the Pi these days.

With the cost of m2 ssd coming down as it has, you can get a lot out of these little devices.
by hdaz0017 | 2025-05-13 00:19:52+00:00
Some of the solution(s) have already been played out a few times, we humans use our imagination(s). Everything that has been built with computers was just an idea a few decades ago.

In the 80's there were a few slices of thoughts, why are you interested in computers? They won't go very far... or we don't know how to make money from them...

IT, Computing, the Internet has for the last 25-30 years been stuck thinking about shopping and billing.

The brute force statistical copy and paste we see today, it may or may not replace a large part of the internet systems, but there were always many other aspects of computing or the world that computers could be used for that have hardly been touched.

To any social media platform's (if any of them can really be called this) that are saying they can not or will not police their own platform's of dangerous content, really you will be held responsible!

Just because the big IT corp's might become blinded they will live in fear of being on the brink of extinction, if they replace the creative people or their customer's. To the CEO's and management sucking billion's/trillion's of dollars out of the market(s) this can't continue.

There has to be change(s) because we have boxed ourselves into weird position(s), i.e always chasing the cash cows.

We are not even at the start of what's possible, what "people" will/could create in the next 50 years, with the right levels of education and inspiration the computing world will most likely not be stopping or slowing down any time soon.
by mkoubaa | 2025-05-13 00:20:10+00:00
My favorite thing about this kind of code is that people are constantly inventing new techniques to do time integration. It's the sort of thing you'd think was a solved problem but then when you read about time integration strategies you realize how rich the space of solutions are. And they are more like engineering problems than pure math, with tradeoffs and better fits based on the kind of system.
by insin | 2025-05-13 00:21:14+00:00
I'm not a zillions of tabs person (my browsers are all configured to lose them on close) but I'm definitely a "comment threads are impossible to follow on repeat visits" person, which is why I made this extension (also on GreasyFork as a user script) which shows which stories have new comments on list pages and can automatically highlight new comments and collapse trees without new comments:

https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news

It also improves HN on mobile somewhat: header links go under the top bar, slightly larger hit targets for voting and collapsing, confirmation for hiding/flagging so you don't accidentally do it on scroll... also, you can mute people, just saying.

Lots more planned, but I'm busy writing my own settings sync backend because there's currently no good way to do that for extensions across all devices and browsers.

I wouldn't recommend it over the official version, but pretty sure I was one of the first to put out an alternative UI when the Firebase feed was released - it has the same new comment highlighting features as my extension, but in "real" time thanks to Firebase - you might have seen Addy Osmani using it for PWA experimentation at Google I/O 2016 o_O:

https://insin.github.io/react-hn
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-13 00:21:58+00:00
FOGBANK was a little more complicated. The process that was written down just didn't work as expected. That was partially lost institutional knowledge that had never been recorded, but the original manufacturing just didn't understand their process. The process had contaminants improving the final product that they were unaware of. When the process was restarted, that didn't happen until it was investigated.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-05-13 00:22:27+00:00
Years ago I was responsible for consolidating three separate office locations into a new, larger, office.

We had some on-premise hosting, and I figured the easiest thing would be to keep the existing network LAN addressing. Each LAN had a different IP range, so it would be no problem for them to share the same ethernet network, as long as only one of the three LANs provided DHCP for the PCs.

We already had a Cisco router for internet access. That should be able to provide routing between our three LANs, right?

That was a terrible idea, as local traffic was bottlenecked on this small router that wasn't designed for the job. Transfers between LANs were as slow as they'd been when we in different physical locations.

I spent an hour or two consolidating the LAN onto a single IP subnet, and everything worked as you'd expect.
by ossm1db | 2025-05-13 00:22:40+00:00
DDD is just the beginning. A successful architecture for AI app generation will apply DDD using data-context-iteraction (DCI) in conjunction with Data-Oriented Programming as described by Yehonathan Sharvit: https://blog.klipse.tech/dop/2022/06/22/principles-of-dop.ht... Note that the "DOP" espoused by Brian Goetz and others complicates AI app generation. It stipulates strong typing, that when combined with "making illegal states unrepresentable" (a concept borrowed from functional programming), makes change -- which is inevitable -- more difficult.
by GianFabien | 2025-05-13 00:23:35+00:00
Business has always been about maximizing profits for the investors. Technology might change, but the profit focus remains.

Regardless of the industry, the workers are a fungible resource to business.

If you don't want to be an easily replaceable cog in the machine, then you need to develop domain expertise which allows you to solve high value problems. You then might become a gold-plated cog in the machine.
by kimixa | 2025-05-13 00:24:43+00:00
Eh, there's plenty of small fabs globally that do smaller run "nowhere near cutting edge" (180nm or so) runs - you can make a pretty decent processor on that sort of tech.

Would be a pretty solid intermediate step to bootstrap automation and expansion in the cases where the supply of the "best" fabs is removed (like in a disaster, or the framework to support that level of manufacturing isn't available, such as your colony example)
by nmgycombinator | 2025-05-13 00:25:31+00:00
As someone who's looked into the internals of macOS for a bit now, this is all incredibly fascinating. However, I am curious: do you think capabilities could be implemented like this at a really low level? Part of me thinks we have the security models we do in POSIX is because they're simple enough to represent in C code.

The capability systems you're mentioning sound cool, but they sound a lot more complex. And if that's true, and they aren't built with irreducible complexity, then it would be possible to work around it by just pulling out bits and pieces from the system and abusing them.
by AngryData | 2025-05-13 00:26:18+00:00
Installing new systems sure. But diagnosing and repairing problems is far from it. You are mixing gas fired devices, compressors and refrigerants, pressurized water systems, electrical systems, and mechanical systems tieing all together. And just junking all those systems because a $5 part wore out as expected and the owners of the system are lied to that it is unfixable is a colossal waste of money and human labor. All just so corporate owners have more money to scrape off the larger margins of a full install of a new system which are going to break down just the same in a few years again.
by ecshafer | 2025-05-13 00:27:22+00:00
I live in syracuse, I found a job this year after being laid off in 2 months. It was a stressful time. Instead or 5-6 hours a week hed be better off studying C,C++ and Java and applying to places locally. Syracuse does not have a ton of web work, but there is a big defense industry here (Saab, SRC, Lockheed, AFRL) so there are things. Cornell, SU, UofR, I imagine are hiring fewer software engineers now though with the potus changes.
by k310 | 2025-05-13 00:27:24+00:00
May I suggest an app like this for ios? MacOS makes it easy to convert file formats via the right/control click "Quick Actions" - Convert Image option, whereas on ios, (I am not kidding) if you end up with a webp in your camera gallery, you can't convert it. Matter of fact, ios is so hostile to webp that it won't even TELL you that a file is webp. It just shows an empty extension instead of jpg or png or gif or other, when you get info.

So, you have to save it to files, and then without opening the file, hold down and select "Quick Actions" - Convert Image, creating a new file, and then open the new jpeg or png and save it (to the camera roll). This is bizarrely baroque.

Getting back to the mac app, I would recommend it to someone who doesn't want to deal with the right/control click menu. And I do appreciate that it's free.

Suggestion: an app that tags all my images even with something as simple as "this is a sunset" or "this is a flower" would be a giant leap forward in organizing the countless anonymous photos in my computer (or mobile device). I absolutely refuse to send any of them offsite to do something as simple as this.

Search? Fuggedaboutit.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-13 00:27:38+00:00
Interesting that they took out the hospital/clinic ? Seems like it would be useful. In the US there are 'golf course to the grave' type communities for adults who want to go smoothly from the 50's into the afterlife. And when I was a teen I read Silverberg's book "The World Inside"[1] which postulated the "Urbmon" a complete community in a single structure. That has always fascinated me, the question of "Can you build a carbon neutral self sustaining human community?" I presume you can but how effective would it be? The Barbican looks like an interesting take on mixed use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside
by utopcell | 2025-05-13 00:29:51+00:00
Here's a (Gemini) AI summary that seems to be capturing the main point that the article wants to convey.

``` This page summarizes a study about continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and how individuals can have highly variable glucose responses even when eating the same meals. The study, which involved 30 participants without diabetes, found a weak-to-moderate correlation between glucose responses to identical meals, with about 80% of the variation attributed to within-participant differences or measurement error.

The article notes that high glucose variability is linked to increased risk of death, greater hunger, and poorer mental health and sleep. While CGMs are beneficial for people with diabetes to prevent hypoglycemic episodes, this study suggests that developing personalized nutrition recommendations for glycemic control may be more complex than previously thought due to inconsistent individual responses. The authors emphasize the need for more reliable dietary assessment and a deeper understanding of the behavioral, dietary, and individual factors that influence glucose responses. ```
by Xylakant | 2025-05-13 00:30:11+00:00
There are a couple of advantages of tricycles that go beyond novice/disabled. They don’t need a kickstand, so they’re easy to park when loaded. They don’t need balancing at stops. They generally have better load capacity.

There’s also tricycles which can lean into a corner which makes them similarly agile as two-wheeled bikes. They’re still wider, though.

Trikes are certainly not for long distances and a sporty style, but as a short distance cargo/kids hauler, they’re cheap, reliable and effective. I know quite a few people Who are happy with them.
by aatd86 | 2025-05-13 00:30:23+00:00
Drawing a legitimate parallel and questioning the legitimacy of what we know and what we are being told is hardly 'whataboutism'. Especially when it might be geo-strategic. I find your accusation severe.

The news colported these past few years should already have opened some eyes normally. Alas...

Said otherwise, if you're a thief accusing someone else of stealing, I can legitimately wonder if you're making accusations in good faith... That simple.

Isn't there a saying for this even? The pot that calls the kettle black?
by LadyCailin | 2025-05-13 00:31:05+00:00
I’m happy to discuss specifics, so long as they don’t start with the premise “regulation is authoritarianism” and also are in good faith. Kids don’t have to have an engineering license to build a bridge out of popsicle sticks, I doubt you think that someone saying “building a bridge should require a civil engineering license” should apply to that. I’m not unreasonable. I just think there has been entirely too much demonstrated harm to start with the premise of “anyone can build any software they want at any time, with zero liability”.

These students may be liable for things after the fact, but that is hardly any consolation to the people that may have had their intimate personal data leaked. Even if they are successfully sued by everybody on the site, how much money could they possibly squeeze out of a bunch of college students? I don’t know how you can prevent this without some up front thing, such as a license, rather than making them liable after the fact.
by imiric | 2025-05-13 00:31:46+00:00
> What I care about is the results. If the "grade" is 10%, then I don't want to rely on it, whether it's a human or an AI.

So you judge mastery of a subject by some arbitrary grade? Produced, incidentally, by the same company that trained the model. But I'm sure they wouldn't cheat...

I also care about the results, but I judge it based on direct experience. IME the current SOTA models can't be relied on to accurately produce working code most of the time, yet I'm expected to trust they can produce accurate healthcare diagnosis and advice? Give me a break.

AI companies have sold us a fantasy that a neat computer trick, which can still be very useful for society, will somehow lead to AGI. Now that we're a decade into this hype cycle and investors are getting antsy, they're doubling down by anthropomorphizing the technology and selling us "chain of thought" and "reasoning", as if making everyone say these things will somehow magically produce intelligence.

What's really irresponsible is that the public and governments are buying into it, which is pushing the tech into industries that can actually harm people. Safety is not just about trusting some arbitrary grade.
by wmf | 2025-05-13 00:31:49+00:00
Would a full IPv6 implementation across the board, hurt Tailscale's M.O. and bottom line, assuming all routing worked properly?

Maybe, but even asking the question is kind of conspiratorial. Companies like Cisco, Google, and Apple have been pushing IPv6. A small startup can't somehow hold back IPv6 "world domination" even if they tried.