MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-08 06:36:49+00:00
> bill doesn't cover all apps owned by a foreign adversary. It has to be specifically TikTok or any other eligible app

The law (not bill) requires an interagency process for identifying further targets. It starts with TikTok. It does so because of TikTok’s ownership. Not speech. I say this as someone who worked on and whipped for the bill.
by lemontheme | 2025-05-08 06:37:07+00:00
PyCharm definitely excels on more ‘dynamic’ code but the number of times I’ve pulled in code written by colleagues using PyCharm only to get a rainbow of type errors from Pyright is too damn high.

The PyCharm checker seems to miss really, really obvious things, e.g. allowing a call site to expect a string while the function returns bytes or none.

Maybe my colleagues just have it configured wrong but there’s several of them and the config isn’t shared.
by int_19h | 2025-05-08 06:37:27+00:00
Function arguments weren't actually first-class to begin with. In Algol 60 (of which Simula started as a superset), you could pass functions as arguments to other functions, but that's it - it wasn't a proper type so you couldn't return it, shove it into a variable, have an array of functions etc. Basically, it had just enough restrictions that you would never get up in a situation where you could possibly call a function for which the corresponding activation frame (i.e. locals) could be gone. But when Simula added classes and objects, now you could suddenly capture arguments in a way that allows them to outlive the callee.
by atoav | 2025-05-08 06:37:38+00:00
Interestingly enough the US seems to have between 1.5 and 6 times more of such cases than Europe (the numbers I found are a little bit fuzzy and use probably different methodology when collected, so this could well be an entirely statistical phenomenom).

I was curious, because I (living in central Europe) could not think of a single case of identity theft in my social circles or a prominent case I ever heard of.
by zzq1015 | 2025-05-08 06:38:00+00:00
Probably not just that. 3DES is the last cipher supported by "old" clients (I'm talking Windows XP). If you remove 3DES, the TLS connection will simply fail.

You can never imagine how many people are still using WinXP, or other forgotten legacy clients/servers that only support up to TLS 1.0 and RC4/DES/3DES without realizing it.
by reify | 2025-05-08 06:38:22+00:00
All thats wrong with the modern world

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/linear-regression

A proven way to scientifically and reliably predict the future

Business and organizational leaders can make better decisions by using linear regression techniques. Organizations collect masses of data, and linear regression helps them use that data to better manage reality, instead of relying on experience and intuition. You can take large amounts of raw data and transform it into actionable information.

You can also use linear regression to provide better insights by uncovering patterns and relationships that your business colleagues might have previously seen and thought they already understood.

For example, performing an analysis of sales and purchase data can help you uncover specific purchasing patterns on particular days or at certain times. Insights gathered from regression analysis can help business leaders anticipate times when their company’s products will be in high demand.
by 331c8c71 | 2025-05-08 06:39:02+00:00
> Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants

Sure. Like there is a whole field of consultants who would help your child to develop a suitable profile.

Moreover, I the US I heard there is an industry for generating experiences for the "young minds" (if their parents are rich enough) e.g. discovering rennaissance via a trip to Italy etc.

Also remember the tennis scam for admissions? Gordon Ernst from Georgetown U.
by silisili | 2025-05-08 06:39:54+00:00
I think that's part of the charm of Go, as a language/community.

I've worked with countless people who came from Java, who try to create the same abstractions and factories and layers.

When I chide them, it's like realizing the shackles are off, and they have fun again with the basics. It leads to much more readable, simple code.

This isn't to say Java is bad and Go is good, they're just languages. It's just how they're typically (ab)used in enterprises.
by leftcenterright | 2025-05-08 06:42:11+00:00
from an intelligence perspective, this is business as usual.

- Rovio sold data to ad companies (ad companies primarily based in the US)

- They used AWS (to which of course NSA has legal access)

- Data is not end to end encrypted, all metadata sits on servers in plain text and within AWS even moves from server to server in plain text

How much insight metadata can grant to someone like NSA is still wildly underrated.

- https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-...
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-08 06:42:47+00:00
Email on Gmail (or on any cloud email service provider subject to US jurisdiction) older than 180 days is available upon request without a warrant.

> Under ECPA, it is relatively easy for a government agency to demand service providers hand over personal consumer data stored on the service provider's servers. Email that is stored on a third party's server for more than 180 days is considered by the law to be abandoned. All that is required to obtain the content of the emails by a law enforcement agency is a written statement certifying that the information is relevant to an investigation, without judicial review.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv...
by mijamo | 2025-05-08 06:43:24+00:00
Of course it is lower! You have plenty of rich people living in known places without any special security and no one comes to kidnap them because they cannot just send over their whole wealth in an irreversible transaction in a second. The problem is not to know who has money, it is a system in which it is trivial to transfer it without any supervision and without any way to go back.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-08 06:43:49+00:00
> But "sending them to prison for the crime of applying for asylum" is the position in power at the moment,

But if they applied for asylum doesn't the US govt already have their information in order to, well, process the asylum application. So, there is nothing for SF College to hide. Not saying that it all has to make sense, but that part doesn't seem to add up somehow.
by schrectacular | 2025-05-08 06:44:14+00:00
>“Many Chinese [nationals] have handlers; they [CCP] want to know everything that's going on at Stanford. This is a very normal thing. They just relay the information they have.”

>"Drawing on anonymous testimony from faculty, students, and China specialists, our investigation confirms that the CCP runs an extensive intelligence‑gathering network at Stanford."

I don't see any value judgement in these quotes, it's just the facts of the matter, no?
by adeon | 2025-05-08 06:46:09+00:00
Ah yeah, I saw the propublica as well, it was one of the first articles I found when looking on the topic. I don't doubt at all that Angry Birds data was used by NSA, doesn't seem controversial.

The specific question I am interested in is: Did Rovio knowingly and willingly accept $$$ from NSA (directly or indirectly) to weaken their security? I.e. were they acting as a willing accomplice.

Because that part would be unusual for Finland (well, at least as far as I know). For US companies I wouldn't bat an eye at news like this.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-05-08 06:47:29+00:00
> you are being unnecessarily disingenuous

I'm not, honestly. Think of AVR-integrated radio receivers and hi-fi CD players: a typical appliance-grade (non-raster) VFD/LCD display is sufficient for navigating through radio stations and CD tracks; I will admit that Alexa-style voice-control can work quite well for online services like Spotify or Apple Music, but even then I find myself frequently needing to reach for my phone (and wait for Amazon's webview-based Echo app to load) for anything nontrivial.

While a good modern TV can show a picture from standby in a few seconds, it "feels wrong" to me to have to turn-on an eye-burningly-bright main living-room TV just to select a song to play.
by josephg | 2025-05-08 06:47:56+00:00
> I don't think Inheritance is always bad - sometimes it's a useful tool.

I can only think of one or two instances where I've really been convinced that inheritance is the right tool. The only one that springs to mind is a View hierarchy in UI libraries. But even then, I notice React (& friends) have all moved away from this approach. Modern web development usually makes components be functions. (And yes, javascript supports many kinds of inheritance. Early versions of react even used them for components. But it proved to be a worse approach.)

I've been writing a lot of rust lately. Rust doesn't support inheritance, but it wouldn't be needed in your example. In rust, you'd implement that by having a trait with functions (+default behaviour). Then have each robot type implement the trait. Eg:

trait Robot { fn stop(&mut self) { /* default behaviour */ } } struct BenderRobot; impl Robot for BenderRobot { // If this is missing, we default to Robot::stop above. fn stop(&mut self) { /* custom behaviour */ } }
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-05-08 06:47:58+00:00
I'm SO surprised to not see aider-chat everywhere mentionned.

I've been using it for about a year and it's incredible.

My take is that most people did not invest the little time necessary to get acustomed to its workflow.

My advices for aider are:

- familiarize yourself with the chat modes (architect, code, ask)

- familiarize yourself with the edit modes (diff, whole, etc) and know which to use for a given model. Indeed not all models handle all modes equally well.

- make the code one feature at a time, by small chunks if needed, by limiting the contxt to the relevant files.

- practice to learn how to best phrase stuff.

- write you coding preferences into aider convention files. Things like "always use type hints, beartype for type checking, python click for the cli, add many comments".

I'm mainly doing python and with proper comments and type hints it's really easy for models to write code that works with the rest of the repo even with only a few files in its context.
by nullc | 2025-05-08 06:49:49+00:00
It's tricky, because you run the risk that any use risks disclosing the capability. Targets can even set traps. E.g. I caught irc opers spying on PMs by sending trap URLs where I secretly could see the access logs. Because great care was taken to make sure the URLs existed nowhere else when they got loaded it was a confirmation that the traffic was monitored.

Now perhaps a somewhat safer tool is to just use the cracking to determine the best targets to bribe or backdoor, but only allow the group with the cracking power to give the names of services to monitor at any cost.
Ask HN: Books for LLMs
by me3meme | 2025-05-08 06:49:58+00:00
LLMs are weak in many fields, for example programming in prolog, so people provide the documentation to the LLM in order to avoid some hallucinations. It seems clear that it would be better to have books available tailored for LLMs for example containing warnings about use of words. (In prolog the thread library is library(thread) not library(threads). So there should be a github for LLMs and prior to prompting you give the url to the LLM to prepare for the concrete task.
by globular-toast | 2025-05-08 06:50:01+00:00
> How much do you have to pay for a quick boot, no ads, and a private movie or music experience?

For me, I reckon less than 5k overall. JVC DLA-X5000 projector, Yamaha A1020 receiver, Focal Aria 936 speakers, SVS SB1000 sub, Raspberry Pi 2 with Kodi on it, a NAS with 16TiB of storage and gigabit networking to connect it all. All the AV stuff second hand, of course. No load times, no ads, just a system that works for me.

I do not accept technology into my life unless it works for me. If the latest nK formats and 1000 channel surround doesn't work without equipment that works for someone else than I'll never have it in my home. Simple as that. I'll read a book instead.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-05-08 06:51:16+00:00
> How are interfaces with ability to provide default implementations for members (which both C# and Java allow today) not a substitute for mixins?

Those default-implementations are only accessible when the object is accessed via that interface; i.e. they aren't accessible as members on the object itself. Furthermore, interfaces (still) only declare (and optionally define) vtable members (i.e. only methods, properties, and events - which are all fundamentally just methods), not fields or any kind of non-static state, whereas IMO mixins should have no limitations and should behave the same as though you copied-and-pasted raw code.
by tornadofart | 2025-05-08 06:51:20+00:00
Looks interesting.

What I understood: it is basically overlaying privacy and net neutrality on the internet.

I am therefore restricted to communicating with other users of mycoria and can't access "the whole Internet" via mycoria.

Am I correct?

What isn't clear for end users, IMO:

- What's the primary use case it was built for? Are there applications using it for chatting / exchanging data / whatever?

- what's the difference to similar projects like, say, yggdrasil?

- what's the difference to using a VPN?
by alganet | 2025-05-08 06:51:44+00:00
You said you wanted "no censorship", I explained why it exists with a cheerful metaphor, then you said "it's too sensitive" (like your car seat belt is too tight).

Decide what you are. If you want no seat belts, I think you're insane. If it's too tight, then you need to complain to the manufacturer.

I only asked about examples to make you explain what you meant. Once it was clear, the conversation actually ended.
by dhaavi | 2025-05-08 06:51:46+00:00
Author here - thanks for the post!

A little more background info for my fellow HN people:

I've spent that last 8 years building privacy technology at Safing as Co-Founder/CTO. The biggest technological achievement there was undoubtedly the SPN (previously called Port17/Gate17): A privacy network (ie. a layer-5 proxy), fitting in the niche between VPNs and Tor. Impossible to misconfigure, good speeds and way superior privacy to VPNs using onion encryption and decoupled authentication/authorization. Funnily enough, this (decoupled auth) is what was later implemented by Apple Private Relay and Google One VPN.

SPN worked great for the most part, but scaling was hard. With the decision to make it a layer-5 proxy for decreased metadata and improved privacy, this meant that also traffic and congestion control had to be re-implemented - no easy feat, and still causing issues.

Meanwhile, I have followed and read a lot about cjdns and Yggdrasil over the past few years and was intrigued by their ideas how to do networking.

After some interesting talks in November 2023, I was at the point where I just wanted to know how far I would get - with all the experience and knowledge I had up to that point - implementing a scalable layer-3 mesh network, that still allowed for some privacy and full security. I spent most evenings of a couple months building it and was surprised how well it went.

Sadly, after a decent MVP and a first friend using it in small scale production, I did not have the time to work on it further.

But I am currently starting a new project, where I will make good use of it, so it will see quite some more development in the coming years!

So, Mycoria works, at least on small scale for now, but is more or less MVP.

Thanks for reading, I hope you have fun poking around and trying it out!

I am also happy to answer any questions you have here!
by uniqueuid | 2025-05-08 06:52:26+00:00
While I get your point, it doesn't carry too much weight, because you can (and we often read this) claim the opposite:

Linear regression, for all its faults, forces you to be very selective about parameters that you believe to be meaningful, and offers trivial tools to validate the fit (i.e. even residuals, or posterior predictive simulations if you want to be fancy).

ML and beyond, on the other hand, throws you in a whirl of hyperparameters that you no longer understand and which traps even clever people in overfitting that they don't understand.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1838/

So a better critique, in my view, would be something that the JW Tukey wrote in his famous 1962 paper: (paraphrasing because I'm lazy):

"better to have an approximate answer to a precise question rather than an answer to an approximate question, which can always be made arbitrarily precise".

So our problem is not the tools, it's that we fool ourselves by applying the tools to the wrong problems because they are easier.
by dgrr19 | 2025-05-08 06:52:44+00:00
memecoins have nothing to do with BTC. Talk about the price was always a thing because BTC is a currency, thus price is key. The tech is good, or it was at the time. I don't see the case for money laundering in BTC, only one could be XMR and mixers in ETH. Apart from that, in general cryptocurrency is not good for laundering since the blockchain can be tracked.
by josephg | 2025-05-08 06:53:47+00:00
> This isn't to say Java is bad and Go is good, they're just languages. It's just how they're typically (ab)used in enterprises.

Yeah; I agree with this. I think this is both the best and worst aspect of Go: Go is a language designed to force everyone's code to look like vaguely the same, from beginners to experts. Its a tool to force even mediocre teams to program in an inoffensive, bland way that will be readable by anyone.
by dhaavi | 2025-05-08 06:54:38+00:00
Yes, the primary focus is connectivity within the network.

You can use it for pretty much anything you would use a VPN for, but it is much easier to configure and secure by default with a built-in firewall. Only services you actively expose are reachable by others - by default nothing on your device can be accessed by others.

In the future, it will also provide some amount of privacy on the network.

I think the biggest user-facing difference is the ease of configuration (ie. none) - if Mycoria had proper installers.
by throw63 | 2025-05-08 06:55:05+00:00
Not quite. It's not about being economic elite per se, but about being part of the handful of people who will control the tech. That might well end up being a single person or family, of course. (I assume that AGI will not take over, rather the humans who program it will. I also assume that, unlike movie villains who need to keep rivals alive so that we can get an entertaining story, real life villains will not take chances and kill off almost everyone.)
by c7b | 2025-05-08 06:55:15+00:00
One interesting property of least squares regression is that the predictions are the conditional expectation (mean) of the target variable given the right-hand-side variables. So in the OP example, we're predicting the average price of houses of a given size.

The notion of predicting the mean can be extended to other properties of the conditional distribution of the target variable, such as the median or other quantiles [0]. This comes with interesting implications, such as the well-known properties of the median being more robust to outliers than the mean. In fact, the absolute loss function mentioned in the article can be shown to give a conditional median prediction (using the mid-point in case of non-uniqueness). So in the OP example, if the data set is known to contain outliers like properties that have extremely high or low value due to idiosyncratic reasons (e.g. former celebrity homes or contaminated land) then the absolute loss could be a wiser choice than least squares (of course, there are other ways to deal with this as well).

Worth mentioning here I think because the OP seems to be holding a particular grudge against the absolute loss function. It's not perfect, but it has its virtues and some advantages over least squares. It's a trade-off, like so many things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantile_regression
by Calliope1 | 2025-05-08 06:55:24+00:00
That’s a fair point — performance-wise, traditional backbones are incredibly hard to beat.

But maybe the value of Yggdrasil isn’t in outrunning the backbone — it’s in outlasting it. In unstable or disconnected environments, resilience, autonomy, and zero-setup connectivity might matter more than raw speed.

So perhaps it's not about replacement, but complement — building networks that keep working when the backbone doesn't.
by simonask | 2025-05-08 06:55:28+00:00
I don't think it's a defect of the language that your particular circumstance makes it infeasible to port your project. Having a great C++ interop story would be amazing, but Rust would be decidedly less awesome if it had made concessions in that direction early on.

There's a lot of warts here, particularly around the fact that all Rust types are "trivially relocatable" in C++ parlance. At the same time, figuring out which C++ types are trivially relocatable is pretty difficult. To give you an idea of the current situation, all or most non-POD C++ types must be "pinned" on the Rust side, forcing you to deal with the rather clunky `Pin<&mut T>` API. Either that or heap-allocating all C++ types owned from Rust code. Not great.

The story is likely to improve, hopefully. There's an interesting overview here: https://hackmd.io/@rust-lang-team/rJvv36hq1e
by masfoobar | 2025-05-08 06:55:36+00:00
I think many developers, especially in the range on 1999-2020, has gone through many pitfalls in programming. More specifically.. OOP.

As someone who was blessed/lucky to learn C and Pascal.. with some VB6.. I understood how to write clean code with simple structs and functions. By the time I was old enough to get a job, I realised most (if not all) job adverts required OOP, Design Patterns, etc. I remember getting my first Java book. About 1,000 pages, half of which was about OOP (not Java directly)

I remember my first job. Keeping my mouth shut and respecting the older, more experienced developers. I would write code the way I believed was correct -- proper OOP. Doing what the books tell me. Doing what is "cool" and "popular" is modern programming. Hiding the data you should not see, and wrapping what you should in Methods... all that.

Nobody came to me and offered guidance but I learned that some of my older codebase with Inheritence, Overrides.. while it was "proper" code, would end up a jumbled mess when it required new features. One class that was correctly setup one day needed to be moved about, affecting the class hierarchy of others. It brings me back to thinking of my earlier programming days with C -- and to have things in simples structs and functions is better.

I do not hate on OOP. Afterall, in my workplace, am using C# or Python - and make use of classes and, at times, some inheritence here and there. The difference is not to go all religious in OOP land. I use things sparingly.

At work, I use what the Companies has already laid out. Typically languages that are OOP, with a GC, etc. I have no problem with that. At home or personal projects, I lead more towards C or Odin these days. I use Scheme from time-to-time. I would jump at the opportunity to using Odin in the workplace but I am surrounded by developers who dont share my mindset, and stick to what they are familiar with.

Overall, his Conclusion matches my own. "Personally, for code reuse and extensibility, I prefer composition and modules."
by kuratkull | 2025-05-08 06:56:02+00:00
Example with smaller numbers:

2^10 / 2 = 512

512 is 2^9

So when dividing powers like this you decrement the exponent.

So no it's not 2^64 but more like 2^127

Dividing a loooong number with a small number has virtually no impact on the number.