MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgrin91 | 2025-05-01 12:41:17+00:00
Isn't that true for basically everything though? I'm not familiar with what other encrypted messaging systems security agencies use, but either (1) they store ciphertexts that can in theory be attacked later or (2) they delete their data after some time, but signal has that option was well.

Obviously using signal here is a terrible opsec failure, I'm just not sure how what you are saying changes anything
by jll29 | 2025-05-01 12:42:43+00:00
If you have the opportunity, I'd suggest go and visit the beach where your late grandfather landed.

Normandy is beautiful even without its rich history, but enriched with the Bayeux tapestry and the D-Day landing it's an amazing region.

After reading several by the minute historic acounts, I visited there. We were joined by a U.S.-American couple and our guide was a young French lady who pointed out many French were angry about the number of French people killed by the allied bombs that prepared the invation (in error, due to bad weather).

My late German grandfather was working as a prisoner-of-war for a nearby farm after the war, and spoke very fondly of a baby girl called "Francine" that he would sometimes babysit after his work; sadly, he could not recall the name of the village or the family (we tried to get in contact by phone in the 1990s), as he never spoke French. The farmers were very good to him, treated him like a family member, and later even funded his train ticket home.

And you are right, talking to seniors in order to preserve their memories good and bad is important and highly interesting. (Nodwadays, I'd recommend recording such conversations to secure the ability to transcribe the treasure stories provided of course folks consent.)
by aestetix | 2025-05-01 12:43:20+00:00
I highly recommend against watching the movie. The main figure, Tim Jenison, comes off as an arrogant know-it-all, reducing art to a technique, and insulting people along the way. In the movie, multiple times he said "I have never done this before, but how hard could it be?"

I'll note two parts of the movie that support my view. First, if his art is so great, then why is it not displayed all over the place? He has a few alleged experts giving praise without criticism, and in the end, it is on the wall in his bedroom. Surely, if the art were that easy to recreate, galleries would be demanding his piece?

Second, notice how they never actually show the real painting. In fact, at one point they make it out to be a conspiracy, that the painting is being kept in some back room nobody can access. I would loved to have seen the real painting side-by-side with Tim's alleged reproduction. I suspect they didn't push to hard for access, because it would have ruined their narrative.
by lolinder | 2025-05-01 12:43:40+00:00
Yeah, I'm honestly trying to figure out why this is getting so much attention. Applications setting themselves to start up at login in order to avoid doing a bunch of work when they're asked for later is one of the oldest patterns in Windows. It's annoying to regularly have to go in and clear out new startup applications, but it's been part of maintaining a Windows machine for decades, and Microsoft Office is hardly the worst offender.

Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?
by wildzzz | 2025-05-01 12:44:06+00:00
This is explicitly for IoT manufacturers that want to lock out people easily modifying a device (or bringing it back to life after it receives an "update of death") or the kinds of industrial customers that need to check a box for a cybersecurity audit.

These IoT manufacturers keep making all of these new products but the thing is, an ESP32 from several years ago is not that much different than one from today. They don't need much compute, anything difficult can take place on the cloud. So how do you sell someone new hardware if the first gen device is still perfectly capable? How do you sell a premium version if it's just the same parts inside? For the former, you can EoL a product by blocking it from cloud services (like Nest this week). If the firmware is locked, a hobbyist can't just flash modified gen 2 firmware and have the device functioning like normal. For the latter, you can lock the bootloader firmware so that it will only load the firmware that you want it to run (i.e. the basic or premium version).
by rayiner | 2025-05-01 12:44:51+00:00
All the “smart” people have been going in the wrong direction for 40 years—pursing short term profits and encouraging wasteful consumption—so you got the toddler. Let that be a lesson.

Our trade deficit in the 1990s was under 1% of GDP. Some people may not remember that time, but we had toys on the shelves, toilet paper, etc. Not at all what the doomers are saying will happen without unrestricted free trade.

If trade deficits are so great, why does the EU try to maintain a consistent surplus? I can accept that Trump is an idiot and doesn’t know what he’s doing on trade. But I think the EU bureaucrats are pretty smart! I think the Germans and Chinese and Japanese are very sharp and have deliberately sought to maintain manufacturing-oriented economies with a large trade surpluses.

You know who else ran large trade deficits? The UK: https://ercouncil.org/2016/chart-of-the-week-week-19-2016-uk.... And it seemingly worked for awhile so long as people gave a shit about the pound and London banks, but that proved to be extremely fragile. The 2008 recession destroyed that and erased the UK’s higher standard of living.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-05-01 12:45:16+00:00
Something doesn’t need to be “optimal” for it to highly net positive.

But even if you don’t want to believe all the research and all the very obvious examples that suggest the tremendous benefits of public research even from a purely monetary perspective, maybe just consider that nearly every other country is trying to rebuild what the U.S. has in terms of public research.

China, Europe, etc.

And countries in the Middle East are using their oil money to essentially pay for these universities to build campuses in their nations.
by belter | 2025-05-01 12:46:55+00:00
There’s virtually nothing, technically or managerially, that can slow down the massive iceberg that is Azure and Microsoft.

Call it cynical if you like, but I see it as a plain statement of fact that as of May 2025:

- A cloud platform riddled with security vulnerabilities.

- Two major breaches that exposed customer data to other customers.

- Widely disliked by seasoned cloud professionals who are forced to use it.

And yet...it’s thriving....Microsoft’s earnings yesterday showed Azure and other cloud services up 33% year-over-year, and the stock jumped 9% in after-hours trading.
by exabrial | 2025-05-01 12:47:26+00:00
Alternative stance:

Google has made sure that _nobody_ can implement a browser with hostile takeovers the "standards" committees and pushing the standards solely in the direction of corporate interests, bypassing consumer interests. The whole point was to make them so complicated it would be impossible for someone without an insane budget to implement one.

Proof of this is the whole advertising sandbox crap... what the hell does an HMTL Client "need" an advert sandbox for?

Breakups are painful. Ultimately they're better for everyone.
by qwerty456127 | 2025-05-01 12:47:40+00:00
> OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter"

It still does. Neither LibreOffice itself nor it's installation process with its components choice have changed seriously since the old days and I'm very grateful for this. The QuickStarter isn't as relevant anymore as we have fast SSDs now but some slow computers are still around and that's great we still have the option.
by shayway | 2025-05-01 12:47:41+00:00
I think everyone but the most feverish oldschool supporters of psychedelics will find these results unsurprising. While it's undeniable that mushrooms and such pop up here and there in traditional usage/depictions there isn't nearly enough evidence to extrapolate anything more than that, and the myths that claim otherwise have always been laughable. More research is always welcome in this space of course - obvious results are often the most important.

I do disagree with Dyck's take at the end, though; the people spreading the myths about historical psychedelic usage (Leary, etc.) tend to do so out of unbridled enthusiasm more than financial goals. And I think the focus on personal, medicinal usage over the more traditional spiritual usage makes sense considering... they experienced them personally, and that's how they understood the value. Not that that excuses the spread of misinformation, but I think it's unfair to characterize it as nefarious when it was really more misguided.

The research is interesting but this article has an odd slant to it, like it's arguing against something but it's unclear what. They seem to conflate the older ~1950s-1980s psychedelic culture - stoned ape theory, mushroom iconography - with the more modern approach, of clinical research and microdosing and so on. I get the impression the author doesn't think highly of psychedelics, and is more interested in finding evidence to support that inclination than actually delving into the complicated dynamics of it all.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-01 12:48:10+00:00
I like the work and advocacy of Jen Simmons too, but without the large infusion of cash (on the order of $20B) from Google, why wouldn't Apple downsize the Safari team and force her out?

I worry about the jobs of all browser devs in fact. The pace of innovation in web and browser technologies will significantly slow down. All browser teams are likely to be downsized.
by rayiner | 2025-05-01 12:48:22+00:00
> And they're mostly right

They’re clearly not! Around the developed world, people—especially younger people—are angry that their economies have been exported to the third world while their countries have been filled with cheap third world labor. Acela-class liberals and highly educated Reagan conservatives teamed up to bring about that state of affairs. Maybe they should do some introspection instead of crowing about how they’re right and half the country is just too stupid to realize how great they have it.

If (neo-)liberalism worked, people wouldn’t be so unhappy about the current state of affairs.
by hollerith | 2025-05-01 12:48:38+00:00
Yeah, I'm not even a web dev, but even I can see that Google wants to make the web stack ever more complicated and is has been good at getting what it wants.

I always thought they do that to make it more expensive for anyone to compete with them. E.g., want to introduce a new operating systems for phones? No one will use it unless it has a web browser. So you have to hire a thousand expensive developers to create and maintain the browser (or maybe somehow induce Mozilla to port Firefox to it, which would probably also be expensive).
by crazygringo | 2025-05-01 12:49:09+00:00
The main point is to skip the indices, which you have to do pre-compression.

When I do stuff like this, I stream the dump straight into gzip. (You can usually figure out a way to stream directly to the destination without an intermediate file at all.)

Plus this way it stays stored compressed at its destination. If your purpose is backup rather than a poor man's replication.
by fredoliveira | 2025-05-01 12:49:33+00:00
> Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?

Probably because it is horrible? It's indicative of how we spend less time optimizing code than we do coming up with computationally expensive, inefficient workarounds.

Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office (I made that number up). Why should Office be partially loaded the other 98% of the time? How is it acceptable to use those resources?

When are we actually going to start using the new compute capabilities in our machines, rather than letting them get consumed by unoptimized, barely decent code?
by constantcrying | 2025-05-01 12:49:48+00:00
I think it should go without saying, but never use this with anything more relevant than a hobby project.

Doing this with any kind of data you don't fully own (e.g. data from your company) is a terrible idea, from so many standpoints. That it is "allegedly" running locally is not making it much better.

I think my question to OP is, who is this for. Any developer can write up a convert for his own datasets, in basically any case I can think of where you are handling large amounts of data you are building a pipeline to do cleanup, renaming, conversion, etc. Who wants to have a part of that pipeline be uploading the data into the browser?
by pessimizer | 2025-05-01 12:49:57+00:00
That throught-terminating cliché propaganda line generated by a bunch of campaign strategists at a whiteboard is what got us into this situation.

The extreme bipartisan view is that government business done by public officials should be hidden from the public record at their whim, even with the explicit goal of avoiding FOIA. Democrats believe that this is not only justified but virtuous, because Hillary Clinton lost an election.
by jcranmer | 2025-05-01 12:51:01+00:00
> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.

Not really. That was done more by the greed of the MPEG alliance.

Back in the days when <video> was first proposed, VP8 was required to be supported as a codec by all browsers. This was removed as a requirement after Apple stated they were never going to support it, but the other browsers still implemented VP8 because it was codec free. Then Google implemented H.264 in Chrome. Mozilla only implemented H.264 in Firefox after it became clear that Google's announcement that they were going to rip H.264 out of Chrome was a bald-faced lie, making H.264 a de facto codec requirement for web browsers.

Having won, then the MPEG Alliance got greedy with their next version. H.265 upped the prices on its license agreement, and additionally demanded a cut of all streaming revenue. It got worse--the alliance fragment, and so you had to pay multiple consortia the royalties for the codec (although only one of them had the per-video demand).

It was in response to this greed that the Alliance for Open Media was created, which brought us AV1. I don't know how important Google is to the AOM, but I will note that, at launch, it did contain everybody important to the web video space except for Apple (which, as noted earlier, is the entity that previously torpedoed the attempt to mandate royalty-free codecs for web video).
by markus_zhang | 2025-05-01 12:51:03+00:00
I worked a bit in a FAANG level company.

TBH I think it's just they don't have the capacity to properly train and doc. That's why you got all those weird commands and out of date docs. The company is forever growing or heading for new directions, team gets requests left and right, so they try to hire good developers and hopefully they don't make a big mess.

I "guess" more critical teams like security and ops might be different, because even very good developers can still mess up royally if the doc is wrong. And system programming teams might also be better, like teams that build tools.
by throw0101a | 2025-05-01 12:51:04+00:00
It's a bit amusing that May Day was due to the major strike in the US, but the US doesn't celebrate on that day, but in September:

> There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe.[18] In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative,[19] formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day#Labor_Day_versus_May...

Labo(u)r Day of US/CA/JP/AU/NZ:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Observance_of_Internation...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Day
by tristor | 2025-05-01 12:51:50+00:00
You are working under an assumption that someone who /takes/ by force is satisfied with the taking. I am working from years of data and my own experiences.

It is sad. Communities should help everyone within them so that nobody has a need to commit crime. Unfortunately many people commit crime because they don't care about others or have deep mental issues, not out of need.

On average 1% of the residents in communities in the US are responsible for >70% of the crime, including the most violent crimes. Who are those 1%? Repeat offenders. Those who have made crime their lifestyle and feel no conscience towards their victims. They are not "otherwise peaceful individuals".

I am American, but unlike most I am well traveled, speak multiple languages, and volunteer regularly in my community. No amount of wishful thinking will change the fact that a small portion of the population feels entitled to commit harm to others with impunity and they are unconcerned with killing or maiming decent people while in the process of their crimes. You should be prepared to defend yourself or all you have is hope that you get lucky.

Rather than trying to make me into a caricature so you can dismiss me, maybe you should also look at the data or go meet some of these people who commit crimes through volunteerism.
by qwerty456127 | 2025-05-01 12:52:29+00:00
> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps

It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster.

The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vulnerability mitigations, cryptography etc.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-01 12:52:30+00:00
You're rather leaving out the fact that the first was upheld for pragmatic, not legal reasons. Kavanaugh, who cast the deciding vote in favor of the CDC, stated that the CDC had clearly overstepped their bounds, but as the moratorium was set to imminently expire, and the ruling could cause imminent disorder, chose to pragmatically, rather than legally, uphold it. The CDC then shrugged and decided to try to do something similar again after it expired, and summarily lost. The legacy media framed this with quotes such as "A group of right wing extremists just decided to throw families out of their homes during a global pandemic." Yeah, real informative...

The quote I gave regarding the unconstitutionality of Chevon deference was from the Supreme Court opinion. It was both unconstitutional and contradicted previous legalese and precedent. It was a loser on every account.
by jlokier | 2025-05-01 12:52:54+00:00
Sure you can. The services just need to agree protocols. The tech & cryptography part is not difficult these days. We've had guaranteed E2E for email since PGP in 1991, though not many people cared enough to use it.

None of the services you listed do it, but that's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done. It's a business decision problem, not a technical problem.
by derektank | 2025-05-01 12:53:40+00:00
>2) You cannot govern exclusively from a SCIF, hence 1.

If you have the resources available to the SecDef, you frankly should be able to. Mobile SCIFs are something private companies can provide off the shelf for a few hundred thousand dollars. That's a drop in the bucket.

Obviously, nobody can or should spend all their time in one unless you're some kind of watch officer, but when handling TS/SCI material, there really is no reason for a principal to not have access to a SCIF within a moment's notice if they make it a priority. And there's no reason to be sharing TS/SCI with anyone that is not themselves in a SCIF. We have a declassification/reclassification process if information needs to be more widely disseminated.
by llm_nerd | 2025-05-01 12:53:53+00:00
Apple sends a specific, detailed receipt on the billing of every such item. Apple has some of the most user-friendly subscription management options of anyone. Apple lets you cancel a subscription immediately without cancelling the service immediately, and so on.

There is a lot to criticize Apple for -- the 30% fee is disgusting, and the subject of this order where they bar external payments without fees is criminal -- but the subscription complaint has always been weak.
by oriettaxx | 2025-05-01 12:54:06+00:00
more from that PDF (in the movie "In the line of fire")

Overall, the project has been a great success. The Secret Service wa able to work closely with the producers to make certain that our portrayal on the big creen was a positive one. There have been several films that depicted the Service or it employees as side i sue to the tory's actual plot. However, as Snow a erts, "It's a story told through the eyes of an agent, his problem , and his experiences." All things considered, it promi e to be a film that just may promote a greater intere t in the Service. "In addition to possibly being nominated for an academy award, I believe this movie will be good for our recruitment effort. It just may do for u what "Top Gun" did for the Navy," ays ASAIC Meyer. According to Snow, "From a recruitment tandpoint, this film will be excellent. This is an exceptional movie that wa re earched well and portrays the Service in a po itive light. If a film had to be made depicting the Service, isn't that the way it's supposed to be done?"
by wildzzz | 2025-05-01 12:54:11+00:00
They make laundry sanitizer you can add to the fabric softener cup, it's just unscented Lysol. There's a big difference between clean, sanitized, disinfected, and sterilized. If you're working with plain soap and detergents, it's only going to come out clean. Anything beyond that requires a lot more heat and more chemicals.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-01 12:54:18+00:00
I definitely have databases like this.

It's not carelessness, it's performance.

Quite simply, I have a table with 4 columns -- A, B, C, D. Each column is just an 8-byte integer. It has hundreds of millions of rows. It has an index on B+C+D, an index on C+D, and one on D.

All of these are required because the user needs to be able to retrieve aggregate data based on range conditions around lots of combinations of the columns. Without all the indices, certain queries take a couple minutes. With them, each query takes milliseconds to a couple seconds.

I thought of every possible way to avoid having all three indices, but it just wasn't possible. It's just how performant data lookup works.

You shouldn't assume people are being careless with indices. Far too often I see the opposite.
by gilgoomesh | 2025-05-01 12:55:23+00:00
From Wikipedia on Chinese Water Torture:

> Despite the name, it is not a Chinese invention and it is not traditional anywhere in Asia. Its earliest known version was first documented by Hippolytus de Marsiliis in Bologna (now in Italy) in the late 15th or early 16th century, and it was widely used in Western countries before being popularized by Harry Houdini in the early 20th century.
by superkuh | 2025-05-01 12:55:49+00:00
>major browser innovation that has happened during the last decade

Indeed. And since there has been nothing but bad changes to HTTP and HTML in the last decade, all centered around turning the web into just a means of transporting javascript applications, we know who to blame. I'm still upset that Google and Microsoft agents within the IETF managed to openwash and push QUIC/udp through as HTTP/3.

It's a status quo that definitely needs changing if we're going to have a web usable by human persons and not just corporate persons.