MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by b112 | 2025-05-08 14:49:56+00:00
We are discussing, in this sub-thread, methods by which people masquerade as others, stealing funds, abusing resources, and so on. The post I replied to was musing, essentially, "How could this possibly happen!?"

My statement is entirely valid in this context.

Social engineering attacks are a well known method to hack, and masquerading as others is indeed a hack.
by radiorental | 2025-05-08 14:50:10+00:00
The premise of Tufte's work make sense until you try to apply it to functional and usable user interfaces.

He has strong opinions strongly held but as someone who's designed industrial strength UIs for over 20 years (networking CLIs & UIs, CAD modeling/simulation, Devops dashboards, cybersecurity tooling) I've read all his books, attended his lectures... he's a king with no clothes
by tm-guimaraes | 2025-05-08 14:50:14+00:00
No. It’s about connectivity.

Payments basics: Simplest scenario (details overly simplified) When you send money from account A on bank X to account B on bank Y, what happens is that Bank X debits account A on its system and credits bank Y’s account on bank X (let’s say it’s Xy account) Then bank X sends message to Bank Y to credit account B, so Bank Y debits X’s bank account (Yx) and credits B.

As you can see this is an issue, it means that every bank has to have an account on every other bank in order to have funds moving around, and even keep liquidity there.

That’s where Clearing And Settlement system comes in, they act as a centralised force.

So instead of bank X having an account (with enough liquidity ) on bank Y so that its customers can transfer money to Bank Y customers, both of these banks have an account on some Clearing/Settlement third party (usually it’s a system by a Central Bank) and interact with that system instead, so instead of N*N bank accounts on outer banks, you have N accounts on central system.

EU has TARGET from ECB for settlement of euros across EU.

But there is no central bank of the whole world of every currency.

So what happens when too far away banks interact?

They have to search through the graph of all the world banks how they can get money to a particular bank. Add currency conversion as an extra complexity, because every connection is on a currency.

So it’s quite the graph search with many constraints, clearing and settling such stuff is hard because of that.

Regulation and AML is just one of the difficulties in linking nodes, but other exists, for example liquidity, a small bank can’t just spread multi currency accounts on many places.

The benefit of stablecoin on a blockchain, is that it kinda gives you “whole world central bank”, more correctly, it makes everybody share the same ledger, instead of each bank having its own that needs reconciliation with everybody else.

The only thing extra needed for stable coins, is space for encrypted messages is a transfer(so that a bank can tell other bank to credit customer B) and a public mapping from Bank Bic to crypto wallet id.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-05-08 14:50:25+00:00
So obviously a technology to get a specific person to buy a specific thing at a specific time isn't going to happen. But the last ten years has taught me two things:

Many social media users are gullible enough to be convinced to act irrationally.

A well-trained AI on great data (which Facebook has) is pretty good at sorting signal from noise, i.e. advertisements that would or would not appeal to a particular user.
by yesfitz | 2025-05-08 14:51:17+00:00
What bothers me about using GDP and Wages as a denominator or a measure of progress is that it ignores the impact of things becoming more expensive (except for inflation adjustments).

In fact, if we paid more for everything except imports, GDP would grow and it would look like we weren't importing as much. If we paid less for imports over the years, and then used them to generate a lot more money (e.g. a computer), it would look like imports were of shrinking importance.

With wages, the OECD definition of "Disposable Household Income"[2] is all income minus taxes, mandatory contributions, and interest on loans. So what isn't excluded? Rent. Childcare. Healthcare. Things that have dramatically increased in price (and also increased GDP).

We can measure everything in dollars, but that doesn't mean that the goods and services represented by those dollars are fungible.

1: Table 3 of https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2025-03/gdp4q24-3rd.... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
by cogman10 | 2025-05-08 14:51:49+00:00
> how is this a "senior engineer"? Is this a "they worked in the industry for 6 years and are now senior" type situation...

Yeah, this is the situation exactly, though I've known a few seniors that were senior just because they've hung around and not experience.

> what is your history and position in the company? It seems odd that you'd get completely ignored by this supposed senior engineer

Been with the company for over a decade at this point. I think I have a pretty good reputation generally. Someone sent me a "This is why cogman10 is the GOAT" message for some of my technical interactions on large public team chats.

Why I'm being ignored? I have a bunch of guesses but nothing I'm willing to share.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 14:53:30+00:00
On the contrary, the people trying to keep the site a useful, curated source of information (rather than a dumping ground for people trying to get others to debug code for them) are on balance strongly against every kind of AI involvement with the site, including the use of that information for training AI (although we can't do anything about that). We curate a repository of high quality questions and answer (which is a "Q&A site", and is specifically what the site is supposed to be, so as to distinguish it from traditional forums) exactly because we want it to be a place where you get information from humans that reflects original human insight.

Which is also the reason for the ban on GenAI content (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831).
by kankouadio_vx | 2025-05-08 14:53:59+00:00
We built an agent that combines deep technical and contextual analysis of any text (emails, messages, URLs) and real-time fact-checking for optimal phishing, scam and ransomware protection. My co-founder Dylan and I (Kan) spent months reading about phishing, cybersecurity and scams, gathering a substantial amount of both real-life and synthetic data to power our original RAG-based system. Originally, the main challenge we encountered false positives so decided to redesign the entire system to be agentic, add real-time fact checking (crucial for credibility), reasoning and increase our knowledge-base 55x with more aggressive, vulgar but non-phishing examples, improve system prompt and bingo now we have a super accurate detection engine that almost never misses a phish or scam and never misclassifies a legitimate input as phishing. A really fun journey, now we're going hard on getting customers. We know phishing is the number one cause of data breach and ransomware for businesses and a lot of people get scammed every day so we're confident with dedication and consistency we'll get our first customer, and many more. We're particularly focusing on financial, legal and medical services, especially the SMEs in these sectors because we know these are the ones most targeted by phishing, data breach and ransomware while they mostly have no dedicated cybersecurity or threat prevention teams and are at the same time legally required to protect clients/patients data. Anyone wants to try or recommend VerifiedX we have a free tier so you can give it a spin - Just paste anything and our agent tells with the best accuracy if it's legit or not and why. app.verifiedx.me Kan
by tim333 | 2025-05-08 14:54:35+00:00
In the UK:

>Tesla just got overtaken in the UK by 2 Chinese brands you've never heard of

Jaecoo and Omoda (!)

I had indeed never heard of them. https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-sales-uk-overtaken-chi...

this prob didn't help https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/activists-place...
by rkangel | 2025-05-08 14:54:38+00:00
I think there are two different things though, and in the UK the bar is (mostly) just a practical one.

Lots of my colleagues cycle to work, because the cycling infrastructure is great (both from Cambridge City, and from my employer). For those along the Guided Busway corridor, quite a few get to work like that because it is convenient.

Step 1 is to make the public transport good enough so that it is at least as good as taking a car. But the US has Step 2 - convince people that they aren't looking poverty stricken if they take a bus.
by neilv | 2025-05-08 14:54:57+00:00
You mean aesthetically, in that interspersed all-caps makes the code visually less soothingly sensual?

I can sympathize, but let me make a non-aesthetic argument...

In large blocks of code, with all-caps, you can see at a glance where all the template substitutions are happening, and also instantly know as you're reading code what are variables and what are template substitutions?

I'm asking because one of my realizations in recent years is that not everyone reads or sees code the same way.

For example, maybe some people are stronger "visual" and some people are stronger "verbal".

For another example of a different in how people perceive and think, some people can visualize an object in their mind almost as if they're looking at it, but other people can only know and describe what it looks like without bringing a visual of it into their head.

With the benefit of the all-caps, I can glance at this and immediately see much of the structure of the template. Without all-caps, I'd have to work harder to find all the pattern variables, and the structure would be obscured.

For a bit kludgy practical matter, as I'm quickly looking at pieces of code in a template, with all-caps, I can look at a fragment of code in isolation and know what are and aren't pattern variables. Without that, I have to go read the top of the template clause (and read through any syntactic scopes of `let-syntax`) and get that in my head, until I get to the fragment of code I originally wanted to look at.

IDE support can make this unnecessary, with a hypothetical great IDE, with familiar syntax coloring. But still, if there is one thing that all-caps should be reserved for, it's something like this.

With all-caps, your code can be sensual, and the jolting all-caps bits are look out, potentially arbitrary code gets pasted into here.
by dmm | 2025-05-08 14:55:05+00:00
> intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by being cleverer

Solar power is great but intermittence is the main issue with it. If you look at 30 year historical weather data, many highly populated regions have two week periods with almost complete cloud cover. Storage and intercontinental power transmission are usually listed as the solutions to this, but the costs of these solutions are rarely included.
by layer8 | 2025-05-08 14:55:06+00:00
The diamond problem strictly speaking only has to be one when the common base class has constructor arguments. While a Java-style interface construct makes it easy to prevent, it also imposes much stronger restrictions than the above. It would have been possible to only impose the above restriction. Yes, there are failure cases with separate compilation, but the way Java dynamically loads classes, that would be similar to how when the JVM loads a class file that is supposed to be an interface, it discovers that instead it has been changed to a class.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-05-08 14:55:13+00:00
I recently watched this YouTube documentary about a Borneo tribe, barely clinging onto their traditional ways/knowledge (displaced by the logging industry) who used a plant as a supposedly universal snake bite remedy ... I wonder if there was ever a scientific study of how effective it actually is?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiQBTesZUJQ
by mapt | 2025-05-08 14:55:20+00:00
I would also wonder whether cultures are compatible with mass spec, and what the bottleneck is on measurement.

Culturing for optical microscopy seems like you need 1-10 DAYS before you get enough of a colony going to identify things, assuming you can successfully culture them at all. What if you plopped your culture down on the fermenter and gave it three hours (very cheap! Parallelizable!), then threw it in the mass spec? Would that shorten mass spec measurement time?
by sim7c00 | 2025-05-08 14:55:20+00:00
Search for 'sweet32 attack' . it's pretty much this technique - i think. The CVE mentions that attack type atleast, and it has its own .info site to explain what it is...

The message type jeroenhd mentioned is useful here, as it generates a predictable response from the server, without having to sent actual email over it or authenticate against it. (so an external attacker can generate the needed encrypted traffic, with predictable / known plaintext). They dont know emails being sent, but they do know the response to EHLO. once the attack is acheived, they have a key, and can decrypt also other traffic sent by the service if you manage to capture it.

I'd say the thread-model or whatever is thus, someone who can sniff your email traffic and can speak to your smtp server. (if they can do the first, certainly they can do the second.)

its much harder to get to the email traffic outside of your network, but not impossible. (ISP for example can grab it easily.... - so in certain regions this might be a big risk - nasty governemnts etc..)
by Aeroi | 2025-05-08 14:55:21+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm Pete, and I've built Sen, a real-time visual intelligence app designed to help people solve practical real-world problems.

Through testing I've found Sen is best at guiding users through tasks like car maintenance, electrical work, plumbing, boating, DIY projects, and challenges faced in industrial services and skilled trades. My mission with Sen is to make complex tasks simple, through hyper relevant instructions.

Visual intelligence is rapidly becoming the next major frontier in this AI wave, and I'm incredibly excited by the potential of this modality.

I'm currently raising a $50 million round through postcards and mail(a deliberate nod to the human element in our tech driven world). Details can be found through our new parent organization at www.camerasearch.ai.

If you're interested in building or investing as we grow to millions of users, I'd love to connect and speak with you.

-Pete
by 9283409232 | 2025-05-08 14:55:22+00:00
People suggest this often whenever a rich person says they should pay more taxes but unless I can specifically say I want my extra taxes to go to a specific government agency or office, I have no idea why I would do this. Just so Boeing can get a larger contract with my extra taxes? At that point I would just donate directly to causes that support what I want instead of dealing with the middle man.
by sstanie | 2025-05-08 14:55:55+00:00
You can search on ASF's data discovery portal for SMAP:

https://search.asf.alaska.edu/#/?maxResults=250&dataset=SMAP...

This lets you bulk download the .h5 files once you have an Earthdata account (https://urs.earthdata.nasa.gov/home )

or you can use the libraries if you'd like, https://github.com/nsidc/earthaccess or https://github.com/asfadmin/Discovery-asf_search
by wizardforhire | 2025-05-08 14:55:58+00:00
Countdown to enshitification in three… two…

I forsee a future where marantz amps have really annoying separate startup and shutdown songs and jingles for increments of volume obviously ascending and descending for increase and decrease in volume respectively with unavoidable long melodies for each power of ten, which of course can not be skipped or disabled by the user and also pause all ui inputs while being played causing the unit to grind to a halt if trying to change the volume too quickly and even causing the unit to crash as the melodies over lap and cause a buffer overflow… to be fixed never of course.
by photonthug | 2025-05-08 14:56:21+00:00
I can confirm there's real wisdom in this approach, lol. Nothing bad had happened to me for a while so I decided to update that one computer to ubuntu noble and YUP, immediately bricked by some UEFI problem. Ok cool, it's not like 2004 anymore, this will probably be a quick fix.. 3 hours later...
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-05-08 14:56:43+00:00
His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'. There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts.

Also, as a recommendation, you guys should look into whether your employer matches charitable donations to 501Cs in any amount. I find giving a solid chunk of my discretionary budget to charity every year lends a sense of purpose to a job that wouldn't otherwise have much (at least, in the sense of helping others).

I enjoy being a dev, and I've given serious thought to simply continuing working once I reach my FIRE number and donating half of what I earn to charity. I think most charities would have more use for my money than my time, given my disability
by RhysU | 2025-05-08 14:56:54+00:00
> Now inequality is high and keeps getting higher.

Gramm et al's book, or at least the first couple of chapters, are worth reading on this topic. Oft-quoted official statistics neglect taxes and transfer payments. There is definitely a large uptick at the top 5% but the spread across the lower 80% isn't as strong as it often is stated, according to Gramm and his co-authors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_American_Inequalit...
by affyboi | 2025-05-08 14:57:12+00:00
I might have misinterpreted what you mean as “standard” (I was originally thinking like you meant that the standard dictates all operations must be safe and doing things like the unsafe/unchecked option references would be outside the standard). I realized that you might mean it like it should be the default behavior, so correct me if I’m wrong there.

Yeah I agree that sane defaults would be nice and that things like unchecked accesses should be more explicit. Having linear types to properly enforce issues with things like use-after-move would also be awesome. I don’t know that anyone has ever accused C++ of being particularly ergonomic. Sum types and pattern matching would be awesome.

Nothing wrong with being a Rust fanboy :), I have written some (https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter).
by Windchaser | 2025-05-08 14:57:46+00:00
> So he’s going to selflessly donate it to himself to save himself from taxes? What a hero.

You don't really "save yourself from taxes" by donating money to charity.

Option A: sell stock for $100, pay taxes of $20, spend $80 on yourself Option B: donate stock of $100 to charity, and spend $0 on yourself

Which of these options leaves Gates with more money in his pocket to spend on himself?

Giving money away doesn't save you from taxes on your income; you just forego the income entirely. The money is gone. It's no longer yours. Why would you be paying taxes on it?
by abraxas | 2025-05-08 14:58:09+00:00
This is an app I'd love to have if done right. There is a lot of hidden complexity within it around automatic topic categorization and clustering but if I had something that was able to turn my streams of consciousness into a sensible journal including to-do lists, items that must be fleshed out more (for example when brainstorming) and things I mustn't forget (reminders about birthdays things to buy etc) that would be super handy.

Do you have anything that is at least at a demo stage (maybe even an in-action video) because your front page is just an email harvest.
by legitster | 2025-05-08 14:59:19+00:00
It's interesting he decided to go this way rather than put it into a sustainable trust and just trickle money out indefinitely.

I suspect he believes that these causes need shock therapy. To eradicate a disease, you are better off doing it all in one go.

I also wonder if he looks at something like the Ford Foundation and realize in the long run that any charitable trust will just turn into an overstuffed political advocacy group that does little to advance his charities or even his legacy.
by DavidSJ | 2025-05-08 14:59:24+00:00
MSFT is up 18x during that time and the S&P 500 is up 5x during that time. His investments are some mixture of MSFT and other things, so we might say he would have been up around 10x if he'd given no money away.

Since his net worth is only up 3x, that means he gave away about 70% of his wealth.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 14:59:37+00:00
Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30% of grid additions [2] before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity.

Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days.

That is how utterly truly insanely expensive new build western nuclear power is.

[1]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...

[2]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

[3]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
by troyvit | 2025-05-08 14:59:51+00:00
> crowded with open source tooling that's already available to anyone with the time and desire to wire it all up.

Those who don't have the time and desire to wire it all up probably make up a larger part of the market than those who do. It's a long-tail proposition, and that might be a problem.

> I have most of the features that they've listed here already set up on my desktop at home

I think your boss and your boss' boss are the audience they are going for. In my org there's concern over the democratization of locally run LLMs and the loss of data control that comes with it.

Mistral's product would allow IT or Ops or whatever department to set guardrails for the organization. The selling point that it's turn-key means that a small organization doesn't have to invest a ton of time into all the tooling needed to run it and maintain it.

Edit: I just re-read your comment and I do have to agree though. "game-changer" is a bit strong of a word.
by ertgbnm | 2025-05-08 14:59:56+00:00
> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."

Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-08 15:00:41+00:00
I totally agree, but I'm not seeing any alternative approach being taken besides declaring that the numbers are incorrect and the feelings are the real facts.

Much of our current political woes can be traced to widespread rejection of various facts. Figuring out how to remedy that (which has to include understanding that particular facts don't always give you the full picture, and people's feelings matter whether correct or not) is critical, but this sort of "lol stop talking about numbers you stupid scientists" response is not helpful.
by Ozzie_osman | 2025-05-08 15:00:56+00:00
For you (or other folks) working in tech and giving to charity, apart from corporate match, another couple pieces of advice are to consider a Donor Advised Fund. They are really easy to set up, and then you get some benefits, like the ability to "bunch" your donations (can help with tax deductions) or donate appreciated investments (like RSUs) without paying capital gains tax.