MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timschmidt | 2025-06-01 23:39:53+00:00
If you believe that physics describe the rules by which the universe operates, then there's literally nothing in the universe a large and fast enough computer can't emulate.

Cyborg c.elegans seem to behave just like the biological version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3zLpm_FbPg

Intuition is a guess based on experience. Sounds an awful lot to me like what LLMs are doing. They've even been shown to rationalize post-hoc just as Humans do.

Humans have incorrectly claimed to be exceptional from all of creation since forever. I don't expect we'll stop any time soon, as there's no consequence to suffer.
by Perenti | 2025-06-01 23:39:54+00:00
We used to steal Iodine crystals from the chem lab at High School, and set "traps" for the unwary. I have no idea how many clothes we ruined by putting NI3 on seats.

We also wired cans in || and wired up the boys' urinal so that they could "complete the circuit".

Ah, the Good Old Days before Workplace Health and Safety, or MDS.
by solardev | 2025-06-01 23:40:51+00:00
That seems to be a huge advantage of religious communities when it comes to passing on lineages. They have a built-in in-group of potential partners from similar backgrounds and values to choose from, and many times they would already be known and vetted by family and friends.

Of course that can also lead to marriages of social convenience rather than romantic love (for better or worse) and, in tragic circumstances, situations like the FLDS church where women and girls are just traded between old men as sex slaves. That's an extreme though.

How have the religious couples you've known turned out? I've known a few, and some are still happily together years later while others have separated. Often they get married just to finally be "allowed" to have sex.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-01 23:41:12+00:00
> Think about CrowdStrike's incident: catching that bug at dev level would cost them shitton times less than what actually happened :P

> Their stock dropped by like 45%

A program that can block booting is definitely on the high side of software bug risk.

But even in that case, the post-drop stock was still trading higher than a year before and they got back to the same level in six months.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-06-01 23:41:28+00:00
OK, that's a good sign. I didn't see any links to the source in the Github thread, and the only mention of contributing in that thread is an email to apply for a job. I'm not going to delete my comment, because the subtree you showed doesn't have a LICENSE file so it isn't totally clear, but I agree it does appear to at least continue to be source-available.

Reviewing the source for this tree, looks like it's been in public development for a fair amount of time, with many PRs.
by aag | 2025-06-01 23:42:23+00:00
The term "hacker," even in the computer field, originally had a larger scope than computer security. It had a more philosophical definition, too. I host a copy of the Jargon File[1], compiled by Guy Steele et al., on my web site. It defined "hacker" as[2]:

HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically, or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value (q.v.). 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; example: "A SAIL hacker". (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker".

I'm guessing that PG had this broader definition in mind when Hacker News was started.

No history of the term "hacker," however brief, would be complete with a reference to The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[3].

[1] https://speechcode.com/jargon/

[2] https://speechcode.com/jargon/jargon.info.Hacker.html

[3] https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
by yurishimo | 2025-06-01 23:42:26+00:00
Stripe has been doing it for god knows how long now and it seems to be working for them. With a robust test suite, I can’t think of too much that can/would go wrong. Honestly, I wish more software would approach things this way instead of introducing a major api version every 5 years. Just continuously ship the latest thing and translate everything that came before. Hopefully if people are also using “official” client libraries, they will eventually upgrade their dependencies and their API version will also get bumped. If there is a particularly heavy usage client jumping forward 100 versions and using too many of your resources, hopefully your org can dedicate some resources to help them upgrade which theoretically benefits both of you.

Now that I think of it Adyen did this to us a few years back. We’ll probably stay in the v5 branch until they politely poke us to upgrade again in another 5 years…
by spankibalt | 2025-06-01 23:42:39+00:00
I don't think we negotiate the same phenomenon. You seem to describe the harmless, almost romantic indulgences of nostalgics. I talk about the bizarre, often enough toxic distorsions of a certain breed of user, who still fights, after all these years, their Platform War. The sort of fan who blames "the PC" for the "ills of the industry".

Anyway, off to some specifics:

> "The strength of the PC during this time was it's rapidly expanding library of business software applications and hardware expansion options in the form of add-in cards [...]".

A standardized general-purpose computing platform "for the future". Exactly what spoke to me, as disseminated in the publications I read as a kid in 1991.

> "Of course, this power balance was largely addressed by the mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac."

"Power balance"? I didn't think in such abstracts when I made my choice, and conducted the long and merciless attrition-lobbying campaign for financial support, to buy a PC. The Amigas and the Ataris were simply not a factor for a variety of different, but very tangible and practical reasons:

Atari ST? I was not (on my way to become) a musician with the need for a precise and affordable backpack-portable computer instrument.

Amigas? The big birds were seen, outside of some specialist-niches, as uneconomical compared to their IBM-compatible brethren.

The vanilla home computers were seen as affordable, but extremely limited, racking-up (hidden) secondary costs to make them more usable. Often enough they carried a certain cultural stigma as well, being perceived by our financiers as gaming toys and therefore time wasters. And most importantly? No one I personally knew had an Amiga. Who to swap software with, where to find a mentor? Yeah...

The Atari guys I befriended used their machines almost exclusively for dabbling in electronic music, later as part of the emerging East German EBM and hard techno scene.

Games? The titles I was interested in either didn't exist on M68k platforms (flight simulations à la Aces of the Pacific, wargames such as the Harpoon series, or adventures like The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes), were practically unplayable (e. g. Red Baron), considered inferior (e. g. Wing Commander)... or just came out too late.

By listening to stories of some Britons of my age, it only recently came to my attention how privileged I have actually been. Some of these people told me stories of buying their first A600s or A1200s only in 1993! At that time it was hard to separate me from my trusty, second-hand PC... a machine with a CPU-type nearing its eighth (!) birthday (386DX-25).
by BoorishBears | 2025-06-01 23:43:23+00:00
CPU-only is really terrible bang for your buck, and I wish people would stop pushing these impractical builds on people genuinely curious in local AI.

The KV cache won't soften the blow the first time they paste a code sample into a chat and end up waiting 10 minutes with absolutely no interactivity before they even get first token.

You'll get an infinitely more useful build out of a single 3090 and sticking to stuff like Gemma 27B than you will out of trying to run Deepseek off a CPU-only build. Even a GH200 struggles to run Deepseek at realistic speeds with bs=1, and there's an entire H100 attached to CPU there: there just isn't a magic way to get "affordable fast effective" AI out of a CPU offloaded model right now.
by const_cast | 2025-06-01 23:43:25+00:00
> You're essentially making the argument that "if you can get away with theft, it's not theft," which really says a lot more about you than it does about me.

No, that's not at all the argument I'm making. I'm making the argument that being a poor worker is not theft because it cannot be. Because theft requires you stealing something, and salary employees cannot steal time because they are not paid by time.

> I think you're just spewing bullshit that isn't actually reflective of reality

This has been the case everywhere I've been employed and has also been the case with everyone I know.

Look, I don't really care if you think your company is different and I'm certainly not going to try to convince you that your experience isn't real. That's not productive.

All I'm saying is, if we have a problem where workers aren't doing a good job, that's a measuring problem. Your company figured out the measuring problem. Congratulations! Most haven't, which is why they have so many shitty workers. They just need to put in more effort into measurement.

Ultimately the company is the sole entity responsible for setting expectations. If they're letting people get away with less work, then they're signalling "what you're doing is okay and you should keep doing it". I'm not going to fault random workers who have zero leverage or control in anything because their company and managers decided to be lazy and irresponsible.

You want to measure performance? Yeah, that takes effort and knowledge. Putting in an HID reader isn't gonna cut it.
by WillAdams | 2025-06-01 23:43:36+00:00
One of my favourite novels, H. Beam Piper's _Little Fuzzy_ is in the public domain (because he died intestate and the Commonwealth of Pa. failed to renew his copyrights before they were turned over to his estate).

There is a professional-quality reading of it by Tabithat:

https://librivox.org/little-fuzzy-by-h-beam-piper/

which I recommend highly.

Unfortunately, the quality of the readings can vary widely, and my family has often been unwilling to put up with a poor quality recording on long trips.

That said, I use their app on my phone while doing boring tasks at work, and greatly appreciate the project.
by ramoz | 2025-06-01 23:44:27+00:00
There is something here about the native filesystem and tooling. & some type of insight into what agentic software engineering will look like - I mostly feel like an orchestrator, or validator in the terminal window next to Claude Code where i run tests/related things.

I was never a great terminal developer, I cant even type right - but Claude Code by far provides the best software engineering interface in there terms of LLM/agent UX.
by thegeomaster | 2025-06-01 23:44:33+00:00
I've personally found that I reject around 80% of suggestions with "No, and tell Claude what to do differently". So it requires a lot of babysitting, and it usually means I cannot do another thing effectively while it's running. For this reason I've considered switching to something less agentic like Aider since it's more predictable. Curious to hear how others work around this.
by mrep | 2025-06-01 23:45:34+00:00
Check out my edit 2. The Dutch already have an automated minigun. Bullets aren't that expensive relative to those shitty consumer drones which would get torn apart by them.

Also, ukraine doesn't have Trophy or any minigun/shotun defense system that I know of yet.

Having automated miniguns/shotguns near civilian areas definitely creates a challenge but I think our defense budget can handle that.
by 8organicbits | 2025-06-01 23:45:44+00:00
This is a good overview, but I think some more actionable advise would be helpful, especially given the beginner audience.

Following the API key example, I'd usually hash these when storing them in the database. This side steps the issue, as hashing the attacker's guess doesn't leak any timing information about the secret. The final string comparison (hash_guess == hash_expected) will leak timing information about the hash of the API key, but that doesn't leak information about the un-hashed API key.

Interestingly, there are lots of frameworks that use timing-sensitive checks. Django, for example, uses timing-sensitive look-ups [1]. Building a practical attack could yield a trove of bug bounties...

[1] https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/31412
by throwawayffffas | 2025-06-01 23:45:57+00:00
> Definition of a good dating app: An app with no dark patterns where you can find dates and relationships.

Yep that's not going to happen. Taking all the dark patterns out is the easy part. But the find dates and relationships part is not a thing you can do on an app. Unless you are like a 9.

Most people are average, and to find a date and have a relationship they have to be in an environment where whoever is doing the picking does not have infinite options and may be open to lower their standards. Like say in a bar where the options are the people in the bar and their standards might be lower because of beer goggles.

In an app people get to be picky and gravitate towards the most desirable end of the bell curve.
by stephen_g | 2025-06-01 23:46:22+00:00
I did somehow have two different cards (an Amex and a Visa) compromised at the same time about two months ago, and I do wonder if it was some kind of skimmer setup - if it was just one of them then I'd assume it was just some online store I'd used it at that had been hacked, but I've not used both those cards on the same sites.

I got a notification asking me to confirm a transaction on the Visa and then looked in my app and found they'd actually got another transaction pending at a hotel. I called them up and the hotel said they would "kick out the guests" and refund me. Not sure why they didn't want to call the police on them, because when I called later they said I should report it to the police, but all of the transactions had been refunded so I literally had zero loss and there was nothing really to report... It was them who'd provided the services and suffered the loss, the hotel should have had the police remove them!

Anyway, on the same day the Visa had been used at the hotel, I also had some fraudulent transactions on the Amex, although most of them seemed to be automatically refunded by the vendor themselves (so maybe it was flagged by the vendor's anti-fraud mechanisms and refunded to avoid a chargeback from American Express) before I cancelled the card. They'd tried three times with a similar amount and they'd all refunded.

The other weird thing was that the hotel that the Visa was used at claimed that it had to be a card-present transaction or in a digital wallet, but I didn't get any notification about it being enrolled in a digital wallet and I always had the physical card with me. So not sure if that was mistaken or BS or if they managed to somehow fake the digital wallet.

But yeah it didn't work out for them because I caught the transaction the same day they'd checked in to a hotel with the card and then both were cancelled that day...
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-01 23:46:30+00:00
Yes, that sentence in full is disclaiming they know it all after claiming they know it all in a seeming attempt to invalidate the author’s account. It is not strictly accurate to say they are not claiming that; what you are pointing out is that they are also disclaiming it. I do not see how that is an improvement.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-01 23:46:32+00:00
For all this "AI is the future," how in the world does OpenAI's own codebase still have "TODO" comments for the most trivial thing I can possibly imagine? <https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/rust-v0.0.2505302325/co...> made extra wtf by a comment at the top of the file laying out that requirement, so no "?" required <https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/rust-v0.0.2505302325/co...>

I would bet it took more wall-clock time to type out that comment than it would have for any number of AI agents to snap the required equivalent of `if not re.match(...): continue` into place
by 29athrowaway | 2025-06-01 23:46:34+00:00
1. Dating apps = a monopoly (Match group)

2. User generated content = moderation hell

3. User to user interactions + emotions = Higher chance of crime

4. It is not for dating, it is for revenue source

5. The gender ratios are asymmetric

6. Men swipe right to everything

7. It is a sea of dead profiles, fake profiles, people looking for attention and not dating, etc.

8. Used also by scammers, sex workers, influencers looking for followers.
by gerdesj | 2025-06-01 23:47:10+00:00
Yes, its an old one. Inject it into a keyhole.

Kids - do note that the Anarchist's Cookbook is absolutely verboten in the UK at least. My old man was an ATO so I didn't need a copy.

The original AC will be several elements in every wordlist that every intelligence service ever has. It is probably quite close to EICAR in that world.
by spudlyo | 2025-06-01 23:47:19+00:00
I'd like to think that in the future this will be possible, but at present I believe there are still too many uncanny valley problems for me to regard any TTS generated audio books as high quality. I can sometimes tolerate listening to articles or technical essays done this way, but quality audio book narrators often do consistent and distinct character voices, understand complex emotional states, and are capable of reacting to contextual clues and subtext. This seems like a pretty high bar for current TTS models.

Something like NotebookLLM seems shockingly good at first, and gives me hope that eventually we'll have machines that are nearly as good as humans at this; but after listening to it for an hour or so the novelty wore off and the artifice of it now seems galling and distracting.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-01 23:47:20+00:00
I like that it has a C API (although it uses opaque data without any real way to initialize it other than just storing it in the program, which doesn't seems like very good to me), and had wanted that before, although I would have preferred one that is written fully in C rather than Zig. (Actually, I did start to write some ideas (including some parts of a .h file) about the structures and functions that the C API should use (although they can be changed if at any time during the design, they are found to be not good). My design is different from that one in many ways.)

I would also want support for some variants (including custom rules) as well as for standard rules, and for team validation (including custom team validation). (I did have ideas also about the rule sets formats, with many options; for some kind of custom rules, it would be necessary to modify the program, but that is OK; some kinds will not require such a modification.)

I also wanted to support Unown's letter in generation II only, and Spinda's spots in some generations (probably III, IV, and V; they would result in some of the data being revealed to the opponent), and the ability to change the number of PP Up (as far as I know, Pokemon Showdown always has the number of PP Up set to 3 and it cannot be changed; it is probably uncommon that you would want to change it anyways but it does have some uses).

Another consideration to be made is: In a double battle, if your second pokemon is prohibited from switching out due to an opponent's ability that you are unaware of (e.g. since it is a pokemon that can have multiple possible abilities, or if it is actually Zoroark), but your first pokemon is immune to that effect (e.g. due to being Ghost type), then it is possible, if the commands are selected for the first pokemon and then for the second pokemon in that order, that you will not be aware of this right away. If your second pokemon tries to switch out, then you will receive an error message and both of your pokemons can reselect their commands, but if your second pokemon tries to switch out and it is actually allowed, then you cannot reselect your commands for either pokemon. (I don't know if this rule is specific to some generations.)
by quesera | 2025-06-01 23:47:37+00:00
I believe GP is confused.

You can read a card (stripe) with one of those cheap readers. The magnetic stripe is not encrypted and you can extract the card number (PAN), expiration date, and cardholder name. Some other less important bits too. You cannot extract the CVV this way, but that is not required for transactions.

Most cards are EMV now. That data is encrypted and it's read/write. These keys can leak, putting you back into a similar state as if you'd read the card via magnetic stripe.

But no amount of card reading gives you the ability to submit transactions to the network. For that, you'd need merchant credentials for their gateway or processor, and you'd usually need to have a presence on the merchant's network (to get through the upstream firewall).

These are all achievable things. Doing so gets you the ability to create transactions against the card. These transactions will be submitted to the network and approved or declined. If approved, funds will settle from the issuing bank to the merchant bank, possibly in multiple steps.

I'm oversimplifying a bit, but the essential point is that funds will settle to the merchant's bank account, not yours. You can cause some headaches, but you cannot steal money.

The compromise of a credit card terminal is only interesting because it gives an attacker the ability to steal the card details for all cards that are subsequently used at the compromised terminal. They can be saved and retrieved later, or sent out to a C&C server, etc. Then these card details can be used for all the usual types of credit card fraud.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-06-01 23:47:50+00:00
The other story with the ST and music studios and productivity software generally was the excellent monochrome 640x400 monitor, which was far better than dealing with interlace on the Amiga. And was cheaper than an Amiga colour monitor.

There were ways to do non-interlaced video on the Amiga, but just like having to buy external MIDI adapter ... more $$, more hassle.

That and floppy format compatibility with MS-DOS made it easier to move data around.
by neilv | 2025-06-01 23:47:51+00:00
I thought the piece was strongest when it leaned on quotes of Lessig and others, but its final word sounded weak to me:

> [...] he told the Senate something else: Too much regulation would be “disastrous” for America’s AI industry. Perhaps—but it might also be in the best interests of humanity.

Is anyone whose decision on this matters motivated by "the best interests of humanity"?

For that matter, the public being represented by decision-makers also has more pressing concerns -- like economic insecurity, a sense of declining national prestige, and (depending on ideology) fear of the general direction that the government is headed. Risks of AI that the piece mentions -- like innovation requiring water and maybe fossil fuels, or allusions to sci-fi AI superintelligence threat -- aren't high priorities. But the US profiting from AI sounds pretty good.