MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jrs235 | 2025-06-04 17:25:19+00:00
This administration is more interested in using executive agencies to advance a political power consolidating agenda not protecting consumers and citizens from corporate abuse and villains of privacy. Mega corporations and government (US Executive branch) are getting in bed and partnering to exploit data to maintain and expand power and control. Where and when the US Constitution protects citizens and prevents the government from doing an action, the government will lean on mega corporations to enforce their policy in the private sector. Social credit, like communist China na, is coming to the US. While the GOP has been resurrecting McCarthyism, they have been stoking the fears to make them a reality. Projection at it's finest. The hypocrisy is mind blowing and the cognitive dissonance in those that way up the FUD extremely strong and empowering for the malicious "elites" using it.
by abeppu | 2025-06-04 17:25:21+00:00
... but now, the "something new" isn't that new anymore. The model 3 looks similar today to how it looked in 2018 right? And in some places, they're everywhere. I can see how the more recently released EV models from other manufacturers feel newer, haven't had the same quality control PR disasters as Tesla, and don't have a CEO who is a giant political liability.
by nerdponx | 2025-06-04 17:25:28+00:00
> labor friendly policies of full employment

Same response as above. Everyone is so eager to criticize unions for doing the same thing big business employers do, and so in fear of the negative consequences, that they'd rather accept the status quo (of massive power imbalance in favor of big employers) than even consider alternative arrangements. Don't be a mouthpiece for corporate propaganda.

In an ideal world, government sees its job as facilitating a balance of economic power betweeen big employers nor big labor unions, acting as a sort of economic referee, and neither of the two market players would exert political influence to unbalance the rules. Sometimes I wonder if the people who are so strongly opposed to powerful labor unions think that this is the current situation. Because if you look at the actual balance of power, political and economic, it's hard not to think that big employers have the majority of it, and that at least some balancing force is needed in the other direction.
by Rastonbury | 2025-06-04 17:26:02+00:00
If wakes losses have been known for years as asserted by the piece, I'd argue it's the fault of the operator and investors building a farm downwind (or potentially) of another. The only thing I can think of is if regulatory or zoning changes caused underlying assumptions of wake loss to change.

It's like setting up a low margin Italian restaurant with none nearby and a few months later another Italian restaurant sets up taking your revenue, tough luck then
by groby_b | 2025-06-04 17:26:10+00:00
"Conquered" is a loaded term, but a 43% reduction in mortality since 1990 is nothing to sneeze at.

The 5 year survival rate for localized (early stage) breast cancer is 99%

Did we remove it as a cause of death? No. But the prognosis is much less dire by now than it was even a few decades ago.

Very few causes are ever completely "conquered", they just move down in relative relevance.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 17:26:28+00:00
By this token, everyone who counts apples in a market is using the axioms of Peano arithmetic every day.

The fact that our high level languages compile down to assembly doesn't mean we use assembly in any meaningful sense. My C code will be correct or not based on whether it conforms to the semantics of the C abstract machine, regardless of whether those semantics match the semantics of the assembly language that it happens to compile down to. Even worse, code that is perfectly valid in assembler may be invalid C, even if the C code compiles down to that same assembler code. The most clear example is adding 1 to an int variable that happens to have the value MAX_INT. This code will often compile down to "add, ax, 1" and set the variable to MIN_INT, but it is nevertheless invalid C code and the compiler will assume this value is impossible to happen.

This relationship between a programming language and assembler is even more tenuous for languages designed to run on heavy runtimes, like Java or JavaScript.
by tptacek | 2025-06-04 17:26:30+00:00
This is the thing. I do not agree with that, at all. We can just disagree, and that's fine, but let's be clear about what we're disagreeing about, because the whole goddam point of this piece is that nobody in this "debate" is saying the same thing. I think the hype is going to scale out practically indefinitely, because this stuff actually works spookily well. The hype will remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
by julie425 | 2025-06-04 17:27:14+00:00
As multi-agent LLM systems gain traction, most are built using intuitive, role-based decomposition—mirroring human teams. This paper from Cognizant’s AI Lab argues that such designs don’t scale, and introduces a framework called AALPs (Asymptotic Analysis with LLM Primitives) to rigorously model the computational cost of agent interactions. Instead of asking how many agents to use, the question becomes: how efficiently do they work together?
by somerandomqaguy | 2025-06-04 17:27:17+00:00
It's not just that; competition has arrived as well. Mach E, F150 Lightning, Blazer, Equinox, Ariya, Silverado EV, Ioniq 5 and 6, EV6 and EV9. Toyota has announce new BEV models as well.

And that's just North America. BYD and NIO have extremely compelling options outside of this side of the planet.
by autoexec | 2025-06-04 17:27:23+00:00
most recently: https://cyberpress.org/critical-libvpx-vulnerability-in-fire..., but you can have your pick from any year https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=webrtc

You're right that biggest reason people usually recommend disabling it is to prevent your IP from leaking when using a VPN https://www.techradar.com/vpn/webrtc-leaks but not having to worry about RCE or DoS is a nice bonus

I'm not sure how much will this impact ffmpeg users. Considering that WebRTC has a bad track record in terms of security though, I do worry a little that its inclusion in one more place on our systems could increase attack surface.
by bobek | 2025-06-04 17:27:29+00:00
Well, it is the same as all those examples of people "just doing their jobs" in concentration camps. Being compliant, focused on execution of their ~orders~ process. Interestingly, many people are being pre-emptively harsher, than required/requested. Checkout "Those Who Said No" (DOI 10.2307/1429971).
by taurath | 2025-06-04 17:27:50+00:00
He got all the contracts and contacts he needs from his time kissing trumps ass while terrorizing charity workers. He was in the Middle East and all over getting signed commitments for starlink.

The military will pay him because there are no alternatives. So will many countries.

$TSLA isn’t a car company anymore, it’s $ELON and he’s trying to be a trillionaire and be more powerful than heads of state. Gilded age indeed.

Fun fact, John D. Rockefeller at his peak of wealth was equivilent to 3% of the GDP of the United States. That 3% figure right now would be $870B.
by vel0city | 2025-06-04 17:27:54+00:00
I remember looking at prices for OEM parts for my motorcycle and marveling at how I could effectively build my own, but parts alone before shipping would cost me like $80k for a bike that was <$25k new for the several year newer model at the time.

The cost for the part at the factory for 1,000+ units is radically different than the part for your one off garage build.
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-04 17:28:02+00:00
>The majority of internet users are either unwilling or unable to pay for content

Except for Spotify, News subscriptions, videogame subscriptions, video streaming services, duolingo, donations, gofundmes, piracy services!, clothing and food subscriptions! etc etc

People pay $10 for a new fortnite skin. You really pretending they won't pay for content?

People were willing to pay for stuff on the internet even when you could only do so by calling someone up and reading off your credit card number and just trusting a stranger.

Meanwhile, the norm until cable television for "free" things like news was that you either paid, or you went to the library to read it for free.

Maybe people could visit libraries more again.
by mjr00 | 2025-06-04 17:28:05+00:00
> Why would I hire 100s of employees when I can cut the most junior and mid-level roles and make the seniors more productive with AI?

Because at competent companies juniors and mid-level employees aren't just cranking out code, they're developing an understanding of the domain and system. If all you cared about was cranking out code and features, you'd have outsourced to Infosys etc long ago. (Admittedly, many companies aren't competent.)

> Exactly. Keep the seniors with AI and no need for any more engineers, or even just get away with it by firing one of them if they don't want to use AI.

This doesn't make any sense. I asked ChatGPT and it couldn't parse it either.

> The problem is "AI" is already good enough and even if their jobs somehow "come back", the salaries will be much lower (not higher) than before.

This much is true but tech salary inflation was, again, largely a ZIRP phenomenon and has nothing to do with AI. Junior developers were never really worth $150k/year right out of university.
by stouset | 2025-06-04 17:28:05+00:00
This goes completely against the golang error-handling mindset.

Error handling is so important, we must dedicate two-thirds of the lines of every golang program to it. It is so important that it must be made a verbose, manual process.

But there's also nothing that can be done about most errors, so we do all this extra work only to bubble errors up to the top of the program. And we do all this work as a human exception-handle to build up a carefully curated manual stack trace that loses all the actually-useful elements of a stack trace like filenames and line numbers.
by hightrix | 2025-06-04 17:28:16+00:00
Ok. It is about politics.

I and many others will not support the megolmaniac that took a chainsaw to our federal government. Musk not only hired a bunch of palantir, ballet machine hackers, but he also ensured the many lawsuits against him were dropped, the investigations into his companies that should have cost him billions were dropped, and that his companies get $100s of millions of no competition government contracts.

Correct. I will not support Musk ever again, regardless of his current PR bombardment. Musk has shown who he is and now he will reap the rewards of that reputation.
by andoando | 2025-06-04 17:28:51+00:00
I think human/animal intelligence at its basis is spatial-temporal. That is we can model and reason about events in space through time.

Our senses I believe map to this spatial-temporal model. Blind people can reason about the world the same way as those who can see, because what were really doing is modeling space, and light, audio, touch etc are just ways of gaining information
by joshstrange | 2025-06-04 17:29:10+00:00
> Why do companies still risk doing these kinds of things anymore?

Money

> Externally we have some amazing security researchers who look out and dig these things out - and try to hold the companies responsible.

At worst they get some bad PR but most people aren't listening to security researchers (or don't care). Companies aren't being held "responsible" for anything, maybe a small fine but that's just the cost of doing business.

> And what is the internal process? Wouldn't these intrusive and privacy violating features (to track users for ex) be captured in design docs, emails, chats, code changes/PRs - and up for discovery?

Yes, probably all these things exist. See also Apple talking about how to make linking-out sound as scary as possible. There are chats with employees brainstorming how to make it scarier to end-users to drive them back into the IAP flow.

> Aren't employees saying anything against these features?

Some are afraid of losing their job or getting branded as a non-team-player. Some don't care. It can be easy to get lost in "implement the spec" instead of "is what I'm building morally ok?"

> What culture are they building?

A bad one.

> What leadership are they demonstrating?

That they only care about money and what they can get away with. Even if they get caught the profits outstrip the fine by a large margin. "It's just numbers/business".

> It can't all be about money by any cost damn the users and their privacy/rights, right?

It is.
by chubot | 2025-06-04 17:29:14+00:00
That's kind of how I feel about C. C is fun, because you get to see "everything"

But C is slow to create -- it is like using a toothpick

Writing from scratch is slow, and using C libraries also sucks. Certainly libc sucks, e.g. returning pointers to static buffers, global vars for Unicode, etc.

So yeah I have never written Assembly that anybody needs to work, but I think of it as "next level slow"

---

Probably the main case where C is nice is where you are working for a company that has developed high quality infrastructure over decades. And I doubt there is any such company in existence for Assembly
by burkaman | 2025-06-04 17:29:18+00:00
I don't think that sentence necessarily implies that he joined the Confederacy because he was racist, although that isn't a very far-fetched claim. It is true that he fought for the Confederacy, and it is also true that he held racist views, by his own admission.

In an essay called Concerning the Jews, which was probably ahead of its time in defending Jewish people, he wrote:

> I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices

- https://origin-rh.web.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1898twain-jews...

That "bar one" was probably referring to Native Americans, whom he seemed to really really hate. You can read his full thoughts in another essay called The Noble Red Man: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/redman.html. It's pretty short, but a shorter summary is that he advocates for all-out genocide and says they are the "scum of the earth" and inferior to insects.

Side note: if written today, Concerning the Jews would definitely be considered racist, because he defines Jewish people as basically a separate species with inherent traits not shared by other "races". That is the definition of racism, even if the traits you're calling out are considered positive. You can't say "I have no racial prejudices, I just think all Asians are good at math". This would maybe be an unfair standard to apply to someone writing in the 19th century, but I just want to point out that it would be reasonable to say that Twain was racist but in a much more benign way than most of his contemporaries (except when it came to Native Americans).
by jajko | 2025-06-04 17:29:20+00:00
Well, I mean would you be willingly sponsoring high profile nazi sympathizer who yearns for totalitarian dictatorship and mocks people speaking about freedom and democracy, all over the world?

Absolutely nothing changed (and people generally don't change, not for the better at least), he is still same pos he was globally considered few months ago. Still same person who was making up pedophile claims of a french diver who actually rescued kids trapped in cave, not some boasting of submarine who would be too little too late, if ever. I know people love to quickly forget bad parts of people they admire or worship, but I don't see a reason why.

Competition offers a lot, people don't have to be ashamed to drive it or be afraid to let it be parked anywhere.
by 9rx | 2025-06-04 17:29:41+00:00
> but it wasn't a mistake to not have exceptions in Go, it was intentional.

It does have them, though, and always has. Use is even found in the standard library (e.g. encoding/json). They are just not commonly used for this because of the inherit problems with using them in this way as you have already mentioned. But you can. It is a perfectly valid approach where the tradeoffs are acceptable.

But, who knows what the future holds? Ruby in the early days also held the same preference for error values over exceptions... Until Ruby on Rails came along and shifted the prevailing attitude. Perhaps Go will someday have its "Ruby on Rails" moment too.
by disillusioned | 2025-06-04 17:30:04+00:00
The Robotaxi "trial" in Austin has a chance to be supremely embarrassing and potentially ruinous, depending on just how weird it gets. Waymos get stuck doing weird stuff sometimes, which makes the news, but broadly speaking, they've completed 10 million paid, driverless rides, and their accident/injury rate is provably lower than human drivers, and there have been, to my recollection, essentially no catastrophic Waymo-faulted pedestrian interactions (ala the original Uber issues).

Owing to the difference in sensor suite, I'm curious if Tesla FSD will be able to truly keep that same margin of safety, but I'm not super confident, and having to pause or rollback the trial would be a big hit in the underlying "value" of TSLA, I reckon.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-04 17:30:13+00:00
> maybe some people have all the human interaction they want outside of work and don't mind "talking" to some AI as long as it gets shit done in the manner they want

This isn't about satisfying a person's need for socializing it is about satisfying society's need for well socialized people

You can prefer closed offices and still be a well socialized person

You can prefer remote work and still be a well socialized person

You can even prefer working alone and still be a well socialized person

If you are in favor of replacing all humans with machines, you are pretty much by definition an asocial person and society should reject you
by wodenokoto | 2025-06-04 17:30:33+00:00
Short of checking every single byte against each other you need to do some sort of short hand.

“Assume these two files are the same, check if they either system is saying they have modified it or check if the size has changed and call it a day” is pretty fair of an assumption and something even I knew RSync is doing and I’ve only used it once in a project 10 years ago. I am sure Rachel also knows this.

So, what is the problem? Is data not being synced? Is data being synced too often? And why do these assumptions lead to either happening? What horrors is the author expecting the reader to see when running the suggested command?

That is what is not explained in the article.
by iammrpayments | 2025-06-04 17:30:42+00:00
I have no idea how that meta is so successful, managing ads in their business dashboard is such a painful experience that I gave up testing new ads after a while. They also keep trying to push features designed to make you spend more money once your ad is running and their “representatives” will keep calling you with “strategies” but 99% of the time they have 0 idea on how it works. If your account gets banned good luck finding a real human being who can solve your issue.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-06-04 17:31:06+00:00
> I was unpleasantly surprised to see Accenture on the list of bad employers who spy on their employees with AI.

for someone with the username 'cynicalsecurity' this is surprising to hear :) i don't think there are any global for-profit consulting firms who are guided by any kind of strong moral/ethical compass.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-06-04 17:31:12+00:00
Or for door handles, if you really don't want drag, use an over-center mechanism like in a retracting pen: press in to get it to pop out, purely mechanical. Include an actuator to allow automatic extension of the handles via software, but let the user mechanically actuate it as a fallback. These sorts of mechanisms aren't new, or difficult.
by etchalon | 2025-06-04 17:31:27+00:00
They were a feat of engineering, ten years ago. Maybe even five years ago.

But for what they actually offer (excluding the "betas" and "Muskian Promises"), most manufacturers make a car that's comparable / better depending on your needs.

And if things are comparable, than you can bring in other things to make a decision. And the politics of the company's outspoken CEO is certainly something you could consider.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 17:31:30+00:00
No, it is not the foundation motivating what other languages give you, not at all.

Programming languages are usually designed based on formal semantics. They include constructs that have been found either through experience or certain formal reasons to be good ways to structure programs.

Haskell's lazy evaluation model, for example, has no relationship to assembly code. It was not in any way designed with thought to how assembly code works, it was designed to have certain desirable theoretical properties like referential transparency.

It's also important to realize that there is no "assembly language". Each processor family has its own specific assembly code with its own particular semantics that may vary wildly from any other processor. Not to mention, there are abstract assembly codes like WebAssembly or JVM bytecode, which often have even more alien semantics.
by input_sh | 2025-06-04 17:31:42+00:00
FTC's yearly budget is under half a billion, companies can simply throw more lawyers at a problem until the next election. Rinse and repeat.

Case in point, FTC did start an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook in December 2020 and the trial finally started last month. Hence, Zuckerberg being at the inauguration, getting rid of fact-checkers etc.
by radicalbyte | 2025-06-04 17:32:05+00:00
Facebook install a rootkit on many Androids which had the ability to send all of you debug-level system logging to Facebook. Even if you never installed their shit. That data can be used to track everything you do on your phone.

We found this out (I was the first to recreate / prove it) when testing the COVID contact tracing apps in NL, at the time Google were logging the seeds to the main system log. That allowed anyone with access to said logs to build a real-time map of ever Android user in the world who had the GAEN framework installed.

EDIT:

Here's the press release in English covering the app shutdown:

https://nltimes.nl/2021/04/29/coronamelder-app-taken-offline...

Here's a paper detailing Facebook's access infecting systems with no Facebook installed:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02713
by ajross | 2025-06-04 17:32:19+00:00
I think it's sort of unclear if "breaking out of a sandbox" is what's happening. Obviously no one expects this to be happening. But the features are known, and mostly desired, things:

* Apps can open local TCP/UDP ports on the device to talk to each other. That's good, often. It's a valuable capability, just like access to shared storage is. And it doesn't leak any info the app doesn't want to leak.

* Apps can get a reasonably unique fingerprint for the device they're running on. Again, that's desired: backends want to know who they're talking to, and that it's not a MitM or hijacked account.

* Browsers can talk to those local servers too. Again, this seems useful to me, as long as native apps have capabilities that web apps lack, they should be able to offer them as extensions to the web API.

So basically we have a situation where Facebook's native app tells Facebook's web app (or rather Facebook's web code being distributed by Facebook's partner sites) what machine it's operating on (and maybe some more details about the history, like user account cookies, etc...), in contravention of the user's expectations about what they told the partner site to store about them.

It's that last bit that's the bad part. But it's not really about device security as I see it. Facebook broke the spirit of the cookie tracking rule, but not the letter.