MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alwa | 2025-06-23 23:22:30+00:00
Does WhatsApp encrypt the data on the device after it’s received and decrypted at your phone’s end (then stored indefinitely)? I thought the term of art was “encrypted at rest,” but “stored data encryption” makes sense to me too.

I was of the impression that Whatsapp’s messages (and its backups, photos, etc) kind of just hung around in plaintext once they reached the device.

Which would seem to be a problem should the device be stolen, or observed by other applications on the phone or a tethered device, or twiddled with sneaky hardware (e.g. [0]) that might use physical means to access the device’s file system.

Although as I understand it, the privacy claims are kind of window dressing anyway, and Meta has been more than willing to share plenty of WhatsApp’s data with all and sundry… even before AI-in-the-same-search-bar came along [1]

[0] https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-p...
by dotancohen | 2025-06-23 23:23:59+00:00
Thank you. I didn't mean to literally sell me something, rather to explain it such that I would see how it could fit into my workflow. Which you did.

I do use Org mode, but only for simple personal notes. When I get home I'll explore using it as a REST client. They always told me that Emacs is a great OS, that just lacks a decent text editor.
by iLemming | 2025-06-23 23:25:22+00:00
Although I like the idea of having a full-blown graphics engine built into Emacs, I personally don't suffer (at least not so badly) from not having a real web browser inside of Emacs. I can navigate my browsing history¹; I can even (to a certain degree) control my actual browser from Emacs - going through the list of tabs, jumping to a selected tab, extracting content from a tab, inserting the current URL at point, etc. Some of it can be done with AppleScript (on Mac), some of it can be done using Linux tools like xdotool. I browse HN and Reddit in Org-mode; I've recently built a package to search through HN². I don't really need to jump back and forth between my editor and my browser (or many other apps) all the time.

___

¹ https://github.com/agzam/browser-hist.el

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44264368
by zdp7 | 2025-06-23 23:25:24+00:00
If the vehicle is solely used for a taxi. I don't see how it works if you are setting a window of availability. What happens when traffic gets so bad it can't make it back in time. What if it gets in an accident? One of the main reasons I have a car is for convenience. If my kid gets sick at school, how long before my car comes back?
by dspillett | 2025-06-23 23:25:41+00:00
> It only became […] that machines give a shit about who you are once we started using computers as the basis of business systems.

One we started using connected machines for much and people with flexible though morals noticed that there was trust in the system(s) ripe for exploitation for fun or profit or both.

I remember SMTP hosts being open by default because it wasn't a problem, that very quickly changed once spam was noted as potentially profitable.

There were accounts all over from quite early on, in academic environments before businesses took much of an interest, if only to protect user A from user B's cockups ("rm -rf /home /me/tmp") though to some extent also because compute time was sometimes a billable item, just not on single user designed OSs¹.

[1] Windows, for example, pre NT & 95 (any multi-user features you might have perceived in WfW 3.x were bolted on haphazardly and quite broken WRT actual security)
by meatmanek | 2025-06-23 23:25:42+00:00
Most replies are talking about the low density of the matter in that area, which is one part of the equation. The other part of the equation is radiative heat transfer. Without radiation pulling heat away, the spacecraft would asymptotically heat up to the temperature of the surrounding matter.

Radiative heat transfer, roughly speaking, tries to bring the temperature of the probe to the average temperature of all the matter that it has line of sight to -- somewhere between the temperature of the sun and the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. Since the probes are far away from the sun, this average temperature is very low.

Both effects are present everywhere. On Earth, with our dense atmosphere, conductive transfer is usually the stronger effect. In space, with extremely low density, radiative heat transfer is stronger.
by floatrock | 2025-06-23 23:27:15+00:00
So an incredibly cheap source of supply exceeded the demand, and the market rules and some trips caused cascading failures.

Why is the problem the cheap source of supply rather than the market rules and incentives that made everything act the way it did?

Your comment suggests move back to good ol' expensive fossil generation instead of looking at how to bring the market rules up to date with evolving technologies.
Ask HN: How can I pivot from software engineering back into neuroscience?
by terrib1e | 2025-06-23 23:27:35+00:00
I’m a self-taught software engineer with nearly a decade of experience building enterprise applications and AI-powered tools. But before tech, my path started in neuroscience. It’s what I originally studied in school, and the fascination never left me.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a strong pull back toward neuroscience. I want to explore how I can contribute to the field using the skills I’ve developed in engineering: data analysis, machine learning, full-stack development, and building scalable systems.

Ideally, I’d love to work at the intersection helping researchers automate lab tools, build better neural data pipelines, or apply LLMs to neuroscience research and education. But I’m not sure where to start.

Has anyone here made a similar pivot or hired engineers into neuroscience research roles? Are there research labs, startups, or open-source projects where someone like me could contribute meaningfully?

Appreciate any leads, advice, or opportunities to get involved.

Thanks, Elijah
by olyjohn | 2025-06-23 23:28:52+00:00
Is this true, or are you just assuming here? There are a lot of mechanical things that work better when they are running and used consistency. Sometimes shutting them down and starting them back up, or throttling them actually causes more wear.

Even my lawnmower runs more efficiently and has less wear at full throttle. It says right in the manual to run it at full throttle all the time.
by PantaloonFlames | 2025-06-23 23:29:27+00:00
> Think about it. When you stand outside in the sun you heat up. All that heat is coming from the sun. But a lot of it was filtered by the atmosphere, so if you're in space near earth it will be hotter than standing at the equator on a sunny day, in terms of radiation.

I think you’re missing the key point - heat transfer. The reason we feel hot at the beach is not solely because of heat we absorb directly from solar energy. Some of the heat we feel is the lack of cooling because the surrounding air is warm, and our bodies cannot reject heat into it as easily as we can into air that is cool. And some is from heat reflecting up from the sand.

Theres a heat wave across much of the US right now. Even when the sun goes down it will still be hot. People will still be sweating , doing nothing, sitting on their porches. Because the air and the surrounding environment has absorbed the sun’s heat all day and is storing it.

That’s what you’re neglecting in your analysis of space.
by FredPret | 2025-06-23 23:29:43+00:00
Personally, I suffer from whatever it is that drives a person to think about what numbers mean.

The numbers themselves aren't a problem, I'm just pointing out that our cognition involves many overlapping layers of abstraction, and we're doing mathematics and every other mental activity in one or more of those layers.

That this seems to correlate strongly to real-world phenomena speaks well of the types of abstraction that nature has equipped us with.
by boshalfoshal | 2025-06-23 23:30:11+00:00
Imo this is a misunderstanding of what AI companies want AI tools to be and where the industry is heading in the near future. The endgame for many companies is SWE automation, not augmentation.

To expand -

1. Models "reason" and can increasingly generate code given natural language. Its not just fancy autocomplete, its like having an intern - mid level engineer at your beck and call to implement some feature. Natural language is generally sufficient enough when I interact with other engineers, why is it not sufficient for an AI, which (in the limit), approaches an actual human engineer?

2. Business wise, companies will not settle for augmentation. Software companies pay tons of money in headcount, its probably most mid-sized companies top or second line item. The endgame for leadership at these companies is to do more with less. This necessitates automation (in addition to augmenting the remaining roles).

People need to stop thinking of LLMs as "autocomplete on steroids" and actually start thinking of them as a "24/7 junior SWE who doesn't need to eat or sleep and can do small tasks at 90% accuracy with some reasonable spec." Yeah you'll need to edit their code once in a while but they also get better and cost less than an actual person.
by BrandonLive | 2025-06-23 23:30:38+00:00
They used it on test mules to create labeled training data for their older monocular depth / Occupancy Network models (which they still use as part of the supervisory policy enforcement and active safety layer, alongside the end-to-end model).

They’ve never had LiDAR in their cars and it would not ever have been practical for them to have done so. Nobody has any mid or long range LiDAR in vehicles as the scale that Tesla sells.
by hatsix | 2025-06-23 23:31:13+00:00
That's the individual server, not a standard Discord policy. Subreddits can also make gates that are exclusionary. So... not Discord the company.

Even if it was, "Requires a verified phone number" is not "Evil". You might not like it, it might be incomprehensible, it might be exclusionary, but it's not "Evil".
by graycat | 2025-06-23 23:32:10+00:00
> Bach lacks the skill and emotional depth to write a song about that lonely feeling

For a wide range of such feelings, some can regard as "lonely", as they develop, achieve a triumph, a catharsis, and finally a recapitulation and a comforting, secure resolution -- communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion, i.e., art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEUYq5t-cCM

Bach wrote it for solo violin, but it's been arranged for solo piano, full orchestra, etc.
by halfcat | 2025-06-23 23:32:32+00:00
> What for? Support legacy CI/CD pipelines

Yes. Azure, for instance, looks for requirements.txt if you deploy a web app to Azure App Service.

If you’re doing a code-based deployment, it works really well. Push to GitHub, it deploys.

You can of course do a container-based deployment to Azure App Service and I’d assume that will work with uv.
by ggm | 2025-06-23 23:32:34+00:00
Not to over state it, embedding the parallelism into the application drives to the logic "the application is where we know we can do it" but embedding the parallelism into a discrete lower layer and using pipes drives to "this is a generic UNIX model of how to process data"

The thing with "and pipe to <thing>" is that you then reduce to a serial buffer delay decoding the pipe input. I do this, because often its both logically simple and the component of serial->parallel delay deblocking on a pipe is low.

Which is where xargs and the prefork model comes in, because instead you segment/shard the process, and either don't have a re-unification burden or its a simple serialise over the outputs.

When I know I can shard, and I don't know how to tell the appication to be parallel, this is my path out.
by nkraft11 | 2025-06-23 23:32:41+00:00
I briefly worked at a YC company that was a ruby shop. Their answer to every performance problem was to stick it on a queue. There were, I don’t know, dozens of them. Then they decided they needed to be multi-region, because reasons. But the queues weren’t set up to be multi-region, so they built an entirely new service that’s job was to decide which queue in which region jobs needed to go on. So now you had jobs crisscrossing datacenters and tracking any issue became literally impossible. Massively turned me off to both that company and ruby in general.
by ropable | 2025-06-23 23:32:58+00:00
The article alludes to the fact of few games covering strategic, operational and tactical play. I recently got into (and heartily recommend) a grand strategy game called Terra Invicta, where you play as a global Illuminati-style faction trying to influence the result of an alien invasion of the solar system.

It involves strategic decision-making (control and priorities of Earth nations), operational decisions (spaceships and armies take weeks or months to reach their destinations), and a very deep tactical element of 3D space battles (consisting of spaceships having extremely asynchronous capabilities). Logistics and extended-term planning are absolutely key to success in this game

It's been an extremely fun, satisfying experience so far, albeit with a high learning curve.
by pxx | 2025-06-23 23:33:14+00:00
I left a firm that was refusing to fix compensation issues because "attrition is near zero." The only thing I said in my exit interview was that I was leaving specifically because of compensation and I didn't want to comment on anything else.

Sure, it didn't get me any more comp at that particular firm but I've heard from those who stayed behind that they eventually did relent.
by anonym29 | 2025-06-23 23:33:30+00:00
My quote was copied and pasted directly from your message. Again, the actual decline in proportional male income and wealth isn't mutually exclusive with male interest in income and wealth rising. If anything, the realized decline is a perfectly logical explanation for the increase in interest.

It seems you may have made a few statements that, by themselves, are strictly speaking, inaccurate, but were intended to paint a picture of your broader argument that I don't necessarily disagree with - I just wanted to point out that many young men are in fact falling behind on income and wealth accumulation, contradictory to a statement you'd made.
by inamberclad | 2025-06-23 23:33:44+00:00
The problem is that the tools are still weak. The languages are difficult to use, nobody has made something more widely adopted than Verilog or VHDL. In addition, the IDEs are proprietary and the tools are fragile and not reproduceable. Synthesis results can vary from run to run on the exact same code with the same parameters, with real world impacts on performance. This all conspires to make FPGA development only suitable for bespoke products with narrow use cases.

I would love to see the open source world come to the rescue here. There are some very nice open source tools for Lattice FPGAs and Lattice's lawyers have essentially agreed to let the open source tools continue unimpeded (they're undoubtedly driving sales), but the chips themselves can't compete with the likes of Xilinx.
by ojosilva | 2025-06-23 23:34:16+00:00
Yes, and I would add my favorite hypothesis to the paradox, an anthropocentric assumption theory of self importance... or let's call it an anthropocentric bias:

Humans tend to define intelligence, life, and communication based on our own structure -carbon-based biology, electromagnetic signaling, language, symbolic thought, etc. This narrows the scope of our search.

We assume other civilizations want to communicate, would use similar media (radio, light, mathematics), and would send signals we could interpret. This ignores other potential modalities (quantum, neutrino, gravitational, exotic matter, etc.) or entirely non-signal-based forms of interaction.

We may not even recognize signs of intelligent activity if they don't resemble our expectations, ie entire civilizations could exist in forms of computation or energy we can’t perceive.

We assume ET intelligences are aligned with our timeframe or curiosity. Maybe they don’t care to communicate, see us as trivial, or operate on million-year attention spans.

It may reflect less the silence of the cosmos and more the limits of our understanding, especially the assumption that we're capable of detecting or interpreting intelligence beyond Earth. A epistemic humility, or rather our lack of it.
by nradov | 2025-06-23 23:34:22+00:00
Have you ever even read the Budapest Memorandum? It contains no promise of protection, or even a vague implication thereof. It merely requires the USA to raise any violations with the UN Security Council, which was done.

I absolutely oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine and think that we (and other allies) should continue giving them the means to resist. But at the same time Ukraine shouldn't have left themselves so vulnerable by letting their military collapse prior to 2014 through a combination of corruption and apathy. In an anarchic world order you can't depend on anyone else to keep you safe.
by bad_haircut72 | 2025-06-23 23:34:30+00:00
I think so many devs fail to realise that to your product manager / team lead, the interface between you and the LLM is basically the same. They write a ticket/prompt and they get back a bunch of code that undoubtedly has bugs and misinterpretations in it, will probably go through a few rounds of revisions of back and forth until its good enough to ship (ie they tested it black-box style and it worked once) then they can move on to the next thing until whatever this ticket was about rears its ugly head again at some point in the future. If you arent used to writing user stories / planning, youre really gonna be obsolete soon.
by cdavid | 2025-06-23 23:34:36+00:00
Or a good one who cares about their naive reports not to get burn.

Like any advice, it is contextual. Especially when working for large organizations, the OT is the right default. If you're leaving because things are bad, it will be a mix of 1) people know but did not care/could not do anything about it and 2) people did not know about specific issues. Younger me thought it was often 2), but actually it is almost always 1).
by z_rex | 2025-06-23 23:35:54+00:00
A spinning generator is not outputting 10x it's rated current over any significant amount of time. You can only add so much steam or fuel to a turbine, and the rotor has a lot of inertia, but not enough to account for 10X its rated capacity for a second. The electrical switchyards would trip nearly instantaneously if it's connected plant output 10X its rated input.
by guptadeepak | 2025-06-23 23:36:28+00:00
As browser security and privacy evolve, Chrome continues to dominate, but alternatives like Brave and DuckDuckGo introduce new privacy trade-offs that can create compatibility challenges. Enterprise-focused browsers focus on security controls and integration rather than privacy alone. Chrome leads in speed, while Edge offers a better balance between speed and efficiency. Each browser’s approach presents unique technical hurdles in balancing security, privacy, and performance.

Given these trade-offs, how do you make your browser choice?
by underlipton | 2025-06-23 23:37:36+00:00
I loved the Uncharted games and have always thought that the first level of TLOU:PI is one of best set-piece intros in gaming history, up there with FFVII's "Bombing Run". If you suspect that this is me buttering you up for a takedown, you'd be correct. I have some major issues with TLOU.

Like a lot of modern zombie media, it eschews the genre's initial thrust towards satire of race/class issues to instead play them straight, presenting a survivalist power fantasy that edges a little too close to colonialist sympathies. The admitted beauty of its settings actually makes this issue worse: players are supposed to admire the despoiled wilderness, cities and towns rendered bucolic via violent depopulation. This is only broken by the continued clashing of human/formerly human fighters and soldiers; there are still too many people.

Finding out that one of PII's subplots was meant to be an allegory of the Israel/Palestine conflict made things click hard, especially remembering how PI's development difficulties (famously, Amy Hennig being forced to lead a push to force Neil Druckmann to change the original plan to make Clickers female-only) dovetailed "grossly" with the eventual story (one where almost every prominent female character is killed brutally on-screen). What was supposed to be a thoughtful exploration of human nature, as literary as it was interactive, turned out to be just another [redacted] [redacted] power fantasy along the lines of Call of Duty. Maybe worse, for the pretense.
by voidhorse | 2025-06-23 23:37:55+00:00
Hopefully a CEO finally tempering some expectations and the recent Apple paper bring some sanity back into the discourse around these tools.[^1]

Are they cool and useful? Yes.

Do they reason? No. (Before you complain, please first define reason).

Are they end all be all of all problem solving and the dawn of AGI? Also no.

Once we actually bring some rationality back into the radius of discourse maybe we'll actually begin to start figuring out how these things actually fit into an engineering workflow and stop throwing around ridiculous terms like vibe coding.

If you are an engineer, you are signing up to build rigorously verified and validated system, preferably with some amount of certainty about their behavior under boundary conditions. All the current hype-addled discussion around LLM seems to have had everything but correctness as it's focus.

[^1]: It shouldn't take a CEO but many people, even technologists, who should be more rational about whose opinions they deem worthy of consideration, m seem to overvalue the opinions of the csuite for some bizarre, inexplicable reason.
Ask HN: Suggest a name for a website archival app?
by busymom0 | 2025-06-23 23:38:09+00:00
I am giving final touches to an app which is a 100% local website archival solution. With one click, it locally archives the webpage into various formats including markdown, PDF, full-page size image, HTML and webarchive formats. You can sign-in in the app to the websites and then it will archive with your signed in account. It has support for queuing multiple webpages to be archived, and can run an Apple Shortcuts after the job finishes.

I had picked a (what I thought) clever name previously but today, I found out that 2 companies are in active litigation regarding that name's trademark. So, I can't use that name.

Can you suggest a few names for such an app?
by mistermaster1 | 2025-06-23 23:38:36+00:00
“What do you imagine will happen as a result of your exit interview? That the company that you need to get away from will magically pull its head of its ass? “Damn shame that Jenkins left, but I’m glad he told us about what a bad manager his boss was. Once we got rid of that guy, the world became a better place around here.” It won’t happen.”

So this actually happened for me with regards to my last job. I was honest during my exit interview and said while the company was largely a good place, the only negative (and negative by far) was a particular manager at the firm, and that he was the sole reason I was resigning. About 2 months later that manager was asked to leave. I also had lunch with his manager a few months ago where he acknowledged that his hiring “John” (the horrible manager) was the worst decision of his career.
by deathanatos | 2025-06-23 23:39:10+00:00
… why `memory commit` what you can `git commit` and then just `git clone`.

(I keep most of my dotfiles in a repository called "dotfiles".)

I get the emotional value/desire for a minimalistic .vimrc, but I also need the usefulness, and that necessitates, e.g., pulling in some plugins. E.g., lang-servers are just so valuable for immediate feedback in the editor.

Over time, someone of my vimrc has been pruned away just by development that has happened in/on vim itself, which is always lovely to see.