MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Tails OS and Spyware Question
by searchaliasaps | 2025-06-17 13:07:11+00:00
Hi! I was wondering if in a scenario I were to click on a phishing link that would install spyware on my pc - what would happen if this was on tails os. Also, would it make a difference if I was running persistence storage? If I unplug the usb would I be good? On the other hand, what if someone installs spyware on my pc by inserting an infecting usb while Im gone. What would happen if I then boot tails os on that pc? Thank you!
by ben_w | 2025-06-17 13:07:15+00:00
Dunno, the people I know only played it in primary school. And I left the country in 2018.

Words can change meaning a lot in a lifetime. Not too long ago, someone here called me out for saying "transvestite", which was a surprise given one of my favourite comedians called themselves an "executive transvestite": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_to_Kill_(Eddie_Izzard)

And my mum, when her Alzheimer's was already bad but not quite bad enough she couldn't live in her own home, referred to the cupboard as a "glory hole" — I'd never been aware of meaning #9 until she used it so, "(Scotland and Northern England) A deep built-in cupboard under the eaves or stairs of a house used for general storage, particularly of unrelated or unwanted items stored in some disorder": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glory_hole

Still, could be worse, as I found out when my grandmother used the word "Irish" in the derogatory sense: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Irish#Adjective
by raxxorraxor | 2025-06-17 13:07:41+00:00
For anything non-trivial you have to verify the results.

I disabled AI autocomplete and cannot understand how people can use it. It was mostly an extra key press on backspace for me.

That said, learning new languages is possible without searching anything. With a local model, you can do that offline and have a vast library of knowledge at hand.

The Gemini results integrated in Google are very bad as well.

I don't see the main problem to be people just lazily asking AI for how to use the toilet, but that real knowledge bases like stack overflow and similar will vanish because of lacking participation.
by stenecdote | 2025-06-17 13:08:34+00:00
Was this written by an LLM? I'm not highly confident, but there are some telltale signs. For example, the negative preceding multiple positive contrasting examples pattern is quite common in LLM-written text, and it appears multiple times throughout the text.

> They didn’t ask permission. They reverse engineered. They read RFCs like scripture. Their idea of “AI” was Eliza on the school computer lab’s terminal—and they probably rewrote it in Perl for fun.

> Today’s AI dev isn’t dropping shellcode into memory via a buffer overflow—they’re fine-tuning GPT on sentiment-labeled customer complaints for a mid-tier CRM startup. The tools are slick. The stacks are vast. The logs are in JSON. And the energy is… agile.

Also, I like em dashes still but the number here seems high. --- As an additional test, I asked Claude to write a post on the topic given just the title, so it couldn't copy the style from a snippet. Here's a snippet from the conclusion. Notice the similar style and structure between it and one of the OP's concluding paragraphs:

Claude:

> The hacker ethic hasn't died; it has evolved. Where once it meant breaking into systems, now it might mean breaking open black boxes. Where once it meant sharing code, now it might mean sharing compute. The tools and targets have changed, but the fundamental drive—to understand, to share, to democratize—remains.

OP:

> What the 90s hackers did with port scanners and punchy manifestos, today’s AI rebels do with open weights, privacy-preserving algorithms, and Git repos that mysteriously disappear from major platforms.

Look, I'm not in principle opposed to posting LLM writing, but it does seem like bad form to post an LLM's output on the topic of LLMs and not at least call it out as such. This is doubly true given that if I had to guess, not very much curation was done on top of this.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-06-17 13:08:40+00:00
The height of unemployment in the US was 14.8% in April 2020. By the end of summer it was down to 7% and continued to fall.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

15% unemployment is high, but it’s definitely not “everyone stopped working entirely.”

The CARES Act authorized a one-time payment of $1,200/$500 per adult/child in March 2020, an extension added $600/per in December.

The American Rescue Plan Act passed in February 2021 and added $1400/per.

This is the closest the US got to UBI-adjacent policies at the federal level.

It’s difficult to believe that the first payment caused a massive spike in unemployment, but the subsequent two did not.
by K0balt | 2025-06-17 13:08:59+00:00
“Of course”

But, that’s not where we are headed.

Instead, automation will make money irrelevant in the “we don’t need to make money because money ultimately only can be used to pay wages, and nothing else” way.

Since automation means you don’t pay wages anymore, you only need natural resources and energy.

When corporations no longer see (external) money as useful, but only as a way to apportion resources internally to stakeholders, that makes everyone outside of that system into ants.

It’s grey goo, just on a macroscopic scale.
by inglor_cz | 2025-06-17 13:09:02+00:00
"you could have a half hour commute to move 30 miles."

Well unless half a million people try to commute along you during the same rush hour, with their commute ending in the wider centre of an old city which cannot absorb all the cars.

In Prague it is quite common to spend half an hour to cross the outer 25 miles of your journey and spend another half an hour in the traffic jam of the last 5 miles.

If it wasn't for the suburban trains and buses which alleviate the pressure, that last 5 miles would be one huge gridlock moving at the speed of a slow walk.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-17 13:09:05+00:00
The irony is that he was both successful and a failure, a contradiction inherent in nuclear launch control.

From a deterrence and military perspective, you want a robot on launch control. Every time, on orders, without fail.

From a human and ethical perspective, you want a thinking individual with agency. Able evaluate orders and possibly disobey them.

Curious at the height of the Cold War (and now), what percentage of launch officers were expected to disobey orders to launch. It had to have been >0%.
by joegibbs | 2025-06-17 13:09:30+00:00
I think UBI is something that can only work in small trials.

The people on the trial - whether that’s a random sample or the population of a geographical area - all get an economic privilege over the people who aren’t receiving the UBI, and therefore can buy more goods and services.

But when you expand this to the whole country (which is producing the same amount of goods and services) then prices naturally increase to match the same disposable income that the entire population now has, due to increased demand.

Now you could say that it’s not actually giving everyone the same, increased, amount of money since it would require huge tax raises on the wealthy to afford it.

But when a poor family gets that extra money they’ll spend it on things that a poor family would buy - a new low-tier car, food, a better air conditioner. And a rich family doesn’t just buy the same stuff as a poor one but in greater quantity - that painting is a million dollars and it’s not like it’s going to feed anyone or get them anywhere.

So the price of goods for the average person will increase, because despite redistribution there will be basically the same supply with more demand.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-17 13:09:41+00:00
Yup. Non-traveling US Americans mostly won’t understand how critical WhatsApp is in many parts of the world, for more than a decade. It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US.

Businesses put WhatsApp numbers on their stores, and it’s often the only way to get a hold of a person. I would bet it’s more used than email, especially for young people. If WhatsApp went down for a week, it would seriously impede normal societal functions. It’s pretty much de-facto standard and arguably critical infrastructure.
by xpe | 2025-06-17 13:09:41+00:00
Two responses. First, CME is criticized as being largely influenced by industry rather than primarily intended to advance medical learning. [1]

Second, assuming medical continuing education is something like 20 to 40 hours depending on the region [2], this feels meager and insufficient. In contrast, think of how much learning a software developer does during a year -- perhaps close to 5+ hours per week on average! [3] Very different contexts, very different incentives.

[1]: https://www.chronicle.com/article/lessons-from-a-professors-...

[2]: Based on very quick research: could be off -- corrections are welcome

[3]: There are many differences, of course. Just to pick one example: to what degree does a software developer's continuing exploration into an area (such as a specific business process that their application needs to understand) help their craft? Does it improve their skill level? Does it result in transferable skills? Does it improve the quality of their work?
by johng | 2025-06-17 13:09:56+00:00
Don't mean to be insensitive but payments to Native Americans has been a long running UBI experiment, has it not?

I grew up near a reservation, and I can tell you --- it's not good. I don't think many people can point out reservations that are doing well except for casino money.

Free government money, I believe, has systematically destroyed the people over the generations.
by gilbetron | 2025-06-17 13:10:18+00:00
"There are piles of that in its training data"

Such a weird complaint. If you were to explain the rust borrow checker to me, should I complain that it doesn't count because you had read explanations of the borrow checker? That it was "in your training data"? I mean, do you think you just understand the borrow checker without being taught about it in some form?

I mean, I get what you are kind of saying, that there isn't much evidence that they tools are able to generate new ideas, and that the sheer amount of knowledge it has obscures the detection of that phenomenon, but practically speaking I don't care because it is useful and helpful (within its hallucinatory framework).
by muzani | 2025-06-17 13:10:42+00:00
Back in ye olde days, people would travel by ship to talk to a smart guy, memorize everything they said then return back to their lands with the memory, and spread it amongst their tribe.

Then we invented writing. People would still travel to a library to copy a book down and then bring it back to their libraries. There would be less errors too.

Then the printing press. It was easy to make lots of books. Even less errors because books would be identical, word for word. We lost quite a bit of art here, but it was worth.

Then the internet. Copying a book was simply CMD+A, CMD+C, CMD+V.

Then Web 2 like FB and Twitter. You didn't even need books. You could just @ any celebrity in the world.

But the cheaper information is, the cheaper misinformation became. The will to produce information is often much greater than producing misinformation. I think friction is too low on some places; the classic forums were probably information at its ideal.
by jjkaczor | 2025-06-17 13:11:14+00:00
Had the same thing happen when standalone GPS units were introduced to the mass market, I got one - and one of my tech friends suggested replacing the stock voice with a sarcastic/whiny one (maybe ... C3PO)...

My response was: "you obviously haven't used one yet"...

They were already bossy enough... 'MAKE A LEGAL U-TURN NOW!'"
by Devasta | 2025-06-17 13:11:19+00:00
It's honestly embarrassing that we are twenty years since the browsers took control of HTML from the W3C and they still have nothing approaching even one tenth the capability of XForms.

The fact that legions of developers are working on browsers, and at the same time everyone scrambles to abstract away from the browser offerings towards JSX, Tailwind and TS is maddening.
by svnt | 2025-06-17 13:12:38+00:00
> But it’s particularly women receiving basic income who experienced the most significant increases in autonomy, as shown in the chart below.

> Image via Pilotprojekt. Study period: March 2021 to November 2024.

> This is likely because women are more likely to experience poverty and economic dependence arising from the gender pay gap, workplace gender bias, as well as the disproportionate burden of domestic and care labour.

These are false. As the author mentions earlier in the article, these are young adult Germans, working for something close to minimum wage, specifically selected to not have children. They are probably not up against any of these issues.

The reason I am frustrated by these dogmatic answers is because this new sexist dogma prevents any curiosity around the real cause of these differences.

For example, perhaps this result discloses a more fundamental reality about female experience that could be analyzed. Or perhaps the population was skewed toward women who were dependent on partner income because they make up a larger part of that income demographic. But it won’t be explored because it is instantly and inaccurately explained away as systemic sexism. It is intellectually lazy.
by metalman | 2025-06-17 13:14:05+00:00
tire dust is specifaly toxic to juvinile fish, and as all roads are ditched, any extream early spring rain event will gather and float a concentrated pulse of tire dust into the equatic environment and cause mass mortality in stream and river bound juvinele fish such as salmon my understanding is that it is additives used to make tires tougher that is the main culprit, so the anouncement of an essentialy zero cost way to gain longer lasting tires that produce less, less toxic dust is good news
by TurboHaskal | 2025-06-17 13:14:11+00:00
Maybe this is just me and my experiences but when I encounter people in the wild that seem dull I often assume they just have fringe interests that are kinda problematic to share with regular people they haven't built rapport with yet.

Like they're probably into something weird or niche that doesn't translate well in casual conversation so they just keep it surface level until they figure out if you're their type of person.
by nostrademons | 2025-06-17 13:14:18+00:00
I mean this in its specific technical and economic definition. Childcare is low productivity in that no matter how much capital, technology, and mechanization you throw at it, one adult will be able to care for a limited number of children, and that limit is not all that much higher than what a parent could do. Infant childcare, for example, is limited by law in many jurisdictions to no more than 1 adult per 4 children, and if you've ever cared for an infant, you'd know that limit is pretty inherent to the job itself. Through Baumol's Cost Disease [1], this implies rising costs in these sectors and an increasing percentage of employment devoted to them.

That these sectors are necessary was part of my point. If the parent isn't doing the job, somebody else is; you can't just eliminate or automate the job entirely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
by schmidtleonard | 2025-06-17 13:14:37+00:00
Yes, 100%, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Here's how I got over the migration hump: I span up my personal email (cloudflare and fastmail, nothing fancy) and then every time google did something evil I channeled my frustration into migrating an account or two over to the new email. After about two years, I was done.

It feels really good to have a meaningful (if tiny and personally-scoped) response when when a megacorp does evil with impunity.
by JeremyNT | 2025-06-17 13:14:41+00:00
I believe this is implied in the parent's post.

We fund the military industrial complex to such a ludicrous degree that $200m can just disappear on bullshit contracts to cronies that go nowhere, and politicians don't bat an eye.

Nobody with power cares about the debt. They just keep borrowing money and handing it to the defense industry. This is one of only a handful of issues on which there is bipartisan agreement.
by bayindirh | 2025-06-17 13:14:47+00:00
Don't forget that flash drives are not accessed linearly. Your data might look linear to you, but without that sector addressing table, you're looking at noise.

On top of that static wear leveling can move all your data around when your disk is idle, and TRIM will effectively zero your unused areas when you are not looking.

So, it's a very different landscape.
by abalashov | 2025-06-17 13:15:34+00:00
I will grant that it's a matter of taste and the prejudices of being O.G., but the subtle visual difference between:

$ nc -v 172.30.110.9 22 [literally nothing]

and:

$ telnet 172.30.110.9 22 Trying 172.30.110.9...

... has always struck me as significant, and pedagogically relevant.
by bdh863 | 2025-06-17 13:15:46+00:00
No one who matters is struggling with it.

Trump or Xi or Putin or random large corp leadership gives a rats ass about what Hariri says unless there is direct evidence of a threat to their own survival

The intellectual class has never been less influential, cause as things have scaled up complexity scales up. So info asymmetry within the chimp troupe is peaking. Everyone cant and will not see the same story.
by evavillaro | 2025-06-17 13:16:01+00:00
Hi HN!

I built AudioGretel (audiogretel.com), an AI-powered platform that generates personalized audio stories for children in multiple languages.

THE BACKSTORY: As a parent of multilingual kids, I was frustrated with the lack of quality, varied bedtime stories that could also help with language learning. Most story apps either have limited content or are monolingual.

WHAT IT DOES: • Generates unique audio stories using AI (OpenAI GPT) • Supports Spanish, English, Italian, and French • Adapts content for different age groups and language levels • Creates high-quality audio using advanced TTS • Stories are personalized with custom characters and themes

TECHNICAL DETAILS: • React.js frontend with Node.js backend • OpenAI integration for story generation • Multiple TTS engines for natural voices • MongoDB for user data and story history • Optimized for mobile devices • Built with internationalization from day one

INTERESTING CHALLENGES: 1. Balancing AI creativity with child-appropriate content 2. TTS quality varies significantly across languages 3. Optimizing for AI assistant discovery (Gemini, ChatGPT) 4. Managing OpenAI costs while keeping it affordable for families

CURRENT TRACTION: • 10K+ users in 6 months • Featured on Product Hunt • Growing 15% MoM • Freemium model: 3 free stories/month, $5 premium

The response from multilingual families has been amazing. Kids are genuinely learning language patterns through repeated listening, and parents love having fresh content every night.

I'd love feedback from the HN community, especially on: • Technical architecture decisions • AI content generation strategies • Scaling challenges with API-dependent businesses • Ideas for educational integrations

Happy to answer any technical questions about building AI-powered content platforms.
by UncleEntity | 2025-06-17 13:16:19+00:00
> To counter other commenters on this issue - we do have price controls on things such as milk, bread etc and it does 'work' to some degree.

My understanding, based in the US, is the commodity price controls set a minimum price to protect the farmers and not the consumers.

To counter your point, look no further than tuition prices at US universities. In the '90s (when I went to university) they were fairly heavily subsidized then the state governments stepped back and federal loans and grants took over. Universities, seeing this new influx of capital, promptly raised their prices well over inflationary rates to capture more and more of these federal funds leading to what we have today. I, admittedly, took the cheap route of community college and state university (along with the GI Bill) and only had something like $6k in student loan debt by the time I got my bachelors in '97 while today's community colleges have higher tuition than what I was paying at university.

Though... I don't doubt AI is going to cause some serious problems when it starts replacing people at high rates across the board.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-06-17 13:16:56+00:00
UBI proponents, in the US at least, usually don’t discuss investing in the public good because both political parties and most of their respective wealthy donors are actively hostile to the public good. The current administration just decimated weather forecasting earlier this year, after all.

UBI sneaks around the problem by giving the rich the same exact benefit as the poor.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-06-17 13:17:04+00:00
No, quite the opposite, apologies if I was unclear.

I think that LLMs are a tool, and a tool that is still in the process of being iterated on.

I think that how this new tool could be applied and iterated on by humans who were, I think, uniquely talented and innovative with language is a useful question to ask oneself.

It’s a rhetorical device, essentially, to push back against the idea that the sanctity of ‘the novel’ (or other traditional, non-technological, word-based art forms) would somehow be punctured if innovative artists were / are given access to new tools. I feel that idea devalues both the human artist (who has agency to choose which tools to use, how to use them, and how to iterate on those tools) and the form itself.

I don’t believe that anyone who really adores ‘the novel’ for its formal strengths can also believe that ‘the novel’ won’t withstand [insert latest technology, cinema, VHS, internet, LLMs, etc].
by dpcan | 2025-06-17 13:17:15+00:00
I have a $20/month GPT subscription, and the $20/month cursor plan. I've yet to come close to going over my limits with either service. I use the unlimited Tab completions in cursor which are what end up saving me an enormous amount of time. I probably use 5 to maybe 10 chats a day in cursor, but I jump over to GPT if I think I'm going to require a few extra chats to get to the bottom of something.

I think that getting "good" at using AI means that you figure out exactly how to formulate your prompts so that the results are what you are looking for given your code base. It also means knowing when to start new chats, and when to have it focus on very specific pieces of code, and finally, knowing what it's really bad at doing.

For example, if I need to have it take a list of 20 fields and create the HTML view for the form, it can do it in a few seconds, and I know to tell it, for example, to use Bootstrap, Bootstrap icons, Bootstrap modals, responsive rows and columns, and I may want certain fields aligned certain ways, buttons in certain places for later, etc, and then I have a form - and just saved myself probably 30 minutes of typing it out and testing the alignment etc. If I do things like this 8 times a day, that's 4 hours of saved time, which is game changing for me.
by the__alchemist | 2025-06-17 13:17:27+00:00
None of the general news sources are worth paying for. "Gell-Mann Amnesia" applies broadly. They depict a perpetual drama. Each focuses from a different perspective, at the same dramatis personae. It's set up this way so viewers can follow, and be entertained. They know the plot threads, the characters, themes, the possible twists to watch for. This is similar to any TV series or cinematic universe. (e.g. Superheros, Tolkien-style fantasy etc)

The themes change over time, but in a gradual, controlled manner. And (nearly) all perspectives point at the latest.

Specialist news sources are sometimes high quality. For example: Quanta magazine, which articles we see frequently here. Ground news is an aggregator that tries to balance out the Left/Right bias of news outlets, but I think this misses the point.