MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ethersteeds | 2025-06-21 07:42:22+00:00
Signal started out as an Alternative Android SMS app that opportunistically upgraded text messages to use encryption when both parties had Signal. It exclusively used sms for transport, so phone numbers were baked deeply into it in a way similar to Twitter's 140 character limit.

It's true that having to disclose your phone number to the service and especially to other users is now a significant drawback compared to internet-first services like WhatsApp that use entirely separate identifiers. Many people have raised this objection, and to their credit they've at last rearchitected to allow exchanging messages using user names and without your phone number being disclosed to the other party.

They still have the phone number at the core of account registration, I suspect for similar reasons to the use of a (one-time sign up) captcha: because they raise the cost to create spam accounts. I'd understand if that's not acceptable to you, but I don't think "unacceptably poor" is a reasonable assessment of their handling of user privacy.

Another example of their approach to privacy: they went to great lengths to design their Giphy search to avoid revealing your search terms to them or your IP address to Giphy: https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/
by MagicMoonlight | 2025-06-21 07:43:49+00:00
The most successful marketing campaign of all time was the marketing department convincing companies that they need marketing.

If you’re Coca Cola and you spend £1,000,000,000 on a Christmas TV ad of a bear drinking cola, does that increase your sales? No. It does nothing. But every year they’ll do it.

The only marketing that works is at the point of sale, and free samples. Anything which is just random and in public will not result in anything.

But the genius of the scam is, it’s not measurable. You bill £1,000,000,000 a year for marketing, and they can’t measure if it worked. How do you know if a TV ad worked? But they can’t withdraw the funding, because you’ll tell them their competitors will win. So the scam keeps going.
by AngryData | 2025-06-21 07:44:17+00:00
I would consider co-op businesses a form of small scale communism, and they have steadily been growing in number for many decades with both workers/owners and customers praising them.

I also would consider many nation level communist movements that are held up as examples of failed communism to not really represent basic communist values very well at all, and to be mostly a thin PR cover for changes and turnover within the ruling class. Its not like the USSR was actually paying fair or equal dividends to the working class citizens who they claimed owned and controlled the country, the vast majority of the wealth, power, and control was still mostly diverted to a small class of elite.
by Defletter | 2025-06-21 07:44:46+00:00
Steel-manning the argument, near where I live, it's not that uncommon to see small to moderately sized advertisements along the road, such as a sign outside/near the entrance of a farm that's selling eggs, meat, etc. I am wholly unopposed to this. In fact, I'm very supportive of this, and used them to find a farm to buy local honey from. Whereas the stereotypical massive slabs whose advertisements get wallpapered on, I think those are distracting menaces, particularly if the primary way you see them is by driving.
by user_7832 | 2025-06-21 07:44:57+00:00
> I'm career IT support. In the entire age of smartphones, 100% of the malware/crapware I've seen was on non-rooted devices - most of it pushed on users by manufacturers, carriers and OS devs.

To add on, almost all the money people I know who have lost to scams have been through non-rooted devices. Sending an OTP or making a bank transfer because "you're under police investigation" is cheerfully easy even without the user knowing what "root" is.

Also see: the recent phish on Krebs (on security). A malicious email and entering a password to a webpage does not need root access, for better or worse. In fact, a rooted device might block your bank app, actually making money transfer scams tougher, ironically.
by troad | 2025-06-21 07:44:59+00:00
Sorry for my late reply. Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation holds up well as a good introduction. Steve Losh's A Road to Common Lisp is a great roadmap for going further (https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/).

For tooling, you can get started with just sbcl and rlwrap, both of which should be in any Linux repo. Get a REPL with `rlwrap sbcl`. Exit with `(exit)`.
by stingraycharles | 2025-06-21 07:45:22+00:00
Maybe, but it would still need to work within a well defined framework. Usually the data science part is “solve the problem”, the data engineering part is “make it work reliably, fast, at scale”.

What that looks like is highly dependent upon the environment at hand, and letting AI take that over may be one of those “now you have 2 problems” things.
by simianparrot | 2025-06-21 07:46:01+00:00
But it's not an autonomous entity. It's entirely passive if you turn it off, or uninstall all the apps that bother you. Stop feeding it your attention. Or are you claiming it's taken over your agency as well? If so -- and I mean this as respectfully as possible -- I'd hope you decide to talk with a healthcare professional about this problem.
by jongjong | 2025-06-21 07:46:17+00:00
I have to agree with the article. IMO, the importance of design/aesthetics is beyond absurd and people have become laughably rigid. Design used to be about creativity, but now it's basically a boring data-driven science; there isn't much room for error. Rounded corners on your components could make the difference between a failed business and a multi-million dollar business. Or maybe a few fade-in animations...

I wish I was joking but I've had so many experiences where I built something with a ton of features with a perfect, bug-free UI and simple/clean design but people are like "The UI is basic" but then after spending just a few hours restyling, people will say "This is cool." It's the exact same UI, just a few more rounded corners and animations is all it takes sometimes.

As a developer, sometimes you spend days wiring complex logic together and the user gives you an apathetic shrug... Then you spend 5 minutes adding rounded corners and a subtle drop shadow and then it's like 'WOW, such a good feature', you code fast!

I've witnessed people dump perfectly functioning, great looking websites for more boring but trendy designs with less flexible functionality, more lock-in and higher costs. Design is important to an absurd extent.

Frankly, I don't like modern design trends, it's very information-scarce with huge fonts... Requires so much scrolling, makes my fingers and eyeballs tired from moving back and fourth! Also, I lose my train of thought before I finished reading the first paragraph.

I tried using Microsoft Windows OS after a few years of Linux and was surprised to find that the UI elements were just so massive, it was like trying to read a book through a keyhole! I was wondering WTF happened. It was like a scene out of planet of the apes!

The sad thing about it is that people have very little tolerance for creative designs nowadays; it's very boring/standard. I've seen more than a few memes going around about how logos of major companies have all become the same: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Finsightcre...

It's kind of disturbing. This feels like a systemic issue. I guess people have major trust issues. They have zero tolerance for anything slightly outside of the norm. You have to wonder what about our system makes people so universally distrusting... Well I think I may know the answer to that.
by inertiatic | 2025-06-21 07:46:40+00:00
You know, humans pick up hobbies like cycling or running which they do consistently for years, listen to specific music genres or even electronic music which is mostly just a beat, hang up a painting they like in the living room and look at it for years and years, go out to their favorite place to eat consistently or cook the same passed down family recipe, and in so many other aspects avoid sudden changes, and you're surprised that for video games we enjoy the same formula repeatedly?
by Shmungus | 2025-06-21 07:46:40+00:00
I've built a Rust-based tool that visualizes token-level confidence and hallucination likelihood from large language model (LLM) outputs.

The goal is to move beyond simple binary classification ("is this hallucinated?") and give users a detailed, interpretable view of where and how an LLM's response may go off the rails.

Key Features:

Token-level confidence visualization (color-coded)

Flagged issues: hallucinations, overconfidence, uncertainty

Terminal rendering (with color)

HTML report generator (interactive)

Markdown output

Stats: confidence range, flagged spans, density

Demo data with realistic hallucination cases

Modular: add custom renderers, integrate into pipelines

Run it via CLI, or integrate as a library into your own tools or dashboards.

GitHub: https://github.com/Mattbusel/LLM-Hallucination-Detection-Scr...

Would love feedback, ideas for integration (e.g. Jupyter, browser extension, VSCode plugin), and thoughts on how to best measure and surface LLM epistemic uncertainty.
by gausswho | 2025-06-21 07:47:47+00:00
After a decade of holding on with a small pool of friends with Matrix, we finallly gave up this month over notifications dropping It hurts because I agree in principle - I don't even fully understand why notifications even should need Play Services or whatever Apple does. But after enough missed occasions, we decided it wasn't worth it and reverted to a blend of SMS and Jabber, where the notifications consistently work (on apps that dont use the above). I don't think the Matrix team is taking this seriousy enough. If you miss out on moments over dropped notifications, you or one of your group will fall back to another method and soon enough so will the whole group.
by charcircuit | 2025-06-21 07:48:24+00:00
By following the principle of least privilege. Like with apps the user should only have privileges for what they are allowed to control and nothing more. So if the user should have privilege to disable apps, then the settings app could expose a way for the user to do so.

Yes, this is kind of approach of coming up with a design to security instead of going with the easy route of everything being allowed is harder to do and takes more time, but it leads to better security.
by amatecha | 2025-06-21 07:49:51+00:00
Completely agreed. I want to be able to talk to people from any modern reasonably-secure operating system. Specifically, I found that there was no possible way to use Signal on OpenBSD natively. The only [poor] workaround was to create a Linux VM and use the Signal app for Linux in there. Frankly, if a communication protocol isn't usable on BSD it's not acceptable to me.
by Animats | 2025-06-21 07:50:04+00:00
Oh, inevitably for a blog, this is about web site design.

Confidence in manufactured physical objects is more interesting. Discuss.

Raymond Loewy on a good day - The Honeywell Round.[1] The standard little round thermostat. It's still manufactured.[1]

Raymond Loewy on a bad day - the first attempt to make a steam locomotive look streamlined by adding a sheet metal body.[3] This bad idea caught on in the UK, for some reason, resulting in a whole series of difficult to maintain locomotives. Eventually he designed the look of an electric locomotive, the GG-1, which was very successful, looked very good, and had good access to the important working parts.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-product-desig...

[2] https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/products/the-round-non-...

[3] https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...
by reconnecting | 2025-06-21 07:50:09+00:00
When a company, through an application or website, communicates any of your personal data to a third-party provider, this should be mentioned in their privacy terms.

In the case of GIPHY that you mentioned, they are sending IP addresses, which is considered PII (according to GDPR), and this should be outlined in the terms and agreed to by the user prior to sending the data.

Signal's privacy terms were last updated in 2018. We are in 2025 now. It is unimaginable for any operational organization not to update their terms for 7 years.

All together, this is what I call "unacceptably poor" in terms of handling users' privacy.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-21 07:51:37+00:00
Are you also surprised by popularity of sitcoms like Friends or HIMYM, or reality shows? They're even more repetitive rehashes of the same mundane thing, both episode to episode and within the genre.

Who are the millions of people who watch, for the 20th time in their life, how Character A does something unrealistically stupid, ends up in an awkward situation, and then spend the rest of the episode being continuously teased over it by other characters, because they're all written to be slightly stupid and low-key assholes.

This is not to criticize sitcoms and reality shows (and people watching them) here, but rather to point out that the same phenomenon you described also manifests with vastly more popular forms of entertainment, so there must be something to enjoying the experience beyond sheer originality.
by Gys | 2025-06-21 07:51:56+00:00
Beautifully made! But I struggle a little for thinking of use cases? Maybe add some to the readme.

Also, I think adding a kind of ‘main color’ would be useful. For example ‘shore’ being in the category ‘blue’ or maybe even ‘light blue’. Because for ‘shore’ itself I personally would associate with sand and maybe yellow.
by wartijn_ | 2025-06-21 07:52:18+00:00
Pointing out that WhatsApp was used to spread misinformation before Brazilian elections under the header “Ethical issues with WhatsApp” seems weird to me.

According to the Guardian article[0] this article uses as a source, WhatsApp has had updates to limit the number of times messages can be forwarded. But there’s obviously a limit to what can be done because the chats are e2e encrypted.

What does the author want from WhatsApp? Reading messages and blocking them if they don’t pass Meta’s moral guidelines is the opposite of want you’d want from your private chats and I don’t see any other way to effectively combat spreading misinformation.

And is there any indication that Signal would prevent situations like this if it gets more widely used?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/30/whatsapp-fake-...
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-21 07:53:48+00:00
Yep, they need viewers to click the like/subscribe button. They need that so content creators keep on providing content to Google for free in exchange for popularity metrics. Which they need to close sponsorship deals (because Google isn't paying them a whole lot).

So, Google is merely optimizing the ad clicks and impressions here. If they succeed in becoming too obnoxious with their ads, viewers might leave for other platforms, and then content creators would follow. So, fighting ad blocking has diminishing returns and can actually have a negative impact on them. Which is why ad blocking is still effective in 2025 and why Youtube has thrived by being not too effective with their anti ad blocking measures. This is more about selling the notion to advertisers that they are a really good advertising platform than it is about fighting the minority of users who block their ads no matter what. It won't work. But it won't matter as long as advertisers keep on paying for advertising on Youtube.

The irony of their latest efforts is that it is driving away users from Chrome to more effective alternatives (Firefox, Brave, etc.) and it's driving content creators to depend on sponsor ship deals instead of advertising money from Google. The only reason Chrome exists is actually ads. So, more effective counter measures against ad blocking in Chrome could end up hurting their ad revenue. And Google's behavior is actually causing for increasingly stronger calls to break up Google. None of that is good for Google and their advertising revenue.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-06-21 07:55:07+00:00
This is a weird framing

Yes, society has deemed that it’s fine to make use of the avenues that have been explicitly created to reduce your tax burden - that’s why they were created. Society is also relatively fine with using unintended loopholes for the same purpose (although it is a lot more controversial and criticized), because we don’t tend to punish people for breaking laws, rules and regulations that don’t exist. When we end up caring a lot about them, we plug the gaps

The other person was talking about straight up not paying for goods and services that are sold at a given price, which is stealing. The more apt comparison would be to tax evasion (actually breaking the law), which is a crime, widely considered wrong and punished accordingly
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-21 07:56:06+00:00
AFAIK that's true for many vendors but for example Pixels (and IIRC also OnePlus at least a few years ago) you can relock the bootloader with other keys.

The crazy thing is that on all the devices I've had AVB is implemented on top of secureboot. Being able to set your own secureboot keys is bog standard on corporate laptops. The entire situation makes absolutely no sense.

Also for the record I think it's a silly attack vector for the average person to worry about. A normal person does not have secret agents attempting to flash malicious images to his phone while he's in the shower.
by LeonM | 2025-06-21 07:56:17+00:00
It still amazes me that George/Tinycorp somehow seems to get AMD on board every time, and being blissfully unaware that they are a very small player. See for example top comment here [0].

Don't get me wrong, I think it's impressive what he achieved so far, and I hope tiny can stay competitive in this market.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36193625
by omnimus | 2025-06-21 07:56:55+00:00
First thing i saw when i clicked the link.

“Privacy of user data. Signal does not sell, rent or monetize your personal data or content in any way – ever.

Please read our Privacy Policy to understand how we safeguard the information you provide when using our Services.”

I clicked Privacy Policy and there is whole page explaining whats happening with your data.

Your comments seem a bit biased?
by swarnie | 2025-06-21 07:58:46+00:00
If you walked in to my living room and saw 17 almost identical paintings where maybe one is styled to look like papercraft, one has a little dinosaur, one has a racoon tail ect you'd rightly think i was a bit mad even before i announced i'd paid $80 for each one.

Now if i had 17 unique paintings exploring a variety of motifs and styles, each one with a story to tell that would actually be worth talking about.
by radicalbyte | 2025-06-21 07:58:57+00:00
You can apply that logic to anything: why bother returning to the same great restaurant? Why bother with sports matches? Why buy a new car? New mobile? New computer? New TV? Why install a new version of an OS or software?

It's because they change: They tell new stories. They look better. They play better. They introduce completely new mechanics.

Persona: we're up to 5 in 25 years (almost 30 now!), during which time we've seen a massive increase in compute on consoles. Having a new game every 5 years seems very reasonable.
by TZubiri | 2025-06-21 07:59:29+00:00
Not 100% sure. In argentina it looks like the law for net neutrality was passed in 2013. Free whatsapp being implemented sometime around 2017, but it must have been reverted shortly after possibly due to FSF lobbying, which was quite close to the government.

Radio and TV neutrality was a hot political topic at the time as well, the incumbent government was pro-intervention and regulation, so that helped. But the FSF had a big impact, going as far as getting Linux to be installed as a dual boot in state sponsored Notebooks for Kids programs.

The good thing is that the field is a bit more open if anyone wants to dethrone whatsapp, but since they were first movers and they have the network effects now, it seems like almost inconsequential, a contender could have negotiated zero-rating with a carrier anyways and work up from there.
by aris000 | 2025-06-21 08:01:10+00:00
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by chaosbolt | 2025-06-21 08:02:09+00:00
I suspect Israel has backdoor access to most CPUs.

Here is how Pegasus seems: - China has 1.5 billion people, lots of resources, would profit a lot economically if they found a way to hack iOS, etc. But yet couldn't hack it. - Israel with its 7 million people, not only hacks iOS multiple times, but does it to spy on its allies.

Now I've seen the threads analysing Pegasus' complexity, I don't know if it's been reproduced, and if it has then I guess it logically proves me wrong (the tinfoil hatter in me still thinks its right though).

Here is why:

Israel has a lot of silicon fabs or R&D centers, now it makes ZERO sense for the US to have fabs or R&D centers in Israel, since that country is (allegedly) always at the risk of being bomber for no reason at all (yeah right).

Intel has had fabs in Israek since the 80s, why not in Japan or France or the UK (France and the UK are close allies to the US and have no earthquakes or risk of being bombed), why not even Canada?

And I compared the dates of when intel started putting the Intel Management Engine in all of their CPU and the date of which they built their biggest fab in Israel, then I went down the rabbit hole of when AMD started using PSP (similar tech to Intel ME), and it coinciding with it buying a large pentesting startup in Israel, then starting to build its R&D centers there, Apple and Qualcomm have similar stories.

Obviously this is all tinfoil, and while the dates coincide it's obviously not enough.

But to each their own, and I choose to treat my tech as if it was all was backdoored already, because for me the evidence (while not enough to be sure) is enough for how much I value my privacy.
by akazantsev | 2025-06-21 08:03:44+00:00
LLMs are not nice to use for spell checking. I do not want to read a wall of text from LLM just to find a missed article somewhere and I want to receive feedback as I type.

Also, once I asked LLM to check the message. It said everything looked fine and made a copy of the message in its response with one sentence in the middle removed.
Show HN: LeetCode for System Design?
by rbajp | 2025-06-21 08:04:45+00:00
I built a free platform for practicing system design interviews!: https://leetsys.dev. The currently available problems will always be listed as free!

It lets you chat with an interviewer in real time as you work through a system design problem. It also gives you detailed feedback at the end of the interview that you can use to assess your performance and see where you can improve. Please try it out and let me know what you think!
by SilverSlash | 2025-06-21 08:07:11+00:00
I've seen several people argue about the quality of ads on YouTube. For me it's not about that. I've been using ad blockers for almost 15 years now. Youtube has been free AND ad free for me for a very long time. I don't want to be interrupted with ads now or ever regardless of their quality.

The point is, I'm making zero excuses about why I don't want to see ads on youtube. It's been that way and I want it to remain that way. No subscriptions and no ads. People watching yt on their phones and TVs will still see ads or pay for premium and they can support the service.