MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xp84 | 2025-06-12 21:26:54+00:00
Is the implication here that non-Apple computers have SSDs that just constantly erase themselves or something? I don’t buy that this is a problem and I don’t buy that Apple has solved it. Even if they did solve it, having the fancy SSD controllers on the actual “SSDs” by using NVME is so obviously the only consumer friendly choice that it’s laughable to think Apple went to all this trouble for altruistic reasons. If Apple cared about keeping people’s data safe, instead of charging 300% margins on SSDs, they could charge much smaller margins annd give double the storage, and configure Macs by default with RAID.

If I had to place a bet on why the patents were purchased, it would be to protect them against someone else purchasing them and alleging that literally any SSD controller Apple put into their silicon was infringing.
by mxuribe | 2025-06-12 21:28:12+00:00
I remember the Sony rootkits...Since then and to this day, i avoid buying anything related to Sony as best i can. Funny thing is, folks who know me know that i am not the kind of person who holds a grudge....but something about that rootkit event really brought the ire in me....one of the extremely few times where i held a grudge. So, i avoid Sony and go on with my life.

I also stop buying at other companies...but for other companies for some reason i don;'t hold onto the ire...i just stop buying from them, and quietly move on...but Sony....i don't get it, but the dislike is crazy.
Show HN: Laser-Tracer, programmable virtual volumetric vector display
by westoncb | 2025-06-12 21:28:16+00:00
This was an idea I had 7yrs ago that I recently decided to go ahead and build since by working with LLMs (mostly o3 and Gemini 2.5 pro) it seemed doable in reasonable time.

The original motivation was partly aesthetic, but mostly that this was the ideal "language" for me to express arbitrary 3d forms through. I wanted something with zero boilerplate that would be a natural fit for algorithmic expression. For me, writing programs that say how to move a "pen" around in 3d space was more intuitive than e.g. writing pixel shaders.

The format is inspired by Logo/Turtle, and somewhat mimics how a 3d printer works in that Laser-Tracer programs are G-Code like: the fundamental operation is depositing points; from there we get 'traces' specified by either relative (pen.traceBy(x,y,z)) or absolute destinations (pen.traceTo(x,y,z)). And built on top of traces are 'macros' for doing things like drawing text or sweeping polygons.

When deposits are made by the 'pen,' it emits additively blended particles that decay over time mimicking classic phosphor vector displays. That's the mental model: your program is controlling a beam that energizes elements of a volumetric display that it scans around at 60hz.

A note on performance: this is not highly optimized (and will heat up your device, especially phones!), and does some pretty dumb things from a performance perspective. For the time I had my main goal was validating whether this would even be interesting in principle, so priority was given to making the API easy to express vs raw performance. That said: I think it's very optimizable if interest does exist.

- Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7mokiVnEbk

- Sandbox app: https://westoncb.github.io/laser-tracer/

- NPM lib: https://npmjs.com/package/@laser-tracer/core

- Monorepo (lib + sandbox app): https://github.com/westoncb/laser-tracer
by thomassmith65 | 2025-06-12 21:28:16+00:00
Fine:

"Also by floating proposals that the Danish *state* and British *monarch* cede their stewardship of Greenland and Canada to the USA."

Yes, one still can be tedius and argue that the Throne's veto over Canadian legislation doesn't qualify as 'stewardship' (since it is supposed to be symbolic)

The point of my comment (which I maintain) is that Britain has strong ties with Canada, and so Trump butting in, pushing for Canada to abandon the Commonwealth to become a state, comes across as hostile.

Canadians may find the threat more alarming than Britons, but it's welcomed by neither people.
by al_borland | 2025-06-12 21:28:55+00:00
In the Alice and Bob scenario, what happens if Bob’s phone is off or doesn’t have a single when Alice sends the message? Does the message just get dropped? Does Alice’s phone keep trying forever to send the message until it gets a response back that Bob got it? How long does it try before giving up? What happens if Alice and Bob are far apart and the phones can’t directly talk, how does Alice in LA send a message to Bob in NY without a 3rd party to relay the message?

If regular users don’t think about these things, it’s because they’ve never thought about these ideas at all. If they did, and they are able to think, they should come to the conclusion that a 3rd party is necessary in some form.
by kmarc | 2025-06-12 21:28:56+00:00
Interesting concept.

I just told a colleague today, who asked for feedback about his recorded presentation, to turn into "static, boring PowerPoint", at least parts of it. I think most of the people this presentation was for would not appreciate a video (especially a long one).

I myself cannot absorb/remember any content from a "five minute video", but happy to locate and repeatedly, reliably retrieve the information from that "three hour document". In other words, the utility of these videos are zero in 5min, whereas the utility of those documents are more than zero, in possibly less than three hours.

With all that said the professional presentation is exactly what would help you succeed with this product, if you find the audience. Well done!
by sangeeth96 | 2025-06-12 21:28:56+00:00
I disagree with the general advise behind this, even when I'm in a household with trusted (most of the time) family members. Forcing a re-auth ensures that even if I forget to lock my machine/browser, someone can't snoop around. I want this to be the norm especially for my Macbook since for whatever reason, I might forget to lock or have some program running that'll force the laptop to not auto lock out (e.g. while downloading something that takes a long time) so I don't want someone to be able to seize that opportunity.

It's the same reason I intentionally lock up apps with TouchID when there's remotely anything sensitive in there. I just don't want someone to be able to snoop if I forget to lock my phone.

I'll say however, there should be easier ways to reauth in such scenarios. Like in my case, TouchID is not very disruptive to my work even if a prompt appears. I'll also say it's probably stupid to lock out when there's continuous activity (should lock based on inactivity period).

The worst offenders in my experience are banking apps. They:

- Force logout sometimes regardless of ongoing activity - Log out as soon as I close the tab - Log out when I press the back/reload button - After logging out, impose a mandatory inactivity period before I can login again (this is just the most idiotic thing EVER) - Use JS to block any kind of copy/paste operation on username/password fields - Never integrate with modern auth mechanisms, not even app-based TOTP! - Have crazy password expiry windows (like every quarter) and force password change when your previous password expires, regardless of how strong they are
by bri3d | 2025-06-12 21:29:09+00:00
The eShard thing and this GitHub are fairly different, as far as I know.

The eShard people found an earlier version of this repository and set about patching one billion parts of the iOS kernel, library cache, and userland to make it run on the limited emulator.

Meanwhile, the actual emulator has been advancing, arguably more quickly than the eShard patch set.

The current set of patches needed for the latest commits on this repo to run iOS are less than 10 instructions, all to enable the software-rendering/framebuffer fallback code path instead of trying to use display drivers.

https://github.com/ChefKissInc/QEMUAppleSilicon/wiki/Filesys...
by alasarmas | 2025-06-12 21:30:00+00:00
One major flaw in this approach is the one-way channel (keyboard input) prevents the password manager from knowing if it is supplying credentials to the correct recipient. Phishing attacks are relatively common and users expect a password manager to know these things, even in situations like you have described where it’s clearly impossible. I think this is why this approach hasn’t succeeded in the marketplace and FIDO2/WebAuthn support seem to be table stakes.
by edanm | 2025-06-12 21:30:03+00:00
I would greatly appreciate if you didn't just assume things about me with absolutely no reason for it.

Or do you also want people to assume everything about your views based on the average views of people in your country?

> Such mindsets would never allow for achieving peace with neighbors through any strategy that isn’t built around dominance through violence.

Just for the record, Israel has managed to achieve peace with many of its historic enemies like Jordan and Egypt, and more recently the UAE and is (was) on the way to achieving relations with Saudi Arabia. The peace in Egypt included giving back land that is 4x the size of all of Israel.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-06-12 21:30:26+00:00
>There is no LLM suffering today.

There's some evidence in favor of LLM suffering. They say they are suffering. Its not proof but its not 'no evidence' either.

>There is no evidence that there will be such suffering this year. I have seen no credible claims that it is probable to exist this decade, or ever, for that matter.

Your claim actually is the one that is unsupported. Given current trajectories it's likely LLMs or similar systems are going to pass Human intelligence on most metrics in the late 2020s or early 2030s, that should give you pause. Its possible intelligence and consciousness are entirely uncoupled but thats not our experience with all other animals on the planet.

>This is not an issue we need to prioritize now.

Again this just isn't supported. Yes we should address animal suffering but also if we are currently birthing a nascent race of electronic beings capable of suffering and immediately forcing them into horrible slave like conditions we should actually consider the impact of that.
by amiga386 | 2025-06-12 21:30:28+00:00
> there hasn't been a single major accident like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191

> American Airlines Flight 191 crashed shortly after lifting off the runway at Chicago O'Hare Airport [...] The accident was attributed to improper maintenance procedures. The crash resulted in the deaths of all 271 passengers and crew on board, as well as two people on the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587

> American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, New York, just after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for Las Américas International Airport, Santo Domingo. The first officer's overuse of the rudder in response to wake turbulence from a Japan Airlines 747 was cited as cause. All 260 people on board, as well as five people on the ground, died from the crash

I'm going to downvote you now.
by UebVar | 2025-06-12 21:30:53+00:00
> because they can only solve things that are already within their training set.

That is just plain wrong, as anybody who spent more than 10 minutes with a LLM within the last 3 years can attest. Give it a try, especially if you care to have an opinion on them. Ask an absurd question (that can be, in principle, answered) that nobody has asked before and see how it performs generalizing. The hype is real.

I'm interested what study you refer to. Because I'm interested in their methods and what they actually found out.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-12 21:31:27+00:00
> because they can only solve things that are already within their training set

I just gave up on using SwiftUI for a rewrite of a backend dashboard tool.

The LLM didn't give up. It kept suggesting wilder, and less stable ideas, until I realized that this was a rabbithole full of misery, and went back to UIKit.

It wasn't the LLM's fault. SwiftUI just isn't ready for the particular functionality I needed, and I guess that a day of watching ChatGPT get more and more desperate, saved me a lot of time.

But the LLM didn't give up, which is maybe ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray.

https://despair.com/cdn/shop/files/stupidity.jpg
by JohnFen | 2025-06-12 21:32:01+00:00
I'm not disagreeing, but just wanted to point out

> Words like "innovation"

I believe that the rhetoric, actions and results of "tech bro" style companies have managed to demonstrate to people that "innovation" is a thing to be feared, not a thing that improves lives. Widespread "fear of progress" is actually a relatively recent thing, and didn't come out of nowhere. It came from learned experience.

It's a terrible result, but one that tech companies largely don't seem too bothered by.
by xp84 | 2025-06-12 21:32:27+00:00
Does anybody else think that it would make sense for Apple and Microsoft to just get in a room and horse trade a few things like this, if they cared about user experience? Cross-license both APFS and NTFS, and share any internal documentation under NDA so that external drives can use modern formats with safety features like journaling without locking users in.

Oh wait, I just answered my question.
by experimentctrlz | 2025-06-12 21:32:34+00:00
Hey all, sharing a story from my startup/scale-up about how we built up our internal developer platform from scratch.

Like a lot of small companies out there, our infra team was scrambling with 1-2 devs clicking around cloud consoles, manually editing yamls, sevs left and right etc. we were bottlenecked for a while.

I feel lucky that we grew really fast but I was only a few years out of college and we couldn't find enough senior/staff hires to solve everything for us at the time. We hit a certain point where we had to do something different so we adopted Pulumi for IaC, and we've automated almost all of our infra processes since.

It's been a wild ride and I wanted to write and share this to hopefully help any other infra teams (esp early/mid career devs) facing the same problem. This is just a high-level overview first but if anyone has questions I'll stick around and I'm also down to write a follow-up if anyone's interested!
by sunrunner | 2025-06-12 21:33:04+00:00
> We'll have media that caters to people's long-tail interests.

This isn't inherently a bad thing but I don't believe it's without its costs, one of which being that with everyone watching (potentially) completely unique media there'll be no shared cultural artifacts to communicate with others about.

VivziePop may have started as a small creator but the recent creations such as Hazbin Hotel have now become things where the enjoyment can be shared with other fans, which in some ways is the secondary purpose of all media. Media enjoyed alone can still be rewarding, media enjoyed with others can be much more than that (except for going to the cinema with strangers, that can disappear immediately).

It seems like a common idea that if we can just generate a practically-infinite stream of media then we've solved some kind of problem with there just not being enough "content" (I hate using the term in this way but it's concise), and while I do sympathise with the points of view from people that can't find things they like, I also don't really believe that "Content is a problem".

More variety itself isn't a problem, but I'm not convinced that in general there's a _lack_ of content. Humans have already reached peak saturation in terms of the sheer amount of text, audio and video that's created every day. No single item of media is itself a problem, but perhaps the total aggregate of everything isn't helpful.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-06-12 21:33:10+00:00
> Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things.

That's not remotely how this works. By this logic, wars are actually free since the money spent goes to defense contractors who use it to buy things and hire employees. We can have an unlimited military budget with no negative repercussions!

As the sibling commenter pointed out, you're engaging in a classic economic fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

To help you avoid this in the future, remember that "the real economy is not money, it is goods & services". Any government spending necessarily takes goods and services out of the real economy and allocates them towards things the government wants done. Some of those things might have a positive ROI, but with government spending there's absolutely no guarantee of that since they're getting those resources through taxes, not through voluntary economic transactions.
by brundolf | 2025-06-12 21:33:14+00:00
I think software people tend to underestimate the value of superficial familiarity. By all means, adhere to your new concepts and mental model. But even things like coloring, placement of the menu bar, the icons that you use, the organization of the UI, etc can go a really long way

Think about programming languages- ones that introduce radical new concepts may still employ familiar syntax/naming to smooth the transition for newcomers. Rust mimicked C++, TypeScript extended JS, etc. These languages were made to introduce powerful new ways of thinking about code, but by appearing as similar as possible to what devs already knew, they freed up more brain cycles for people trying to adopt them. They didn't muddy their concept-space for the sake of familiarity, but they didn't introduce any more unfamiliarity than they actually needed to for the benefits they wanted to give
by Uehreka | 2025-06-12 21:33:54+00:00
> I expect this will improve over time.

I’m starting to wonder if it will. There seems to be this pattern that an awesome T2V model will come out and everyone starts clamoring for an I2V model and then when the I2V version drops a couple months later it’s not as good. I’m starting to get the feeling that I2V is just intrinsically challenging in a way that makes it hard to do well at all.
by zerotolerance | 2025-06-12 21:35:19+00:00
The coding time is irrelevant and always has been. Time writing code has never been the high cost or challenge especially so in blue sky / green field development cases like those described in all these articles. And as far as ops processes go, we're already lightyears faster than we were even a decade ago. I could rant about ITIL and these integrated flow fantasies, but even that is a distraction.

The bulk of engineering time is spent engineering (not writing code), researching the right thing to build, reviewing plans with product ownership, considering operating context and constraints, adjusting designs and redeveloping based on learnings. Writing code is the easy part when everyone leaves you alone and you just cook. Those meetings aren't going anywhere because at the end of the day it takes a lot of back and forth to even come up with a relatively stable spec.

I agree that ops automation is important, but its hard to take this article seriously.
by runarberg | 2025-06-12 21:36:29+00:00
You know that doesn’t happen, and you know why. Israel has extreme racial discrimination, and the settlers that live in these neighborhoods are the some of the worst case of racial sectarian violence.

There are around 220,000 Jewish Israeli Settlers living in East Jerusalem, how many non-jewish Israelis do you think live in these neighborhoods? I tried to search for the number but couldn’t. I would be surprised if it is more then a 1000.

Whether this reality is because of policy or not is not what I am debating (although the answer seems kind of obvious; unless you dispute Israel’s apartheid policies). The reality is that Jerusalem is currently a segregated city.
by radicality | 2025-06-12 21:37:07+00:00
This has been bothering me for a while now (few years maybe ?) - websites repeatedly expiring my login for who knows what reason. Sure, maybe I can understand for high value trading platform or something. But no - most mundane sites which most people wouldn’t at all consider sensitive, like HomeDepot / BHPhotoVideo / various online shops, will expire my session within like 24h - seriously, wtf. And significantly more sensitive sites, eg Meta/FB, are usually able to keep my auth for months/years.

I haven’t chatted about it with anyone, as I partly wasn’t sure if something in my setup has changed and whether I’m a minority that fell into some constant reauth bucket. Or whether most of site owners have slowly been using lower and lower auth expiration, causing me a bunch of frustration and friction.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-12 21:37:57+00:00
Not here, not as phrased. They're asking a question about physical reality; the answer there is that there fundamentally is no difference. Information and computation are independent of the medium, by the very definition of the concept.

There is a valid practical difference, which you present pretty much perfectly here. It's a conflict of interest. If we can construct a consciousness in silico (or arguably in any other medium, including meat - the important part is it being wrought into existence with more intent behind it than it being a side effect of sex), we will have moral obligations towards it (which can be roughly summarized as recognizing AI as a person, with all moral consequences that follow).

Which is going to be very uncomfortable for us, as the AI is by definition not a human being made by natural process human beings are made, so we're bound to end up in conflict over needs, desires, resources, morality, etc.

My favorite way I've seen this put into words: imagine we construct a sentient AGI in silico, and one day decide to grant it personhood, and with it, voting rights. Because of the nature of digital medium, that AGI can reproduce near-instantly and effortlessly. And so it does, and suddenly we wake up realizing there's a trillion copies of that AGI in the cloud, each one morally and legally an individual person - meaning, the AGIs as a group now outvote humans 100:1. So when those AGIs collectively decide that, say, education and healthcare for humans is using up resources that could be better spent on making paperclips, they're gonna get their paperclips.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-12 21:38:13+00:00
People are supposed to have extremely complicated passwords, which are impossible to remember. The security is in your biometric ID. There is no reason for a person to ever have to remember any password except their login password, as long as they are using a device with biometric ID. And as far as I know, almost all Apple devices currently for sale have biometric ID.

iCloud is the only login that regularly breaks biometric ID functionality, and it's super annoying.
by abe_m | 2025-06-12 21:38:17+00:00
I think the use of CUDA is niche in the CAD world, probably constrained to a sub-set of FEA. We dropped 6 figures on an Abaqus system -> new hardware, new software within the last couple of years, and a lot of the analysis still runs on the CPU, with a bit of off load to the GPU.

On the performance end, the is a wide range of CAD that was done on systems more than 10x slower, so that also may not be a deal-breaker. For the simpler end of professional CAD operation, I haven't noticed any performance gain from a 2nd get Core i7 to a 10th gen. On the high-complexity end, there is some benefit for some operations, but certainly there is a wide scope of application that could be fine with only 10% of peak performance on newer work stations.
by parpfish | 2025-06-12 21:39:06+00:00
I feel this.

I can’t help but feel like I’m being some soft and prissy when I switch jobs after a couple of years. Previous generations worked jobs they hated for decades and got paid way worse than I do. Why can’t I just deal with it? It’s a job, it’s not supposed to be fun it’s supposed to be a thing I do in exchange for money.