MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Feature Phone and Pegasus Style Spyware Question
by searchaliasaps | 2025-06-13 16:01:27+00:00
Hi! If someone were to use suppose a Nokia 225 4G (2024) - I know about there is no encryption for messaging as in signal and I'm also aware about cell tower triangulation for location - but in terms of a bad actor infecting your phone via zero click exploit to listen to everything you say and activating the camera and knowing your precise location would this feature phone be better in defeat that? Any info appreciated!!!
by evanelias | 2025-06-13 16:01:27+00:00
I get that people hate Oracle for a variety of reasons, but this is just such a ridiculous assertion. They've been one of the largest tech companies for multiple decades. Do you honestly believe that a majority of their revenue came from legal settlements from suing their own customers, at any time in their history?

Do you have a citation for this claim? I mean if the company is as absurdly litigious as you're saying, it stands to reason that you wouldn't make unsubstantiated claims about them in a public forum, right?
by benterix | 2025-06-13 16:02:01+00:00
Just a single anecdata: I bought a second-hand Xbox360 once[0] with two pads but use donly one for some months. One day I tried to use the other one but smelled the odor of burned plastic - for some reason the batteries caused a piece of the plastic melt.

This single event made me a bit more cautious about batteries in general. There are decades of no accidents and then unexpectedly something like this happens.

[0] Yest I still think Kinect was ahead of its time and I'm very sorry it got discontinued
by Fraterkes | 2025-06-13 16:02:11+00:00
Meta is a huge nation-state of a company, like Apple or Google, but its actual sources of income are arguably precarious: in the past decades new social media platforms have crept up and become really popular pretty frequently. Ai and Vr are mostly ways to find new sources of income: Meta has the means to outinvest smaller companies like Anthropic, but not the obligation to fit it into an existing product, like Apple.
by ldjkfkdsjnv | 2025-06-13 16:02:23+00:00
Yeah ageism is a huge issue, even in early 30s, working as a regular programmer is met with suspicion and looked down upon.

Not only that, young engineers will be build whatever without questioning the value, business people prefer this. They dont want an engineer raising product questions

also, it is true that technology moves quickly, startups dont need experts in tech thats no longer bleeding edge. large old school companies still do, so the number of companies that are viable employers decreases
by toast0 | 2025-06-13 16:03:01+00:00
Returning no longer used anonymous memory is not without benefits.

Returning pages allows them to be used for disk cache. They can be zeroed in the background by the kernel which may save time when they're needed again, or zeroing can be avoided if the kernel uses them as the destination of a full page DMA write.

Also, returning no longer used pages helps get closer to a useful memory used measurement. Measuring memory usage is pretty difficult of course, but making the numbers a little more accurate helps.
by bastawhiz | 2025-06-13 16:03:17+00:00
5% higher velocity doesn't mean arriving at your destination 5% sooner. A car traveling 52.5mph will complete a trip (absent acceleration/deceleration/stops) of 3 miles only about 10 seconds faster than a car traveling 50mph. That's the upper bound, because cars have to stop. The speed is not the efficiency bottleneck, not by a long shot.

Even if you saved thirty seconds on each ride throughout a day, that doesn't translate to more profit. It translates to the ability to take on extra rides. Which in total, is maybe one or two. You're talking about an extra $30 or so in revenue. Subtract off normal overhead and you're looking at maybe ten dollars of extra profit per vehicle per day at best.

You're also assuming the service runs at capacity at all times. You will infrequently be at capacity. Arriving ten seconds sooner doesn't matter if you just have another car you can dispatch for another rider, and optimizing how and when to bring cars in and out of service becomes the bottleneck.

There are so many inefficient aspects of a naively designed ride sharing service that can be optimized for real meaningful profit. And almost all of those things can be done without changing the way the car handles in any way. Just making sure you have vehicles in the right places at the right times, or fueling vehicles at more opportune times, or choosing more optimal pickup and drop-off locations could increase the number of rides you can perform, which is what translates into profit.
Ask HN: What is your fallback job if AI takes away your career?
by 7402 | 2025-06-13 16:03:24+00:00
For the sake of argument, assume that if your job consists of sitting at a computer, reading on a screen, and typing on a keyboard, then your career will go away.

There is always room at the top, and there may always be room for humans at the top of any career. Assume (this is a tough ask, I know) that you are NOT one of those people.

What is your fallback job? What skills do you have or would like to acquire that might keep you going? Bicycle mechanic? Teach music to children? Woodworking/carpentry? (Living off your stock options or investments does not count)
by bsenftner | 2025-06-13 16:04:01+00:00
Ageism is looking a one tree in a forest of extremely similar problems. We have a othering at scale issue in the species. It's fundamental. It needs to be recognized as an issue of, a problem with self determinism itself, the othering of those we are not intimate is a serious species-wise issue. There is another science here, waiting for formalization.
by GTP | 2025-06-13 16:04:12+00:00
You're posing a good question but, if you look at things from this perspective, then every time you type the password to decrypt your private key you should worry about the possibility of some software running on your machine reading it and sending it somewhere.

While you pose a valid concern, I think most people don't have to worry about this. The reason is that printing private keys isn't a common practice, so I think it's unlikely that nation-states mandate backdoors in printer firmware to collect private keys, and most people don't have to worry about targeted attacks.

EDIT: On a second thought, your comment reminded me of that creepy time many years ago when a printer randomly regurgitated a partial print of a document I printed some time before (read: days or even weeks before), clearly showing that the printer kept it somewhere in memory. So it still possible that some printers memorize what you print. IIRC it was a Brother printer. At the end of the day, you can't account for every possible attack vector. Pick a reasonable threat model and act accordingly.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-06-13 16:04:12+00:00
The Cartesian product of nonempty sets is nonempty.

This is obvious!, you might say — obviously we can just pick one element from each set and be done with it. But the statement that we can pick an element from each set is the axiom of choice.

Note that it's not necessarily simple to pick an element from a set. For instance, how would one pick an element from the set of uncomputable numbers? A human cannot describe said element, by definition. The axiom of choice says it's possible anyway.
by metalman | 2025-06-13 16:04:39+00:00
"tired of clickbait", also tired of declines in the trustworthyness of manufacturers of food/health and regulators thereoff, so personaly I choose the no failure mode solution, ie:I eat mostly whole food items and cook meals at home, and just avoid all of it.....which is the simplest response to the whole dilema for anyone concerned with possible health consequences of the latest "finding" so I simpathise with both sides in the debate, but vote with my kitchen
by dudeinhawaii | 2025-06-13 16:05:46+00:00
This isn't my language (saw it on a youtube video but agree with it) -- LLMs are not calculators. It's as simple as that.

If the LLM can complete the task using tools, then it's a pass.

Apples team went out of their way to select tests that LLMs would struggle with and then take away tools -- and then have the audacity to write that they're surprised at the outcome. Who would be surprised? No one using AI since GPT-4 expects them to be calculators or algorithm executors.

You want the LLM to be smart enough to realize "I can't do this without tools", grab the tool, use it correctly, and give you the actual correct answer. Preventing LLMs from using tools or writing and executing code -- then you're intentionally crippling them.
by Reubachi | 2025-06-13 16:05:47+00:00
Anecdotal story, but I don't "keep" old electronics anymore save for ones I know are in a fireproof container.

My attic and furnished top floor room adjacent to it can on a bad day get to 110 without the attic fan on. Very old NE colonial on a hill getting full sun from sunrise to sunset.

Items i cannot keep up there, as I have watched them explode or turn into puddles of goo: Aersol cans (oils, cleaners, sunscreen etc) Normal squeeze trigger bottles (IE, chemical cleaners, auto detailer) Tapes, adhesives Electronics
by username223 | 2025-06-13 16:05:48+00:00
> What’s Meta’s strategy here? What’s their vision?

I don't get it, either. Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp are ways to communicate with people you know, and they have a monopoly on that. (Well, Instagram is also softcore porn and product placement...)

TikTok beat them as mindless entertainment, showing people videos they're likely to watch until they end, and Zuck freaked out. Sometimes people would rather just watch TV than hang out with their friends! OMG! TikTok's bottleneck is that humans have to create the videos, so if Zuck can generate videos to maximize watch time, he wins.

Paying billions of dollars for a data-labeling company, though... Well, I guess it's not easy to put together a bunch of digital sweatshops in Kenya and the Philippines, but is it worth that much?
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-06-13 16:06:01+00:00
Nuclear weapons have done more for world peace than any other invention in history. Countries with a nuclear option are effectively uninvadable, and that pushes conflicts away from the grueling total wars of the Napoleonic and World Wars, and into constrained, limited proxy wars. Want Israel to stop committing atrocities? Nothing better for it than nuclear armed neighbors. Want to keep Israel from ceasing to exist? That's why they've got the bomb.

Supporting Israel in preventing Iran from getting nuclear capabilities is destablizing, not the opposite.
by jimt1234 | 2025-06-13 16:06:08+00:00
I used to work with a guy that was known for dressing nice, very formal. Back in the 2000s, he would wear button-down shirts, slacks, nice shoes; he stood out for a software nerd. Anyway, when I saw him recently, he was dressed in jeans and flip-flops, wearing a t-shirt. I asked him what's with the casual attire. He just said, "Trying to keep my job." Being an older dude in this field as well, I know what he's talking about.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-13 16:07:55+00:00
If your kids school is more important than your job is, that only means your job is extremely unimportant. Like my job.

Your kid is better off not going to school for a day, or arriving late. They're not doing anything important in school.

Depending on company, maybe they need to hire people to do important things and have responsibility for important things. Somebody who would prioritize things like driving their kids to school over that is a no-hire. They should work a job which is less important, like I myself do.
by dzonga | 2025-06-13 16:08:07+00:00
I would rather work with "old" engineers rather than 25/30 year old "senior" engineers.

Places with older engineers means:

1. things are done properly

2. less to break

3. no need to be on call

4. excellent WLB (no grind n burnout culture)

5. excellent mentoring and learning opportunities

6. sniper / laser focus on business fundamentals / making money rather than making noise on the internet streets
by paxys | 2025-06-13 16:08:11+00:00
It isn't really a solvable problem as long as there is no standardized/regulated tech industry. Companies want coders who will fit into the "culture" – work whatever hours they need to, be on call 24x7, chase the newest fads, accept fantasy money, "move fast and break things" etc. There is an unlimited stream of new grads who will happily accept all this. Older people meanwhile don't have the patience or have other responsibilities in life.

Go into companies and industries where this culture isn't the norm, however, and you'll find teams full of 40-50+ year old software engineers. Defense, aerospace, government, construction, medical tech, research labs, education.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-13 16:08:17+00:00
> the world has increasingly moved to Retina-type displays

Not my world. Even the display hooked up to the crispy work MacBook is still 1080p (which looks really funky on macOS for some reason).

Even in tech circles, almost everyone I know still has a 1080p laptop. Maybe some funky 1200p resolution to make the screen a bit bigger, but the world is not as retina as you may think it is.

For some reason, there's actually quite a price jump from 1080p to 4k unless you're buying a television. I know the panels are more expensive, but I doubt the manufacturer is indeed paying twice the price for them.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-13 16:08:32+00:00
I'm looking forward to a nice part time side-hustle during retirement, cleaning up vibe-coded messes. In a few decades, we might have an industry full of 20-40 year old software engineers who don't know how computers work and don't know how to write or fix code beyond begging an LLM to do it and hoping it produces something that works.

Maybe I'll be wrong, and in 2050, there won't even be human software engineers anymore, but I'm not so sure that will be the case.
by datameta | 2025-06-13 16:08:38+00:00
What of the "just so" attitude of a child growing up? Everything is taken at face value, there is no comparison, only stories (unless you have a catalogue of 30EB of 8K earth footage or something to that effect for them to fawn over). They don't have the reference frame for other situations for a while, perhaps long enough to not be able to see things differently?

This makes me think of multi-generational migrations north out of Africa. There's only so much that can be passed orally losslessly. Eventually the group in north siberia after 20K years doesn't see living any other way.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-13 16:08:47+00:00
400V electric vehicles and 400,000V transmission lines play by different rules.

There are no MOSFETS anywhere in HV applications. IGBTs, but no MOSFETS. Most converters use thyristors and newer ones use IGBTs. No matter what, PN-junctions are king for HV silicon applications.

Also ripple is a function of filtering not switching. The reason higher switching frequencies generally have better ripple characteristics is because smaller capacitors can filter them and/or larger capacitors filter them better. So in a cost constrained/size constrained product you get more filtering for the same buck same size.

I also can't figure out what you are saying in your last line, apologies.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-13 16:09:16+00:00
When the CEO is 28, it is the head where the fishrot starts.

In The Days of Old, the folks running the corporation were almost always in their 50s. They might have been prejudiced towards folks my age (60s), but they didn't have issues with hiring what are now considered "older" folks (40s and 50s), with the only issue being cost (they might be ageist, simply for cost reasons).

The prejudice from younger folks is cultural, not cost. They don't want people around that make them feel uncomfortable. Many younger folks at tech companies, these days, make boatloads of money. It's not about cost.

From where I stand, it looks like a lot of modern tech companies are establishing a "college, but being paid" culture. It seems that many modern tech companies resemble idealized college campuses, more than traditional professional production environments.
by silasdb | 2025-06-13 16:11:09+00:00
This is a great website—it reminds me of To Scale: The Solar System [1], a mini-documentary where people attempt to build a true-to-scale model of the Solar System. It makes me feel like a tiny speck of dust, floating in the vastness of nowhere...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg
by zozbot234 | 2025-06-13 16:11:12+00:00
If anything, "abstract links across domains" is the one area where even very low intelligence AI's will still have an edge, simply because any AI trained on general text has "learned" a whole lot of random knowledge about lots of different domains; more than any human could easily acquire. But again, this is true of AI's no matter how "smart" they are. Not related to any "super intelligence" specifically.

Similarly, "deeper insight" may be surfaced occasionally simply by making a low-intelligence AI 'think' for longer, but this is not something you can count on under any circumstances, which is what you may well expect from something that's claimed to be "super intelligent".
by jandrese | 2025-06-13 16:11:20+00:00
It's one of those cases where you have very small numbers multiplied by very large ones. The actual risk is hard to intuit because there are so many orders of magnitude involved in both directions.

In any case it's probably a moot concern as long as we are living under the twin tyrannies of Newtons Third Law and the Rocket Equation. Building a rocket that can accelerate constantly and noticeably for weeks, months, or even years on end in order to accelerate up to a velocity where Relativity starts to matter requires an absurdly large rocket. Like converting the mass of Jupiter into rocket fuel to make it to the next habitable solar system in a couple of centuries level of craziness.
by mliker | 2025-06-13 16:11:28+00:00
It doesn't really affect the other frontier labs too much because OpenAI and Anthropic rely on multiple data vendors for their models so that no outside company is aware of how they train their proprietary models. Forbes reported the other day that OpenAI had been winding down their usage of Scale data: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/06/12/scale-a...
by HelloNurse | 2025-06-13 16:12:28+00:00
Two perplexing aspects:

- Why so many lambda functions instead of regular named functions? Is it a technical limitation? Something important should have a name, for instance (for the example in the article) different ways to compute greetings from names.

- How are the computations ordered, particularly multiple Effects that trigger at the same change? For instance, in the example in the article, when the name changes the updated greeting is printed before or after the updated location.
by softwaredoug | 2025-06-13 16:12:32+00:00
I experience it differently. As an IC that’s relatively respected it my field, I think my seniority seems like a threat to some leaders. Because my word carries weight and I tend to be less obsequious with little to lose in these interactions. I have less of a problem to saying “the emperor has no clothes”. Younger ICs don’t have this luxury. They go along despite their reservations and often feel they don’t know better. Older ICs suffer fools much less (life is short, and older ICs have a well calibrated BS detector. Some bad leader don’t like that!).

I have no problem interacting with younger ICs and even embrace my Dad-ness and Dad humor. I like mentoring and growing others, and I think it’s important to advocate for less experienced to get the lionsshare of the glory and attention.

For hiring, I just am not open about my age and mostly interact with people virtually. I don’t have my early irrelevant jobs and don’t show my graduation dates. So I haven’t seen it as a problem.
by aseipp | 2025-06-13 16:12:42+00:00
Your comment remains completely stupid regardless of how much of it is in the quote. OxCaml's goal is to be upstreamed. "I don't see the point in this unless people have programs using OCaml" and it's like, yeah, that's the point of adding features to a computer program. Any computer program. Because people already use the computer program and it will be useful to them.
by vb66 | 2025-06-13 16:13:30+00:00
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by 999900000999 | 2025-06-13 16:13:39+00:00
https://luxeengine.com/get/

>Business - If you need more than 16 seats, or you have access to > $1m USD in the last 365 days, this tier is required, you must contact us to customize pricing.

Customized pricing is very scary. It's whatever we feel like charging you under NDA. Why would I pitch this to my boss over using Godot under an MIT license?
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-13 16:13:55+00:00
The funny thing is that in some ways it's true. Modern phones are all retina (because even 1080p at such a resolution is indistinguishable from pixelless). Tablets, even cheap ones, have impressive screen resolutions. I think the highest tea device I own may be my Galaxy Tab S7 FE at 1600x2500.

Computers, on the other hand, have stuck with 1080p, unless you're spending a fortune.

I can only attribute it to penny pinching by the large computer manufacturers, because with the high-res tablets coming to market for Chromebook prices, I doubt they're unable to put a similarly high-res display in a similarly sized laptop without bumping the price up by 500 euros like I've seen them do.
by sulam | 2025-06-13 16:15:10+00:00
That would honestly be an extreme red flag for me if I was considering hiring you. As an older engineer myself, I would never roll the dice like that — my contributions in this industry are public and I have the network to show for it. My time is worth something to me, even if it’s not worth anything to anyone else, and the older I get the more that’s true.
by abhaynayar | 2025-06-13 16:15:18+00:00
I have been TickTick for daily-habit tracking for years now. It has a monthly GitHub-like graph widget for phones which is amazing for feedback. I also use TickTick for misc. task-tracking like "laundry", "buy apple", etc.

Then for non-recurring areas like job-tasks, I use a separate tool with a simple Kanban board. Prior to Kanban, I used to just track time, and write a list of things I did for the day, but I realized there was no feedback and it was just a passive "I did this stuff".

So coming from that, a Kanban board has been god-sent. Because otherwise Parkinson's Law was a common occurrence for me. Each task in the board is somewhat tied to a project/outcome through a tag. So there is a feedback/working-backwards/active concept to it. I have just started using it, but the more I use it, the more I automatically learn how to set better tasks, because otherwise they do not go from TODO -> DOING -> DONE.
by grafmax | 2025-06-13 16:15:43+00:00
Anti-capitalist revolutions of the past all relied on a strong workers’ movements. Revolutions don’t make themselves. If you believe the answer is replacing capitalism then I think the best place to start is labor organizing. A general strike carries with it a great deal of power that doesn’t rely on politicians bought and sold by corporations. I think labor organizing as a strategy is something that people who want either reform or revolution should agree on.

Now, it’s also true that military force can make a revolution happen. But looking at developed countries I don’t see anti-capitalist military revolutions happening any time soon.