MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-12 09:10:09+00:00
> The situation you're protecting against is one where someone who compromises the OS can make that compromise persistent by replacing the bootloader. That means you can't place any trust in any component after the bootloader, since an attacker could just fake whatever mechanism you're enforcing.

Isn't that kind of pointless?

Suppose the attacker gets root on your OS, i.e. what they would need to supply the firmware with a new hash. That OS install is now compromised, because they can now change whatever else they want in the filesystem. If you boot the same OS again, even using the trusted bootloader, it's still compromised.

If you don't realize that it's compromised, you're now using a compromised system regardless of the bootloader. If you do realize it's compromised then you do a clean reinstall of the OS and designate your bootloader as the trusted one again instead of whatever the compromised OS installed.

What does the bootloader really get them that root didn't already?

> The firmware validating the signatures only has public keys.

Having the keys installed from the factory still seems like the thing causing the problem:

If it only trusts e.g. Microsoft's public key, they now get to decide if they want to sign something you might want to use. If they don't, secure boot prevents it from working, which causes problems for you if you want it to work.

Which then puts them under pressure to sign all kinds of things because people want their firmware updaters etc. to work, and then you get compromised by some code they signed which wasn't even relevant to you.

Whereas what you want is some way of designating what can run on your machine, regardless of what someone else would like to run on theirs. But then that's a machine-specific determination rather than something somebody should be deciding globally for everyone.
by WanderingSoul | 2025-06-12 09:10:20+00:00
Hi. OP here. I wanted to share a passion project. The Gratitude Calendar is a daily reminder on the numerous blessings we have.

Once a day, visit the site, take a breath, and reflect on something you're grateful for.

If you're interested in the background of this project, you can find more info in this LI post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jameel263_the-gratitude-calen....

Open to feedback and feature requests :)
by aa-jv | 2025-06-12 09:10:35+00:00
Hey - thank you for your interesting post today. It set me off on a personal journey which, in my mind, involved the discovery of many secret trails and camping spots, metaphorically ..

One thing I have learned about al-Ghazali today, thanks to your efforts, is that philosophers aren't always right, faith and logic can work together, and doubting everything can lead to truth.

But, most importantly, live ones faith honestly - and this is especially true for those of us who detest imperialist/corporate interference in spiritual activities, such as publishing packages to the npm ecosystem intended to make ones fellow human beings lives' more rewarding, in spite of the lack of personal rewards to be gained in doing so.. that the value in seeing this is lost on a lot of HN responses in this thread so far, is no big surprise - but it is surely disappointing.

I hope you will consider adding Aquinus and Augustine of Hippo to your references, also. Sometimes it helps to see how the universality of true philosophy crosses cultural divides.
by StanislavPetrov | 2025-06-12 09:12:34+00:00
>So e.g. I have hunches that there's no way there is a God that's in any way as religions might think it is, and I do have a hunch that we somehow happened from probably deterministic chain reactions, but it's a hunch, it's hard to call it a belief, or it's hard to think that I believe there is no God.

Saying that you know for certain that there is no god(s) is exactly the same as saying you know for sure that there is a god(s). Being agnostic is the realization that you can't be sure one way or the other. We are not omniscient and our reasoning abilities are not flawless. You might have your strong suspicions one way or the other about whether there is a god, but if you aren't certain (as many people are) I consider that as agnostic.
by nextlevelwizard | 2025-06-12 09:12:37+00:00
>20 years ago they wanted to nurse Turkey, then Georgia, now Ukraine, they probably want to manage the western part of Russia.

Stop watching state propaganda. None of us want anything to do with you. If you would just go back home and get the fuck out of Europe you wouldn't hear from us ever again, but it is literally your colonialization efforts that are biting you in the ass.

Russians seem to have this weird way of looking at other countries and complaining how they are influencing/supporting other countries while they never question what their own country is doing all over the globe.
by graemep | 2025-06-12 09:12:40+00:00
It does not seem to be working though. They could have used EU infrastructure for their for their email and website, and did not bother to. Its not as though there is no alternative.

I suspect people pushing to host websites in the EU will default to using American DNS and email providers etc.

The real problem is lack of motivation, not lack of options and it is a lot easier for people to keep on using Cloudflare and Gmail and AWS etc.
by roenxi | 2025-06-12 09:12:55+00:00
> Direct death counts from nuclear meltdowns might be rather low, but the damage is clearly that entire cities need to be evacuated (and stay uninhabitable for decades). Fukushima alone cost the Japanese taxpayer close to $200 billion.

Ok, so say they don't evacuate the city. What is the actual risk here that we're talking about?

> I'm not saying that is the only effect.

What other effect are you considering? The materials aren't getting that more expensive and the labour will cost similar too. There aren't a lot of options left apart from regulatory changes.

> I personally think that collective standards regarding risk and pollution have risen significantly...

Then do you potentially think that the reason the price is rising is because of regulation? Because this whole paragraph reads like a justification for the costs incurred due to regulation. I'm not seeing what your complaint is here pinning the inverted learning curve on the regulators - you seem to be saying that is what happened and it is reasonable in this paragraph.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-06-12 09:14:38+00:00
> there’s a process by which you can replace these expensive skilled workers with cheap unskilled idiots and still get great results. > Another variation: the magic process that lets you get great results from people who don’t care.

Isn't that pretty much what the US military does? They take in "dumb" teens + docs + processes and get whatever it is they need out of this? It's also cheap (compared w/ industry). And by the end of the exercise the "dumb" teens become skilled in their own niche, some of them highly skilled (see nuclear specialists, ATCs, pilots, navigators, managers, procurement, etc.)

The military processes are at the base of lots of organisational stuff we have in software dev and business as well (agile, scrum, ooda, etc)
by leiroigh | 2025-06-12 09:15:26+00:00
>in a higher-dimensional parent universe

That's incorrect: The parent universe is not higher-dimensional, it's the same good old 3+1 as our universe.

What they propose is: Let's take our good old GR, and start with a (large, dilute) compactly supported spherically collapsing collapsing cloud of matter. During that, you get an event horizon; afterwards, this looks like a normal black hole outside, and you never see the internal evolution again ("frozen star", it's an event horizon). Inside, you have the matter cloud, then a large shell of vacuum, then the event horizon.

Quantum mechanics suggests that degeneracy pressure gives you an equation of state that looks like "dilute = dust" first, and at some point "oh no, incompressible".

They figure out that under various assumptions (and I think approximations), they get a solution where the inside bounces due to the degeneracy pressure. Viewed from inside, they identify that there should be an apparent cosmological constant, with the cosmological horizon somehow (?) corresponding to the BH horizon as viewed from the outside.

All along the article, they plug in various rough numbers, and they claim that our observed universe (with its scale, mass, age, apparent cosmological constant, etc) is compatible with this mechanism, even hand-waving at pertubations and CMB an-isotropies.

This would be super cool if it worked!

But I'm not convinced that the model truly works (internally) yet, too much hand-waving. And the matching to our real observed universe is also not yet convincing (to me). That being said, I'm out of the cosmology game for some years, and I'm a mathematician, not a physicist, so take my view with a generous helping of salt.

(I'm commenting from "reading" the arxiv preprint, but from not following all computations and references)

PS. I think that they also don't comment on stability near the bounce. But I think that regime is known to have BKL-style anisotropic instability. Now it may be that with the right parameters, the bounce occurs before these can rear their heads, and it might even be that I missed that they or one of their references argue that this is the case if you plug in numbers matched to our observed universe.

But the model would still be amazing if it all worked out, even if it was unstable.
by mrob | 2025-06-12 09:15:34+00:00
Despite Apple hardware being fast, it subjectively feels slow because of the mandatory UI animations. The "reduced motion" setting does not help because it only replaces them with equally slow fades. I believe there are unofficial ways to disable them, but if you're willing to sacrifice the convenience of sticking to officially supported configurations why use Apple products at all? There are better options for those who like customizing and tweaking things.
by rwmj | 2025-06-12 09:15:41+00:00
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/20/fact-check-can...

Interesting that Article 49 [1] says that only "European state"s can apply, but then "European" is not defined anywhere.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/treaty/teu_2016/art_49/oj/eng
by DrScientist | 2025-06-12 09:15:54+00:00
> Why is this important?

Because leadership is important and is why things like this keep happening in companies like Meta and are not a regular occurrence in companies say like Apple ( despite the laws for the rank and file being the same.... )

> Where are the examples?

Health and safety legislation. Sarbanes Oxley ( after Eron and the bosses getting off ).

I don't understand why you are so keen to give Meta leadership a free pass.
by cr3cr3 | 2025-06-12 09:15:55+00:00
DNS is inherently a globally distributed system. Recursive resolvers depend on a hierarchy of name servers—root, TLD, and authoritative—many of which are geographically and administratively dispersed. Attempting to localize DNS strictly within national or continental boundaries goes against the core architecture of how name resolution works.

This particular initiative, while branded as an EU project, appears to be the product of a consortium of private companies, CERTs, and academic partners. In practice, efforts like these often struggle with cohesion, efficiency, and long-term viability—especially when guided by complex bureaucratic processes. It’s difficult to imagine such a model offering a meaningful alternative to existing resolvers, either in terms of privacy, performance, or sovereignty.
by bayindirh | 2025-06-12 09:15:57+00:00
EU was cozy with US cloud operators which built and ran datacetners in the EU soil. They have special agreements for data isolation and data travel limitationss (i.e.: Data can't leave the said datacenter or the continent).

After the last election, they decided that it's not safe in the long term, and started to build their own infra. It'll take some time.
by transpute | 2025-06-12 09:16:23+00:00
In an alternate universe, trade war and rare earth minerals shortage halts manufacturing of new iPhones, operating system updates become paid products and existing iPhones must implement the secure launch protocol that Asahi Linux uses on Apple Silicon, enabling AOSP for iPhones.

https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/06/03/2155

> Apple has dropped the ball so badly that Sky is like a perfect storm of what they could have done, but didn’t. And now, not only is it a third-party app that is doing what Apple should have done, but it is also doing it in a better way that anything they ever shipped.
by vintagedave | 2025-06-12 09:17:07+00:00
I worked for nine years as a senior product manager, including a radical UX overhaul. I can speak to this.

There is a saying among PMs: when you're not sure what to do, you do a UX refresh.

(It's a bit like the same one for CEOs: if you're not sure what to do, drive an acquisition.)

UX rework needs to be done with real care -- not primarily care for looks, but care for function.

I _love_ Snow Leopard's UI. It was clear. Watching the videos on Liquid Glass, I was really hopeful we'd see a return to a similar design. Old OS X gave me joy, and I am sure I heard the word 'joy' used in the Liquid Glass video... and I was so happy! But what I see when I installed last night, and from this article, is glass and shadows in the background of windows, very low contrast ratios, and confusion between window areas.

Backgrounds are the wrong place for fancy effects. You need to be able to see foreground content clearly.

Foregound elements, like buttons, are great for fancy effects. They are small and isolated.

That's why pinstripes were awful (difficult background) and Aqua as a whole was great (blue gel buttons were clear.) Look at the comparison screenshots in this article: a list view in Finder, which is sorted, has a blue header on the sorted column. That is a fancy gel effect, but it is isolated and readable. If liquid glass were used the same way in Tahoe, we'd really be on to something. It's what I hoped for, and what I don't see.

However: one good thing in Tahoe is how fast UI elements interact. There is no animation on mouseover transition. It snaps in and out. This is excellent.
by karel-3d | 2025-06-12 09:17:23+00:00
I don't know the details. They have ordered Google, Cisco and Cloudflare to block these on their public resolvers (so not just ISPs). I will google "Piracy Shield" to see the details.

edit: it seems it's local court orders, ordering those specific companies to poison the DNS; it's not a law. So DNS4EU is fine for now.
by Rattled | 2025-06-12 09:17:26+00:00
I find it more useful to anchor the concept of "real" in what one has direct access to. Beyond that there are many ways to describe our shared reality and the space of possible realities, including the past and future, some of which are more real than others, and go far beyond what we can imagine. Quantum physics gives us a language to expand what we can describe and imagine.
by rswail | 2025-06-12 09:18:44+00:00
Which is exactly how CVS (and its predecessors RCS and SCCS) worked.

They were file based revision control, not repository based.

SVN added folders like trunk/branches/tags that overlaid the file based versioning by basically creating copies of the files under each folder.

Which is why branch creation/merging was such a complicated process, because if any of the files didn't merge, you had a half merged branch source and a half merged branch destination that you had to roll back.
by joegibbs | 2025-06-12 09:19:20+00:00
The water argument is way overblown. Even based on the worst figures from the article "OpenAI’s older model would be using 31 million liters of water per day, or 8.18 million gallons" - this is 2 billion gallons of water per year. A single Californian pistachio grower uses 130 billion gallons a year, likely more than the entire AI industry, for quite a niche crop. Don't even think about the water usage of staples like cotton or beef.

Also, before the AI boom there were still huge numbers of GPUs using the same water and power that AI was using to run things like Netflix and YouTube (not exactly vital for human existence) - and still are - yet AI is treated like unique sin against the environment.
by benjojo12 | 2025-06-12 09:19:28+00:00
In the era of relatively complicated company ownership structures (especially in a capital heavy business such as Datacamp), the company on the whois does have the same level of meaning as you seem to expect it to.

207 Regent Street, it's a relatively well known virtual office type address, I would be shocked to learn that there were any datacamp employees at that address)
by adrian_b | 2025-06-12 09:19:31+00:00
You could make a pin-point camera with an array of detectors that will receive thus only the radiation coming from the direction fixed by the positions of the aperture and of the detector.

However that might not work well because the material around the pin-point aperture might not absorb sufficiently the rays coming from different directions and it cannot be made thick.

So what may work better is to make the detector array in the form of a compound arthropod eye, where each detector is at the bottom of a long tube whose walls absorb the rays coming from any other direction except its axis.

In practice, besides trying to absorb the rays coming from different directions, preventing them to reach the detector, for high-energy rays there is the alternative to use 2 or more collinear detectors for each direction (corresponding to an image pixel). A high-energy particle or photon will pass through all collinear detectors, causing simultaneous pulses at their outputs. Whenever such pulses are not simultaneous, they are discarded, because they correspond to rays coming from another direction than intended for that pixel. The accumulated count of filtered pulses per some time interval will give the luminosity of the corresponding image pixel.
by vintagedave | 2025-06-12 09:19:56+00:00
Last night, I started a small test project in Xcode to try to change how Tahoe controls render, swizzling. The idea is: use glass for foreground elements. Basically, use glass tech to drive a Snow Leopard-like UI.

Changing something like a checkbox is ok. Changing something like the side panel, or a set of toolbar buttons to resolve the background/floatiness/shadow issues in the article, is going to be hard (for me, with my level of AppKit and SwiftUI knowledge.) If I get far enough, I'll share with HN.
by tempfile | 2025-06-12 09:20:46+00:00
> You make it sound like systemd manufactured this monoculture somehow.

Where are you getting this from? I do not see it at all. The parent comment just says that it is an emergent compromise they don't think is a good one. That the code cannot be audited is also not necessarily a quality issue, either. It is just impossible to feasibly audit over 10 million lines of C. (this criticism applies equally to the kernel, although I doubt anyone would claim the kernel is less audited than systemd)

> Let's not pretend that a modern "init" does only system initialisation by calling shell scripts and then disappearing.

Nobody is pretending this. the comment you are replying to literally says "I don't think it represents the current state of the community".
by ETH_start | 2025-06-12 09:21:17+00:00
That was an answer to a trick question. The inquisitor was trying to get him to admit to defying Roman rules so he could get him imprisoned. And he gave an answer that the coins that have Roman emperor faces on them belong to the emperor, implying people could stop using those coins.

Even the most generous pro-government take on that passage would have him believing that the state should be separate from the church, so church doctrine should not be imposed through state decree.
by pmontra | 2025-06-12 09:21:34+00:00
Rails has view helpers for that. Instead of

<td class="<%= teacher.colour_coded_availability %>">

there would be

<td class="<%= colour_coded_availability(teacher) %>">

but no metaprogramming, no decorators/ directory, no new concepts, only standard plain Rails. As a bonus it's even an instance of functional programming.
by canucker2016 | 2025-06-12 09:25:44+00:00
And sometimes they loved MSMAIL for the weirdest reasons...

MSMAIL was designed for Win3.x. Apps didn't have multiple threads. The MSMAIL client app that everyone used would create the email to be sent and store the email file on the system.

An invisible app, the Mail Pump, would check for email to be sent and received during idle time (N.B. Other apps could create/send emails via APIs, so you couldn't have the email processing logic in only the MSMAIL client app).

So the user could hit the Send button and the email would be moved to the Outbox to be sent. The mail pump wouldn't get a chance to process the outgoing email for a few seconds, so during that small window, if the user decided that they had been too quick to reply, they could retract that outgoing email. Career-limited move averted.

Exchange used a client-server architecture for email. Email client would save the email in the outbox and the server would notice the email almost instantly and send it on its way before the user blinked in most cases.

A few users complained that Exchange, in essence, was too fast. They couldn't retract a misguided email reply, even if they had reflexes as quick as the Flash.
by leoedin | 2025-06-12 09:26:36+00:00
Unfortunately the moment the environment and energy are involved, journalism falls apart. "Water consumption" is a meaningless metric if it 's not accompanied by other information - location, energy intensity of water, source of water, where the water goes next. None of this stuff is ever included.

A mill next to a river "consumes" the water that turns its wheel, but then immediately releases it back into the river. That's very different to a cooling tower that turns that water into vapour and releases it into the air. Which is the data centre doing?

Assuming the data centre isn't actively depleting groundwater, the only important number is how much energy it consumes (including for water related activities). Perhaps also power per unit of compute.

In a lot of places in the world, using water for cooling is likely to be more efficient than an equivalent heat pump - so should be celebrated!
by alerighi | 2025-06-12 09:27:18+00:00
It's not about security. Apple doesn't want to open on external applications, including the one run in VM/emulators, because it wants every software to pass from the AppStore. Not because security, but for the fee it has on app store purchases.

If it opens to having VM, you could just run another OS in a VM (Windows, for example) and install normal software on it (like the desktop version of most programs) and not pay the AppStore fee.

It's only a commercial reason, not a security one.
by perihelions | 2025-06-12 09:27:45+00:00
This is overloading the meaning of the phrase "right to repair". Usually on HN it means some kind of obligation on suppliers, to provide access to documentation or parts. Here it's something else: the client actually signed a contract agreeing not even to attempt to repair their own devices, which they bought:

> "six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves"

It's a very different flavor of "right to repair", so I wanted to highlight the language ambiguity.

(Tangentially, food service on a different US aircraft carrier was one of the targets of the "Fat Leonard" contractor bribery ring,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal (C-f "Former Food Service Officer for the aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington and the Seventh Fleet Command Ship, the USS Blue Ridge")

)