MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fennec-posix | 2025-07-28 03:48:18+00:00
The Internet is always gonna have undesirable traffic if you're facing it. The trick is to minimize your surfaces as much as possible:

- Only keep open ports/forward ports for applications you use, drop/block everything else.

- Use strict host-header checking for web services on port 80/443, drop anything to 403/404 that doesn't have a valid host-header for the website(s) you're hosting.

- Move SSH and other remote admin servers to use a non-standard port. (legit, find a random port number between 9000-65535)

- If it doesn't need to be public, allow-list it with iptables.

Unfortunately DO and other providers will never have 100% legit traffic, it's just the nature of the Internet's noise floor.

Hope this helps you or someone else!
by deathanatos | 2025-07-28 03:48:39+00:00
> It's a problem that's been solved in hundreds of different ways over the last 40 years

If we put the requirements of,

1. E2EE 2. Does not rely on Google. (Or ideally, any other for profit corporation.)

That eliminates like 90% of the recent trend of WebRTC P2P file transfer things that have graced HN over the last decade, as all WebRTC code seems to just copy Google's STUN/TURN servers between each other.

But as you say,

> but certain people don't want that problem to ever be solved without cloud services involved.

ISPs seem to be that in set. IPv6 would obsolete NAT, but my ISP was kind enough to ship an IPv6 firewall that by default drops incoming packets. It has four modes: drop everything, drop all inbound, a weird intermediate mode that is useless¹, and allow everything.

(¹this is Verizon fios; they claim, "This feature enables "outside-to-inside" access for IPv6 services so that an "outside" Internet service (gaming, video, etc.) can access a specific "inside" home client device & port in your local area network."; but the feature, AFAICT, requires the external peer's address. I.e., I need to know what my roaming IP will be before I leave the house, somehow, and that's obviously impossible. It seems utterly clearly slapped on to say "it comes with a firewall" but was never used by anyone at Verizon in the real world prior to shipping…)
by ajmurmann | 2025-07-28 03:48:41+00:00
Does Nextdoor actually have the local news? The other day I kept hearing sirens outside for hours. I hoped to find on Nextdoor what was going on but I mostly got lost-cat posts and people trying to sell stuff like handyman services. This is how it goes most times I check on Nextdoor. Maybe it depends on the area.
by ankit219 | 2025-07-28 03:49:51+00:00
The current paradigm is driven by two factors: one is the reliability of the models and that constraints how much autonomy you can give to an agent. Second is about chat as a medium which everyone went to because ChatGPT became a thing.

I see the value in HUDs, but only when you can be sure output is correct. If that number is only 80% or so, copilots work better so that humans in the loop can review and course correct - the pair programmer/worker. This is not to say we need ai to get to higher levels of correctness inherently, just that systems deployed need to do so before they display some information on HUD.
by SegfaultSeagull | 2025-07-28 03:50:05+00:00
You mean that’s what happened in Israel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_viol...

https://www.algemeiner.com/2025/03/11/propaganda-of-victimho...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_in_t...
by 8bitsrule | 2025-07-28 03:50:43+00:00
If there are two more companies just like that one, that's 3-thirds of the business, right?

Point is, what's to stop that from happening? In that business or any other, it's bad for many, good for a very few.

In one side-effect, the wait time for a new truck has reached up to 4 years. And the contracts are being written so that the cost can go up during that wait.
by roxolotl | 2025-07-28 03:52:19+00:00
Bezos likes to describe Amazon as a “Day 1 Company” where you should approach every day like it’s your first day.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to...
by JeremyNT | 2025-07-28 03:53:27+00:00
But what are we even doing here? We have an entire political party that is anti science. This isn't some temporary setback, it's an ideology.

Is the future going to be completely defunding science for 4 (or 8) years and then whipsawing back to normal levels once the republicans lose power?

It seems like as long as the parties are close to popularity of each other and one party is explicitly anti science there is no way to build anything sustainable. This is no way to run a country.
by maxbond | 2025-07-28 03:54:37+00:00
> [It] screams "I've never written code outside of an academic context".

SQLite, perhaps the most widely deployed software system, takes this approach.

https://sqlite.org/lemon.html

> The Lemon LALR(1) Parser Generator

> The SQL language parser for SQLite is generated using a code-generator program called "Lemon".

> ...

> Lemon was originally written by D. Richard Hipp (also the creator of SQLite) while he was in graduate school at Duke University between 1987 and 1992.

Here are the grammars, if you're curious.

https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src/parse.y
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-28 03:54:46+00:00
If only there were a company that produced flat pack bed frames with minimalist design for little money

I have a bed frame that's around 24" above the floor. I took parts of Ikea bed frames I found on the street that were thrown out around the time students change schools. I then bought some 2x4s, cut them down to size, and used a mallet and chisel to cut out mortises. The other parts of the bed frame were the tenons, and support the normal Ikea bed slats, with a couple 2x4s added underneath for extra support, and some diagonal 1x4s for leg reinforcement. Probably cost me $20 (including screws) and it packs down to a couple long boards and two rolls of bed slats.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-28 03:55:50+00:00
These aren't incompatible issues. Google has a monopoly maintained by excessive and illegal anti-competitive practices. The majority of users have no clue how to even change their default search engine, which Google actively exploits. Just checking it out - it took no less than 6 clicks into various specific menu and sub-menu settings to do so.

Poll only the subset of people that are actively aware of how to change their search engine and I suspect Google's dominance suddenly completely disappears. Remember, there was a time when Internet Explorer was the leading web browser across all age groups. Then Microsoft was forced to make it easier for people to change their default browser, and suddenly nobody was using IE anymore.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-28 03:57:16+00:00
You know what helps? Proper sex ed around the age of 12-14. That's what we do in Holland. And why we had one of the lowest teenage pregnancy ratings. Unfortunately the conservatives are complaining about this more and more (the Lentekriebels program) because they mention that men can also love men. This porn filter is also from their corner.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-28 03:57:19+00:00
> That doesn’t seem like a sensible reading as that would be tautological.

> By definition wealth and power enables those who have it to modify the status quo, otherwise we would call that having delusions of wealth and power.

Wealth and power do not obligate one to do the right thing, it’s true. That doesn’t mean that the onus doesn’t remain on the power structure whose decision making capabilities are enabled by technological means. There’s no one else whose hands last touched the apparatus from whence their technological power flows. We could ask the public collectively to respond, but their hands don’t rest upon the levers of power.

Should we raise taxes on the lower and middle classes to pay for it too? There’s no need, as the truly wealthy don’t need to touch their assets directly or even pay them any mind, as they have hired help for that. The devaluation of privacy hits the little people first, and hardest. Elites are not able to be bothered even performatively by these issues, as they are not subject to these particular failure modes of society.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France

> Cela consiste pour les pauvres à soutenir et à conserver les riches dans leur puissance et leur oisiveté. Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.

> It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
by yoz-y | 2025-07-28 03:57:52+00:00
I worked in non invasive BCIs for a couple of years (this was about 7 years ago). My current horizon estimation for a “put a helmet and gave usable brain computer interface” is never.

With implants, we are probably decades away.

What currently works best is monitoring the motor cortex with implants as those signals are relatively simple to decode (and from what I recall we start to be able to get pretty fine control). Anything tied to higher level thought is far away.

As for thought itself, I wonder how would we go about it (assuming we manage to decode it). It’s akin to making a voice controller interface, except you have to tell aloud everything you are thinking.
by tomhow | 2025-07-28 03:59:06+00:00
Original title was "The UK is Poised to Ban VPNs" but the article's title has changed and the author commented:

Edit: I've changed the title of this post from its original and slightly more inflamatory "The UK is Poised to Ban VPNs", because it seems to be getting popular and I don't want to see a million people arguing over it.
by nulld3v | 2025-07-28 03:59:22+00:00
Ehhh, when I explain jj to people I like to say that it is "a tool to edit git repos", and that "the repo is still a git repo" because people have so many misconceptions of how jj works. When they see how different jj's interface is from git, they think it's a whole new VCS and are worried that it will break compatibility with other git tools.

That said, I only do this to avoid overwhelming beginners, when actually learning/using jj it is definitely more useful to think of it as a different VCS.
by dapperdrake | 2025-07-28 03:59:40+00:00
If mathematical definitions, theorems and proofs help your way of thinking, then go for it.

Many good people don't even need math books to be really effective with data structures.

High-performance data structures are more about different Geometries (asymmetries in timings on hardware vs. access patterns -- tape vs. drum (bubble-sort, yay) vs. disk vs. flash; temporal locality, spatial locality, caching) rather than algebraic structures (symmetry properties of binary trees, bipartite graphs, groups, rings, fields, algebras, set algebras).

Some people interested in discrete mathematics and data structures go with Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth mentioned the link between drum storage and bubble sort. Just a fun tidbit.

Stuff like permutations become interesting for statistics and NP-hard search problems.

P.S. What options do you have to clarify your question? How is learning discrete mathematics from Keneth Rosen's books linked to hard requirements for understanding data structures and at the same time learning discrete mathematics step by step? Which are you targeting, data structures or discrete mathematics?
by Buttons840 | 2025-07-28 04:00:33+00:00
Sure, we should avoid people purposely doing harmful things, but they should be given the benefit of the doubt unless it can be proven they were intentionally doing harm beyond just testing the security.

One thing that is not a good option is the status-quo we're discussing here, in which a "bumbling idiot" can take down a city power grid. If that's how things are, the we shouldn't cower and hope we remain safe from every idiot out there, we need to shake things up and find the problems now. Hopefully without actually taking out any power grid.
by mkaic | 2025-07-28 04:02:42+00:00
Have you kept up with recent ML papers like MindEye, which have managed to reconstruct seen images using image generator models conditioned on fMRI signals?

Ever since that paper came out, I (someone who works in ML but have no neuroimaging expertise) have been really excited for the future of noninvasive BCU.

Would also be curious to know if you have any thoughts on the several start-ups working in parallel on optimally pumped magnetometers for portable MEG helmets.
by wonjunhwang | 2025-07-28 04:02:45+00:00
Do LLM Agents really understand Linux?.

I am working on world model for computer systems. I am designing experiment and benchmark for LLM Agents to see if they possess understanding of "Linux". World model for computer systems will be crucial next step for computer use agents to reliably plan their actions over long horizon.

Links to draft: https://open.substack.com/pub/disastermanagementtechnologies...
by quesera | 2025-07-28 04:04:31+00:00
I have a family member who worked in a Hallmark store when they launched a custom card printing service (in-store, select the cover art and write your own message, printed on a card).

She says that about 75% of the custom card customers would ask her what they should write for a message.

She wrote messages of friendship, love, birthdays, graduations, congratulations, sympathy, etc. To support her coworkers on other shifts, she filled an index card box with several dozen canned "custom" messages for Hallmark customers to choose from.

Somewhat separately, she reports that working at Hallmark is a good way to make a misanthrope out of an intelligent teenager. To which I reply that most of the intelligent teenagers I knew were already misanthropes! But the stories she tells, particularly of Christmas ornament hysteria, are hysterical.
by bjoli | 2025-07-28 04:06:06+00:00
I wrote this, which I find more usable than racket's loops: https://rikspucko.koketteriet.se/bjoli/goof-loop

It does not use mutation, and should produce just as efficient code as the racket loops. It is also extensible (and easily portable to racket!). It is written almost exclusively in syntax-rules.

Guile fibers can be found here: https://codeberg.org/fibers/fibers
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-28 04:06:14+00:00
They were not just any floppy but actually 8" floppies that the minuteman missiles used.

I've been heavily involved with computers since the mid 80s and I've never even touched one of those 8". I've seen one in a museum that's all. They were just a bigger version of the 5 1/4" floppy which I used loads and I still have most of them (and USB hardware to read them, the greaseweazle). But by the time the commodore 64 and the pc came on the scene the 8" was already obsolete. So much so that I've never seen them in the shop even back then.

I know some US home computers used them, like the IMSAI which featured in WarGames (nice tie-in with this post). But really, those 8"'ers are old.
by allenleee | 2025-07-28 04:06:31+00:00
AirPosture: Turn your AirPods into a smart posture coach

An iOS app that uses your AirPods' sensors to catch bad posture in real time.

How it works:

Real-time tilt tracking – Your AirPods already have the tech Customizable alerts – Adjust sensitivity so it nudges you only when needed Prevent strain before it starts – Stop neck pain and headaches at the source

https://www.airposture.pro/ (TestFlighting)
by nunez | 2025-07-28 04:07:00+00:00
I create courses that are taken on Linux and Windows.

On one hand, I love that curl is aliased to iwr, since I can tell learners to run a curl command without arguments and trust that it will work cross platform

On the other hand, iwr is a cmdlet that shortcuts the System.Net.WebRequest .NET method, which is very, very different from libcurl.

For example, the cmdlet uses one of its properties to obtain bytes downloaded so that it can display a progress bar. Unfortunately, doing this seems to be blocking, as downloads complete SIGNIFICANTLY more quickly if you add -NoProgress to the command. This break cross platform compatibility, however, which adds complexity during course development (more tests, more copy, etc)
by hnfong | 2025-07-28 04:08:12+00:00
In these cases, if you speak too much you get killed.

I'll post one such case to corroborate the article, since it was big news in my community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Hong_Kong_trade_office_sp...

Allegedly involved are Hong Kong government, multiple private security and private investigators from the UK with ex-military/law enforcement background, and a mysterious death after the whole scandal was exposed.

Which sounds exactly like what the article is describing.
by onecommentman | 2025-07-28 04:08:14+00:00
Length of time from end of WWI (the war to end all wars, remember) to start of WWII (the next war) was 20 years and 9 months. To quote the late Tom Lehrer, “we taught them a lesson in 1918 and they’ve hardly bothered us since then”.

Length of time from the end of WWII (ending with two ideological opponents, victors who saw the fruits of victory, a ramped up industrial base focused on armaments and a devastated landscape of Europe and Asia to fight on) to WWIII is 79 years, 10 months and counting. No one reading this site has experienced a World War (and if you did, I’d like to shake your hand). Whatever keeps that counter ticking over have been, and are, dollars well-spent.

A bit like keeping your hand raised to keep elephants away from your US house (well, it’s worked so far). But the alternative is just…unacceptable.
by WiggleGuy | 2025-07-28 04:09:29+00:00
Currently thinking about better ways to spread the word about https://theretowhere.com (my website that makes it easier to find apartments and Airbnbs/hotels close to things you care about).

I've actually started getting some back and fourth feedback with a couple users, which has kept me motivated and validated. But I need more organic traffic somehow. I've recently released a new usecase (https://theretowhere.com/vacation) that might be more well suited for vacationers, so let's see if that sticks.

Funny anecdote from today - I just set up Slack notifications so I get more instant knowledge of errors on the platform, and the first notification came in just a couple moments after I deployed. It was for an error that I thought noone would run into for a couple days. Imagine my (bad) luck!
by ComplexSystems | 2025-07-28 04:09:44+00:00
I am curious how much of this is real. I mean, it's a great story, and it fits a bunch of tropes about ol reliable systems that don't need a-changin', but it seems crazy to put any actual information about the US's nuclear weapons' systems infrastructure in the New York Times. At least I hope everything in this article is fake, anyway.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-28 04:09:51+00:00
By they, do you mean that you said that?

They said it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44704593

But when you responded, am I bound by their context or yours? For clarity, I am responding to you both in a good faith steelman manner, so please respond in kind.

I thought the ambiguity remained, because different people have different opinions about network isolation, what it entails, how it may be implemented securely, and how different implementations have different implications regarding failure to maintain isolation in the event of a security breach that compromises networking equipment. Most folks aren’t running diodes at home. If your isolation relies upon configuration of reconfigurable equipment and/or VLANs, that isn’t isolated to readings that require or imply a highly secure computing environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network
by somenameforme | 2025-07-28 04:10:18+00:00
People often say things like this, but it's not supported by polling (or my own extensive anecdotal evidence) whatsoever. [1] For instance 81% believe the risks outweigh the benefits of corporate data collection, and 66% believe the same of government data collection.

64% would be uncomfortable with companies sharing their personal data with outside groups doing research that "might help them improve society", which is great because it shows people understand that such phrases aren't just about sitting around and singing kumbaya.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-an...
by jongjong | 2025-07-28 04:10:48+00:00
Government almost always seems to overpay for everything. It's a racket to benefit big finance.

The idea that everything is so complex that only a small number of suppliers are capable of building any machine is preposterous.

I bet you with a budget of $50 million, I could design and build a Firetruck from scratch as well as the entire production line and I could produce each subsequent truck for $200k max, made in America. I could probably have the whole thing almost fully automated with robots in 5 years with a bit of additional funding.

And I know nothing about mechanical or electrical engineering. I just know I could do it. I would find the right people. There doesn't need to be that many components to bloat up the cost/complexity to $2 million, that's ridiculous. I'm no Elon Musk. I just think many people with a little bit of brain could do it if given the opportunity.

The problem is lack of opportunity. I will not be given this opportunity because it works against established financial interests. The economy is a zero-sum game, that's a fact. Everybody knows this because nobody would even give me the opportunity to prove it even though $50 million would be chump change for big finance.

Why would anyone fund a venture which involves work and risk, when they can already extract the same nominal profits without any additional risk or work? Nobody is thinking about 'real value'; everyone is chasing nominal gains in a race to the bottom; whipping up the entire economy into a giant souffle full of air.

Caring about nominal gains is like caring only about volume and ignoring the weight... If the economy was a cooking competition, everyone would end up baking souffle, chocolate mousse and meringue. Nobody would be baking pound cake.
by MilnerRoute | 2025-07-28 04:12:47+00:00
There's been some criticism of researchers who mistook the stitching together of human-like sentences for actual consciousness.

I thought of that because The Atlantic recently pointed out some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are actually leaning into promoting the idea they can build/own/market some corporate-controlled AI consciousness. (Many AI services "market themselves through what [tech journalist Karen] Hao calls the industry's 'tradition of anthropomorphizing': talking about LLMs as though they contain humanlike minds, and selling them to the public on this basis.")

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...

I guess if you're posting here for a reaction: aren't you worried that you're inaccurately anthropomorphizing your service, right from the get-go?

I also found it hard to identify what it was trained on. (But surely it's just repeating snatches of previously-transcribed conversations?)
by kdinn | 2025-07-28 04:13:45+00:00
A clear, simple Markdown viewer for the Mac: ViewMD

When using developer AI agents like Claude Code, often they output, and use, .md files like CLAUDE.md, README.md, etc. You largely want to just read these, and if Claude updates them, read the latest version.

Other markdown apps incorporate editing, split screens, etc. I just wanted a neatly formatted read only view. And if you want to edit them, just use something specifically designed for that like Sublime Text, my viewer will instantly load with the updated file.

Anyway, check it out: search for "ViewMD" in the Mac App Store.