MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-01 03:41:45+00:00
> The only thing I hate is the stupidity of the command/ctrl behavior that's different than windows/linux. But I fixed that with a mechanical keyboard running VIA.

Amusingly, that's probably my favorite thing on Darwin! It fixes annoying conflicts like ctrl-c meaning copy except in a terminal where it means (approximately) kill the running process; now ctrl-c means kill, and cmd-c always means copy. Similarly, web browsers can have terminals that I don't accidentally close because ctrl-w only means delete-word, not close tab. It's good enough that I've passingly toyed with porting it to the FOSS-unix ecosystem, but I don't think it's practical.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-07-01 03:41:51+00:00
AES-GCM-SIV[1] does something similar to your per chunk derived key, except that AES-GCM-SIV expects the key to be user-provided, and the IV is synthetic - hence Synthetic IV mode.

What's your threat model? This has "interesting"[3] properties. For example, given a file, the provider can figure out who has the file. Or, given a file, an arbitrary user can figure out if some other user already has the file. Users may even be able to "teleport" files to each other, like the infamous Dropbox Dropship[2].

I suspect why no one has tried this is many-fold: (1) Most providers want to store plaintext. Those few providers who don't want to store plaintext, whether for secrecy or deniability reasons, also don't want to store anything else correlatable, either. (2) Space is cheap. (3) Providers like being able to charge for space. Since providers sell space at a markup, they almost want you to use more space, not less.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES-GCM-SIV [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_(software) [3]: "Interesting" is not a word you want associated with your cryptography usage, to say the least.
by gxs | 2025-07-01 03:43:02+00:00
I’ve been asked at work to build less than savory stuff, here are some general observations, none of which are admittedly an excuse:

* you get caught up in the moment, hell bent on solving the problem you don’t really think twice

* you don’t want to get that stink on you, you don’t want to be that guy that brings this type of stuff up

* you are mindful of the fact that you are being very well compensated to build it and you don’t want to lose your job

* you know it’s going to fall on deaf ears - maybe they will pay lip service, maybe they won’t but either way nothing will happen

* in the back of your mind you figure someone else is fighting the good fight

On and on, so many different things can go through your mind, who knows which it’ll be on any given day, on any given project
by tptacek | 2025-07-01 03:43:31+00:00
This piece starts out super-duper inside baseball (optimizing DER encoding for, in the main, X.509 certificate handling) in Rust code that is increasingly leveraged by Python's cryptography stack. But it ends up somewhere crazy: with an LLM agent apparently one-shotting an LLVM optimization, then semiformally verifying the change, which is ultimately merged by the LLVM team.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-01 03:43:45+00:00
An interesting thing about fertility rates is that they determine not only population, but the exact young:old ratios, approximate average age, and more! Imagine you have a fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation will be half as large as the one before it. As humans have a peak fertility window of ~20 years, this ends up being the time of a generation, making it really easy to model.

Imagine you have exactly 1 newborn in the latest generation. Then the prior generation must be composed of 2 ~20 year olds, 4 ~40 year olds, 8 ~60 year olds and 16 ~80 year olds. So you end up with a total ratio of 24:7 old (defined as 60+):young and a 24:6 or 4:1 retirement:working age (after we remove the 1 newborn). By contrast a fertility rate of 2 means each generation is the same size as the one prior so you end up with a 1:1 retirement:working ratio. And with positive population growth you have an exponential system with more workers than retirees

This is one of the main mechanisms through which fertility collapse drives economic collapse. Not only does your population shrink far more quickly than most realize, but you end up with the overwhelming majority of your remaining population being elderly. So yes - you have fewer people consuming resources, but you also have exponentially fewer people working those resources.
by nonethewiser | 2025-07-01 03:44:32+00:00
>Whether they call it now "prompt" or "context" engineering because it's the same tinkering to find something that "sticks" in non-deterministic space.

I dont quite follow. Prompts and contexts are different things. Sure, you can get thing into contexts with prompts but that doesn't mean they are entirely the same.

You could have a long running conversation with a lot in the context. A given prompt may work poorly, whereas it would have worked quite well earlier. I don't think this difference is purely semantic.

For whatever it's worth I've never liked the term "prompt engineering." It is perhaps the quintessential example of overusing the word engineering.
by wavemode | 2025-07-01 03:45:04+00:00
I wouldn't really say "very often". Occasionally, perhaps.

Even from a pure zero-sum mathematical perspective, it can make sense to invest even as much as 2 or 3 months of engineer time on cloud cost savings measures. If the engineer is making $200K, that's a $30000 - $50000 investment. When you see the eye-watering cloud bills many startups have, you would realize that, that investment is peanuts in comparison to the potential savings over the next several years.

And then you also have to keep in mind that, these things are usually not actually zero-sum. The engineer could be new, and working on the efficiency project helps them onboard to your stack. It could be the case that customers are complaining (or could start complaining in the future) about how slow your product is, so you actually improve the product by improving the infrastructure. Or it could just be the very common case that there isn't actually a higher-value thing for that engineer to be working on at that time.
by cmcaleer | 2025-07-01 03:46:04+00:00
> Surely it can't be a mere lack of land that drives the cost of rice.

It's not, it's a consequence of some land reform policies that made sense after WW2 to take power away from the rich, but has meant that economies of scale for rice farming has suffered later on.

The median rice farm owner in Japan only is in charge of single digit acres, whereas in EU/US it's like tens or hundreds of acres. So it's harder to justify mechanisation since the economies of scale don't work out and the children of farmers don't want to continue working the farm after their parents are no longer able to because the ceiling of what the farm can produce is low and economic and social prospects are better elsewhere.

That's without even getting in to the JA and the fact that a lot of these farmers are part time.

It's a really complicated issue without a simple fix or cause like labour costs. Realistically these farms are going to have to get consolidated, which is something that is happening, but slowly.
by mootoday | 2025-07-01 03:46:07+00:00
That was a great intro to clap, thanks for writing it up!

I've been building clap CLIs for a while and started to put together a template: https://github.com/mootoday/cli-template.

It also includes a crate I developed to reduce the boilerplate code for nested commands: https://crates.io/crates/clap-nested-commands
by dgoldstein0 | 2025-07-01 03:49:16+00:00
Perhaps then there should be a subscription API, so Apple could make the nice "see all your subscriptions in one place" UI? Or maybe banks could better offer this as part of online banking for credit cards. Not sure the right place to put this.

Anyhow I do see your point that narrowing user options can lead to better UX - if you actually like all the tradeoffs they make. The problem is if you don't, your SoL. And in this case the trade-off is Apple taking a giant extra cut so... I think it's reasonable that folks don't like that trade-off.
by dabbz | 2025-07-01 03:49:35+00:00
There's very low margin of error for a user trying something over speech (where they don't know what's actually capable). A user tends to try something once, if it fails they nearly never try it again. So now the question is, how do you get a user to try it again when you've fixed it? Alexa's approach has just about driven everyone mad "By the way, did you know..."
by kilpikaarna | 2025-07-01 03:50:13+00:00
I don't think the OP specified web based?

Personally I'd love a separate thing that could crawl the photos in a folder I point it to and then let me search using semantics and natural language. But can it please just be an exe I can double click when I need it? If it involves maintaining a server or faffing about with Docker I'm probably not going to bother.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-07-01 03:50:38+00:00
Require certain disclosures to be made in not so fine print.

Require that each privacy waiver is individually initialed, per clause, in wet ink.

This shit would end tomorrow if they had to start delivering modems with 1 inch high letters that said "THIS DEVICE WILL TRACK YOUR LOCATION WITHIN YOUR HOME AND SHARE THAT DATA WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE", and the modem didn't work until you went down to the Comcast store to sign your rights away.

You don't have to force anything except taking this knowledge out of the fine print and prove that your customers are actually aware of the contractual clauses they are subject to.

The tech industry could come together and come up with a privacy standard guarantee that device manufacturers could use (Something as simple as, we will never share data with law enforcement unless legally compelled).

There's a lot of solutions, ranging from technical (firmware update) to social (pass some laws with teeth).
by quantified | 2025-07-01 03:50:59+00:00
Dot-com bubble: popped, and if you don't have a .com presence you have a .net, .org, or similar Blockchain bubble: popped? Looking good, always profitable to bet on crime and stupidity. Real estate bubble? Popped, but what do think about the asset price of housing now?

Moore's Law wasn't a law, it was a reflection of investment which reach dizzying heights in its heyday. I think there's a ton of over-hype now but some stuff will come out of it.
by cryptonector | 2025-07-01 03:51:26+00:00
A big stumbling block is that Fil-C requires all C in the program to be built with Fil-C, including all libraries. That means that Debian and such would need to either adopt Fil-C (perhaps for some distros) or ship Fil-C and non-Fil-C libraries for all pkgs with libraries. The alternative is that you have to build everything yourself, and this gets painful if you need to support ELFs/DLLs.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-01 03:54:15+00:00
RF human detection sensors ((that can even tell you the heart rate of someone in the room (if its below 120 I think)), cost almost nothing. Or at least they did before tariffs .

They can also be programmed to detect people on the floor, so if you have elderly in your house you can know if someone fell, without cameras. They are made for hospitals but are cheap, but not 100% accurate for HR and falls, but reliable enough for security, and cheap.
by trinsic2 | 2025-07-01 03:54:59+00:00
> Earlier today, Proton filed court papers in the US District Court for the Northern District of California to join an existing class-action lawsuit against Apple. Proton is a plaintiff in the case, but we are representing and suing on behalf of a class of similarly situated developers. Challenging one of the most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism is not a decision we make lightly, but Proton has long championed online freedom, privacy, and security, and we believe this action is necessary to ensure the internet of the future lives up to its potential.

Challenging one of the most powerful corporations in history, god I feel so much safer already. Sounds like PR campaign speak. I trust Proton as much as I trust Microsoft.
by fastball | 2025-07-01 03:57:00+00:00
My YouTube does not auto-play, so not sure what you mean by that. Also the ability to "hide shorts" isn't a feature I'd expect from any other web platform out-of-the-box, so definitely didn't expect to get it with my Premium subscription.

Wrt auto-dubs, they can be turned off. To me this feels less deliberately hostile on YT's part and more tunnel vision where they assumed everyone would find this to be a helpful feature and didn't even think about adding a user-level preference to disable it.

But also I find user-level preferences kinda an anti-pattern anyway. Would be nice if you disable it for one video and it just remembers that preference for the next one (or vice versa).
by vips7L | 2025-07-01 03:57:29+00:00
I love exceptions. I also think they’re the best mechanism of error handling, but in my experience a lot of developers just don’t seem to “get” exceptions. They seem to be scared of them from runtime crashes or they try to predict when they’ll happen instead of just catching/responding. I really think that’s because most implementations of exceptions are not checked.

I really think that a language that invested in them properly more developers would come to see their value. I truly hope that will be Java some day. Making checked exceptions work across lambdas and providing language constructs to uncheck them would go miles.
A curated AI tool directory with free tools and traffic trends
by ximu | 2025-07-01 03:58:37+00:00
I made halotool.com to help people (and myself) discover free, practical AI tools without getting lost in endless, outdated lists. It features 1000+ tools, updated daily, with filters for language, category, pricing, and platform. Each tool includes traffic trend data to help you see what’s actually used. It also offers curated AI news in Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean. Still solo-built, and always improving. Happy to hear your thoughts
by usefulcat | 2025-07-01 03:58:54+00:00
> Sounds like, at least in some limited circumstances (using the provided WiFi AP, having this feature turned on, etc), ISPs are going to be able to tell law enforcement/courts whether anyone was home at a certain time or not.

Kind of, but I'll bet most homes would frequently also appear "empty" any time the occupants are asleep. Not everyone gets up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-01 03:59:10+00:00
> Strictly, you just need a way to indicate the repeating. No?

It depends on your data structure, yes. You can also do the separate numerator / denominator thing, and I'm sure there are other ways too. Just that naively if you try representing it, that's when you need infinite space. Or if you do it the way IEEE-754 formats do.
by alnwlsn | 2025-07-01 03:59:52+00:00
Side note, but if you're trying to sell off this stuff, you better do it soon. Train nuts like this are a dying breed. Probably will all be mostly worthless in a couple decades, along with commemorative plates, or the "good china" your parents never use.

Market is hot(ish) now though, or was a few years ago. A friends dad died and he had trains. We helped ebay all of it. Owned a toy store or something, lots of rare stuff (like window displays). We even had a guy buy one of the rare posters, return it for questionable reasons, and then start selling counterfeits. Even so, the grand total wasn't a ton of money, more within the "worth doing" category.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-01 04:00:03+00:00
> People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time.

That sounds no different from comming up with narratives on a playground. That's not a designed narrative, that's people making up a narrative where none exists. Hey, the jungle gym in our secret base! The swings are space ship! The ground is lava!

I think we can all imagine what he wanted to build even if he failed to come close to building it. He wanted to make a story machine where you could play the game and converse with the characters in a free flowing way yet still have the game provide a setting and conflict. Imagine talking to characters in the holodeck on Star Trek. Ideally where, over the course of the game, the dialog and interactions are designed in real time within the constraints of the setting. And, the way you treat characters influences how they react. Be a dick to the bartender, all his connections are harder to get consessions from. Be nice to one romantic partner, get snubbed by another, etc... And not just by canned responses. Tell one character a piece of info and it gets leaked to their closest contacts who then change their behavior/dialog based on this new knowledge.
by photon_garden | 2025-07-01 04:00:20+00:00
It may feel harmless to you, but research consistently shows a large proportion of men feel insecure about their penis size [1].

Let’s assume those studies are off by an order of magnitude and it’s only 1% of men who feel insecure about their penis. In the US, that’s still 1.7 million men.

If I had to choose between vulgar jokes and two million people having a better relationship with their bodies, I know where my priorities lie.

[1]: https://www.issm.info/sexual-health-qa/what-percentage-of-me...
by goodthink | 2025-07-01 04:00:57+00:00
Writing multisynq.io apps in newswpeaklanguage.org. Two game changing technologies now working together. My dream Frankenstein has finally come to life! I (re)implemented my toy application, The Chalculator, to yet another platform (the 7th or 8th maybe?) [1] I added comments to my blog _without any backend whatsoever_ [2] I built a counter app using Newspeak's Hopscotch GUI components to respond to Multisynq (javascipt) subscriptions (the final milestone) [3] 1) https://youtu.be/MPW5L1gj4Dw?si=Lms3odwQElZu_mLu 2) https://youtu.be/8gcCIaXmQjU?si=Qg2XSDu6mIhSAd9d 3) https://youtu.be/2-tZzB8MAX0?si=6nZ1nD6d4isdQd-5
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-01 04:01:15+00:00
I don't think just producing meat is enough to stabilize the price of food anywhere.

It helps, reducing most of the need for government intervention, but it doesn't seem to be enough.

Also, it's wasteful, at least from some point of view. You stabilize the price by consuming the excess, but you would still need to survive an eventual shortage. It may not be a huge problem worldwide, but Japan in particular doesn't have a lot of excess capacity.
by bogtog | 2025-07-01 04:02:59+00:00
> If a company invests billions in R&D to create hardware and its integrated software, shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it? Why should I be forced to open up the carefully designed ecosystem I’ve built?

Once a company becomes massive enough and displays properties of a monopoly, the rules of free commerce change

(that being said, I agree that Apple largely provides users with a high-quality product)
by miki123211 | 2025-07-01 04:05:30+00:00
They already can.

If they have access to your router and its logs, they can simply check whether your mobile device was in WiFi range at that time.

Sure, mobile devices can be turned off, but at that point, so can routers.

In 99.9% of circumstances, it's a "nothing burger" from a law enforcement perspective, except maybe for detecting actual crime occurring when no residents are home.
by josephg | 2025-07-01 04:05:52+00:00
> For example, my country routes internet traffic to Australia solely to take advantage of its pro-surveillance laws while undermining my rights as a US citizen

Then sort out the laws in your country.

As an Australian citizen, I can't "fix" US politics. I can't and I wouldn't want to try - because its not any of my business. If the US government really wants to infringe on your american civil liberties, there's nothing I - or any other Australian - can do to stop them. (Well other than meddling in your elections or invading - and I don't think anybody wants that). Its up to you and your countrymen. Nobody else can vote.

As for the environment and the great barrier reef - politically I totally agree with you. Its an unfolding, unforced tragedy. But you've also gotta understand, if your president says he wants to largely ignore the rest of the world and do whats best today for americans, it weakens your moral standing when you lecture others about doing the same. You can't have it both ways.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-01 04:06:42+00:00
And another reason you don’t want laws governing the internet is that politicians are dumb. As soon as I heard about the laws I knew this was going to happen.

https://reason.com/2025/01/24/age-verification-laws-meet-vpn...

> ”Google searches for online tools like VPNs have surged in Florida after Pornhub, one of the world's largest adult websites, blocked access to users in the state," CBS News reported earlier this month. "Since the end of November, Google searches for VPNs have surged in the Florida, according to Google Trends. From the week of Dec. 22 - 28 to Dec. 29 - Jan. 4, searches nearly doubled. Since then, the numbers have gone even higher."
by gertlex | 2025-07-01 04:07:18+00:00
I had that thought of "existing installers are sus..." but didn't connect to "fingerprinting it as malware". Makes sense.

Couple questions as savvy tech person but not working day-to-day in security/IT:

Would a regular home user with an old installer in their Downloads folder need to worry? (is a bad download file going to target looking for these old installers, then moving files around, etc?)

On the other hand, I could see corporate IT having the stronger case of proactively wanting to flag this installer if present on their systems.
by sneak | 2025-07-01 04:07:43+00:00
I remember many years ago when I realized this is what they were doing with iMessage. It’s really truly brilliant.

I went all in; for years I paid 100% to replace phones of friends or lovers who were still sending archaic SMS.

It’s the implicit camraderie between the speaker and listener in “A computer for the rest of us…”

Today, I don’t even have iMessage enabled on my disposable carrier number. It’s off off.
by slater | 2025-07-01 04:08:07+00:00
> Where did you get the idea that it isn't possible to do so?

Not op, but the various "must use our genuine brand printer cartridges!" schemes that printer manufacturers have used over the past, oh, 2 decades might have something to do with it?

edit to clarify: I mean the cartridges with their own chips that HP et al. tried to make happen a while back
by blobbers | 2025-07-01 04:10:27+00:00
Staple yes. Didn't really think of it as healthy, but you're right didn't think of it as unhealthy.

We did make our own jam growing up though, so ... there's that?

Either way, I'm way more conscious now as a nutrient nerd but I believe everyone else is... well, 'a little naive' to put it nicely.
by ninjin | 2025-07-01 04:10:46+00:00
Played a tiny bit of the first one in the 90s, but like you I only played through the trilogy just recently (in my case, last year) and on original hardware. I would not go so far as to say disliked, but you are absolutely correct that the controls are floaty (although not as bad as Sonic, but Sonic is truly awful) and it is often a challenge to tell where objects and platforms end. The third game has the weakest music, but I would consider a lot of the level and boss design substantially better. Overall, I think there is a heavy amount of nostalgia going on when it comes to the fans, but that is okay as long as we speak openly about it.

As for difficulty, we will have to agree to disagree. Only point that had me somewhat frustrated was the waterfall boss in the last game and that one had me stumped for some time (should have read the manual I guess?). Overall, I would still recommend the games as good for their time and among the better action platformers for their console, but they really are nowhere close to a masterpiece like Super Mario World that has pretty much perfected controls and you can tell exactly where platforms and objects start and end.