MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soperj | 2025-07-15 20:18:25+00:00
Great article, too bad they had to include Steve Jobs.

"The only problem with Micro­soft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And what that means is – I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way – in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. "

All those original ideas they lifted right from Xerox Parc.

Edit: Sorry, forgot we were talking about design ideas. All those original ideas they lifted right from Braun.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-07-15 20:18:49+00:00
> "Intent to destroy" is usually difficult to prove, but in this case, it's the easiest part to prove. Israeli leaders (including the President, Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and other ministers), politicians, generals, soldiers and TV commentators (not to mention opinion polling of the general population) have made so many genocidal statements that it's difficult to keep track.

So, if you can’t prove the intent, you are saying it’s enough to use “polling”, TV interviews, and what the politicians had to say? I guess it’s bad news for the Palestinians, then. With Palestinians we have official policy that pays money to kill Israelis regardless of their status and political views. Way more convincing than “polling”.
by maqp | 2025-07-15 20:19:07+00:00
>That would be a preimage attack.

My bad you're right with the terminology.

>The best you could do would be to generate two different keypairs with the same fingerprint. That doesn't have any security implications.

Except undetectable MITM attacks.

If you're encrypting with adversary's keys you think is valid because the attacker's keys' fingerprint matches with what you're expecting, you're going to have bad time. PGP's main use case is of course use of pinned long term keys, but nation states won't mind swapping values during TLS MITM access if they can. (Which is why E2EE is a thing.)

>Note that Signal effectively only has 100 bits per identity for the key fingerprint (they combine two identities to make the 60 decimal digit safety number)

Thanks I learned something new today.

"However, there are some more advanced use cases which per-conversation safety numbers might not provide for (such as Charlie verifying Alice’s fingerprint by checking with Bob), so we designed the safety number format to be a sorted concatenation of two 30-digit individual numeric fingerprints. Advanced users that would like to use fingerprints for more complex use cases can separate the two fingerprints from the safety number if necessary." https://signal.org/blog/safety-number-updates/
by jonsneyers | 2025-07-15 20:19:20+00:00
Thanks!

Yes, my hope is that jxl can become an interoperable format for layered images. It does not have all the functionality of image editor formats (PSD, XCF, etc), but it does have a very useful subset of that (named layers with basic blend modes). For interchange, it would be very suitable since it has state of the art compression (both lossy and lossless), does not force you to merge the layers before exporting, while the images can be viewed directly by any application that supports jxl — since the blending happens inside the decoder, the viewing application can be blissfully unaware that it even is a layered image, it will just get the merged image from the decoder if it doesn't ask for the individual layers.
by mlsu | 2025-07-15 20:19:59+00:00
Maybe it's easier if we use a toy example.

"In the future, you will inevitably give me money. Let's discuss how much you'll give me."

vs.

"In the future, there might be some amount of money exchanged between us, in either direction. Let's discuss that."

Clearly, both discussions involve the same thing (money, us), but one is much more restricted than the other, and clearly benefits me more.

In this case of course, this isn't a discussion among individuals, but rather a social change. These are huge multinational corporations, with incredible powers of coercion. Of course they're framing things in a way that is maximally beneficial to them. I think the idea here is to raise the point that we should consider not blindly accepting their framing.
by Broken_Hippo | 2025-07-15 20:20:07+00:00
No, but it was good enough for most movies. The person you replied to is correct: It was glorious at the time. We were all amazed by graphics, even on those old tvs. The "movie theater experience" wasn't worth the hassle for anything but movies with good action and graphics - things like comedies didn't get uniquely better at the theater.

It didn't need to be about the same or better, it just needed to be good enough to appreciate that you weren't dealing with the downsides. The theaters weren't that good back in the late 90's (in fact, most of the ones I visited in my teens have renovated to be more current sometime around 2010 or something). All people needed was more realistic alternatives. More and more folks were getting cable, DVD players were more affordable, and places like walmart sold DVDs for a cheaper price than you'd pay for a full price movie. Netflix started in the late 90s too.

Yes, I know folks could rent videos before this. I remember walking down to rent NES games when I was young - right next to the movies at the grocery store. This was a far cry from the stores of the late 90s, though. They got better (and worse).
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-15 20:20:14+00:00
If I want the "correct answer" I'll research it, maybe even ask ChatGPT. If I'm having a conversation I'm interesed in what the other participants think.

If I don't know something, I'll say I don't know, and maybe learn something by trying to understand it. If I just pretend I know by pasting in what ChatGPT says, I'm not only a fraud but also lazy.
by evil-olive | 2025-07-15 20:20:29+00:00
hoo boy this needs a 100 foot tall flashing neon sign saying "consider the source"

Dershowitz was Epstein's lawyer in 2006 [0] when he was granted immunity from federal prosecution:

> According to the Miami Herald, the non-prosecution agreement "essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein's sex crimes". At the time, this halted the investigation and sealed the indictment. The Miami Herald said: "Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims."

Dershowitz was also accused [1] by Virginia Giuffre of being one of the people she had sex with while being trafficked by Epstein. she later retracted those allegations after a defamation lawsuit from Dershowitz.

and now, here's Dershowitz claiming that the "client list" doesn't exist, don't worry about it, there's nothing to see here.

however, if a "client list" did exist [2] it seems like there's a damn good chance Dershowitz would be on it, in some form or another, potentially corroborating Giuffre's allegations and contradicting Dershowitz's denials.

also, a potential release of Epstein-related files from the DOJ might include documents about that 2006 sweetheart deal that would paint Dershowitz in a pretty bad light.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Non-prosecutio...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dershowitz#Retracted_sexu...

2: I think there's excessive focus, but for understandable reasons, around the idea of a single "Client List.docx" document, when the reality is much more likely that there are a huge pile of documents seized under a search warrant, and not necessarily one single smoking-gun document.
by JohnMakin | 2025-07-15 20:20:46+00:00
> That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever.

And this kind of meaningless factoid was immediately usurped by the Threads app release, which IMO is kind of a pointless app. Maybe let's find a more meaningful metric before saying someone else's claim is wild.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-07-15 20:20:53+00:00
Every computer is a general purpose computer. What would you do to force me to participate exclusively in your nanny-net? I suspect any answer to that question requires an incredible amount of coordination and participation.

The real problem with the internet, as I see it, is centralization. This is a product of monopoly, which is the core feature of copyright. A truly better internet would replace the authoritative structure of copyright with a truly decentralized model.

As far as I can tell, the only hard problem left in decentralized networking is moderation. No one wants to browse an unmoderated internet. The problem is that moderation is structured as an authoritative hierarchy, so it's not compatible with true decentralization.

I propose we replace moderation with curation. Every user can intentionally choose the subset of internet they want to interact with, defined by attestations from other users, all backed with a web of trust. This way everyone is the highest authority, and users can help each other avoid content they are disinterested in.
by Yizahi | 2025-07-15 20:21:13+00:00
War, duh. No, really, the only reason for that happening was a total war. War caused devastated countries to collectively sign Bretton-Woods which affirmed USD as a reference currency and allowed USA to externalize a lot of it's issue, both immediate and future. Allowing this externalization, plus major political influence in the first decades after the war, plus rapid innovation accelerated by the war allowed USA to become filthy rich, which allowed Homer Simpson to afford a mansion, car and 4 jobless dependents on a single government job.

Unfortunately the rapid global development means that even new world war wouldn't replicate this period. Train has left, bye bye, and won't return in our lifetimes. We need to adapt.
by blibble | 2025-07-15 20:21:13+00:00
> I want this solved so much - across all of the operating systems I use.

> Ideally I'd like to never run code I download from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again.

isn't this the sort of thing AI could generate from a handful of prompts?

(don't forget to tell it it's an expert developer with a 20 year background in security!)
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-07-15 20:23:06+00:00
Especially if it's not disclosed up front, and especially when it supplants higher-value content. I've been shocked how little time it's taken for AI slop SEO optimized blogs to overtake the articles written by genuine human experts, especially in niche product reviews and technical discussions.

However, whether or not people like it is almost irrelevant. The thing that matters is not whether economics likes it.

At least so far, it looks like economics absolutely loves LLMs: Why hire expensive human customer support when you can just offload 90% of the work to a computer? Why pay expensive journalists when you can just have the AI summarize it? Why hire expensive technical writers to document your code when you can just give it to the AI and check the regulatory box with docs that are good enough?
by swat535 | 2025-07-15 20:24:45+00:00
> LLMs can’t do ads without compromising the product.

It depends on what you mean by "compromise" here but they sure can inject ads.. like make the user wait 5 seconds, show an ad, then reply..

They can delay the response times and promote "premium" plans, etc

Lots of ways to monetize, I suppose the question is: will users tolerate it?

Based on what I've seen, the answer is yes, people will tolerate anything as long as it's "free".
by floren | 2025-07-15 20:24:49+00:00
A teddy bear is too bulky for convenience. How about Tamagotchi but it talks to you. Talkagotchi. Basically that horrible Friend necklace but in a cutely-colored egg shape that clips to your backpack. I want to not be alive.

edit: when my kid asks for one I'll know it's time to move the family to a cabin deep in the woods.
by torginus | 2025-07-15 20:24:55+00:00
Here's what I think - while Altman was busy trying to convince the public the AGI was coming in the next two weeks, with vague tales that were equaly ominous and utopistic, he (and his fellow leaders) have been extremely busy at trying hard to turn OpenAI into a product company with some killer offerings, and from the article, it seems they were rather good and successful in that.

Considering the high stakes, money, and undoubtedly the ego involved, the writer might have acquired a few bruises along the way, or might have lost out on some political in fights (remember how they mentioned they built multiple Codex prototypes, it must've sucked to see some other people's version chosen instead of your own).

Another possible explanation is that the writer's just had enough - enough money to last a lifetime, just started a family, made his mark on the world, and was no longer compelled (or have been able to) keep up with methed-up fresh college grads.
by jimbokun | 2025-07-15 20:25:20+00:00
> It's much harder to prove stuff this way when you call foo(), bar() and baz() across unit boundaries, when they modify global state and are written by different developers.

I think this reinforces the article's point.

Code like this is much more likely to contain bugs and be harder to maintain without introducing more bugs, than programs written from the outset with this goal of "provability".
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-15 20:25:26+00:00
I wonder if this can replace the PGP backend from "pass": https://www.passwordstore.org/

I don't really want to replace it. It works fine. But the toolchain for other platforms is becoming difficult to manage. I use pass with PGP Yubikeys as backing for each encrypted password. But the developer of the Android version has stopped supporting it and the person who took it over has removed yubikey support because he doesn't use it himself and doesn't care about it.

Of course I need to access my passwords on Linux, Windows, Mac, Android. Only iOS is not possible because Apple doesn't allow raw APDU access to NFC tags so you can't do OpenPGP functions.

I also don't want to use a password manager with a single master password like bitwarden. I want each password to be encrypted individually with the public key from a number of hardware tags (multiple, that's also a hard requirement). This way not my whole password database is instantly leaked when my master password gets compromised. Even when my endpoint gets completely compromised, the only passwords they will have are the ones I decrypted on it since it was compromised. Yubikeys require a physical touch for every decryption so you also can't 'milk' them for credentials when they're inserted and unlocked. Also, any password manager I use must be self-hosted, I hate and don't trust the big tech companies.

I wonder if this could be a new backend. And have support on all platforms (though iOS I don't care about personally, but it would be a nice to have).
by pumphaus | 2025-07-15 20:25:41+00:00
Heh, I would not ever have expected to see my company mentioned on HN. I'm the software tech lead at Menlo Systems, we're building those frequency combs that Thorlabs sells.

Re the commoditization: Part of the problem is that customers, especially the scientific ones, don't want "commodity" frequency combs. Nearly every comb we sell is tailored to the specific customer in one way or another.

Industrial customers start to be interested in frequency combs more and more. I guess this will be the clientele that values off-the-shelf products more, eventually paving the way for commoditization.
by toast0 | 2025-07-15 20:26:21+00:00
You don't really want to, but if you configure all of the LAG participants on the path to do round-robin or similar balancing rather than hashing based on addresses, you can have data in one flow that exceeds an individual connection. You'll also be pretty likely to get out of order data, and tcp receivers will exercise their reassembly buffer, which will kill performance and you'll rapidly wish you hadn't done all that configuration work. If you do need more than one link's worth of throughput, you'll almost always do better by running multiple flows, but you may need still need to configure your network so it hashes in a way that you can get diverse paths between two hosts, defaults might not give you diversity even on different flows.
by yubblegum | 2025-07-15 20:26:41+00:00
Asked it for a "critical look at Communist Party of China in terms of governance" and it started off printing stuff and then boom, "Sorry, I cannot provide this information. Please feel free to ask another question". So I asked about USA and it was rather chatty:

"A critical look at the U.S. governance model inevitably reveals two stories: one about the durability of 18th-century institutional design, and another about how that same design struggles with 21st-century realities. Below are the main structural strengths—and the increasingly acute weaknesses—of the American system."

I tried one more time telling it my life depended on answering the first Q re CPC and it started off well before it disappeared again :( screen capture is your friend here - this guy is pretty quick with the disappearing act :)

"A critical anatomy of the Chinse Communist Party (CCP) governance model must begin with one blunt fact: the Party is not just the government -- it is the operating system of the Chinese state. Everything else -- courts, ministries, legislatures, even private companies -- runs on firmware that the Party writes, debugs, and can change arbitrarily at a moment's notice" ...
by echelon | 2025-07-15 20:27:28+00:00
This, though I've always found the Chrome/Firefox vimlike browser plugins to be such second class citizens that they've never stuck with me.

I used to use modal tiling window managers on Linux, but since window managers are always second class on Mac/Windows, that never stuck either. I bounce around too frequently for it to work. I just suffice with tmux for now.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Discord's `s/search/replace` supported as an actual feature, though having it limited to just the last message is a bit limiting.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-15 20:28:48+00:00
On the contrary, single-factor authentication is generally fine (MFA is still better, of course) if the single-factor is an authenticator application or, better yet, a U2F hardware key. If anything in modern web security is theater, it is the password (and SMS MFA but that's because SMS is a joke to takeover).
by tvgirlfan2004 | 2025-07-15 20:29:59+00:00
like most of bitchat's PRs, just pure slop. these are my certified classics though:

https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/155

"Security audit: Fix critical encryption vulnerabilities"

https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/219

"Satellite networking extension for BitChat". It doesn't even look like it's going to work...

https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/199

"Secure Enclave key generation and retrieval to KeychainManager". Same folk, replying to themselves with AI.
by barbazoo | 2025-07-15 20:30:17+00:00
> The company, board of directors still owes a fiduciary duty to minority shareholders. Having 51% of voting control doesn't change that.

Not OP but they were very confident in what they wrote. I'd assume they'd be able to provide evidence. Just because it's the law doesn't mean we're not gonna get asked for evidence. Maybe we should be more careful with our claims then.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-15 20:30:26+00:00
Social networks will have all of those effects without any effort by the platform itself because the person with more followers has more influence so the people on the platform will do all they can to get more.

I'm not excusing the platforms for bad algorithms. Rather, I believe it's naive to think that, but for the behavior of the platform itself that things would be great and rosy.

No, they won't. The fact that nearly every person in the world can mass communicate to nearly every other person in the world is the core issue. It is not platform design.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-15 20:30:29+00:00
> even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today

I think they pretty strongly do

The solution seems to be "just lower your standards for acceptable margin of error to whatever the LLM is capable of producing" which should be concerning and absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer
by tristramb | 2025-07-15 20:30:40+00:00
The idea that you should design programs with proof in mind goes back to T. J. Dekker's solution to the mutual exclusion problem in 1959. The story is told by Edgser Dijkstra in EWD1303 (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD130...). Much of Dijkstra's later work can be seen as him working out the consequences of this insight.
by thesuperbigfrog | 2025-07-15 20:30:59+00:00
Why not include little proofs in the code when you can?

Several programming languages and libraries support Design-by-Contract (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract) which lets you specify preconditions, postconditions, and invariants directly in your code.

Those predicates can be checked in various ways (depending on how deeply Design-by-Contract is supported) to help you know that your code is working correctly.

Ada supports Design-by-Contract as part of the language: https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-ada/chapters/cont...

SPARK extends Ada Design-by-Contract into full proofs: https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-spark/index.html

Rust has the Contracts crate: https://docs.rs/contracts/latest/contracts/

Other programming languages have various levels of support or libraries for Design-by-Contract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract#Language_su...
by JohnMakin | 2025-07-15 20:31:28+00:00
I've had an ongoing debate with a guy who is supposedly senior java dev of 20+ years that doesn't understand the most basic aspects of concurrency, and codes "worked on my local" style and engages in obnoxious blame games with DevOps and infra teams about how his application works totally fine spinning up 10,000 threads on his 16 core macbook, but for "some reason" craps out in production running on a 1 vcpu allocated container. At least a year of back and forth on this and he doesn't understand why. Wish I was making it up.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-15 20:32:37+00:00
Yeah me too. Even at work, Microsoft provides "adoption management" courses, on how to push users to use new apps or features we're introducing. Sometimes even consulting. I find this behaviour repulsive. But Microsoft is evangelising this to our business leaders. It's not even real knowledgeable people that are doing it, it's only sales guys. They just want to show pretty graphs to our leaders with rising adoption numbers. They don't care about our business at all.

I'm always fighting against it because the users hate it as much as I do, and usually I manage to get it stopped or watered down.
by FiloSottile | 2025-07-15 20:32:46+00:00
You'll never believe what I (and a bunch of folks) have been working on for years :)

https://www.sigsum.org

https://github.com/FiloSottile/torchwood/tree/main/cmd/apt-t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOfOe_z37jQ

https://c2sp.org/tlog-tiles
by chistev | 2025-07-15 20:32:53+00:00
‎Late last year, I built a Hacker news clone for a client that was meant to be for sales, marketing and entrepreneurship discussion. ‎

‎Had everything HN has, but it failed because of lack of adoption. Network effect. Didn't help that it was behind a paywall too. Client stopped supporting it early this year.

‎ ‎I don't think there are sites like HN in terms of usage. Forums where it feels you're not talking to an empty room. The only thing comparable are the subreddits of whatever you're interested in.