MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atonse | 2025-07-23 21:00:04+00:00
The acquisition and procurement departments in many government agencies are often “independent” in that they don’t directly report to the agency. They’re more like compliance people that make sure you’re completing with the procurement laws and regulations.

And unpaid software licenses are a violation.

Now maybe the client in this case may have had some kind if ownership clause, etc. but in general, procurement people tend to be pretty neutral in my experience.

Then again, over only dealt with small contracts (< $500k)
by heyoni | 2025-07-23 21:00:16+00:00
Since when is dissemination of publicly facing information considered political action under the Hatch Act? The latter requires the person to use their influence or be on duty for it to count. The raids being reported by the app aren’t using insider information, they’re in progress and out in the open.

This situation is pretty clear cut. The administration isn’t being coy about purging anyone they think might be less than blindly loyal.
by tumidpandora | 2025-07-23 21:00:23+00:00
I wholeheartedly agree with OP, the article is very timely and illustrates the mis-direction of AI tooling clearly. I often find myself and my kids asking LLMs "don't tell me the answer, work with me to resolve it" that is a much richer experience than seeing a fully baked out response to my question. I hope we see grater adoption of OPs EDGE framework in AI interactions.
by dathinab | 2025-07-23 21:00:36+00:00
btw. this

> ICEBlock is an app that illegal aliens use to evade capture

is highly dehumanizing language you normally find only and autocratic regimes ruled by force and despotism instead of law

if you read that in you country and it's not a exception but the now norm you alarm bells should ring in overdrive

historically speaking language like this has pretty reliably an indicator of a country going to commit mass murder (lets hope it doesn't come to this)
by pferde | 2025-07-23 21:00:44+00:00
Ah, ok, I didn't think of systemd version changes. Thanks.

Regarding your rhetorical question about "the same NIC", I think the problem is in determining whether the NIC is the same, and it is not an easy one to solve. I remember that older Suse Linux versions used to pin the interface name to the NIC's MAC address in an udev rule file that got autogenerated when a NIC with a given MAC first appeared on the system, but they stopped doing that.
by margalabargala | 2025-07-23 21:01:09+00:00
Yes, the language comment was hyperbolic.

Importing a library someone else wrote basically is flipping a switch and getting software behavior you didn't write.

Frankly I don't see a difference in creative terms between writing an app that does <thing> that relies heavily on importing already-written libraries for a lot of the heavy lifting, and describing what you have in mind for <thing> to an LLM in sufficient detail that it is able to create a working version of whatever it is.

Actually can see an argument that both of those are also potentially equal, in creative terms, to writing the whole thing from scratch. If the author's goal was to write beautiful software, that's one thing, but if the author's goal is to create <thing>? Then the existence and characteristics of <thing> is the measure of their creativity, not the method of construction.
by personalcompute | 2025-07-23 21:01:55+00:00
I think you've got it!

- That commit's date matches the date in the 404media article (July 13th)

- The commit message is totally unrelated to the code (highly suspicious)

- The code itself downloads additional code at runtime (highly highly suspicious)

I have not yet been unable to uncover the code it downloads though. It downloaded code that was hosted in the same repo, https://github.com/aws/aws-toolkit-vscode/, just on the "stability" branch. (downloads a file called "scripts/extensionNode.bk") The "stability" branch presumably was a branch created by the attacker, and has presumably since been deleted by Amazon.
by reactordev | 2025-07-23 21:02:12+00:00
I’m currently using MessagePack. It does the job of making small binary messages but I still suffer from marshal/unmarshal copying.

For certain messages with a fixed size (no strings or arrays) I can pin a message and reuse its memory address within the queue but there’s still data in memory that needs to be copied. At the very least from the TCP/IP stack.
by vlod | 2025-07-23 21:02:31+00:00
I seem to hear this a lot, but there's probably like 10 commands (maybe a few more if you want to be fancy with copy-paste). Note: great if you like nano however!

For those that are interested, this will get you 90% there:

exit without saving> :q!

exit with saving> :wq

beginning of line> 0

end of line and edit (enter insert mode)> shift-a

delete line> dd

insert mode> i

stop insert mode> ESC

undo> u

show line numbers> :set number

go to line number (e.g line 5)> :5
by taneq | 2025-07-23 21:02:38+00:00
Arduinos and hobby servos. No, neither of them are "industrial grade" and yeah, you'll reach their limits pretty quickly, but building a physical thing that does stuff is (in my experience) a huge motivator.

Or if you're already all over the basics, figure out what kind of stuff you want to build and then try and build it. :)
by Aurornis | 2025-07-23 21:02:53+00:00
> However, she also admits to the journalist that she is a ‘minority shareholder’ in the app development company.

That’s a lot more than a footnote. If the app development company owned the app and she had ownership in the app development company, there’s no way to argue she didn’t have an interest in the app.

Nobody can expect to have a side interest in an app that works against their employer and continue to keep their job. You have to be divested from one or the other. Due to the marriage, there likely any way to divest from the app unless her husband also divested from it. Even then, the damage was done.
Extremism as a "metric". To understand if society is "doing a good enough job"
by mobileturdfctry | 2025-07-23 21:04:30+00:00
I've been thinking a lot about politics recently. As I'm guessing a lot of you all might be as well.

A lot of what I read online tells me that most people treat far-right (and other) extremism as an unnatural phenomenon. But the more I think about it I am starting to think it's a very natural phenomenon.

Does it strike you that what we're currently experiencing is a systematic loss of faith in humanity and its institutions? Does that just mean these people were born with, or derived these feelings from nothing? Or are they just like the rest of us who ended up "on the short end of the stick" in life?

I think what could follow from this reasoning is that extremism in a society could be used as a metric for us all, collectively, to understand whether or not we're "doing a good enough job" for our fellow citizens and humanity in general?
by ben_w | 2025-07-23 21:04:36+00:00
While that detail is true, the real problem is much more general: you have goal x, you use some proxy y for that goal, you pay people for y, they give you lots of y that may end up being the exact opposite of x.

Famously, the British found x was "fewer cobras" and y was "cobra tails", the opposite of x being "the locals bred cobras to get money for cobra tails".

Make a citizen science weather station that's free, it's all fine. Make it paid, someone's going to grab satellite pics and generate from them plausible but not necessarily accurate simulated weather station data for everywhere to get that money.
by chaorace | 2025-07-23 21:05:26+00:00
Yes, of course. We're all reasonable adults who are capable of acknowledging that services of value cost money.

It just so happens that weather is a phenomenon which affects all people and requires large, distributed, passive infrastructure to effectively manage. It's a classic case where the public option is bound to be more efficient in terms of absolute resource allocation.

On what basis do I assert that it's "bound" to be more efficient? Simple: weather affects the production, transportation, and logistics of virtually all goods. The costs of weather are therefore distributed equally across society regardless of government policy. Government is very good at delivering this specific type of centralized basic infrastructure in a cost-effective way (see also: roads), so if we're all paying for it together regardless this is a no-brainer policy.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-23 21:06:20+00:00
In quite a few cases, old rail right-of-ways near cities are large enough for an extra track or few. Because, back in the heyday of American railroads, they either had another track or few, or they expected to.

The biggest issue is often bridges. Retaining the land that additional track(s) were on is fairly cheap. Building and maintaining rail bridges is not.

And building the light rail bridges for a transit system is not cheap. It's just less horribly expensive than building bridges which you could run strings of 220-ton freight locomotives over.
by uzj100 | 2025-07-23 21:06:38+00:00
I love when people bring up the kei truck argument. If all you do is haul mulch around town from Home Depot, by yourself, and you already have another car, sure, go for it. But pretty much nobody owns a key truck as their only car. There's little crash safety, your knees are the crumple zone, they're not designed to go on 70 mile interstate highways, you usually can't transport many people. I would feel uncomfortable transporting friends/relatives more than a few miles on low speed roads in a kei truck, because they're 25+ year old designs focused on size rather than safety.

A kei truck is a supplementary vehicle at best... so you'd still want a car, and then you have two vehicles. Lots of people don't want two vehicles when a single vehicle that covers both use cases exists.

Sure, nobody needs a gigantic beast, but for people in lots of parts of the country, the downsides to owning a larger vehicle aren't that big. Why buy a smaller pickup truck when a full size truck is just a few thousand dollars more (in a country where the average new vehicle sells for $50k), gets similar fuel economy figures, and has more room in general?
by vorgol | 2025-07-23 21:07:19+00:00
Tim Harford mentions in his podcast "Cautionary Tales – A Fascination with Failure / Death on the Dance Floor" that checklists might have prevented the 1981 skywalk collapse in Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel (killing 114 people).

It's really a good podcast (pretty much all of his podcasts are)

https://timharford.com/2023/07/cautionary-tales-a-fascinatio...
by TacticalCoder | 2025-07-23 21:08:41+00:00
> Given that it comes with issues, I assume the benefits outweigh the downsides.

I think it doesn't outweight the downside. Let's not forget this:

"OpenSSH normally does not load liblzma, but a common third-party patch used by several Linux distributions causes it to load libsystemd, which in turn loads lzma."

The "XZ utils backdoor" nearly backdoored every single distro running systemd.

People (including those who tried to plant this backdoor) are going to say: "systemd has nothing to do with the backdoor" but I respectfully disagree.

systemd is one heck of a Rube-Goldberg piece of machinery: the attack surface is gigantic seen that systemd's tentacles reaches everywhere.

With a tinfoil hat on one could think the goal of systemd was, precisely, to make sure the most complicated backdoors could be inserted here and there: "Let's have openssh use a lib it doesn't need at all because somehow we'll call libsystemd from openssh".

Genius idea if you ask me.

What could possibly go wrong with systemd "now just opening a port for openssh" uh? Nothing I'm sure.

Now that said I'm very happy that we've now got stuff like the Talos Linux distribution (ultra minimal, immutable, distro meant to run Kubernetes with as few executables as possible and of course no systemd) and then containers using Alpine Linux or, even if Debian based, minimal system with (supposedly) only one process running (and, once again, no systemd).

Containerization is one way out of systemd.

I can't wait for a good systemd-less hypervisor: then I can kiss Microsoft goodbye (systemd is a Microsoft technology, based on Microsoftism, by a now Microsoft employee).

Thanks but no thanks.

Talos distro, systemd-less containers: I want more of this kind of mindset.

The future looks very nice.

systemd lovers should just throw the towel in and switch to Windows: that's what they actually really want and it's probably no better than they deserve.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-07-23 21:09:09+00:00
gRPC is a very badly implemented system. I have gotten 25%-30%+ improvements in throughput just by monkeypatching client libraries for google cloud to force json api endpoint usage.

At least try something else besides gRPC when building systems so you have a baseline performance understanding. gRPC is OFTEN introducing performance breakdowns that goes unnoticed.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-23 21:09:30+00:00
Donald Rumsfeld didn't do much good during his life, but this quote by him lives in my head rent free like the kids say:

> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

Even before social media and AI summaries, when we only had land lines and libraries, my passion has been lowering the amount of unknown unknowns and increase the amount of known unknowns.

My grandfather shared the same passion and owned a series of books that had stuff about _everything_ on a surface level. The one of them on the shelf next to me is from 1952 and is called "The Book of Skills". And has stuff like how to water your plants, detailed instructions on bookbinding, how to build a boat and fix (1950s) electric components.

Basically I don't pretend to know everything about everything, but I do enjoy knowing something about a bunch of things.

If I know a solution for a problem _exists_ so if I (or someone else) need it, I know it has been solved - even though I don't have a clue how - but I know too look for a ready-made solution. Then I can go look it up and stand on the shoulders of giants so to speak.

Nowadays I use LLM summaries for similar things, I don't claim to know everything but I absorb enough surface level information so I can go look for more if I need the full data later on. Basically building an index instead of a full-ass library.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-23 21:09:47+00:00
Of course they're not. In a progressive system that uses marginal rates, there's little point in giving someone a raise when they're in the 90% bracket, so nobody is going to be paying a 90% effective rate on all their income.

The point isn't to actually collect $90 million in taxes from a CEO paid $100 million, the point is to discourage that kind of ridiculous pay package in the first place.
by j45 | 2025-07-23 21:10:12+00:00
This means searches are still happening, just being routed elsewhere?

I noticed Google's new AI summary let's me click on a link in the summary and the links are posted to the right.

Those clicks are available, might not be discovered yet, curious though if those show up anywhere as data.

Google being able to create summaries off actual web search results will be an interesting take compared to other models trying to get the same done without similar search results at their disposal.

The new search engine could be google doing the search and compiling the results for us how we do manually.
by RGBCube | 2025-07-23 21:11:07+00:00
Sounds good, but it's still YAML and shell scripts. It's not even close to ideal.

A custom lazy, typed functional language that doesn't differentiate between expressions and "builds" would be much better. Even better if you add "contexts", aka implicit tags under values for automatic dependency inference. Also do "serializable bytecode", and closing over dependencies of thunks efficiently like Unison does for great distrubuted builds.

And it would be pretty easy to add a debugger to this system, same logic as doing "import"

Nix gets somewhat close, but it misses the mark by separating the eval and build phases. It having terrible documentation, 1332432 ways to do the same thing, not properly separating the nixpkgs/nix divide, and nixpkgs being horribly, but still insufficiently abstracted also doesn't help.

Also, I'm not sure why you posted this comment here, as there is nothing that prevents you from writing a Radicle CI adapter that can handle huge repositories. You can reference the bare git repo stored in the Radicle home, so you just need to be able to store the repo itself.
by squeaky-clean | 2025-07-23 21:11:24+00:00
I don't think they were saying to use blockchain to do this. It's just an example that shows that if you offer financial incentives in exchange for data people will exploit it and gameify it. The reason blockchain clearance rates are so slow is because of all the effort to prevent this. You could remove PoW from bitcoin and the network would be significantly faster. It would also be dominated by people exploiting it.

It's the same thing with ad networks, most of the effort goes into verifying that an ad click was legitimate and not a bot. Or that classic story of when the British government tried to eliminate Cobras in India by paying a bounty for every dead cobra, which just led to people breeding more cobras.
by ryukoposting | 2025-07-23 21:11:39+00:00
> Every type contributes to a cost on the instruction cache, meaning that if your program parses a lot of different types, it will essentially flush your instruction cache any time you enter a parser. Worse still, if a parse involves enough types, the parser itself will hit instruction decoding throughput issues.

Interesting. This makes me wonder how nanopb would benchmark against the parsers shown in the graphs. nanopb's whole schtick is that it's pure C99 and it doesn't generate separate parsing functions for each message. nanopb is what a lot of embedded code uses, due to the small footprint.
by 90s_dev | 2025-07-23 21:11:40+00:00
I did something similar ones as a vs code extension for love2d which I called live2d, so that you could develop your game while it was running. It was incredibly fun, but incredibly hard to use, and nobody had any interest in it, so I abandoned it and lost the source code eventually. But it worked so well. I had invented this thing called magic tables to go along with it and make it easier to use, I forgot what they did, I just remember the name and how cool it was.
by NobodyNada | 2025-07-23 21:11:59+00:00
> there was some kind of optimization in LLVM that relied on being able to assume values were never undef

It's true that LLVM has restrictions on what you can do with undef/poison memory, but LLVM also supports the "freeze" operation that comes up in the Rust discussions (which transforms an undefined value into an arbitrary, well-defined value). It would certainly need to be unsafe to avoid violating invariants like you mentioned, but "LLVM" isn't the blocker to supporting this.

Rather, there are more subtle problems with reading from initialized memory -- for example on Linux, a heap allocator might use MADV_FREE on free memory, which hints to the kernel that a page contains freed memory and the operating system is not required to preserve its contents until the application writes to it again. This means the following sequence of events is possible:

- An application frees some memory, and the heap allocator invokes madvise(MADV_FREE) on the address range.

- The application makes a heap allocation, obtaining a pointer to the free'd memory.

- The application freezes the uninitialized memory and reads from it.

- Due to memory pressure, the kernel decides to reclaim the free'd memory. It unmaps it from the process and uses it somewhere else.

- The application accesses the first allocation again, and sees that its value has now changed to all-zeroes.

Thus, we can see that "freezing" arbitrary memory can't actually be implemented on real-world systems -- the contents of uninitialized memory really can change out from under you until you write to that memory.

It would be possible to implement a "by-reference freeze" that copies a MaybeUninit<T> to a new location, but introducing this functionality still has the downside that you can write a Heartbleed bug without invoking undefined behavior, which is what makes it controversial.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-07-23 21:12:31+00:00
Yes we obviously just won't agree on this but I will just state some final points. You are assuming an awful lot of things about self-taught people that simply are not safe to assume, while assuming that fresh CS grads don't have any field experience. I am only assuming the default for CS grads -- that they actually studied relevant material for 4 years. Many people who go to university also do part-time jobs, internships, and extracurricular projects in their field. I certainly did a lot on my own time on top of the years of classroom work.

This whole discussion is fraught with problems. I posit that for those people who feel that they need to sell the fact they have no education, they also lack sufficient experience to be marketable. Certainly, for people with little experience, the person with a degree is objectively more credible than the person without. There may be some self-taught individuals who are amazing in some way, but I think the only reason you ever meet these people to begin with is because the less interesting ones get filtered out. In other words, if you are looking for guidance, not going to university is a bad idea. If the bias against education picks up steam, then you might do even better to go to university then pretend to be self-taught after you have a bit of experience lol. As absurd as that sounds, it jives with what you and the article are claiming.
by ofalkaed | 2025-07-23 21:12:34+00:00
So it is not illegal? you just need to go through the proper bureaucracy as you do with every countries. Last I looked into it a few years back it was easy to get the paper work, one person I found who went there just signed up for guitar lessons in Havana to study Cuban guitar, showed the paperwork for the guitar classes and was good to go because it was for educational reasons even if the guitar lessons only accounted for a tiny portion of their time there. The white listed reasons are fairly broad and easy to work within, sure you can't just hop on a plane for a weekend visit but that is true of many countries that no one would say it is illegal to go to.
by tonyarkles | 2025-07-23 21:13:21+00:00
Yeah, I think one of the nice things about making it a "clean" number (either an integer or a rational with a small integer denominator) is that you can easily validate it without needing high-precision measurement equipment: put a mark on both gears (maybe even embedded in the 3D print), line up the marks, rotate the large gear 1 full rotation, and count the number of rotations the smaller gear makes. Check to see if the marks line up perfectly after those rotations.
by em-bee | 2025-07-23 21:13:30+00:00
whether that matters or not depends on whether the logic error occurs because of a rare combination of events or as a result of a certain state and whether that state remains after recovery. if there is for example a logic error that causes the app to crash after say 10 minutes of runtime, or eg. at a certain message size, then a recovery will reset the runtime and it will work again. it will of course invariably fail again after another 10 minutes or when the same message is resent, because it is a logic error, and logic dictates that the error won't go away no matter how often you restart, but it will work in the meantime.

in other words, any error that doesn't occur right at start can be recovered from at least for all those operations that do not depend on that error being fixed.