MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anyfoo | 2025-07-16 00:37:22+00:00
Octal has advantages to be more readable when you are dealing with bits in groups of threes (or multiples), just like the decimal is advantageous when dealing with bits in groups of fours (or multiples).

In UNIX-like systems (and POSIX in general), POSIX permissions are in groups of threes: rwx for user, group, and others. Hence `chmod 777` means "rwx for user, group, others" (i.e. everyone can do everything), `chmod 0644` means "rw for user, r for group and others", and so on.

Before we standardize on 8 bit bytes, there were all kinds of word sizes. Some machines had 18 bit words, for example. 18 is divisible by 3, but not by 4, so octal made more sense for those at least.
by pyman | 2025-07-16 00:37:32+00:00
The bug bounty world is a funny one. I remember one complaining that their bug was dismissed and fixed after they signed an NDA, no payout, nothing. Another one got $100 instead of $5,000 because the company downgraded the severity from high to low. So they ended up with little or no money, and no recognition either. Not sure if these were edge cases, but it does make you wonder how fair the process really is.
by epolanski | 2025-07-16 00:38:02+00:00
Few things that should be noted: women at 25+ have more or less the same children they had 60 years ago.

It's teenage and very young women virtually not having kids anymore.

Thus, the narrative that in order to stop population shrinking we have to go back to some past state is false. We shouldn't promote teenage and very young women pregnancies, and we should support older women and men having child at later stage at higher rates than previously during humanity.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-07-16 00:38:06+00:00
My guess is that LLM's are bridge technology, the equivalent of cassette tapes. A big step forward, allowing things that we couldn't before. But before long they'll be surpassed by much better technology, and future generations will look back on them as primitive.

You have top scientists like LeCun arguing this position. I'd imagine all of these companies are desperately searching for the next big paradigm shift, but no one knows when that will be, and until then they need to squeeze everything they can out of LLMs.
by thrownearacc | 2025-07-16 00:38:46+00:00
Oh, I’m sure some “anecdotal” stories will come up, painting a perfect picture of the “good old days” — without calling them that, of course. Here's one then:

Take my great-grandfather, for example. 56, falls head over heels for a 14-year-old girl from church, and boom — 30 days later, they’re married. 8 months later, my grandfather’s born. They stayed married for 50 years. My grandmother was 16 when she married my 47-year-old grandfather after a chance meeting in the woods, and, guess what, smooth pregnancy again. My parents? Same song, different verse. Now, fast forward to today: I broke up with my girlfriend (late 30s, early 40s) because we wanted kids, but couldn’t conceive — and back then when were were younger and when we could, I couldn’t afford it. See, back then, the older man was not only virile but also financially set, while the young woman could pop out babies at the drop of pants.

Yeah, those “good old days” sound amazing. Make World Pregnant Again.
by dylan-m | 2025-07-16 00:38:47+00:00
My favourite thing about Django is the versioned documentation. Land on a page - any page - and you can trivially read the docs on that subject all the way back to 1.8. That's ten years old. And it works, because Django knows how to patiently deprecate APIs and migrate things. They built one docs site, and it still works. It didn't bitrot. The URLs haven't changed. They didn't restructure everything and force people to rewrite their entire projects or be judged quietly. Every single time I end up working with a framework where docs are littered across a handful of different websites for different versions and types of docs or whatever, I think of Django and I wonder why people have such terrible taste.

Alas, that tends to be the majority of my experience with Django. Using it for one-off personal projects and quietly wishing for the current new shiny JavaScript thing to go away. It still feels like home, but most of my time is somewhere else.
by defrost | 2025-07-16 00:38:56+00:00
First you claim to want science, now you're saying thermodynamics goes stale?

Maybe read the paper and those that followed, especially about the follow on increases in water vapor and methane and where trapped heat energy goes once there's little to no ice left to melt and act as a sink.

The people you are quoting are a known fossil fuel disinformation crew providing a pension plan to fossils like Clauser who have zero peer review papers in any part of the climate or geophysics field despite some sound work in unrelated fields contemporous with 1967.
by vjulian | 2025-07-16 00:39:29+00:00
What we need are 25/30+ year-olds who are completely at ease with sex, who have no hang-ups, and who know how to form strong relationships because they’ve been doing it and having sex freely since they were teenagers.

Instead, we have a generation of adults of parenting age who are deeply uncomfortable with sex and emotionally unskilled in relationships. And that’s a big part of the problem. I’m saying a large swathe of the population is sexually dysfunctional? Yes, I am.

On public forums like Reddit, I can ask questions about all sorts of topics and get a range of responses. But if I’m a young person asking about sex, the answers are often shaped by politics and public health messaging. Behind the scenes, there’s a strong influence from health authorities, and the responses tend to follow a standard script focused on fear, safety, and official ideas about what sex and relationships must be, rather than letting young people figure things out for themselves.

What young people really need is encouragement to form whatever kinds of relationships they want, whether casual or serious, and to have sex and enjoy it. If you support them in that, they’ll do it naturally. Cautions against early pregnancy can be made gently and are no different to other important non-sexual cautions.

Young people need space to figure out their sex lives for themselves, without someone watching over them, especially not a public health voice pushing out patronizing or useless messaging.

Then, and only then, will we grow a generation of mindful and intentional baby-makers.
by blurbleblurble | 2025-07-16 00:39:44+00:00
Hand wavy idea: I wonder if we couldn't take this to another level and have some kind of general graph representation along with hierarchical reductions of it.

I sort of disagree with the assertion that "language is fundamentally hierarchical" in that it supposes there is a single abstraction hierarchy that's universally preferable or correct. That's just not true. It doesn't hurt anybody and it's definitely simpler to choose just one useful one (a hierarchy) but why learn only one? Why not learn multiple and also learn how to modulate between them?
by bawana | 2025-07-16 00:40:12+00:00
The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth.

Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salomon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ‘too big to fail’ kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI.

This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedy’s inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side.

Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built.

Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ‘competition’ of multiple players in the US multiplies the energy requirements.

Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now?

Will AI’s contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war?
by privatelypublic | 2025-07-16 00:40:28+00:00
I seem to recall that rowhammer was known- but thought impossible for userland code to implement.

This is a huge theme for vulnerabilities. I almost said "modern" but looking back I've seen the cycle (disregard attacks as strictly hypothetical. Get caught unprepared when somebody publishes something making it practical) happen more than a few times.
by _cwpi | 2025-07-16 00:40:36+00:00
Yes, its model is that you make a selection and then act on it. After the action happens there's nothing selected. The editor can't infer your intent in making the selection, so there's no reasonable notion of repeating the last edit. You can separately repeat the last motion or last action, but not the whole edit---which of course isn't as useful.

Helix would _ideally_ like you to tell it ahead-of-time everywhere you're going to make an edit by selecting all the edit points with multiple cursors, without a great option to fire edits on the fly. Ironically I found this worse for visual feedback when making larger edits---where it's most needed---because there are usually edits happening off screen, instead of only at the point of the cursor (where the latter can be easily repeated).

It ends up feeling less interactive and more like I'm using a batch editor due to this, which (I think?) was not its intention.
by haiku2077 | 2025-07-16 00:40:49+00:00
It means companies with US government contracts writing Go code can use the standard library crypto package in native Go instead if having to enable CGO and using a crypto library written in C. CGO is kind of a pain in the ass to develop with compared to fully native Go code, especially when cross-compiling (and cross compilation is very common now that ARM is common on both laptops and servers).

This also now makes Go a very convenient language to write US Gov software in.

If you have never heard of FIPS before ignore this entirely and continue to live in happiness.
by rogerdb | 2025-07-16 00:40:56+00:00
I'm not an expert in the genre, but I am a big fan of Neuromancer. I skimmed the article, and while I agree that the "cyberpunk" aesthetic has practically evolved into self parody, I'm not sure I agree about the analysis/critique of the genre.

IMO the core of cyberpunk is about envisioning a world where advanced technology is useful and ubiquitous, yet humanity is worse off than ever ("high tech, low life"). It's a subversion of the simple tech dystopias where the technology itself is evil or is misused by evil people, and more of a realistic counterpoint to the idea that technological progress leads to inevitable utopia.

I'm not sure about more contemporary works that build on those themes. Maybe it's lost its edge as "futuristic" technology has pushed its way more and more into our lives?
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-16 00:41:10+00:00
It goes both ways. Add to this that boys today have been raised on a steady diet of pornography on their smartphones from a young age and never taught to master their impulses and learn genuinely masculine virtue. What do you think this does to their perception and treatment of women? And women are taught to view sex as an instrument of power and control (look at the number of young women with OnlyFans accounts), and raised on a steady diet of viewing men as sleazes by nature, not by condition. They are not taught feminine virtue. What do you think will do to female behavior?

The cycle continues.

The cycle must be broken by admitting that boys can be raised to be self-sacrificing gentlemen who have no interest in bad women, and girls can be raised to be loving ladies who can discern between exploitative jerks and noble men.
by mreid | 2025-07-16 00:42:26+00:00
Thanks, I hadn't seen that term before.

Just to be clear, I wasn't claiming that "communicating clearly" is a new idea in software engineering, I'm mainly commenting on how effective embracing it can be.

When doing math, pretty much every term is "load-bearing" in that arguments will make use of specific aspects of a concept and how it relates to other concepts.

If you look at most graduate-level math textbooks or papers, they typically start with a whole bunch of numbered definitions that reference each other, followed by some simple lemmas or propositions that establish simple relationships between them before diving into more complex theorems and proofs.

The best software projects I've seen follow a roughly similar pattern: there are several "core" functions or libraries with a streamlined API, good docs, and solid testing; on top of that there are more complex processes that treat these as black-boxes and can rely on their behavior being well-defined and consistent.

Probably the common thread between math and programming is both lean heavily on abstraction as a core principle.
by lmm | 2025-07-16 00:42:58+00:00
> Backend is needed in any case

Well, sort of. Much as I hate the idea, maybe Next.js for everything is the way to go, bashing out a CRUD app there is very quick.

> create partial forms and return HTML fragments, instead of full pages

I loved that approach with Wicket and made systems that way for many years, but it just isn't good enough these days, at least for a website that's going to be used in more than one location. When it takes a network roundtrip to update your UI it's always going to be noticeable.
by more_corn | 2025-07-16 00:43:09+00:00
I can think of some communism problems that are not capitalism problems. Central planners causing famine that kills millions not once but twice that I know of. Also reports from communist nations sound like living under communism sucks balls.

I suppose the Nordic socialist democracies are pretty nice. They probably have birth rates below replacement levels as well though. It turns out if you offer women the choice to have a career, enough of them take it that you drop below the replacement rate.
by epolanski | 2025-07-16 00:43:22+00:00
+1.

I'm 38 and the overwhelming majority of women I had relationships with had the maturity of a teenager well in their 30s. Barely able to take care of themselves financially, mentally, physically, let alone of a family. I seriously felt, except once, I had daughters rather than significant others.

Mind you, I might've been unlucky, but the narrative that women are more mature than men, might be true on large statistics which are quickly lost on an anecdotal level.
by groby_b | 2025-07-16 00:43:23+00:00
The US sees about 20K teen pregnancy abortions.

That's probably not why the number of births is way down.

Number of births in the US are ~3.6M right now. We also have 1M abortions per year. That's - if abortions were the sole problem - 4.6M births / 330M people.

Except... It was 4.3M births / 177M people in 1960. Double the current rate. It dropped off sharply right after the 1960s. Not coincidentally right when the pill was introduced.

It never was about "better end the pregnancy". It was always about women having a say, instead of being default-delegated to brood mare.

We landed in a ~stable equilibrium with that, with a TFR of 2.1 in 1990. And then live births dropped again, like a stone. And, oddly, so did abortions. Which implies that the likely problem is a drop in pregnancies in the 1990s.

Teen abortions are a tiny irrelevant side show compared to this. So maybe let's not speculate on "baseline beliefs of society" based on what's noise in the statistics.
by 90s_dev | 2025-07-16 00:44:53+00:00
I went from vim to emacs and used that for a few years, then moved to VS Code for the next 10 years or so. It's showing its age a bit lately, so I'm sure I'll try another one soon, which is why I looked at Helix. But I'm very glad there are very different editors for very different types of minds, just like how there are different ways to indent/format code. Programmers do not have one-size-fits-all minds, and we shouldn't design anything assuming they do/should. (Looking at you, Golang.)
by lenerdenator | 2025-07-16 00:44:54+00:00
My point is that everyone involved is awful and that none of this should happen in a remotely sane society. What kind of corporate governance model allows for a dictatorship? Why aren't the shareholders just selling if they think they were wronged the better part of a decade ago?

Because we're insane.

Maybe they're filing the suit out of the fiduciary duty to their fund members. Worst-case scenario, it goes nowhere. Best-case scenario, they get money out of Meta. Now, they're doing this off the backs of the people of Delaware, but whatever.
by tptacek | 2025-07-16 00:45:17+00:00
If you're dealing with large companies, a good rule of thumb is that the bounty program is incentivized to pay you out. Their internal metrics improve the more they pay; the point is to turn up interesting bugs, and the figure of merit for that is "how much did we have to spend". At a large company, a bounty that isn't paying anything out is a failure.

All bets are off with small random startups that do bug bounties because they think they're supposed to (most companies should not run bounties). But that's not OpenAI. Dave Aitel works at OpenAI. They're not trying to stiff you.

Simultaneous discovery (either with other researchers or, even more often, with internal assessments) is super common. What's more, you're not going to get any corroboration or context for them (sets up a crazy bad incentive with bounty seekers, who litigate bounty results endlessly). When you get a weird and unfair-seeming response to a bounty from a big tech company, for the sake of your own sanity (and because you'll probably be right), just assume someone internal found the bug before you did, and you reported it in the (sometimes long) window during which they were fixing it.
by anyfoo | 2025-07-16 00:45:43+00:00
The very excellent "Advent of Computing" computer history podcasts had an episode involving The Story of Mel relatively recently: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/acting-up/id1459202600...

It provides a lot of context, and puts things into perspective.

Note that it helps to be familiar with The Story of Mel before listening to that episode. I think the podcast may have explained The Store of Mel itself in a previous episode that I haven't listened to yet, but I was personally familiar with it already through the usual folklore.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-16 00:46:13+00:00
The more and more AI projects I see both at work and online, the more convinced I'm that I should treat AI as an application interface, that's all.

It's a slightly different modality for the application. Nothing AI does wasn't possible before. You could always "create a price performance chart showing a stock's movement with key events annotated since May". You could also always buy dozens of software that will not just give you all the charts you could possible think of, but any one that you could even dream of. Check tradingview.com or koyfin.com for a taste of what a "free" offering can give you. Then imagine what the 100k software gives you.

The difference is the interface. You'll 100% need someone onboarding on their 100k custom trading platform. It might take you months to master it if you never saw one of these things before. Once you have learned it though, your productivity and velocity is expected to significantly increase.

Now with the AI interface, you don't need someone onboarding you or months to learn. You can ask the AI to "build a benchmarking analysis against Velocity's athletic footwear comps" instead of learning how to learning how to use the software to create such a thing. Maybe you never saw financial analysis software before, but you spent the last 20 years analysing financials by hand (in 2025 for some reason) and now you wanna onboard to a financial software. You don't need to "learn" anything. Just describe your thoughts to the AI and it figures the interface for you.

How transformative was that for you? I don't know. Maybe your financial analysis tool is as big of a piece of shit as Reactjs is and it's mind-numbingly tedious to generate such report. "It's just a 75 clicks that you have to do" and the AI interface saves you from doing that like it saves me from using React's shitty interface (text editor) to write garbage react components that are all just a copy of each other.
by mreid | 2025-07-16 00:46:38+00:00
I also had to convince my parents to buy me books about fractals. My prized possession as a 15 year old was a copy of Mandelbrot's "Fractal Geometry of Nature". A lot of it went over my head but it had some gorgeous colour plates and interesting sections. I still have it at home some 35 years later.

That also inspired me to write IFS code for ferns, Sierpinski gaskets, and Menger sponges in 68k assembler (after realizing AmigaBASIC was too slow).
by asadotzler | 2025-07-16 00:47:16+00:00
That's an exaggeration. Most industry leaders do not require NDAs, only coordinated disclosure.

Mozilla's program, which has been around longer than most, doesn't. Google and Microsoft don't. Meta and Apple don't.

This is water carrying, intentional or not, for a terrible practice that should be shamed, so that it doesn't become standard.
by requilence | 2025-07-16 00:48:02+00:00
In one of the responses, it provided the financial analysis of a not well-known company with a non-Latin name located in a small country. I found this company; it is real and numbers in the response are real. When I asked my ChatGPT to provide a financial report for this company without using web tools, it responded: `Unfortunately, I don’t have specific financial statements for “xxx” for 2021 and 2022 in my training data, and since you’ve asked not to use web search, I can’t pull them live.`.
Show HN: Tlsinfo.me – check your JA3/JA4 TLS fingerprints
by elpy1 | 2025-07-16 00:48:10+00:00
Recently I was learning a bit about TLS. This involved lots of capturing network traffic with `tshark`, then opening up wireshark to import the dump and check fingerprints, so I made this small service for easily checking.

curl https://tlsinfo.me/json or visit from your browser. It returns the TLS fingerprint that your request presented, including: JA3, JA3_r (raw), JA4 and JA4_r (raw).

No auth, QUIC supported, rate limited at 10 req/10s/IP to protect the server (pls be nice). Could be handy for:

- Playing around and learning about TLS.

- Debugging.

- Investigating how different clients/software leave different fingerprints.

- Adding one-liner fingerprint checks in tools or as part of an automation pipeline.

- Set up a reverse proxy or domain on cloudflare CNAME'd to tlsinfo.me and check their fingerprint.

Let me know if you find it useful. Reach out if you have any questions or ideas. Thanks.
by bobbiechen | 2025-07-16 00:48:51+00:00
It's hard to self evaluate productivity. In a much simpler domain (decoding a cipher with a tool vs. by hand), I thought I was going much faster, but the stopwatch showed it was about the same: https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2020/5/28/the-making-of-semaphor...

Not feeling tired afterwards is a real improvement though, and I think that feeling is reliably self-reported.