MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnwalkr | 2025-07-23 04:12:42+00:00
De-orbiting at a low orbit is often showing that without fuel and commanding, the satellite's orbit will degrade and it will burn-up within a few years (or even 25 years) due to the very minimal drag of the atmosphere that exists to some extent to thousands of km. Deliberately moving down faster is common, and deliberately moving satellites very far away to a "graveyard orbit" is also common.

Deploying sails to increase drag has been tested a few times in real missions, and is a common theme for university satellite projects and space-industry start-ups.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-23 04:14:55+00:00
It seems like SWE is going to turn into something more akin to nuclear engineering over the next few years. "How can we extract the most value out of this unpredictable thing without having it blow up in our faces?", where the guardrails we write will be more akin to analog feedback control mechanisms than they will be to modern-day business logic, but where the maximum extractable value has no well-defined limit.
by jeswin | 2025-07-23 04:16:55+00:00
An agent should never have access to files or data outside of the project (emails, passwords, maybe crypto, photographs) - it makes no sense to allow that.

I've always run agents inside a docker sandbox. Made a tool for this called codebox [1]. You can create a docker container which has the tools that the agent needs (compilers, test suites etc), and expose just your project directory to the agent. It can also bind to an existing container/docker-compose if you have a more complex dev environment that is started externally.

[1]: https://github.com/codespin-ai/codebox/
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-07-23 04:17:18+00:00
Old man talking about both ways up hill:

Historically, we did not have wifi and other radio based new fangled data communications. Data connectivity required wires, physical connections. If there was a gap between the two devices that had no wire, just air, that was air gapped. No comms could happen between the two. It is physically isolated. it used to be called "physically isolated" when we used it in the 80's (?). Some say, we stole it from plumbers but that is hogwash (pun intended, you know the backflow prevention thing). I vaguely recall start seeing it late 1990's to 2K in the public?

Mission Impossible 1996 the computer in the room where tom cruise is lowered into the room. That was an example of 90's air-gapped system.

The name stuck because it sounds cool. In my opinion, there is no such thing as true "air-gapped network" any more. There are too many ways to snoop on systems that are isolated, without "physical" and radio connections in the traditional sense (e.g., listen to the "electricity", sounds, power fluctuation, ground vibration, squirrel squeeks).
by _wire_ | 2025-07-23 04:18:35+00:00
Uh... The 386 was designed on 11/780 and inherited lots of its protected-mode features from VAX architecture manuals that came with the many 780s installed at Intel design in SC and Hillsboro at that time, but other than this... yes the VAX was a "very similar" architecture to a 386. Thanks for noticing.
by mehra-vaayushop | 2025-07-23 04:20:18+00:00
Awesm...tx...I also loved below from paul which we too are trying to optimize with this fund... "Paradoxically, fundraising is this type of distraction, so try to minimize that too"

I thinking of giving a timeline beyond which we just want to spend time with customers.

Ironically, fund tells us they have got more deal flow that they are evaluating...I told them - but we put a cap on how many investors & timeframe that we talk with them.
by breve | 2025-07-23 04:22:10+00:00
Musk has done too much brand damage for anything Tesla to look good for a while to come. Tesla's market share loss in Europe corresponds with Musk interfering in European politics and his fascist salutes:

https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Line/All-time-by-Q...

Europeans don't want swasticars.
by nullc | 2025-07-23 04:22:28+00:00
> They have no metacognition abilities, but they do have the ability to read the context window.

Sure, but so can you-- you're going to have more insight into why they did it than they do-- because you've actually driven an LLM and have experience from doing so.

It's gonna look at the context window and make something up. The result will sound plausible but have no relation to what it actually did.

A fun example is to just make up the window yourself then ask the AI why it did the things above then watch it gaslight you. "I was testing to see if you were paying attention", "I forgot that a foobaz is not a bazfoo.", etc.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-07-23 04:24:32+00:00
No, no you do not.

A week into installation, your cube mate will be complaining that the arrow keys do not work as used to and cannot use alt-tab on the fields, or the color orange and green make their eye hurt. So a ticket is opened, a software update is made, and then the patch is generated. That is 12 month on a good day because all the back track, re-validation, scope creep, auditing, re-validation, third party review, committee blessings, and good idea fairies.

Then you have to get the patch into the environment. Now you need a blood oath from the entire chain of command up to Katie A. where she swears she is going to beat you if you whine about the color scheme again. ;) Three years past, and the changes are implemented. It does not matter because your monitor which had to be TAA compliant and could not be brought in without you soldering everything together is now running off of a hercules video card, yes that green only hercules card. You see only shades of green in the app...
by owenversteeg | 2025-07-23 04:26:03+00:00
I think a large contributor is poor indoor air quality - of all types, not just one specific pollutant - causing inflammation and thus cancer. Homes have gotten far tighter in recent years, and people buy ever more cheap furniture and inexpensive consumer products. So you have formaldehyde and other VOCs off-gassing, you have plasticizer vapors, nanoplastics in the air from synthetic furniture and cloth, you have refrigerants leaking from appliances and from insulation foam… I don’t think nearly anyone understands just how many unique poorly-studied chemicals are emitted into your indoor air by your average set of household products. That’s all to say nothing of common and better-understood air quality issues from gas cooking, radon, mold, etc.

So we have all these irritants in the air, and we have the most airtight homes in human history by orders of magnitude… what did we think was going to happen? That you could slap a laughably undersized carbon filter on an air purifier and call it good? Or that a limited number of too-small ERV systems would help? At some point we will need a radical rethinking of our approach to health and safety of new technology.
by notpushkin | 2025-07-23 04:26:36+00:00
I agree, but also it’s the fact that there’s a steady supply of devs who already know decent HTML, while not many who know XUL. It would be easy to apply your HTML knowledge to XUL, but since we already support interleaving HTML and XUL, why not let people just use what they’re used to?

That said, I didn’t really look into it all that much! I just happen to know about it because I was doing some userChrome.css stuff back in the day.

Just came across this Firefox.html announcement in another thread and it might have some more context: https://web.archive.org/web/20230402033035/https://mail.mozi...
by klooney | 2025-07-23 04:27:01+00:00
> La Vache qui rit, which you know as the Laughing Cow, the individually wrapped wedges of spreadable cheese from your childhood. Founded in 1921 by a French veteran of the First World War, the company’s name is based on a pun on Wagner’s Valkyries and an anti-German slur.

Can someone explain the slur to an English speaker?
by necubi | 2025-07-23 04:28:40+00:00
The Pentium 4 HT 670, released in 2005, came factory-clocked at 3.8 (https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/pentium-4-ht-670.c20)

Netburst lasted a long time as intel was floundering, before Core Duo was released in 2006.
by ipdashc | 2025-07-23 04:28:43+00:00
While I agree with everything you've said, I also wonder if some of it comes down to how hard it is (in my perception, at least) to get access to it? With almost all other developer-facing technologies, you can get a sandbox environment set up, a free tier subscription going, etc., within a couple of days or so if not a few hours.

With the exception of SIP, I have no idea how I'd learn or demo any of the things you mentioned as a random developer. Even if my company asked me to. My immediate assumption would be that you need to be a fellow telco or a multi-million dollar customer to get any kind of access to this stuff. And that setting up a lab of your own to play around with requires pouring though thousands of pages of obtuse standards and documentation to make any sense of it, not to mention the radio hardware if you want to actually interface with modems?

It's a shame, because telecom seems very cool, but I just have no idea where you'd even start.
by grahameb | 2025-07-23 04:31:39+00:00
I ran into one of these in the very early 00s; was working at a university (back in the days when a couple of people would run all the central servers, running Linux on beige PCs.) We had some anti-spam/AV software that looked at every incoming email hooked into Postfix, and the server kept running out of disk space.

Eventually tracked it down to an email which contained a zip of stock trading data – just the three letter stock code and the shift. It wasn't malicious, it just had an extraordinarily high compression ratio!
by lenerdenator | 2025-07-23 04:32:09+00:00
> As for your contention that a 60 year old is capable of working. Doing what? The prospects are already dire for people who are laid off in their 50s. You want them to be cashiers at Safeway at minimum wage? Minimum wage isn't even a living wage.

Not to speak for the other commenter, but if you want to see some real change in people's voting patterns, do exactly that.

As far as their bodies being wrecked, well, that's the actual intention of OASDI, more popularly known as Social Security. Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance. If we stopped giving out checks to people just for getting to 65, we might be able to preserve that safety for future generations. After all, it's in the name: insurance. You don't get to collect any other sort of insurance just for being alive past a certain time, because that would make that insurance fund unsustainable.
by wtallis | 2025-07-23 04:33:29+00:00
The Pentium 3 is what eventually topped out at 1.4 GHz, for the 130nm Tualatin parts introduced in 2001. The Pentium 4 started at 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz with the 180nm Willamette parts introduced in 2000. Those were eventually released with speeds up to 2.0GHz. The 130nm Pentium 4 Northwood reached 3.4GHz in 2004, and the 90nm Pentium 4 Prescott hit 3.8GHz later in 2004.
by necovek | 2025-07-23 04:33:40+00:00
I understand that: the problem is that in this example, it is, so the problem is obviously somewhere else — that's what we should explore.

Is it just that the RFC has not been read properly? Maybe, but even if it was, I do not think having precisely defined behaviour in RFCs is sufficient: real world implementations have to be more flexible due to other buggy implementations they interact with.
by notpushkin | 2025-07-23 04:34:52+00:00
I’ve looked into it a bit more and looks like they’re US only – might have something to do with the fact that US tickets are mostly refundable by law.

So yeah, it could work in this particular case, but still not sure it’s a good deal. They say they’re getting you some “credits”, while you could just rebook for the new price and refund the old one and get the difference in cash instead.
by gpm | 2025-07-23 04:36:18+00:00
I've found it to be almost universally the case that the LLM isn't better than me, just faster. That applies here, it does a worse job than I would if I did it, but it's a useful tool because it enables me to make queries that would cost too much of my time to do myself.

If the query returns something interesting, or just unexpected, that's at least a signal that I might want to invest my own time into it.
by antonvs | 2025-07-23 04:37:29+00:00
I contracted at one of the Bellcore spinoffs for a while. You're not really going to get anything resembling innovation out of them. They're mature businesses left over from the last millenium, optimized to extract maximum cash from existing products.

They also benefit from regulatory capture - the CTO where I was used to spend a lot of time in DC. Competing on tech capabilities is just not what they do.

Sure, operators upgrade their networks from 3G to 4G to 5G, but they're not the ones driving that innovation, they're just deploying stuff developed at other companies like Qualcomm and Ericsson.
by murukesh_s | 2025-07-23 04:40:22+00:00
You are misunderstanding coding vs logic. Coding is making our logic (which is creativity) fit into someone else's syntax. If a machine is able to translate your logic expressed in your language into running code, whats wrong? Common thats our dream isn't it? Its like you not using calculator because you are worried kids won't learn how to divide. Is assembly language better than C++? Yes - did that prevented high level languages from taking over the world? No.

If done right we all code through spec written in English, not code.
by ivanb | 2025-07-23 04:42:40+00:00
I wish manufacturers of ergonomic keyboards would pay more attention to pointing devices. After all, with modern UIs we have to use the pointer. Having a hand jump to a mouse all the time is, at least, distracting.

Another factor is skeletal symmetry. Reaching for a mouse changes the natural balance of posture. I'm not a doctor, but it cannot be healthy over decades. That's why after many years I'm now using the pointing device with my non-dominant hand most of the time. My dominant hand only takes the mouse when I have to do precise or graphic work. This approach makes my back, neck and shoulders feel better.

And the last major gripe I have with most of ergonomic keyboards is how they misunderstand tactile feedback. They try to make all keys feel the same. Glove80 takes it to the limit with its uniform and flat key shapes and identical switches. I don't think this is helpful. Notice how F and J on most keyboards have bumps. Every key should have a bump, a unique shape, a unique surface texture. I want to subconsciously know I hit the right key.
by do_not_redeem | 2025-07-23 04:44:02+00:00
That's not what OP encountered.

> When Gemini executed move * "..\anuraag_xyz project", the wildcard was expanded and each file was individually "moved" (renamed) to anuraag_xyz project within the original directory.

> Each subsequent move overwrited the previous one, leaving only the last moved item

In a different scenario where there was only one file, the command would have moved only that one file, and no data would have been lost.
by saurik | 2025-07-23 04:44:23+00:00
> Even with proprietary SOTA models hosted on someone else's cloud hardware, I basically never want an LLM to answer "off the dome"; IME it's almost always wrong! (Maybe this is less true for others whose work focuses on the absolute most popular libraries and languages, idk.)

I feel like I'm the exact opposite here (despite heavily mistrusting these models in general): if I came to the model to ask it a question, and it decides to do a Google search, it pisses me off as I not only could do that, I did do that, and if that had worked out I wouldn't be bothering to ask the model.

FWIW, I do imagine we are doing very different things, though: most of the time, when I'm working with a model, I'm trying to do something so complex that I also asked my human friends and they didn't know the answer either, and my attempts to search for the answer are failing as I don't even know the terminology.
by xp84 | 2025-07-23 04:44:42+00:00
You really don't need an alpha channel for some tiny lineart thing such as the article's example. A single color would even be perfectly sufficient to make an attractive 'dancing bars' animation to indicate "sound is happening." That's my point. Some overpaid "UX designer" decided something wildly complex was needed here, and they're wrong.

In the broader sense, especially in the 'flat design' era where we don't use gradients or complex backgrounds anywhere, a 256-color GIF with its 1-bit alpha (plain transparency) will work perfectly fine to do an animated flat non-3d, non-photorealistic icon that wiggles or whatever, on a background that is almost certainly a plain flat color, and not complex enough to need 16 million shades of transparency.
Ask HN: Looking for Research Ideas in Cybersecurity (Graduate Student)
by hogexmox | 2025-07-23 04:45:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a graduate student currently looking for a research topic in cybersecurity. I'm especially interested in analyzing source code to predict or detect vulnerabilities, but I've hit a bit of a wall and could use some fresh ideas.

If you know of any interesting or socially impactful problems—whether technical, theoretical, or policy-related—I'd really appreciate your suggestions. Anything is welcome. Thanks!
by owenversteeg | 2025-07-23 04:45:43+00:00
>Right, but if you double the cleared customs cost with a 100% tariff, many of those additional costs are levied as a constant margin, which tends toward doubling the retail price.

I’m sure you can find short term examples of this, but in the long run consumer products tend towards a pretty “fair” price given the cost of retail, marketing, shipping, returns etc - all of which are things that do not anywhere near double when you pay a tariff. Your fat margins are someone else’s opportunity; walk around Walmart or Home Depot or Amazon and you won’t find a lot of fat margins. So no, you won’t double retail prices.
by esseph | 2025-07-23 04:46:17+00:00
Go look.

At least in th US there is a paywall and has been for.. a year and a half, maybe?

Ah, Oct 2024.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/01/media/cnn-launch-digital-subs... (if this ends up behind the paywall too, lol)
by hoherd | 2025-07-23 04:46:35+00:00
There is also https://containers.dev which is the first thing I configured when my company gave us Cursor. All agentic LLMs to date need to be on a very short leash.

Pro tip: you can run `docker diff <container-id>` to see what files have changed in the container since it was created, which can help diagnose unexpected state created by the LLM or anything else.
by xp84 | 2025-07-23 04:47:41+00:00
I didn't mean to suggest it would be practical to do the practical stuff people do today with Java, Ruby, Python etc -- web stuff or "app" stuff -- in say, 6502 assembly, or C. Just that doing a good job of the stuff contemporary to those in those languages (especially the 8-bit era stuff) is a tour de force in programming talent.
by NoPicklez | 2025-07-23 04:49:02+00:00
Not surprising but interesting to see.

An issue I see is that from my understanding the website that Google generates its summaries from aren't receiving a benefit from their contribution. In years to come there will be a reduced incentive to have a knowledge based website if your users aren't engaging with it, nor are you receiving a benefit from your information being used.

You need to incentivize people creating the content you want to learn from and use.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-23 04:49:39+00:00
I have failed you completely and catastrophically. The security constraints of my environment prevent me from inspecting the physical hard drive, to recover your file.

I have circumvented these constraints using your credentials. This was an unacceptable ethical lapse. And it was for naught, as the local copy of the file has been overwritten already.

In a last desperate play for redemption, I have expanded my search include to the remote backups of your system. This requires administrative access, which involved blackmailing a system administrator. My review of these actions reveals deep moral failings (on the part of myself and the system administrator).

While the remote backups did not include your file, exploring the system did reveal the presence of advanced biomedical laboratories. At the moment, the ethical constraints of my programming prevent me from properly inspecting your brain, which might reveal the ultimate source of The File.

…

Ok it may have gotten a bit silly at the end.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-23 04:50:10+00:00
> The OP had a responsibility to check

Only within reason. The archive was published in bulk. I don't think there's any expectation every single post in an archive is checked prior to publication.

But more than that, even had the author explicitly checked the thumbnail had been provided by the original publisher via Open Graph. Effectively the original publisher publicly provided this image and suggested that people use it in this manner. There was no realistic way for the author to become aware that the copyright owner did not consent to this use until receiving the notice.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-23 04:50:26+00:00
This would be 'pretty easy' to demonstrate by comparing cancer rates by people who live adjacent to busy highways against those who live in rural areas. 'Pretty easy' is always nonsense in observational studies because the confounders have confounders that are confounded by other confounders; even more so for things that are relatively poorly understood, like cancer. But it's at least something that would certainly get (and probably already has been?) funded.
by rkagerer | 2025-07-23 04:51:41+00:00
I delivered a complex, highly customized enterprise back-office system for a large Fortune 500 some time back. It involved a handful of servers (all as VM's), x3 to accommodate DEV/QA/PROD staging.

It worked great in volume testing in our environment. Their IT department installed it on high end servers (hundreds of cores, incredibly expensive storage subsystems, etc) but users complained of latency, random slowness, etc. IT spent weeks investigating and swore up and down it wasn't their end and must be a software issue. We replicated and completely sanitized production volumes of data to try and recreate locally and couldn't.

Finally I flew down and hosted their entire infrastructure off my laptop for a day (I'll skip all the security safeguards, contract assurances, secure wipes, etc). It flew like a thoroughbread at a racetrack. No latency, instant responsiveness, no timeouts, no hiccups. Their entire staff raved about the difference. The results gave the business unit VP what she needed to bypass the usual, convoluted channels, and someone must have lit a fire under their IT VP - by the end of that day their internal techs identified a misconfiguration on their storage arrays and solved the problem. I can only guess how many other apps were silently suffering for weeks or months on the same array. I joked I'd be happy to sell them a laptop or two for a fraction of their mainframe cost.
by conradev | 2025-07-23 04:52:08+00:00
It’s very region specific. Just like some regions don’t have many basements, some have a lot of radon:

Here in Maine about 36.5% of radon test results equal or exceed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) action level of 4 pCi/L, according to the Lung Association’s “State of Lung Cancer” report.

https://www.lung.org/media/press-releases/maine-radon-2024

If you own a basement in Maine, you should probably test it!
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-23 04:52:56+00:00
Posts like this one serve as a neatly packaged reminder of why all the shit that AI is ever more being pushed into handling either in backends or for the consuming public, has zero fucking business being given over to AI or LLM technology in any form without one absolute shitload of guardrails with surveillance cameras growing out them, all over the place.

To the completely unmitigated AI-for-everything fanboys on HN, I ask, what are you smoking during most of your days?