MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hydrox24 | 2025-08-29 00:11:55+00:00
This article (as it makes clear) owes it's analysis at least largely to what Tufte has written about the Challenger disaster (1986) and Columbia Disaster (2003). He wrote about the Columbia one more fully in the second edition of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.

Given that the link in the article to his report on his website is now broken, people might be interested in teh few page grabs that he has included in the "comments" on his site here[0].

See also the article that he has re-posted under the "comments" section on his page on the matter[1].

[0]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/new-edition-of-the-cogn... [1]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/the-columbia-evidence/
by crazygringo | 2025-08-29 00:12:05+00:00
Probably even more have been burned by overdesign.

If you decided to make your boolean a timestamp, and now realize you need a field with 3 states, now what?

If you'd kept your boolean, you could convert the field from BOOL to TINYINT without changing any data. [0, 1] becomes [0, 1, 2] easily.
by tptacek | 2025-08-29 00:12:14+00:00
Without getting into the alternatives: scraper defense isn't a viable proof of work setting, because there's no asymmetry to exploit. You're imposing exactly the same cost on legit users as you are on scrapers. Economies of scale mean that the marginal cost for your adversary is actually significantly lower than for your real users.

What the Anubis POW system is doing right now is exploiting the fact that there's been no need for crawlers to be anything but naive. But the cost to make them sophisticated enough to defeat the POW system is quite low, and when that happens, the POW will just be annoying legit users for no benefit.

I don't know if "mistake" is the word I'd use for it. It's not a whole lot of code! It's a reasonable first step to force crawlers to emulate a tiny fraction of a real browser. But as it evolves, it should evolve away from burning compute, because that's playing to lose.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-08-29 00:12:28+00:00
I have a S24+ and Anubis often runs poorly for me and fails. I tend to frequent tech related sites so browsing on my phone has been miserable the last couple months.

I checked the value of navigator.hardwareConcurrency on my phone and it returns 9... I guess that explains it.

It looks like setting light performance mode in device optimisations (I don't game on my phone) turns off the S24s sole Cortex-X4.
by jt2190 | 2025-08-29 00:13:18+00:00
(I’m not the person you replied to.)

My understanding is that people with financial training don’t think about money, they think about risk. If you are a banker and ask yourself “What is the probability that this 100 deposit will be here in another 30 days?” you might answer differently depending on what you know about your customer.

- If you think that your customer will withdraw 50 in the next 30 days, you might take the other 50 and invest it in a 30-day CD, and take the other 50 and just hold on to it.

- If you think all 100 will remain in the account the entire time you could invest all 100.

- etc.

If you are the customer you want a bank that understands what kind of inflows/outflows you’ll typically have. The bank wants to manage the risk, and you want a bank that doesn’t freak out at what seem to you to be very mundane transactions.
by ammojamo | 2025-08-29 00:13:59+00:00
This. And I do their work a lot more slowly because it's not my regular job, and I actually already had to do some of the work (getting the items out of my trolley and onto the conveyor). Now I stand there forever fumbling with barcodes, trying to get bags to stay open, switching between getting items out of the trolley and scanning. The old checkout system is so much more efficient when you are buying anything more than a couple of items at a time.
by utyop22 | 2025-08-29 00:14:16+00:00
"I'm also concerned with the impact of LLMs on the quality of information."

You have finally made an astute observation...

I have already made the assumption that use of LLMs is going to add new mounds of BS atop the mass of crap that already exists on the internet, as part of my startup thesis.

These things are not obvious in the here and now, but I try to take the view of - how would the present day look, 50 years out in the future looking backwards?
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-29 00:15:01+00:00
Games that needed trig in the 90's often used SIN/COS lookup-tables. To keep memory down:

1) you only need the first 1/4 of the Sine table since the remaining 3/4 are either the first 1/4 in reverse and/or with the sign flipped.

2) and of course Sine can also be used as a Cosine lookup if you add pi/2 radians to the cosine angle (wrapping around of course).

3) to avoid the size needed for a table of floats you can of course use integers (scaled by some factor) or fixed-point values.

4) and simple interpolation would get you seemingly more precision.

(Combining all the above was a bit gross so documentation and a good SPI helped.)
by jeffbee | 2025-08-29 00:15:13+00:00
> each type of CPU core (what they call a "tier" in the article) will still be a power of two

Yeah that's obviously not true, and believing it shows a marked lack of experience in the field. Of the current Xeon workstation lineup, only 3 of 14 SKUs have power-of-2 core counts. And there are consumer lines of CPUs with 6 cores and that sort of thing.
by jumploops | 2025-08-29 00:15:33+00:00
It may not be full-blown psychosis, but I’ve seen multiple instances[0][1] of people getting “engaged” (ring and all) to their AI companions.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/s/oZXJ3TUhVC

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/s/nZpoziZO8W
by utyop22 | 2025-08-29 00:16:12+00:00
"but quality is definitely taking a hit now that no-one is able to keep up."

And its going to get worse! So please explain to me how in the net, you are going to be better off? You're not.

I think most people haven't taken a decent economics class and don't deeply understand the notion of trade offs and the fact there is no free lunch.
by protocolture | 2025-08-29 00:16:22+00:00
The problem was that they did meet the letter of their obligations. The contract was allegedly worded to payout upon a certain revenue threshold. What it should have been crafted around, was a certain level of recurring revenue. So they sold a bunch of services, for quite a lot of money and simply never delivered them, delaying them for years.

The owner was very prideful and I think could not accept he had been conned, the only way out for him to keep his pride was to sell the business back to them.
by rainsford | 2025-08-29 00:16:46+00:00
Maybe. But crucially Teslas, and EVs in general, don't look like muscle cars and they're not marketed that way. Yeah they can be insanely fast in a straight line, but the appeal of muscle cars was about a lot more than straight line performance.

I'm not actually sure any EV could capture what people like about muscle cars, but you're definitely not going to get it from some futuristic transport blob that just happens to have a low 0-60 time. The Tesla roadster might have captured some of the sports car magic, but it's telling they don't make that any more (for now). I don't know if they could do the same thing for muscle cars at all.
by AngryData | 2025-08-29 00:17:01+00:00
But of course China is still going to be able to look at the response of nearly every other modernized nation and see how they deal with population drop first. That still puts them at a major advantage over other nations even after they peak. China is in an absolute prime position going into the future, they just gotta hold onto competent leaders for a few generations, and from my (admittedly limited) view they are doing a better job than most.
by ares623 | 2025-08-29 00:17:49+00:00
My personal theory is that the stock market rewards the behavior of cutting jobs as a signal of the company being on the AI bandwagon. Doesn't matter if the roles were needed or not. Line goes up, therefore it is good.

This is a complete reversal in the past where having a high headcount was an easy signal of a company's growth (i.e. more people, means more people building features, means more growth).

Investors are lazy. They see one line go down, they make the other line go up.

CEOs are lazy. They see line go up when other line goes down. So they make other line go down.

(I am aware that "line go up" is a stupid meme. But I think it's a perfect way to describe what's happening. It is stupid, lazy, absurd, memetic. It's the only thing that matters, stripped off of anything that is incidental. Line must go up.)
by Amezarak | 2025-08-29 00:17:51+00:00
I am not making any argument about his corruption or lack thereof. We're talking about two specific very bad legal cases using novel legal theories that should have never been brought, with people like CNN's legal correspondent agreeing, not Trump fanactics.

"Trump corrupt" !=> "this case was sound."

I also provided an example of the Mackey case, where the DoJ was weaponized to go after Trump supporters on Twitter.
by kacklekackle | 2025-08-29 00:17:52+00:00
Right now I get timed out on my thinking queries use of VM in 60 seconds and as a result the responses are less than adequate as it tries to take shortcuts to stay within the time out limit. I can imagine that in the future maybe there won't be a time out limit which would greatly increase the quality of the responses. And more recently the model seems to get stuck reaffirming facts that we already established and moved on from. For some reason it feels it wants to remind me. Additionally, we may have moved on, but then it applies the fact to what we have moved on to so the context needs to be improved.
by toss1 | 2025-08-29 00:20:47+00:00
For sure! Tho it seems the original BTC design expected huge transaction volumes and transaction fees to take over providing income for miners as mining fees repeatedly halved.

But they didn't anticipate that people are not using BTC to buy pizza and a million other things, the great bulk of BTC is being stashed in financial vehicles like ETFs, generating fewer and fewer transactions.

Seems like a doom cycle. Fewer transactions, less profit, fewer miners, slower transactions, less value.....
by computerex | 2025-08-29 00:20:49+00:00
I feel exactly the same way.

Even this post by Martin Fowler shows he's an aging dinosaur stuck in denial.

> I’ve often heard, with decent reason, an LLM compared to a junior colleague. But I find LLMs are quite happy to say “all tests green”, yet when I run them, there are failures. If that was a junior engineer’s behavior, how long would it be before H.R. was involved?

I don't know what "LLM's" he's using but I just simply don't get hallucinations like that with cursor or claude code.

He ends with this: > LLMs create a huge increase in the attack surface of software systems. Simon Willison described the The Lethal Trifecta for AI agents: an agent that combines access to your private data, exposure to untrusted content, and a way to externally communicate (“exfiltration”). That “untrusted content” can come in all sorts of ways, ask it to read a web page, and an attacker can easily put instructions on the website in 1pt white-on-white font to trick the gullible LLM to obtain that private data.

Not sure why he is re-iterating well known prompt injection vulnerability, passing it off as a general weakness of LLM's that applies to all LLM use when that's not the reality.
by utyop22 | 2025-08-29 00:20:54+00:00
I want to re-phrase your definition.

To me a bubble reflects a market disconnect from fundamentals - wherein prices go up steeply, with no help from the fundamentals (expected growth in base year cash flows and risk).

Indeed there is a subtle difference between a bubble and speculation of what could come of a technology. But the two are connected because the effects of technology are reflected by investors in asset prices.
by jc4p | 2025-08-29 00:21:42+00:00
Thank you! I’ve been fine tuning tiny Llama and Gemma models using transformers then exporting from the safetensors that spits out — My main use case is LLMs but I’ve also tried getting YOLO finetuned and other PyTorch models running and ran into similar problems, just seemed very confusing to figure out how to properly use the phone for this.
by idiomat9000 | 2025-08-29 00:22:19+00:00
The problem is more acute and current . China has not enough white collar work. It has no pension system , usually the 4 grandparents move in with their kids. Who must provide income for 6+ person households. Which only whit collar work can do. Or investments,like flats etc.

China is spiralling right now, not tomorrow , today.
by DaveZale | 2025-08-29 00:22:40+00:00
very thoughtful. Obviously many conscientious Israelis are leaving their country (it's a real thing). Likewise with the US.

I am in the US, but my approach to the oligarchy/AIPAC takeover is real simple, though maybe not effective: just cut spending to a bare minimum. The billionaires need to make more more more, well not if I can help it. Politcally, everyone should switch to Independent status! Don't let them takw your vote for granted. Never ever vote straight party choices. It's more work to research each candidate but hey, enjoy learning sometimes unsavory details. Check opensecrets.org about who is bankrolling each candidate. Read responsible alternative news sources that don't push ads, and donate to the best ones.
by roxolotl | 2025-08-29 00:23:09+00:00
As a manager I strongly agree with this post. I’m currently responsible for taking a team whose old manager wanted to go back to being an ic. The team has a reputation for being slow, not being the best at architecture. So far I don’t really care about that. The problem is that no one at any level can even agree on what their priorities should be. When every standup you’re told to do something different of course you’re going to be slow. And this isn’t to bash the old manager this is coming from above him.

A manager’s job is first and foremost to manage tasks. I’ve instituted real sprints and they’ve started burning through the backlog. It’s not that agile is amazing it’s that structure is. There’s now a single on call person who is the target of sudden important bugs. Work doesn’t just fly in unannounced and blow up the whole team anymore. The team knows if I ask a question they can respond the next day.

It’s crazy to me how little many leaders I’ve encountered appreciate focus. I do think part of the problem is thrashing looks productive to some leaders. But it almost never is. There’s that quote: “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”. It almost always holds true.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-29 00:23:37+00:00
Yeah this is like saying Aldi “automated” cart return. They didn’t, they got every shopper to do the work themselves. Automated cart return would be if you just gave the cart a little “giddyup!” when you were done and it found its way home. Or those cart conveyor belts at Ikea, it’s only part of the process but that part is automated.

[edit] Aldi did automate the management of getting shoppers to do that work, because there’s not a person standing there taking and handing out quarters, but (very simple) machines. Without those machines they might need a person, so that hypothetical role (the existence of which might make the whole scheme uneconomical) is automated. But they didn’t automate cart return, all that work’s still being done by people.
by Hizonner | 2025-08-29 00:23:47+00:00
Actually, my main original purpose was to call (more) attention to the fact that looking for somebody specifically advertising a VPN to your particular country, for a censorship-resistance purpose, has a vastly greater chance of getting you a honey pot than almost any other possible way of looking for a relay. Honey pots are particularly dangerous in one-hop protocols with cleartext exit.

The part about the unreliable ad-hockery is also true, albeit less critical. The fact is that you don't know what your adversary is doing now, and you definitely don't know what they're going to to roll out next. You don't have to be stupid to decide to take that risk, but you also don't have to be particularly stupid to not think about that risk in the first place, especially when people are egging you on to take it.

The greater purpose underlying both is to keep people from unknowingly getting in over their heads. I have seen lots of people do actually stupid things, up close and personal, especially when given instructions without the appropriate cautions.

And "services and providers" doesn't necessarily mean commercial VPNs. In fact those were way down the list of what I had in mind. Your own VPS is a "provider". So is Tor or I2P (not that those won't usually run into problems). So is your personal friend in another country.
by sterlind | 2025-08-29 00:23:56+00:00
ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) brings back a kind of domain fronting, except you don't need to front anything at all. the Client Hello itself is encrypted, so the SNI is hidden.

hopefully ECH will catch on. I suspect the corporate backlash over domain fronting was them not wanting to be caught in the crossfire if their domain was used as a front. if e.g. Signal used "giphy.com" as a front, Russia might block giphy to block Signal. but if Signal is hosted on, say, AWS, and ECH was used, Russia would have no option other than blocking the entirety of AWS, since all TLS handshakes to AWS would look the same.

though cloud providers (other than CloudFlare, respect!) don't seem to care about censorship or surveillance anymore, and might decline to adopt ECH if some lucrative market complains.
by jleyank | 2025-08-29 00:24:46+00:00
Perhaps it's time to fork the united states and see how each half goes. One half will have food. One half will have money. There's probably enough guns and enough disorder to keep things messy. Very messy.

I guess we can take Irish solution and employ work-to-rule, passive resistance and the like. Prevent the cash from leaving the state, prevent the Guard from mobilizing or leaving the state. Rely on ejecting non-whites and women from the services doing a number on effectiveness.

Who gets to invoke Nato? The nukes are in red states I think, will they nuke themselves? Is there enough of an edge to teeter on to get people to wake up and turn on other branches of government? The Civil War was bloody. The French Revolution was bloody, perhaps the lack-of-bloodthirstiness will help people say "ah, f*ck it" and let things part?

Never, ever thought this sh*t possible. And so quickly... Puts China in a very odd position, trying to determine which result is optimal for China. Strong, well-armed rogue states aren't good for business.
by lrvick | 2025-08-29 00:24:50+00:00
They absolutely did, and beat us to it. They were a fantastic reference, and we link to their blog posts in our readme. We even have a comparison with Guix there too.

https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/#comparison

Guix optimized for maximizing package and architecture variety quickly and focused on retrofitting supply chain security tactics as a secondary goal later where possible. For example it allows for untrusted packages with binary blobs in the supply chain in cases like Haskell, Ada, and Qemu. Their supply chain security efforts are on a package by package basis and not mandatory, and still assume that all maintainers are unable to be compromised.

Stagex by contrast is a supply-chain-security-first distro that can trust no single maintainer or computer by design. As such, Haskell and Ada are impossible to add support for right now as no bootstrap path exists for them.

With Qemu we did the hard work of learning how to build all those binary blobs ourselves from source because we really needed it.

Guix has by far the best supply chain security of any workstation distro out there, but I would never ever use it in the supply chain of anything bound for high value production use where no single person should be trusted. Guix is also very difficult to use in container environments as it has no signed/reproducible OCI images so you would have to build all that yourself.

That is what stagex was built for.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-29 00:25:09+00:00
I actually do not have a problem with digital IDs, as long as my personal identity isn't being shared alongside it. Not to the site operator, not to the government.

This might seem contradictory, but I believe this is technically possible? What I don't think is this is how these solutions actually work currently. Like to basically prove that I am indeed a unique visitor who's a person according to the govt, but wouldn't reveal the person info to the site, and wouldn't reveal the site info to the govt, even if they collude.

Same with the whole +18 goof. I'd actually quite like to try age gated communities, like +-5 years my age. I feel a lot of conflict stems from people coming from a bit too different walks of life sometimes. Could even do high confidence location based gating this way, which could also be cool (as well as the exact opposite of cool, because of course).
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-08-29 00:25:12+00:00
> so long as the cost is appropriately small.

there are different metrics for cost, however. Based on cpu utilization and/or time, it's hard to argue that Anubis is a high price.

But if it is important to you to not run javascript for whatever reason, the price of access to a site using Anubis is rather high.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-08-29 00:25:24+00:00
There are a number of sites that aggregate some things, here is one

https://moderncss.dev/topics/

Recent survey of what people use to learn CSS:

https://2025.stateofcss.com/en-US/resources/

CSS Tricks article on this:

https://css-tricks.com/how-to-keep-up-with-new-css-features/
Ask HN: What to do when you suspect your interview is with a state operative?
by puppycodes | 2025-08-29 00:26:41+00:00
I'm curious what HN thinks is the best course of action when you are reasonably certain you have interviewed someone who is attempting to gain access to your company from a certain place that is famously totalitarian.

Let's assume they are a state actor, Here are some things that crossed my mind:

- Citizens from this region of the world are forced to do this and it amounts to slave labor. I have empathy for their situation. What is a responsible way to report things like this?

- I try to avoid communicating with law enforcement in general, is the FBI or other US agency the only avenue to warn others?

- Without hiring this person, what exposure should we worry about? What precautions are worth taking in the future?

Thanks for your insights :)
by tharkun__ | 2025-08-29 00:26:52+00:00
Nobody is making you. You are given a choice.

This company needs to get paid. For that it uses ads and other means, just like everyone else does. Their list of ads, tracking and other partners happens to be around 200. They tell you and you either choose to accept that, read their content for "free" (like you use other content/apps for "free") or actually choose to say "No, if "free" costs me this, then I don't want it".

And some really aren't even to "sell your data" but just their own analytics to let their dev/SRE staff see what's going on. Nothing nefarious at all.

Nobody forces you to accept this and read their content.

Heck, your online banking/brokerage probably uses a bunch of trackers you probably aren't aware of, because they don't tell you. Go open the network tab in dev tools and check.
by chuckadams | 2025-08-29 00:27:33+00:00
Nifty, hadn't noticed that. I only switched back to Firefox as my daily driver a few months ago after a long time with Chrome, so I'm still finding new things.

Now we just need it to save the page state like it would for an unloaded tab. But I guess the hard parts of that aren't really implemented after all, all kinds of issues though with serializing the page state, making it work with sync across platforms, or just dealing with someone trying to open the same state multiple times...