MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-07 04:44:52+00:00
So there are two complaints about this authn scheme that I'm seeing in this thread:

1. It's pretty phishable. I think this is mostly solved, or at least greatly mitigated, by using a Slack-style magic sign-in link instead of a code that you have the user manually enter into the trusted UI. A phisher would have to get the user to copy-paste the URL from the email into their UI, instead of clicking the link or copy-pasting it into the address bar. That's an unusual enough action that most users probably won't default to doing it (and you could improve this by not showing the URL in HTML email, instead having users click an image, but that might cause usability problems). It's not quite fully unphishable, but it seems about as close as you can get without completely hiding the authentication secret from the user, which is what passkeys, Yubikeys, etc., do. I'd love to see the future where passkeys are the only way to log into most websites, but I think websites are reluctant to go there as long as the ecosystem is relatively immature.

2. It's not true multi-factor authn because an attacker only needs to compromise one thing (your inbox) to hijack your account. I have two objections to this argument:

a. This is already the case as long as you have an email-based password reset flow, which most consumer-facing websites are unwilling to go without. (Password reset emails are a bit less vulnerable to phishing because a user who didn't request one is more likely to be suspicious when one shows up in their inbox, but see point 1.)

b. True multi-factor authn for ordinary consumer websites never really worked, and especially doesn't work in the age of password managers. As long as those exist, anyone who possesses and is logged into the user's phone or laptop (the usual prerequisites for a possession-based second factor) can also get their password. Most websites should not be in the business of trying to use knowledge-based authentication on their users, because they can't know whether the secret really came from the user's memory or was instead stored somewhere, the latter case is far more common in practice, and only in the former case is it truly knowledge-based. Websites should instead authenticate only the device, and delegate to the device's own authentication system (which includes physical possession and likely also a lock secret and/or biometric) the task of authenticating the user in a secure multi-factor way.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-07 04:45:08+00:00
I never liked MOOCs because I didn't see the value add over youtube. At the end of the day I just want free and unfettered access the full list of video lectures. Accounts, course enrollment, fixed sequences, it's all just friction that gets in the way of actual learning.

They also (at least in my experience) try to force you to watch via the browser. It's far more ergonomic for me to yt-dlp a full playlist and watch it locally.

Luckily MIT OCW exists and an almost unimaginably wide variety of educational material is constantly being dumped on youtube.
by MisterMower | 2025-08-07 04:45:44+00:00
The fact that it cost hundreds of millions to put these satellites into orbit is irrelevant. That’s sunk cost. The only relevant question is whether the data collected from them is worth $15M a year. I don’t think it is.

Think about all the carbon you could sequester with $15M a year. You could lease thousands of acres of farmland in the Midwest, plant trees, and sequester thousands of tons of carbon for that amount of money.

But no, we must keep spending money on projects like this to keep the climate hysteria at a maximum. It’s hard to produce headlines like “Atmospheric Carbon Rises to a New High Under Trump administration” without this satellite, you know.

Remind me, who has ulterior motives or terrible judgement?
by theultdev | 2025-08-07 04:45:50+00:00
I just found it interesting they think that the majority of Americans elected a candidate who supposedly ran on "authoritarian" ideals to be the leader of the free world.

Don't you think that's a bit unbelievable? You don't think there's a bit of bias/hyperbole there?

If you disagree, respond with a specific policy you think is "authoritarian" so everyone can debate it.

-- post limit, replying to below --

In 4 years if your side makes a convincing argument then you can undo those executive orders you feel are "authoritarian". Until then, we feel they aren't and they are just, and they are the right thing to do. And the law agrees.

Sorry you disagree but that's how it is. Sometimes your side doesn't call the shots. But the system is still working. I promise you another person that aligns with you will be in power eventually... unfortunately.
by alisonatwork | 2025-08-07 04:46:07+00:00
I remember back in the 90s there was somewhat of a backlash against the 303, which presumably was part of what Norman Cook was getting at with the name of the song mentioned on the top of this thread. Ironically - or perhaps deliberately - that track was peak unimaginative/tedious usage of the instrument, which is funny because he had also done some much more elegant takes in his Pizzaman project.

For me it never felt like the 303 ever got really overdone in mainstream electronic music. Certainly there was the riff from Pump Panel's Confusion remix showing up all over the place, and there were a few tracks that got a high rotation on MTV like Daft Punk's Da Funk and Josh Wink's Higher State, but I don't think it was ever really ubiquitous outside of acid music, which is already a niche genre. Like, we never got 808s & Heartbreak for the 303.

It was definitely controversial inside the synth community, though, where hardcore analog and modular synth nerds scoffed at it being so limited and toy-like, and everybody - young and old - resented it becoming so expensive and sought-after, which in turn raised the prices of other vintage synths that according to the rumor mill could do a decent approximation if you programmed them just right.

Rebirth busted that market by making the basic essence of the sound available to everyone, and there were plenty of bad acid tracks that came out during that period, but I think that's also when the opportunity was there for it to really break through as a serious instrument. Later VSTs like Phoscyon took inspiration from mods like Devilfish and more elaborate clones like the FR-777, building on the 303 base to create the kinds of sounds that in the old days might have required a lot hacking/patching up of different instruments to construct. But by that point it was clear that the mainstream didn't really care.

I'm at work right now so don't have access to my music library to share specific favorite tracks, but there is still so much great music featuring the 303 coming out - it never stopped. There is stuff for people of every taste. If the more unsubtle stuff doesn't work for you, you might want to check out Mighty Force label, which has been putting out a bunch of IDM/braindance and pleasant electro music recently that sometimes has delightful uses of the 303. Also in the back of my mind for more IDM-ish and electro stuff are Analogical Force, Virtual Urban Records, HC Records, Nocta Numerica... There's a bunch more in that vein, plus all the usual suspects doing big room techno, hard party acid, all-hardware synth jams etc etc, but you probably need to dig in any case. I tend to find even the best albums only have one or two tracks that are to my taste, but everyone is different so it's great that there is so much out there.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-07 04:46:33+00:00
Requirements provide absolute maximal bounds on interoperability. (This is why setting bounds to be only very recent versions arbitrarily is unhelpful because barely much of the world exists in bleeding-edge, rolling releases.)

A lockfile provide a specific, concrete, minimized, satisfied solution on what an application or library uses to operate.

Generally, deployed applications have and save lock files so that nothing changes without testing and interactive approval.

Libraries don't usually ship lock files to give the end user more flexibility.

What solved system package dependency hell is allowing multiple versions and configurations of side-by-side dependencies rather than demanding a single, one-size-fits-all dependency that forces exclusion and creates unsatisfiable constraints.
by pdntspa | 2025-08-07 04:47:51+00:00
Not sure why this is so remarkable. You can find similar assets on Windows buried in explorer.exe or shell32.dll. Hell just poking around my win10 install and I see winhlp32.exe and write.exe sporting their original Windows 3.x icons (though the programs themselves do not function)

My guess is that it's cheapest and lowest-risk to leave them in. It's not like most users are going to encounter them anyway.
by GianFabien | 2025-08-07 04:47:52+00:00
I was looking for some update on Wayland's status.

Wayland isn't actively on my radar, but I am sufficiently aware of it, that I would like to consider it, but only if it has gotten past the early adopter stage. My Debian desktop system is my daily workhorse. I don't futz with it to try out bleeding edge stuff.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-07 04:48:42+00:00
No, BAD just inserts your email address on GOOD’s login page which sends you the login code, and they lie to prime you into thinking it’s not suspicious that the email came from someone other than BAD.

When you insert the login code on BAD, BAD uses it to finish the login process on GOOD that they started “on your behalf”.
by jimbob45 | 2025-08-07 04:49:01+00:00
How does this square with the Indian tariffs? Are they going to entirely abandon all of their efforts to shift to India from China and pivot to America instead? Or is this in addition to those efforts as a plea for the current administration to drop India’s tariffs?

Either way, India seems like it has once again miscalculated who to side with on the world stage. Russian oil may be cheap, but Russia hasn’t been a reliable ally to any country in the past 30 years, and now India looks set to lose significant investments from the US.
by wouterjanl | 2025-08-07 04:49:12+00:00
I do not think Hiroshima existed in isolation. I totally agree that the Japanese empire and the Third Reich committed horrible war crimes in WW2. If there's anything I lament, it's how it seems so hard to feel empathy for the traumas of the real people who die in war, whatever side they are on. The New Yorker piece we are commenting on describes mundane lives of normal people. These were not people who were beating someone or someone's children to death. Sure, many if not all Japanese were supporting a regime that was responsible for immense crulety, and sure, I do understand how that affects our ability to feel empathy for them (it's maybe similar to how I feel less empathy for a fan of a rival football team mourning a game's loss compared to a fan of the football team I happen to support). I understand this way of thinking, but I choose to rebel against it. Because we talk about losing real lives, real suffering - and what citizenship of which empire or nation state should be so crucial that it cancels out a person's humanity? As you write yourself, "war is terrible". It really is. Call me naive, but I dream of a world where that sentence is not followed by a 'but', but by a period.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-07 04:49:25+00:00
iPhones are more expensive in developing countries due to developing country taxes and tariffs. China used to be the same way (iPhones are imported into China because they are made in SEZs), but has a price that is comparable to the USA now mainly due to china’s push for more consumption by Chinese consumers. iPhone prices are high in India simply because the government would rather Indian consumers not spend money on them, not because the Indian government thinks they can afford it.

The USA is sort of addicted to consumption (where China wants to be actually), you could dissuade a lot of consumption by raising taxes on it (if, for example, you want people to save more and focus only on necessities). It would be a huge change for America though, the market might not survive intact if it happens too quickly.
by disambiguation | 2025-08-07 04:50:33+00:00
The effectiveness and pragmatism of economic theory aside -

It's interesting to observe that highly opinionated topics (such as economics) tend to follow a "team sports" pattern. More than day to day utility, people argue passionately for their "home team". It becomes a point of pride and identity.

Of further note is the role of education - generally considered a form of training to improve your personal wellbeing - yet it has a secondary function. It can convince you to "change teams."

rethinkeconomics.org says:

> The problem we face is the total dominance of one way of teaching, which promotes the marketisation of society, leading to increased inequality, injustice and significant harm to the natural world.

A cohesive society is one with "team support" parity between the people and government. It begs the question - what happens when society reverses parity?
by gwern | 2025-08-07 04:51:29+00:00
> Edit: if someone can explain why this was instantly downvoted I would genuinely appreciate knowing where I went wrong here

Alluding to some conversation which supposedly demonstrates my unsuitability for such a role, while pointedly refusing to link it or describe it any detail which could be judged (to the point where I, the person in question, have no idea what misdeeds you are talking about), is not credible and reeks of, one might say, 'very unconstructive crap-on criticism', and people might be understandably reluctant to upvote it.

If you think my criticisms were that bad, then link the tweets in question - and, since my account is currently locked, I will happily copy them all out here so everyone can read them and judge for themselves. I am not afraid.
by musicale | 2025-08-07 04:53:02+00:00
A few multics features that I wish unix/linux had:

- ring based security (allows for multilevel containers at user level, among other things)

- better permissions by default (mandatory access control, acls, etc.)

- finer-grain memory permissions (segments vs. pages, etc.)

- no buffer overflows (and minimal memory errors)

- long command names in addition to short abbreviations (easy to implement in linux/unix, just missing)

- multiple entry points for commands (currently faked with symlinks)

- (related) being able to call into an executable like a library

- unified storage model (can sort of be faked with mmap())

and some features I wish unix didn't have (and which multics didn't need):

- dumping new kernel APIs into /proc

Ironically linux is much larger than multics ever was, but much (most?) of it isn't basic kernel functionality but things like libraries, tons of drivers for everything imaginable, lots of network protocols, file systems, etc., and a bunch of kernel modules.
by endtime | 2025-08-07 04:53:10+00:00
I worked at Google for ten years (as an IC). Here's my personal perspective.

Yes, of course, the individual employees know. But the decision making for these kinds of things is usually a full-time middle manager, who isn't deciding on behalf of Google as a whole, but on behalf of their organization within Google (could be 50 people, could be 2000). It's not just _not_ that manager's job to make the globally optimal decision for Google, it's actually likely often in direct conflict with their job, which is basically "set the priorities of your org such that they launch things that make your boss look good to his boss". Spending headcount on maintaining niche stuff is usually not that (and takes resources away from whatever is).
by deterministic | 2025-08-07 04:53:14+00:00
Customer code generators have made me 10x more productive (generating 90% of a typical client/server biz application from a declarative spec).

AI's so far haven't been able to beat that.

However I have found AI's to be great when working with unfamiliar tools. Where the effort involve in reading the docs etc. far outweigh the benefits. In my case using AI's to generate JasperReports .jrxml files made me more productive.
by codebje | 2025-08-07 04:54:11+00:00
The post I replied to was speculating on IPv4's life being extended by "simply making the numbers bigger" rather than having more bits per byte, but nevertheless... there still would've been a transition, delayed by at most a few years.

Exhaustion was raised for 32-bit IPv4 in the very early 90s, when we had a few million active Internet users. Allocations were very sparsely used and growth in Internet usage was exponential. It didn't take much of an imagination to foresee a problem.

A 36-bit Internet would be little better. By the middle of the 90s we had ~45 million active Internet users, ending our 16x space advantage, even assuming we didn't just squander that with 8x as wasteful Class A allocations and bigger spaces reserved for uses that will never arise.

Today, we have ~70 billion connected devices: 5-6 billion home subscribers each with multiple devices in the home, 7.5 billion smartphones, 20 billion IoT devices, and all growing rapidly.

We'd need NAT. But NAT was a response to exhaustion concerns, as a stop-gap measure to provide time to design and transition to a proper solution. If we didn't have exhaustion concerns, there'd be no NAT. If we did have exhaustion concerns, brought on perhaps by the lack of NAT, we'd still have invented IPv6, because we'd still have been able to forecast that the Internet would rapidly outgrow 36 bits of address space.

edit: disclaimer, I work in this space, but my comments reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily those of my employer.
by GianFabien | 2025-08-07 04:54:18+00:00
My understanding of a "distro" is as being a curated collection of components from lots of different sources which have been re-compiled and tested to work together. At its core is always a specific version of Linux and then the userland packages that users may choose to install.

The most fundamental alternative would be to build the core Linux system, e.g. following the Linux from Scratch process and then downloading each application from its repository and compiling, installing and configuring. That too is a valid choice but one that some of us don't care to indulge in.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-07 04:56:08+00:00
A +1% majority thinks authoritarianism is good for America, and maybe this democracy experiment that the founding fathers wasn’t such a great idea. He is literally ruling by executive fiat, and owns the Supreme Court while congress is inert, so there is nothing there to stop him.

Executive orders, at least, are completely ephemeral. The other side doesn’t have to make an argument, they just need to win the presidency. All of Trump’s executive orders can be undone on day one of the new president’s term. Only laws made by congress are binding past the president’s term. Even Trump supporters should know that, Apple definitely does.
by duttish | 2025-08-07 04:56:19+00:00
A security review was the first real eye opener for me in my Claude code use.

I opened a Claude prompt in my server folder and wrote something along the lines of "Review this codebase from a security perspective. Think deeply about the implications of the code and produce a report". Nothing advanced, very straightforward.

It was my first experiment with triggering a larger review and it was way above expectations. Found a couple of things I had missed, found some things that were on my todo list, and then I asked it to create a phased implementation plan based on that report, and then after looking over the plan too claude fixed it.
by illiac786 | 2025-08-07 04:58:36+00:00
The diagram is confusing because DB has started “massaging” the data. As an example, if a train which travels back and forth between two cities has a certain amount of delay, it will just turn around and not serve the remaining stations on the line. And that’s as many stations not counted as delays. This trick is named the “pofalla turnaround”, after the DB infrastructure boss Ronald Pofalla who introduced it in 2018.

And I think that’s just one trick, meaning the downfall starts earlier and is more significant I suspect.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-08-07 04:58:48+00:00
'A government of laws...' Ah-ha-ha. For some.

The guy, with a green-card, was in his late 20s when he 'possessed' marijuana. Oh, the shame, the infamy, the degradation!

"McLaughlin told Newsweek: "if you break the law, you will face the consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S." Hard-ass bogus bullshit. Why not be hard-ass about criminal native citizens as well? Be like the President ... NEVER break a law - ANY law - or you're out.

He was not illegal, his 'crime' was self-medication with a substance now legal in many jurisdictions, and he 'was granted a withholding of removal order' in 2007 ... 18 years ago.

How many of the hardasses approving this action ...deportation to 'either Romania or Australia' are themselves 'marijuana criminals'? Capitulation to this kind of crap will lead us into an era of misery.
by pomian | 2025-08-07 04:58:53+00:00
This project has invoked a lot of very interesting dialogue and discussion - Very fun fit for HN. Someone mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson's book: Aurora. (There is an audiobook version.) I recommend it also... It is a bit long winded but presents a lot of detail and thinking on many of the ideas discussed in this comment section. A very fun read. A grand adventure similar to old school science fiction books. One of the brilliant concluding quotes, went something like; The earth is an interstellar spaceship too.
by a2128 | 2025-08-07 04:59:02+00:00
Link to actual GitHub PR since Reddit blocks some ASNs: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/144232

From documentation, and a test in the PR:

When tail calling a function, instead of its stack frame being added to the stack, the stack frame of the caller is directly replaced with the callee's. This means that as long as a loop in a call graph only uses tail calls, the stack growth will be bounded. This is useful for writing functional-style code (since it prevent recursion from exhausting resources) or for code optimization (since a tail call *might* be cheaper than a normal call, tail calls can be used in a similar manner to computed goto). pub fn fibonacci(n: u64, a: u64, b: u64) -> u64 { match n { 0 => a, 1 => b, _ => become fibonacci(n - 1, b, a + b), } }
by merek | 2025-08-07 04:59:40+00:00
> The FDA approval comes based on trial data submitted by the pharmaceutical company, so it's worth noting that published peer-reviewed reports are yet to be published. Peer-reviewed publications often follow regulatory approvals, not precede them, which is common in the field of ophthalmology and dermatology.

Does anyone know the reason that data is published after approval rather than before? Seems illogical at face value, but I'm obviously missing something.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-07 05:00:14+00:00
Skillfully diplomatic? He's overtly mocking the behaviors of the British Empire. You're also off on your timeline. The 'shot heard round the world' would happen in 1775, not 1773, years after this letter was written. Even the Boston Tea Party hadn't yet happened. His overall complaint, and its solution are also rather plain. Britain was trying to impose their authority like a foreign occupation, rather than treating the colonies as an equal and integrated part of the Empire.

There's probably no timeline where Britain holds onto the colonies simply because of the distance involved - people don't like being ruled by those who don't represent themselves in any meaningful way. But they almost certainly accelerated the end through hubris. They were the Mighty and Civilized British Empire, and the colonies were just uncultured backwoods vagrants who's existence was only at the leisure of the Crown.