MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-08-21 00:13:09+00:00
Respectfully, I think it's you missing the point here. None of this is to say you shouldn't use Anubis, but Tavis Ormandy is offering a computer science critique of how it purports to function. You don't have to care about computer science in this instance! But you can't dismiss it because it's computer science.

Consider:

An adaptive password hash like bcrypt or Argon2 uses a work function to apply asymmetric costs to adversaries (attackers who don't know the real password). Both users and attackers have to apply the work function, but the user gets ~constant value for it (they know the password, so to a first approx. they only have to call it once). Attackers have to iterate the function, potentially indefinitely, in the limit obtaining 0 reward for infinite cost.

A blockchain cryptocurrency uses a work function principally as a synchronization mechanism. The work function itself doesn't have a meaningfully separate adversary. Everyone obtains the same value (the expected value of attempting to solve the next round of the block commitment puzzle) for each application of the work function. And note in this scenario most of the value returned from the work function goes to a small, centralized group of highly-capitalized specialists.

A proof-of-work-based antiabuse system wants to function the way a password hash functions. You want to define an adversary and then find a way to incur asymmetric costs on them, so that the adversary gets minimal value compared to legitimate users.

And this is in fact how proof-of-work-based antispam systems function: the value of sending a single spam message is so low that the EV of applying the work function is negative.

But here we're talking about a system where legitimate users (human browsers) and scrapers get the same value for every application of the work function. The cost:value ratio is unchanged; it's just that everything is more expensive for everybody. You're getting the worst of both worlds: user-visible costs and a system that favors large centralized well-capitalized clients.

There are antiabuse systems that do incur asymmetric costs on automated users. Youtube had (has?) one. Rather than simply attaching a constant extra cost for every request, it instead delivered a VM (through JS) to browsers, and programs for that VM. The VM and its programs were deliberately hard to reverse, and changed regularly. Part of their purpose was to verify, through a bunch of fussy side channels, that they were actually running on real browsers. Every time Youtube changed the VM, the bots had to do large amounts of new reversing work to keep up, but normal users didn't.

This is also how the Blu-Ray BD+ system worked.

The term of art for these systems is "content protection", which is what I think Anubis actually wants to be, but really isn't (yet?).

The problem with "this is good because none of the scrapers even bother to do this POW yet" is that you don't need an annoying POW to get that value! You could just write a mildly complicated Javascript function, or do an automated captcha.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-21 00:13:15+00:00
Same. In fact, I don't organize much of anything that's digital, photos or files. I just use search, it's pretty good these days, and with OCR even better.

Just give me a big flag structure with robust search and I'm happy. Heck I don't even bother to organize or layout the apps on my home screen. quicker for me to search with spotlight than scroll around and find what I want.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-21 00:13:37+00:00
The author though neglects what a bus factor of 0 means in real terms and how it gets there, aside from the description of the definition upfront where all knowledge lost.

A company acceptable with a bus factor of zero is a company that is not willing to pay the economic advantage to the expertise required to do the work.

The economic demand, of humanity competing with AI is zero because AI does things its good at with an order of magnitude difference in cost, and the deception and lies surrounding the marketing coupled with communications channel jamming lead to predictable outcomes. What happens when that demand and thus economic benefit go to zero? Any investment in the knowledge in the first place has no return. No one goes into it, no one learns, and that's quite dangerous in economies based in money-printing.

So while there may not be a problem right now, there will no doubt be problems in the next proverbial quarter. Career development pipelines are years in the making. They are sequential pipelines. Zero into a sequential pipeline is zero out with the time-lag between the two (which is years).

~2 years without economic incentive is when you lose your best and brightest. From there is a slow march to a 10 year deadline after which catastrophic losses occur.

I had a chance to have a interesting discussion with a local community college Dean. Apparently they have had to lower the number of Computer Science related program sections because of lack of demand. In intro courses, for 18 sections there were 13 people who had declared for the major, most students when asked citing AI concerns and lack of career development pipeline.

What happens when you have no expertise that you can pay at any price to fix the processes involved because you put them all out of business using what amounts to a semi-thinking non-sentient slave.

Without supply, there can be no demand. Where supply becomes infinite because of external parties, there can be no demand. There can be need, but demand is not need.

So this all started in 2022. Best and brightest are re-skilling. There's a glut of lower competency talent too. Bad things happen when you mess with the foundations of economics, and they happen on a time lag, where you can't react fast enough after-the-fact.

What will it take? At some point there will be a crisis where they will have to treat it as triage on the battlefield. The people in charge didn't want to hear about this when it could have made a difference.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-21 00:13:50+00:00
The size is about what every manufacturer settled on, and what most people want, it is unfortunate that smaller phones are not an option but it doesn't sell.

What bugs me however is that thin body with a huge camera bulge. Do anybody actually like that? It looks ridiculous, and the bulge defeats the point of having a thin phone. If you can't make the camera thinner, make the phone thicker, there is plenty of things you can do with more space: bigger battery, better speaker, more powerful vibration, more robust, etc...
by siliconc0w | 2025-08-21 00:14:02+00:00
The problem is that our brains really don't like expending calories on information we don't repeatedly use so the further you get from something, the less you understand it or remember it.

So even if you aren't even vibe coding and are trying to review every change, your skills are atrophying. We see this all the time as engineers enter management, they become super competent at the new skills the role requires but quickly become pretty useless at solving technical problems.

It's similar to why it's so hard to go from level2 to level5 in driving automation. We're not really designed to be partially involved in a process - we quickly loose attention, become lazy, and blindly trust the machine. Which is maybe fine if the machine is 100% reliable but we know that isn't the case.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-21 00:15:39+00:00
> solvable with a case

The iphone 16's camera bump is 3.5mm. Short of making your own case that makes the bump a Pixel like bar, that wont be solved by just sticking a case.

On photos, it is indeed a very personal topic to many. In particular someone taking dozens of random pictures everyday won't have the same use case as someone being a lot more deliberate for each picture for instance. A one size fjts all approach isn't helpful IMHO.
by tiffanyh | 2025-08-21 00:16:33+00:00
With so many new AI editors popping up, it feels like the Zed team is in a tough “lose/lose” spot.

If they stick to their current path—focusing on craftsmanship and letting their world-class talent build the best editor—they risk falling behind giants like Cursor. Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there) in just two years. With that kind of momentum, Cursor can now buy their way into a superior product.

On the other hand, if Zed takes more VC money, it likely means doubling down on AI in ways they clearly don’t seem eager to—but at least it would give them a fighting chance.

I really feel for this team. It couldn’t have been an easy decision, and from the few interactions I’ve had, they strike me as incredibly talented, kind, and genuine folks. I truly wish them the best.
Show HN: Matchsticks Puzzle Solver
by gdind2003 | 2025-08-21 00:16:51+00:00
This is a matchsticks puzzle solver, solves any matchsticks puzzle with two digit numbers in the format x [+-x/] y = z. Upto two moves allowed.

Some sample puzzles: https://github.com/fastcodejava/Matchsticks/tree/main/images
by jp0d | 2025-08-21 00:17:05+00:00
I learned VB .net when it first came out back in 2003 (might have been earlier). VB was quite widely used back then and now days it's declined in popularity a lot. I checked the repo insights and it's a single person who's built this and has been maintaining it. Their contribution and dedication is definitely commendable even though the language isn't popular these and even more so on Linux! This is pure selfless programming!
by AlienRobot | 2025-08-21 00:17:21+00:00
Scaffolding is another area where LLM's work great.

I want to create a new project using framework XYZ. I already know how to do it, but I don't remember how to set up it since I only do that once, or I don't know how to set up a class that inherits from the framework because I usually just copy the other from another class in the same project. I can simply tell the bot to write the starting code and take it from there.

The sad thing is for a LOT of use cases an LLM is completely unnecessary. Like why do I even need an LLM for something like this? Why can't I just download a database of code examples, plug it into a search engine that apppears in the sidebar, and then just type "new project XYZ" or "new class XYZ.foo" to find the necessary snippet? A lot of NPM frameworks have a set up script to get you started with a new project, but after that you are practically forced to use Google.

It's crazy that a problem that could be solved so easily with a local file search has been ignored for so long and the only solution has been something impossibly inefficient for the problem it's supposed to solve.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-21 00:17:43+00:00
> If someone violates the GPL, the FSF can't sue them on your behalf unless they are a copyright holder.

This seems to be factually untrue; you can assign specific rights under copyright (such as your right to sue and receive compensation for violations by third parties) without assigning the underlying copyright. Transfer of the power to relicense is not necessary for transfer of the power to sue.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-21 00:18:26+00:00
It's the same now. Turn on hotspot->Connect to it on the PC. After that one step it's in your saved networks and you're good to go.

The only difference is Apple will do this automatically for you. If you open up your mac, and don't have network, you get a little pop up that says "use iPHone's connection?" and will turn on hotspot and connect automatically. Nice, but hardly any different or time saving really.
by Conlectus | 2025-08-21 00:20:21+00:00
Good catch on the license in that file. I went by separate documents in the repo that said the source is available “under the licenses documented in the repository”, and took that to mean at-choice use of the license files that were included.

I think the caveat to the claim that CLAs are only useful for rug pulls still important, but this is a case where it is indeed a relevant thing to consider.
by defrost | 2025-08-21 00:21:07+00:00
FWiW I'm in Australia with a similar enough (I'm aware of the yawning chasm of differences) population with pride parades, trans people, social justice calls, etc.

We've been through the political immigration hysteria, "Stop the boats" and "Babies overboard" tipped elections and spawned offshore processing policies that were the envy of Trump v1.0.

That said, hyping fear of trans people following the lead of US podcast warriors pretty much fell flat on it's face here, burned out in disaster, much to the chagrin of aussie neo christians (small c) who tried to fly it up the pole.

At the end of the day the actual demographic volume of those under the tails of the bimodal sex and gender distributions are too small to give Aussies pause but apparently so great they terrify the US conservative into embracing .. umm, whatever this current failing of US democracy will go by in hindsight.

( Franklin, in foresight, referred to it thus:

I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other. )
by avidiax | 2025-08-21 00:21:38+00:00
Yes, a privacy preserving TV that lacks home screen ads, forced updates, automatic content recognition (ACR), etc.

Apple TV has by far the fastest processor in a TV set-top box. The interface is much cleaner and faster than any smart TV. And I'm sure Apple could do best in class 4k or 8k AI upscale, and live AI captioning w/ translation. They also have the lawyers needed to do some of the AI transformation and deal with the inevitable lawsuits from copyright holders.

They are probably also smart enough to class it as a "smart monitor", delete the TV tuners, and avoid lots of local regulatory requirements that way.

Could be a very competitive product as long as the price is no worse than Sony Bravia.
by nicce | 2025-08-21 00:21:39+00:00
The thing with taking VC funding is that your intention usually is not to steadily grow a sustainable product.

You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster. All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new. At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users.

In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users.

I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
by neumann | 2025-08-21 00:21:40+00:00
twins!

I miss it so much. I bought a replacement one after it got cracked, only to have the battery AND Sim get nerfed a month later. Putting a custom ROM seemed to work for a while, and then it just got too unstable with sim card turning off randomly and silently. So now it sits in a drawer and used as a kids camera and I am so jealous of them. My google pixel 8 is bigger, but somehow nowhere needs as performant for my needs (camera + voice calls is basically it).
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-21 00:21:45+00:00
FTWIW the keys' hitboxes aren't at the displayed area, but at the expected landing area.

I'm slightly making up the exact bias, but for instance it will be assumed the user lands a touch slightly above the actual key, as the finger hides the target and Apple's heuristics expect some overshooting.

In comparison people used to the iPhone's heuristics might have a harder time on android.
by ai_critic | 2025-08-21 00:22:27+00:00
He's a windbag and perhaps the best example of how some people really just need a wedgie.

That said, he does raise some interesting points--in extremely roundabout ways--and it's incredibly telling how different people react to him. The amazing amount of butthurt und sturm und drang that comes up whenever urbit is mentioned, for example, is almost always due to political/tribal stuff and not due to technical deficiencies or the deliberate obfuscation of whatever ideas actually might be there.

I think he's basically riding coats of the populist MAGA movement at this point in an almost ESR "I helped make this" sort of way, and while an interesting footnote in the evolution of NRx he's basically just an edgelord with some extra money.
by glawrence13 | 2025-08-21 00:22:30+00:00
Yep, I should be more precise

> If i’m building an ecommerce website, why would I need your API if I’m just selling my own products?

You're right, Channel3 isn't for existing ecommerce websites. Channel3 let's anyone build a shopping experience (which I vaguely conflated with ecommerce website). You don't worry about managing product, you just build the platform. Some AI shopping experiences like this already exist, check out plush.shop, daydream.ing, and onton.com.

> Can you explain the main use cases when i would want to add shopping to my platform?

In short, if you want to monetize your platform without running ads. What's neat is there aren't really "main" cases -- this is up to the inventiveness of our users! We believe some of the most lucrative opportunities are yet to be imagined. My co-founder, Alex, experienced this problem at his last job when he was building an AI tutor; they decided to try to add an additional revenue stream by letting the AI tutor recommend products. Maybe blogs can integrate an AI-recommended product feed based on their article. Maybe yoga teachers who have a website for booking classes can recommend their gear to their students and earn some money when they do. Maybe someone just loves the color orange and wants to build a shop for orange products. We don't know what devs have in store for Channel3, but we do know agentic commerce is going to reshape how we interact with products!
by Twirrim | 2025-08-21 00:22:32+00:00
I can't talk about it, but I've yet to see an accurate guess at how Glacier was originally designed. I think I'm in safe territory to say Glacier operated out of the same data centers as every other AWS service.

It's been a long time, and features launched since I left make clear some changes have happened, but I'll still tread a little carefully (though no one probably cares there anymore):

One of the most crucial things to do in all walks of engineering and product management is to learn how to manage the customer expectations. If you say customers can only upload 10 images, and then allow them to upload 12, they will come to expect that you will always let them upload 12. Sometimes it's really valuable to manage expectations so that you give yourself space for future changes that you may want to make. It's a lot easier to go from supporting 10 images to 20, than the reverse.
by alias_neo | 2025-08-21 00:23:21+00:00
> In the olden 8-bit days

I hear you.

My first real experience with drawing anything was with Postscript, but then I did my fair share of blitting, and a bit of OpenGL. These days I'm just looking to visualise some data in a nice looking way with minimal effort.

> if you want 3D plots without having to reinvent the wheel, three.js is fit for purpose, with the right CodePen example

Amazing, thanks for the tips.
by windows2020 | 2025-08-21 00:23:30+00:00
The difference is this isn't some legacy system that still exists a decade later. It's brand new with the tag still on. And it wasn't designed by a conscious being but by probability.

I've seen from beautiful to crazy legacy systems in various domains. But when I encounter something off, there appears to always be a story. Not so much with LLMs.

It got hit by a bus before it was born.
by lif | 2025-08-21 00:24:17+00:00
tl;dr:

"the architecture taking shape in low-Earth orbit appears to be more akin to SpaceX's military-grade Starshield satellites and the Space Development Agency's future tranches of data relay and missile-tracking satellites."

"China has now placed 72 Guowang satellites into orbit"

"SpaceX has already launched nearly 200 of its own Starshield satellites"
by NobodyNada | 2025-08-21 00:27:06+00:00
The math in the article assumes scrapers only need one Anubis token per site, whereas a scraper using 500,000 IPs would require 500,000 tokens.

Scaling up the math in the article, which states it would take 6 CPU-minutes to generate enough tokens to scrape 11,508 Anubis-using websites, we're now looking at 4.3 CPU-hours to obtain enough tokens to scrape your website (and 50,000 CPU-hours to scrape the Internet). This still isn't all that much -- looking at cloud VM prices, that's around 10c to crawl your website and $1000 to crawl the Internet, which doesn't seem like a lot but it's much better than "too low to even measure".

However, the article observes Anubis's default difficulty can be solved in 30ms on a single-core server CPU. That seems unreasonably low to me; I would expect something like a second to be a more appropriate difficulty. Perhaps the server is benefiting from hardware accelerated sha256, whereas Anubis has to be fast enough on clients without it? If it's possible to bring the JavaScript PoW implementation closer to parity with a server CPU (maybe using a hash function designed to be expensive and hard to accelerate, rather than one designed to be cheap and easy to accelerate), that would bring the cost of obtaining 500k tokens up to 138 CPU-hours -- about $2-3 to crawl one site, or around $30,000 to crawl all Anubis deployments.

I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea of Anubis -- that cost still might be way too low, especially given the billions of VC dollars thrown at any company with "AI" in their sales pitch -- but I think the article is overly pessimistic. If your goal is not to stop scrapers, but rather to incentivize scrapers to be respectful by making it cheaper to abide by rate limits than it is to circumvent them, maybe Anubis (or something like it) really is enough.

(Although if it's true that AI companies really are using botnets of hacked computers, then Anubis is totally useless against bots smart enough to solve the challenges since the bots aren't paying for the CPU time.)
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-08-21 00:27:53+00:00
> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?

I can also just plug my Pixel into my Linux machine (I think I needed some other program to do this on Mac, bit it's still easy enough; can't comment on windows) and drag and drop photos, videos, ebooks whatever onto the device.

This is huge for me as I work at a location with no BYOD WiFi and poor (very low bandwidth) connection speeds so I often download YT videos for offline listening later. Also worth mentioning VLC is really good on Android and merely OK on iOS.

Also very important when you're low on storage from photos, you can unload them with no hassle.

I can't do the same with my iPhone; even when I can mount it successfully, its always an arcane directory structure in DCIM sorted by date or something.

This is HUGE for me. I cannot understate how much utility I get from this alone.
by throw46395 | 2025-08-21 00:28:43+00:00
import FLT theorem PNat.pow_add_pow_ne_pow (x y z : ℕ+) (n : ℕ) (hn : n > 2) : x^n + y^n ≠ z^n := PNat.pow_add_pow_ne_pow_of_FermatLastTheorem FLT.Wiles_Taylor_Wiles x y z n hn
by ivanjermakov | 2025-08-21 00:29:03+00:00
I find the idea of using git for code reviews directly quite compelling. Working with the change locally as you were the one who made it is very convenient, considering the clunky read-only web UI.

I didn't get why stick with the requirement that review is a single commit? To keep git-review implementation simple?

I wonder if approach where every reviewer commits their comments/fixes to the PR branch directly would work as well as I think it would. One might not even need any additional tools to make it convenient to work with. This idea seems like a hybrid of traditional github flow and a way Linux development is organized via mailing lists and patches.