MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aseipp | 2025-08-14 02:49:54+00:00
Performance is an evolving target. Meta reported they spend ~0.05% (1 out of every 2000 CPU cycles) on X25519 key exchange within the last year, which is quite significant. If that can be brought down, that's worthwhile. And ongoing research and deployment of PQC will make key exchange even more expensive.

> If there is not some novel, brand new algorithm that is being employed, the answer is because it is insecure.

Lol that is just not true at all. A major point of discussion when NIST announced the SHA3 finalist being Keccak back in ~2012(?) was that BLAKE1 at the time offered significantly better software performance, which was considered an important practical reality, and was faster than SHA-2 at a higher (but insignificantly so) security margin; their own report admitted as much. The BLAKE1 family is still considered secure today, its internal HAIFA design is very close to existing known designs like Merkle–Damgård, it isn't some radically new thing.

So why did they pick Keccak? Because they figured that SHA-2 was plenty good and already deployed widely, so "SHA-2 but a little faster" was not as compelling as a standard that complimented it in hardware; they also liked Keccak's unique sponge design that was new and novel at the time and allowed AEAD, domain separation, etc. They admit ultimately any finalist including BLAKE would have been a good pick. You can go read all of this yourself. The Keccak team even has new work on more performant sponge-inspired designs, such as their work on Farfalle and deck functions.

The reality is that some standards are chosen for a bunch of reasons and performance is only one of them, though very important. But there's plenty of room for non-standard things, too.
by Syzygies | 2025-08-14 02:49:57+00:00
After inciting the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in 2017, and later effectively destroying our US democracy, Facebook is having billion dollar offers to AI stars refused.

News flash! It's not so your neighbor's child can cheat in school, or her father can render porn that looks like gothic anime.

It's also not so some coder on a budget can get AI help for $20 a month. I frankly don't understand why the major players bother. It's nice PR, but like a restaurant offering free food out the back door to the homeless. This isn't what the push is about. Apple is hemorrhaging money on their Headset Pro, but they're in the business of realizing future interfaces, and they have the money. The AI push is similarly about the future, not about now.

I pay $200 a month for MAX access to Claude Opus 4.1, to help me write code as a retired math professor to find a new solution to a major math problem that stumped me for decades while I worked. Far cheaper than a grad student, and far more effective.

AI used to frustrate me too. You get what you pay for.
Show HN: Squash SDK – Give your web app access to rich browsing context
by xtrkil | 2025-08-14 02:50:33+00:00
We built an SDK that lets your web application tap into the user’s browsing context—history, open tabs, clicks—so you can build personalized, context-aware experiences. The SDK is designed with privacy in mind: the user explicitly grants permission before any context is shared.

Potential uses: Recommending content or actions based on recent activity Smoothing onboarding flows by recognizing where the user came from

Docs + code: https://github.com/kstonekuan/squash-browser-memory/
by pabs3 | 2025-08-14 02:50:47+00:00
Google should be compiling for the CPU baseline of the ABI their binaries are for, and then check if newer instructions are available before using them. Just like glibc and other projects do. The Debian documentation for this mentions tools to do this, like SIMDe and GCC/clang FMV.

https://wiki.debian.org/InstructionSelection
by chollida1 | 2025-08-14 02:51:07+00:00
2 years doesn't seem like a very long time to stay at a company you founded.

I can only imagine what would cause someone to make such a drastic move. If he's going into Venture Capital then he has no problem with the workload.

Elon seems very talented at finding trends and convincing talented people to help him build the future. He seems equally talented at then pushing these same people away.
by pama | 2025-08-14 02:51:19+00:00
These tools together solve a fraction of the problen. The other parts of the problem are interfacing with classic c, c++ libraries and handling different hardware and different OSes. It is not even funny how tricky it is to use the same GPU/CUDA versions but with different CPU architectures and hopefully most people dont need to be exposed to it. Sometimes parts of the stack depends on a different version of a c++ library than other parts of the stack. Or some require different kernel modules or CUDA driver settings. But I would be happy if there was a standardized way to at least link to the same C++ libraries, hopefully with the same ABI, across different clusters or different OS versions. Python is so far from solved…
by almostgotcaught | 2025-08-14 02:54:44+00:00
there's something about these comments ("name-collision") that drives me up the wall. do y'all realize multiple things can have the same name? for example, did you know there are many people with exactly the same names:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristenharris1/famous-people-same-n...

and yet no one bemoans this (hospitals don't consult name registries before filling out birth certificates). that's because it's almost always extremely clear from context.

> The real pyx

what makes that pyx any more "real" than this pyx? it's the extension of the language py plus a single letter. there are probably a thousand projects that could rightfully use that combination of letters as a name.
by billy99k | 2025-08-14 02:55:16+00:00
During Covid, many of the Hackers in the infosec community supported government-mandated vaccination (this was what I saw through Twitter). I think this changed my view of activists and hackers after this.

It's authoritarian-minded people that don't want to listen to anyone (and want to force you to do what they want through hacking). When they get want they want, they don't care about trampling on the rights of or oppressing the people that disagree.
by pkasting | 2025-08-14 02:56:20+00:00
Former Chrome team member here. Nightingale's suspicions were plausible but incorrect. The primary cause of every one of these we looked into over the years (and there were indeed many) was teams not bothering to test against Firefox because its market share was low compared to the cost of testing for it. In many cases teams tried to reduce support burden by simply marking "unsupported" any browser they didn't explicitly test, which was sometimes just Chrome and Safari. We were distressed at this and wrote internal guidance around not doing things like the above, and tried to distribute it and point back to it frequently. Unfortunately Firefox' share continued to go down, engineering teams continued to be resource-constrained, and the problem continued to occur.

Several years ago I glumly opined internally that Firefox had two grim choices: abandon Gecko for Chromium, or give up any hope of being a meaningful player in the market. I am well aware that many folks (especially here) would consider the first of those choices worse than the second. It's moot now, because they chose the second, and Firefox has indeed ceased to be meaningful in the market. They may cease to exist entirely in the next five years.

I am genuinely unhappy about this. I was hired at Google specifically to work on Firefox. I was always, and still remain, a fan of Firefox. But all things pass. Chrome too will cease to exist some day.
Show HN: Genesis Query – The First Question for an ASI
by lafalce | 2025-08-14 02:56:58+00:00
After reading the AI 2027 report, one question stuck in my mind:

If you were the first ML researcher to stand face-to-face with an ASI, what would be the first query you'd ask it to solve?

I built this page as a proof-of-concept to capture what people all over the world would choose as their Genesis Query.

Would love to see your thoughts :)
by nomdep | 2025-08-14 02:57:16+00:00
Hard and vehemently disagree. Subtitles are not commentary tracks.

The artists are the writers, voice actors, and everyone else involved in creating the original media. Never, ever, a random stranger should contaminate it with his/her opinions or point of views.

Subtitles should be perfect transcriptions or the most accurate translations, never reinterpretations
by Marsymars | 2025-08-14 02:57:16+00:00
I kinda suspect there’s a premium once you mention “EV vehicle”, since you’re signalling that you’re affluent enough to afford an EV and have committed to spending the money required to get EV charging at home working, etc. (Kinda like getting a quote for anything wedding related.)

I’m getting some wiring run about the same distance (to my attic, fished up a wall, with moderately poor access) for non-EV purposes next week and the quote was a few hundred dollars.
by kamaal | 2025-08-14 02:57:41+00:00
If there are no people, there won't be a need for managers to exist either. Who/What are the managers going to manage? The office air?

Eventually whoever that is running the business has to be smart enough to figure out everything, and the margin for error will be small in a economic environment where every one is already poor and can't spend to buy your things.

I remember the days of socialist India. If everyone is poor its impossible to do the good things like research, development, innovation. The reason is simple, with no one having money to buy your things, you will never make profits to invest in them.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-08-14 02:58:36+00:00
Lots of people are claiming LLMs are therapists. People are claiming LLMs are lawyers, doctors, developers, etc... The main problem is, as usual, influencers need something new to create their next "OMG AI JUST BROKE X INDUSTRY" video and people eat that shit up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I have spoken to people who think they are having very deep conversations with LLMs. The CEO of my company, an otherwise intelligent person, has gone all in on the AI hype train and is now saying things like we don't need lawyers because AI knows more than a lawyer. It's all very sad and many of the people who know better are actively taking advantage of the people who don't.
by headinsand | 2025-08-14 02:58:48+00:00
I think it is insincere to call what doge and its employees did a “blunder”.

Their actions were intentional and malicious.

That’s like calling deciding to deny a same sex couple a marriage certificate a bureaucratic “blunder“ when it is in fact a targeted act using your position to supplant existing law to malign others based on your own interests.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-14 02:59:06+00:00
Current submission title “Print, a one-line BASIC program” is not great. Title from the page:

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

Could also be something like “10 PRINT: a book about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program” (taken from the first sentence with “is” changed to a colon).
by protocolture | 2025-08-14 03:01:17+00:00
>Even by your own logic, after all, Israeli Jews are just exercising their “right of return” no?

No. There are surviving people with a clear right to return they were removed from. Its those people that Israel seeks to outlive by holding them in Gaza. Its happening now. That's not equivalent to some loose claim from a long time ago.

>That would not work. You see what Hamas is willing and was able to do on Oct 7th. If Israel allowed that they’d likely be facing the same as Oct 7th continually.

Lmao, if theres a fear that returned people would continue terrorism, the anger is coming from being held in an open air prison for decades. It should be a police matter, from a government that protects all citizens. Thats the only way to start to repair things.

>The Arabs that remained after the Nakba are full Israeli citizens now. It’s not perfect but to my eyes living next to several Palestinian Israelis they have pretty good lives. Much better than in Jordan actually.

Yes so the arabs that didnt let themselves get forced or ordered off their land retain some rights. That's not the amazing argument you might think it is.

>Unlike the Palestinian governments, Israel has already given citizenship to remaining Arabs and proved they can live peacefully with their minorities. They grant the right to vote. They protect places of worship for all faiths. They’re not perfect but far better than how the Arab peoples and nations treat Jewish minorities pretty much anywhere in the Middle East.

Yet you continually see them being forced off their land by settlers. If you have proven coexistence possible, you would only strengthen it by returning the refugees. If you want a 1 state solution, that state needs to demonstrate it is capable.

>Most Israelis were supportive of it and removing illegal settlers in Gaza, yet it was a political battle against their own extremist elements. Yet despite doing that it only took a couple years before the rockets started coming from Gaza

You need to understand that removing illegal settlers from gaza is like saying you stole someones house and gave them back the couch.

Israel literally has members of its own cabinet that pursue the extermination of palestinians. Gvir literally shows up to pro settler demonstrations and demands people be shot. You need to understand that a decade ago Israel was able to have its global image be quite pure, and people didn't read what Israelis and their government were saying at home. Now its quite easy to access, it would be simpler to drop the pretense.
by saurik | 2025-08-14 03:02:46+00:00
Is there a human? I've been programming forever and I even teach classes to students on how to program and I don't ever really "read code aloud"... I understand someone who is blind would need this, but I'd expect that you'd end up with something extremely unlike what most people would find at all intuitive were they not to spend a lot of time trying to train up in such a tool?
by cxr | 2025-08-14 03:04:19+00:00
Only somewhat related and unfortunately misses the point.

CSS Zen Garden was powered by style sheets as they were designed to be used. Want to offer a different look? Write an alternative style sheet. This site doesn't do that. It compiles everything to a big CSS blob and then uses JS (which for some reason is also compiled to a blob, despite consisting of a grand total of 325 SLOC before being fed into bundler) to insert/remove stuff from the page and fiddle with a "data-theme" attribute on the html element.

Kind of a bummer since clicking through to the author's Mastodon profile shows a bunch of love for stuff like a talk about "Un-Sass'ing my CSS" and people advocating others "remove JS by pointing them to a modern CSS solution". (For comparison: Firefox's page style switcher and the DOM APIs it depends on[1] are older than Firefox itself. The spec[1] was made a recommendation in November 2000.)

1. <https://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-HTML/html.html#ID-87355129>)
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-14 03:04:35+00:00
> The problem though, is that it’s against Palo Alto city code to operate a business or a private school in a house if it creates more traffic than normal and if its employees do not live at the home. “The home occupation shall not be conducted in a manner which generates traffic or parking demand or vehicular deliveries substantially greater than customarily associated with residential occupancy of the dwelling unit,” the code states.

Ok so it’s about running a non residential thing in a house. Whatever - I’m glad to see people experiment with alternatives to the terrible public education system.
by quantummagic | 2025-08-14 03:05:15+00:00
I don't think you've refuted the point though. There's no reason to think that the apparatus we employ to animate ourselves will remain inscrutable forever. Unless you believe in a religious soul, all that stands in the way of the scientific method yielding results, is time.

> Maybe climate change or nuclear war will turn the world into a Mad Max–esque wasteland before we get the chance

In that eventuality, it really doesn't matter. The point remains, given enough time, we'll be successful. If we aren't successful, that means everything else has gone to shit anyway. Failure wont be because it is fundamentally impossible, it will be because we ran out of time to continue the effort.
by voidhorse | 2025-08-14 03:06:08+00:00
Spot on. It's also fascinating to watch people have their minds blown in 2020+ by basic features that have been around since the nineties. It's kind of sad, actually. The industry would be in such a better place than it is today if so many programmers weren't allergic to all things academic and "theoretical" and were more curious and technical than they were conceited. It's baffling that computing, literally a subject area in which the theory quite literally is the practice, is so full of people who refuse to engage with theoretical work and research.
by const_cast | 2025-08-14 03:07:01+00:00
Except neither of those do anything and they're actively counteracted 100 to 1 by the rest of the new fiscal policy introduced.

So weve lost a bunch of shit and gained... let me check here... oh, -2 trillion dollars. Okay.

But at least some poor sick people will lose Medicaid. Glad to see we're burning our money and then spending more on running the AC full blast so we don't boil.
by Zak | 2025-08-14 03:07:07+00:00
I'm not sure the experiment can be done other than to try interventions on real users of a public social media service as Facebook did in the article I linked. Of course people running those services usually don't have the incentives to test harm reduction strategies and certainly don't want to publicize the results.

> the vast majority of users don't create original content

That's true now at least most of the time, but I think it's as much because of design and algorithmic decisions by the platforms to emphasize other types of content. Early Facebook in particular was mostly original content shared between people who knew each other. The biggest problem with that was it wasn't very profitable.
by tkgally | 2025-08-14 03:07:47+00:00
From 1983 until it closed in 1999, I used to play guitar and mandolin with friends at a country bar in Akasaka, Tokyo, called Stonefield’s. Until his death a few years ago, the owner, Sam Ishihara, continued to perform regularly at country places around Tokyo, including some of those mentioned in the article. I occasionally sat in with him when the bar had a piano, which is the only instrument I play now.

Sam was unusual among Japanese country singers for writing his own songs in English. Earlier this year, one of his friends released some studio recordings Sam had made of his originals in 2002:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V_uncczgZ4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDwUHp61X40

Last year, some of us got together again and did a few shows in Sam’s honor at a live house in Akabane. If the audience was representative of the current state of country music fandom in Japan, then the answer to the author’s question about “whether or not Tokyo’s country music underground can hold on for another generation” is “probably not.” At one show, at the age of sixty-seven, I was the youngest person there.
by semiquaver | 2025-08-14 03:07:52+00:00
> Ruby is mostly used in web dev, where most if not all of your dependencies tend to be pure Ruby.

There is literally no such thing as a rails app that’s pure ruby. Rails depends on nokogiri, which is a libxml2 wrapper, and all activerecord database adapters are C bindings. Ruby development involves dealing with frequent native extension compilation, just like python.
by sleepybrett | 2025-08-14 03:07:57+00:00
I do work with a a few plotters, both pre petis buyout EMS plotter, a vintage HP, and a custom built plotter.

Everything he says here is true, but to me at the end of the day after running some of my work off on very high end inkjets and dyesubs. It's just not the same. There is an inherent, and i'm not sure how to fully communicate this, physicality to a plotted artwork. Slight imperfections in ink flow, the way fountain ink behaves when lines cross, the way the ink bleeds into the medium you are plotting on, the inks (or other mediums) you can choose vs what you can put through an inkjet. It's like comparing an oil painting to even a high quality print of that oil painting. You lose texture going to inkjet.
by shpongled | 2025-08-14 03:08:59+00:00
As someone who loves SML/OCaml and has written primarily Rust over the past ~10 years, I totally agree - I use it as a modern and ergonomic ML with best-in-class tooling, libraries, and performance. Lifetimes are cool, and I use them when needed, but they aren't the reason I use Rust at all. I would use Rust with a GC instead of lifetimes too.
Show HN: FreeFlipbook – Create and Share Interactive Digital Flipbooks
by pang_shijiu | 2025-08-14 03:09:38+00:00
Hi HN community,

I’m excited to share FreeFlipbook (https://freeflipbook.com/), a platform I’ve been working on to make it easy for anyone to create and share interactive digital flipbooks. Whether you’re a designer showcasing a portfolio, a teacher creating engaging educational materials, or a small business promoting products, FreeFlipbook lets you turn PDFs or images into responsive, mobile-friendly flipbooks with a realistic page-turning effect.

Some key features:

Simple Creation: Upload a PDF or images, and our tool automatically converts them into a flipbook with customizable themes.

Interactive Elements: Add links, videos, or annotations to enhance the reader experience.

No-Code Integration: Embed flipbooks on your website or share them via a unique URL.

Tech Stack: Built with C#,.NET core,Tailwind, optimized for performance and scalability.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the UI, features, or potential use cases. Have you used similar tools for digital publishing? What features would make this more useful for you? Looking forward to your thoughts!
by htrp | 2025-08-14 03:10:11+00:00
Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.

For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
by jmye | 2025-08-14 03:10:32+00:00
“You don’t see me as a member of your specific ethnic group because I’m genealogically not” and “you don’t see me as a member or citizen of your country because we’re not genealogically the same” are not the same thing, and it’s deeply (and intentionally) dishonest to pretend they are.

Being an American, for instance, should not exclude anyone who wants to be a part of the group, and the only folks suggesting it should typically have one or two groups they specifically want excluded. That is obviously not all right, however much you’d like it normalized.
by theendisney | 2025-08-14 03:10:36+00:00
I had a funny chat in the 90s with soneone in charge of a bank. The thing was, they wanted me to supply a business plan. I know how to write those but find it mysterious that they want me to write it for all completely unorriginal businesses. If one wants to start a shoe store one should simply investigate the demography and map the varous shoe stores nearby. The bank is in a position to do that cheaply for their entire service area. Innovation would be to put the opportunities in the window display. Their standard plan can have everything they look for. No need to complaint that the guy who hapoens to be good at baking bread forgot something. If the data checks out you can give much larger lones with more interest. If there are many holes in the coverage you sell someone a lone for a franchise. It was a funny chat because everything was impossible, even a bank director should not submit ideas.