MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnklos | 2025-08-25 16:12:55+00:00
This is a problem.

There's a recent phishing campaign with sites hosted by Cloudflare and spam sent through either "noobtech.in" (103.173.40.0/24) or through "worldhost.group" (many, many networks).

"noobtech.in" has no web site, can't accept abuse complaints (their email has spam filters), and they don't respond at all to email asking them for better communication methods. The phishing domains have "mail.(phishing domain)" which resolves back to 103.173.40.0/24. Their upstream is a Russian network that doesn't respond to anything. It's 100% clear that this network is only used for phishing and spam.

It's trivial to block "noobtech.in".

"worldhost.group", though, is a huge hosting conglomerate that owns many, many hosting companies and many, many networks spread across many ASNs. They do not respond to any attempts to communicate with them, but since their web site redirects to "hosting.com", I've sent abuse complaints to them. "hosting.com" has autoresponders saying they'll get back to me, but so far not a single ticket has been answered with anything but the initial autoresponder.

It's really, really difficult to imagine how one would block them, and also difficult to imagine what kind of collateral impact that'd have.

These huge providers, Tencent included, get away with way too much. You can't communicate with them, they don't give the slightest shit about harmful, abusive and/or illegal behavior from their networks, and we have no easy way to simply block them.

I think we, collectively, need to start coming up with things we can do that would make their lives difficult enough for them to take notice. Should we have a public listing of all netblocks that belong to such companies and, as an example, we could choose to autorespond to all email from "worldhost.group" and redirect all web browsing from Tencent so we can tell people that their ISP is malicious?

I don't know what the solution is, but I'd love to feel a bit less like I have no recourse when it comes to these huge mega-corporations.
by chickenbig | 2025-08-25 16:13:34+00:00
> What's the dog whistle?

"Aren't technology companies terrible. They destroy the natural environment for their profit. Look at these large numbers out of context."

> Most data centers (80% for Google) require potable water for cooling, and it can't come straight from a river.

Well, there are two kinds of water that are required for cooling; that which circulates around the datacentre, and the water used to take away the excess heat. These can be different, using heat exchangers to move the heat from one to the other.

> I think you're oversimplifying the "just use rivers" idea.

The most difficult bit appears to be dealing with conservative (with a little c) people and environmental regulation.

> Plus, using potable water in cooling adds mineral deposits to the water

Citation needed ...
by teachrdan | 2025-08-25 16:13:58+00:00
> This is one example of why I've stopped listening to climate change alarmists.

I'm not sure if I understand your logic. People who advocate to stop climate change (alarmists?) literally never use is as a convenient excuse "not to do anything." If you could provide an example I'd be happy to take that statement back.

Instead, the point is that, due to climate change, we're having more and more instances where something as trivial as a clogged drain can lead to people drowning in their basement apartments.

EDIT: On reflection, the so-called "climate change alarmists" who say you should "not do anything" are probably shills for big corporations, who want to save money on risk mitigation by saying there's no point because it's too late to mitigate the risks of climate change.
by runjake | 2025-08-25 16:14:05+00:00
This article is from June 26th.

The real news is that Omarchy 2.0 has just been released, as well as an Omarchy distribution ISO based on Arch. Installation is fairly quick (~5 minutes on a fresh machine), given you have bandwidth.

https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v2.0.0

Here is the updated Omarchy Manual to get a good feel for things: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual
by Sharlin | 2025-08-25 16:14:07+00:00
I'm not sure if you're being difficult on purpose.

What I meant is that there's a specific use case for the rejection sampling algorithm, namely computer graphics, and in that use case the asymptotic behavior is irrelevant because n will never not be 3. What is relevant is that the algorithm is more obvious to non-statisticians than Box-Muller, and Marsaglia's variant in particular is also more efficient. Sqrt, ln, and sincos aren't particularly fast operations even on modern hardware (and the latter two aren't SIMDable either), whereas generating uniform variates is almost free in comparison.
by egypturnash | 2025-08-25 16:14:09+00:00
I have a plugin for Illustrator that has several options for helping to make sure your file gets saved regularly. I have it configured to just pop up a polite little warning after fifteen minutes of unsaved work.

Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am.

Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.
by lilsoso | 2025-08-25 16:14:09+00:00
You can buy prepaid SIM cards with cash, and without hassle, in the US as well.

You can do this in many countries, I believe, as well as online through services offered in exchange for crypto.

You didn't define where "here" is for you. Mexico is a better option than the US because the retail price of a SIM card with a number and service is around 50 pesos (maybe lower).
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-25 16:14:13+00:00
I don't think you have any idea how serious the issue is. I was loosely speaking in charge of application-level performance at one job for a web app. I was asked to make the backend as fast as possible at dumping the last byte of HTML back to the user.

The problem I ran into was performance was bimodal. We had this one group of users that was lightning fast and the rest were far slower. I chased down a few obvious outliers (that one forum thread with 11000 replies that some guy leaves up on a browser tab all the time, etc.) but it was still bimodal. Eventually I just changed the application level code to display known bots as one performance trace and everything else as another trace.

60% of all requests are known bots. This doesn't even count the random ass bot that some guy started up at an ISP. Yes, this really happened. We were paying customer of a company who decided to just conduct a DoS attack on us at 2 PM one afternoon. It took down the website.

Not only that, the bots effectively always got a cached response since they all seemed to love to hammer the same pages. Users never got a cached response, since LRU cache eviction meant the actual discussions with real users were always evicted. There were bots that would just rescrape every page they had ever seen every few minutes. There were bots that would just increase their throughput until the backend app would start to slow down.

There were bots that would run the javascript for whatever insane reason and start emulating users submitting forms, etc.

You probably are thinking "but you got to appear in a search index so it is worth it". Not really. Google's bot was one of the few well behaved ones and would even slow scraping if it saw a spike in the response times. Also we had an employee who was responsible for categorizing our organic search performance. While we had a huge amount of traffic from organic search, it was something like 40% to just one URL.

Retrospectively I'm now aware that a bunch of this was early stage AI companies scraping the internet for data.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-25 16:14:28+00:00
Thorium requires a great deal of effort to turn into viable fuel, and China only recently managed to catch up on the tech.

It is a byproduct of Lithium mining in many places, and you can see the mountains of powdered low-grade waste from space. It is good they can at least turn it into something useful, as the US shuttered their research facility shortly after it showed viable output.

I was more concerned about our friends radioactive kitty after chemo treatments. =3
by jajuuka | 2025-08-25 16:14:28+00:00
This feels very broad strokes. It's like saying Germany is bad because of Nazi Germany. That's not to excuse terrible actions but that these histories are long with a variety of leaders and popular beliefs. So viewing a country as a monolith in line with all its past crimes seems very nationalistic.

Using more current context, leadership and events seems like a more realistic view of things. Which doesn't mean the UK is a shining beacon of freedom or democracy, but just to better explain why things happen instead of blaming events of leaders who are not in office or even alive.
by const_cast | 2025-08-25 16:14:29+00:00
The frog has been slowly boiled on online privacy and censorship for decades now. Make no mistake, this is not a swift move - it's a meticulous progression.

I mean, you tell someone 20 years ago that you have to use your real name on websites or provide a phone number and they would look at your like you're crazy. Now, we're demanding people upload real pictures of their real life ID to fuck around on the internet.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-25 16:15:05+00:00
Yes of course. Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society. It's an old, tired narrative and most of the country can see through it which is why he keeps getting elected.
by cxr | 2025-08-25 16:15:51+00:00
1. Describing this as a "linter for zip files" is kind of weird—this library is a full-on ZIP implementation that is meant to be used for the kinds of things people use any sort of ZIP library for.

2. It's one of the libraries that the authors of the paper cited and subjected to testing. It's column/row 31—the one that is the source of the prominent vertical/horizontal bands in Table 4 (on p. 450 aka p. 21)
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-25 16:16:13+00:00
Sure. I'm absolutely certain that there has always been music... so much 15th century Bulgarian folk music that it could fill a record store, for instance. But just because that music existed doesn't mean I have access to it or even awareness of it unless I am an academic researcher that pours years of my life into it. Your indy music stuff is just like that... but I have no desire to spend the next 10 years learning to dig it out of remote corners of the world just to listen to it.

It's permanently and sociologically walled off from me in ways that I don't care to overcome. If I was interested in music discovery in 1980, how many record stores would I have had access to that I could walk into and just browse? How many of those are still around today? While radio was still pretty bad in 1980, it wasn't 12-stations-of-ClearChannel bad... I've heard those same 300 songs on an endless loop since I was a child.
by jkaplowitz | 2025-08-25 16:16:23+00:00
> in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".

This varies a lot by country. The French are still known for their protests, certainly not nearly as violent or disruptive in the modern day as their famous 18th-century revolution but very much quite impactful even so. And German trade unions use strikes very effectively to have a fair outcome in contract negotiations with employers.

Countries in the English-speaking world, certainly including the UK but also the US and Canada, seem a lot more deferential to elites in many ways than most of continental Europe.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-25 16:16:31+00:00
Are you talking about the TCP fallback that musl has also had for 2 years? https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2023/05/02/1

In any event, that makes no sense. Pretend for a moment that glibc has working DNS and musl doesn't have working DNS (not true, but let's pretend). You don't build your compiler chain with working DNS support and then use it to build programs without working DNS.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-25 16:16:32+00:00
I was kind of amazed to learn that apparently if you connect Windows NT4/98/2000/ME to a public IPv4 address it gets infected by what is a period correct worm in no time at all. I don't mean that someone uses an RCE to turn it into part of a botnet (that is expected), apparently there are enough infected hosts from 20+ years ago still out there that the sasser worm is still spreading.
by pm215 | 2025-08-25 16:16:35+00:00
I used a SparcStation 2 as an X terminal for several years in the late 1990s, having picked it up free as a student. Eventually PC monitors and my budget improved to the point that I retired it, but it was massively better than the cheap 14" CRT I had on my PC at the time.

I did have to contribute floating point emulation support to the Linux sparc32 kernel code, as otherwise the X server would occasionally crash when it hit a denormal number in the font rendering...
Show HN: Bitcoin Challenge. Try to steal a plain text private key you can use
by redactsure | 2025-08-25 16:16:40+00:00
Hi HN, I'm releasing my round one public demo of a new browser security system I've been developing.

There's a real Bitcoin private key (worth $20) in plaintext at app.redactsure.com. You can copy it, paste it, delete it, move it around - full control. But you can't see the actual characters or extract them.

The challenge: Break the protection and take the Bitcoin. First person wins, challenge ends.

Details: - Requires email verification (prevents abuse, no account needed) - 15 minute time limit per session - Currently US only for the demo (latency) - Verify the Bitcoin is real: https://redactsure.com/bitcoinchallenge

Technical approach: - Cloud-hosted browser with real time NER model - Webpages are unmodified - Think of it as selective invisibility for sensitive data. You can interact with it normally, just can't see or extract it

Looking for feedback on edge cases in the hiding/protection algorithm. Happy to answer questions about the implementation.
by bix6 | 2025-08-25 16:17:18+00:00
This article is sad to me and I don’t really agree. The best people I know have balance. They aren’t the richest but when you optimize exclusively for wealth you give up other things that are way more valuable imo.

This person slept 3.5 hours a night and gained 80 pounds. That’s one way to live but not the way I subscribe to.
by IanCal | 2025-08-25 16:18:05+00:00
> but it wasn't their responsibility to prevent children from looking at their magazines

They weren't made to guarantee no child could peek at them, no, but they do have age restrictions that are followed (a child who picks one up couldn't buy it) and they were often on the top shelf. The kind of thing a basic risk assessment would flag "hey we keep the hardcore porn in front of the pokemon magazines...".

> The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops

The pictures emit photons which fly through the air to the child. The air is the shop.

Or for websites your computer is the shop.

The ISP is not the shop. Nor in the OSA is it viewed as such. The company who makes the service has some responsibility.

> So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs.

This fundamentally cannot work for what is in the OSA, and if you cannot see why almost immediately then you do not know what is in the OSA and cannot effectively argue against it. It is not a requirement to add age checks to porno sites.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-25 16:18:09+00:00
But they have been buying the bootstraps. They were buying water from the town, and they were perfectly aware that it wasn't something the town was obligated to provide.

The problem seems to be that the townsfolk want to water their lawn:

> “These men were brought in because I had put them on a water restriction schedule,” Pacheco said in an interview. “They are upset they can’t water their lawns while people can’t have water to actually live.”

They're not completely cut off; they just have to significantly further to purchase their water, and some of them do:

> Some are driving two hours to Pueblo to buy water. Many have been getting water in the town of Blanca, where officials offered — only as an emergency solution until the end of August — to let people fill up water tanks from a hose connected to a fire hydrant.

I don't think this is a situation where we're laughing at people who are in the Find Out phase.
by demarq | 2025-08-25 16:18:10+00:00
I modded mine to remove the friction in the middle wheel. But switching the switches is next.

If there’s one product that absolutely needs to be shamelessly ripped off it has to be this one. It’s a mouse so close to perfection it boggles the mind why Logitech wouldn’t go the last mile.

Manufacturers in china, if you see this, do the thing!
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-25 16:18:36+00:00
Slightly better, but how do you get parts to repair your vehicle or anything else?

There's virtually no such thing as "off-grid", no such thing as a human being who lives totally unreliant on people around them in the modern age, unless you can carry everything you own in both hands, and can survive with nothing else. And there's damn few people out there living like that.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-25 16:18:40+00:00
You are projecting an ideology onto these people for no reason other than to satisfy your own bias and/or earn a few cheap upvotes from likeminded readers.

99.9% of these people are not living "off grid" for any particular ideological reason. They are living off grid because where they live is simply too dispersed and/or poor for there to be a grid. They've either always lived this way or adapted when they moved there.

Buyer: "but if it's off grid where do I get water"

Realtor: "there's services you pay for that truck it in and fill your tank, just like propane or heating oil"

Buyer:"oh, ok"
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-25 16:18:45+00:00
I looked at the graph first, and misread the version numbers as sizes in megabytes, because that yielded stuff that wasn’t far off matching the curve linearly. “25.1 MB?” I said. “Huh, I’d have expected a lot more than that, but… maybe it’s just ultra compressed? Somehow? Still seems a bit too small. But maybe this article is actually praising Adobe for keeping it down.”

Then Sumatra being 3.something MB seemed possible, for a well-compressed installer.

Ugh, some of these sizes are absurd. I still remember Zoom basically doubling in a single release, as they put a second entire web browser inside the package.
by Jensson | 2025-08-25 16:18:48+00:00
> doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out?

No? When new tech arrives there is always a bunch of low hanging fruit around so there is quick progress immediately afterwards, but then it flatlines relatively quickly and progress is as slow as usual again.

So its a safe bet that progress will slow down to the usual level sooner or later, and it seems to be around now for text models, as this flatlining happens faster the more you invest into it since you exhaust the low hanging fruit faster.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-25 16:18:55+00:00
That's not the important part. My point is that moderators should be able to see or at least set policies on what people vote... if these 3 posts are good and fit with the community, maybe someone is still permitted to downvote 1 of them. Just personal preference after all. But if they're downvoting those (and all the other good fits), then they're simply not compatible with the community. So a "people who constantly downvote good fits" (or upvote bad fits) are punished/removed/whatever.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-25 16:18:59+00:00
There needs to be a place for 4chan, but mainly so those users spend less time on normal sites. If I recall, one of the admins was outed as a government agent after many years... lol

Site-blocking won't work, and NERF'ing the world under the guise of protecting kids is a poorly obfuscated despotic strategy. Bouncy castle politics only undermine institutional credibility. =3
by skhameneh | 2025-08-25 16:19:02+00:00
I can relate in so many ways. I purchased a MX Master 3S and while it has a lot of great design choices, overall there were too many flaws for me and I returned it.

While I had the mouse, I kept looking for ways to "fix scrolling" and everything repeatedly pointed to third party software. If you have an iPad or Android device, you're completely out of luck.

How does a company become so out of tune with customers that customers feel the need to "fix" the design flaws of devices they bought?

I'm not one of those people to "fix" the device, because when I found the polling speed and latency couldn't be increased, that was a complete stopper for me. I really wanted to make the mouse work for me, I really tried to make it work, but I couldn't get past the many flaws. It felt as if they went backwards from their old devices like the MX Revolution in many ways.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-25 16:19:06+00:00
There's a YouTuber named Fil Henley (https://www.youtube.com/@WingsOfPegasus) who has been covering this for some years, now. Xe regularly comments on how universal application of pitch correction in post as an "industry standard" has dragged the great singers of yore down to the same level of mediocrity as everyone else.

Xe also occasionally reminds people that, equal temperament being what it is, this pitch correction is actually in a few cases making people less well in tune than they originally were.

It certainly removes unique tone. Yesterday's was a pitch corrected version of a performance by John Lennon from 1972, that definitely changed Lennon's sound.
by Diggsey | 2025-08-25 16:19:09+00:00
No, sRGB refers to both a colour space and an encoding of that colour space. The encoding is non-linear to make best use of the 256 levels available per channel, but you were never supposed to interpolate sRGB by linearly interpolating the encoded components: you're supposed to apply the transfer function, perform the linear interpolation at higher precision, and then convert back down into the non-linear encoding.

Failure to do this conversion is what leads to the bad results when interpolating: going from red to green will still go through grey but it should go through a much lighter grey compared to what happens if you get the interpolation wrong.
by catigula | 2025-08-25 16:19:36+00:00
The notion that states are the perfect reflection of the democratic will is quite silly.

Suppose a party in Europe is elected on the premise that they will provide free ice cream for all. This is an important issue for people, so they vote for the party. When they get into power, they ban ice cream to promote "healthier living".

Most citizens do not support this policy but they did support the government being elected due to various leveraged mechanisms, such as political polarization, identity politics, laws, outright lies & manipulation, etc.

Ironically, these states keep turning over their leadership because it's incredibly unpopular and the new leadership just continues to do incredibly unpopular things.
by staticman2 | 2025-08-25 16:19:58+00:00
It's interesting to see per the comment section of that YouTube video Mario 64 had only 7 programmers working for 621 days. Obviously very small by today's standards.

I'm a little surprised that development costs and team size keep going up in the game industry.

While games are certainly more complicated, it's a little surprising to me the tooling hasn't scaled to compensate for the complexity.