MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sunshine-o | 2025-09-26 08:14:20+00:00
Yes and keep in mind that while the common law abiding citizen feels like he is living in the 1984 novel, most governments have no idea who is actually walking around, a resident or citizen in their countries. It is now anywhere between a 5% to 20% error margin in "the west".

Worst I knew for sure of a specific country which had no databases of who was currently imprisoned, with inmates just walking out. Yes, it is that bad.

At the end it can just be viewed as an IT problem, the same way most corporations have multiple CRM and have been working on "a 360 view of their customers" for decades. Even most licensed, audited banks have those types of error margins if you really asked them to provide a clean list of their clients.

So all we hear about Digital IDs is a marketing term for the new version of that database they are working on.

A lot of countries were already collecting fingerprints when issuing IDs decades ago. But those projects fails like most CRMs.

So now the UK and others are arresting people for Facebook posts because it is actually a good database. Probably way better than their actual fingerprints or criminals databases.

I am not sure if you should be terrified or just not care about those announcements.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-09-26 08:15:17+00:00
Sounds expensive. Amazon SES has 1k emails/month included for free (if you use an API to send). When sending via SMTP that quota does not apply, but still 1k Emails just costs 0.1$ (yes, 10 cents). I do not use any other AWS services but SES for my emails because of the pricing, I host everything else on Hetzner.
by sadiq | 2025-09-26 08:15:23+00:00
We did note several places during the trip that didn't contain bramble. The hotspot in the middle of the residential area was also entirely isolated.

For a proper evaluation you would need to be more methodological but as a sanity-check we were very happy with it.

One other thing to point out about the bramble model is that it is pixel-wise. That is each prediction is exclusively only what is within the 10 metre pixel (give or take the georeferencing error).
by matwood | 2025-09-26 08:15:46+00:00
> How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out?

Such an odd complaint about LLMs. Did people just blindly trust Google searches before hand?

If it's something important, you verify it the same way you did anything else. Check the sources and use more than a single query. I have found the various LLMs to very useful in these cases, especially when I'm coming at something brand new and have no idea what to even search for.
by forkerenok | 2025-09-26 08:15:47+00:00
> This decision came after Illinois Secretary of State [...] discovered that Flock had allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois cameras in a “pilot program” against state law, and after the RoundTable reported in June that out-of-state law enforcement agencies were able to search Flock’s data for assistance in immigration cases.

This illustrates the textbook argument for why mass surveillance is bad: these tools can quickly end up in the wrong hands.

Play silly games, win silly prizes.
by auggierose | 2025-09-26 08:15:54+00:00
> The main beauty of type theory is that one gets two for the price of one.

You get what you pay for.

> The thing is that if one wants to make set theory practical, one probably ends up implementing something close to type theory anyway.

That is wrong. Unless you want to argue that types are pretty close to sets already. Let's just throw away what makes types different from sets, and I am happy with that.

Your point is that axioms are scary, and I agree with that. When you use them, you should be aware where they come from, and why they are consistent with each other. In type theory, everything is definitions from the bottom up, but that also restricts your freedom in what you can do. But you can view these definitions just as one source of axioms that you trust, because you trust the type theory. But I argue that it would be just as safe to have two or three or ... sources of axioms, as long as you can argue why you trust the combination of these sources (in fact, every type theory implementation has multiple such sources inside, they just don't advertise that). Ideally that argument is machine-checked, which leads the way to trusted extensions of the prover without sacrificing flexibility.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-09-26 08:16:07+00:00
Yeah, liberalism preaches selfishness under the false guise of pseudo-individualism. Everyone today is special, unique individual, but ironically, at the same time, almost identical to the next special, unique individual, with their identity constructed by fervent consumption of the same mass produced goods and images.

Final product of liberalism is Nietzsche's Last Man.
by antocuni | 2025-09-26 08:16:51+00:00
(author of the blog post here) "just compile when you know the types" is not a good strategy for Python. My EuroPython talk "Myths and fairy tales about Python performance" explains many reasons why Python is VERY hard to optimize: https://lwn.net/Articles/1031707/

One big advantage of tracing JITs is that they are generally easier to write an to maintain. For the specific case of PyPy, it's actually a "meta tracing JIT": you trace the interpreter, not the underlying program, which TL;DR means that you can write the interpreter (which is "easy") and you get a JIT compiler for free. The basic assumption of a tracing JIT is that you have one or more "hot loops" in which you have one (or few) fast paths which are taken most of the time.

If the assumption holds, tracing has big advantages because you eliminate most of dynamism and you automatically inline across multiple layer of function calls, which in turns make it possible to eliminate allocation of most temporary objects. The problem is that the assumption not always holds, and that's where you start to get problems.

But methods JITs are not THE solution either. Meta has a whole team developing Cinder, which is a method JIT for Python, but they had to introduce what they call "static python", which is an opt-in sets of constraints to remove some Python dynamism to make the JIT job easier.

Finally, as soon as you call any C extension, any JIT is out of luck and must deoptimize to present a "state of the world" which is compatible with that the C extension finds.
by atoav | 2025-09-26 08:17:46+00:00
> You've put forward a false dichotomy between punching my manager in the face and nodding along silently to everything I'm told. Frankly, both will get me fired pretty quickly.

No I did not. I characterized a certain type of person by how they would act at the extremes. Naturally most day to day decisions are not taking part at those extremes. Also these being a false dichotomy would mean you can somehow both nod along and tell them they are wrong at the same time. Nodding along implies you are not telling them they are wrong, which means they are mutally exclusive types of behavior, or: a dichtomy.

If I read you favourably you probably thought I meant people literally just have those two extreme options, while obviously there are many shades inbetween. But I did not claim there were no such shades.

Why did you turn what I said into "punch them in the face"? Because my original statement wasn't that easy to attack?

> It's his job to override me and say "I hear your concerns. Do it anyway."

Contrary to your perception everything I said is in perfect alignment with this statement. I didn't even talk about outcomes, only about behaviors and only behaviours by the manager.

If a superior asks a manager if a thing can be done in two days although the manager knows their team can at best do it in six, assuming your superior wants to know the truth and telling them: "the fastest we ever did this was six days and that was already problematic" isn't what you called punching them in the face it is simply a statement of fact. If the manager is good they then add a: "We can try to do it in 5, if Greg and Linda from Design are 100% on the project and my team is lifted from all other day to day responsibilities for that duration. Afterwards they probably need a day off."

The superior obviously has many options to go forward, but this is offering a realistic step towards their direction, states what is needed to make it possible and gives a realistic feeling about how possible it is. But what if the manager had not said the truth but (trying to please the superior) promised impossible things? That way the superiors choice suddenly involves more risk than they might be aware of. And bad managers consistently choose the latter as they are more concerned with their appearance than with the result of the work.
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-26 08:17:50+00:00
(I wrote the article).

The optimizations do have to be correct. However, there are some significant factors that make it a lot easier in the Truffle architecture:

1. The optimizations are themselves implemented in a language with memory safety and lots of static analysis tools, so they're just less likely to be buggy for the usual reasons.

2. Most of the complex optimizations that matter for a language like Javascript or Python are implemented in the interpreter, which is then partially evaluated. In a classical language VM complex optimizations like PICs, specialization, speculation etc are all hand coded in C++ by manipulating compiler IR. It's a very unnatural way to work with a program. In the Truffle architecture they're implemented in normal Java in relatively straight-line logic, so there's just far fewer ways to mess up.

3. The intrinsics are also all written in a memory safe language. Buggy intrinsics are a common cause of compiler errors.

It is nonetheless true that at some points the program is transformed, and those transforms can have bugs. Just like how languages with memory safety and strong standard libraries don't eliminate all bugs, just a lot of them. It's still a big upgrade in correctness, I think.
by willy_k | 2025-09-26 08:18:02+00:00
> If shit ever did hit the proverbial fan, you can bet that any US military walking around an American city would be constantly worried about getting a lead injection from any Tom, Dick or Harry who's got a firearm.

And then in many scenarios, that Tom, Dick, or Harry gets returned the favor, except with a tank round or worse. If the military remained organized, or at least large factions of it did, it would considerably outclass the general population in both intelligence and firepower / strike capabilities.

Soldiers would be on edge and vulnerable, sure, just like in the conflicts of the past few decades, but overall the military would retain a significant advantage.
by supz_k | 2025-09-26 08:18:48+00:00
We are working on an open-source, self-hosted solution [0] to make this easier. When you correctly set up DKIM, SPF, reverse/forward DNS for IPs, it is not much hard to get emails delivered. IPs can still get blacklisted and you need to monitor blacklists and contact them if it happens. Solutions like Postfix are great, but they lack observability. In our solution, we have developed dashboards and health checks to make it easier to find problems with the set up.

We are currently running beta tests (really appreciate it if you can join).

[0] https://github.com/hyvor/relay
by miki123211 | 2025-09-26 08:18:50+00:00
You need to become more like a "normal person."

No VPN (unless your ISP is extremely shady, then do use a VPN or change ISP), no overly zealous adblock (ublock origin on default settings should be fine), no JS blocking / weird privacy extensions / whatever, nno PiHole, just what your average, relatively tech-savvy geek would use.

HN readerships's problems with Cloudflare are mostly their own fault. "normal" internet users don't have these problems[1].

[1] except for people in specific countries, and I do feel sorry for those.
by TZubiri | 2025-09-26 08:19:31+00:00
I'm not sure but I think the original utility and motivation for this mathematical puzzle is how to represent possible legal moves when programming chess, and this would be evidence that an 8bit unsigned integer is sufficient for the worst case scenario, although you would need some complex kind of encoding mechanism to make the representation terse enough to represent the common moves along with 7 promoted queens in the same 256-moves space.

Practically I think I'll stay with a fixed-length encoding for each of the starting pieces and their movements assuming maximum freedom, while adding a variable length variable in case of promotions.

Although nowadays with OOP and classes and superfast CPUs you probably have entirely variable length encodings, you know, an array of piece objects each with their own legal_moves function. But back in the day, when chess engines were written in C, these things were managed globally with all kinds of hack to save space, not due to space reasons, but to improve locality by reducing cache sizes.

For example, even though the chess board is 8x8, a common trick is to make the board 12x12 to account for knight moves that go off the board (and mark them as ilegal of course.) Which goes to show that even with efficiency as the upmost consideration, a terse representation is not ideal, so I doubt we are going to see 8bit variables to represent moves.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-26 08:19:56+00:00
Home Depot has had an incredibly aggressive retail theft problem for about half a decade now across virtually every market.

Their response of putting 10 ALPRs in each store's parking lot and locking up everything seems rational based upon what I've seen. There's something about stealing Milwaukee tools that gets certain groups of people very excited. They even have some tool manufacturers designing activation at checkout mechanisms to discourage theft.

I have a hard time believing this stuff is making them any money or is a secret government arrangement. It seems purely about loss prevention in the case of HD. They have been an easy target up until recently.

Home Depot seems like the one compelling win I've seen so far regarding these cameras. You'd have to be pretty crazy to try and steal tools these days. The speed with which law enforcement can react to these signals is incredible. I don't necessarily like the implications for other things but it does make shopping in certain retail environments feel much safer.

So, cameras in the HD and Apple Store parking lots seem acceptable to me based upon the risk these businesses endure. Cameras in public I don't like, but without them the ones in private wouldn't be able to accomplish as much (I.e., interception of felony retail theft suspects while they still have all of the evidence on them).
by mechanicum | 2025-09-26 08:20:07+00:00
I don’t think so, no. This is how it works today: https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work

If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem.

If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records.

Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).
by matwood | 2025-09-26 08:20:08+00:00
Yeah, some of these comments make it sound we had zero security issues pre-AI. I think the challenge is what you touched on, you have to tell the AI to handle it just like anything else you want as a requirement. I've use AI to 'vibe' code things and they have turned out pretty well. But, I absolutely leaned on my 20+ years of experience to 'work' with the AI to get what I wanted.
by jan_g | 2025-09-26 08:20:40+00:00
A nautical mile is ~6,076 feet or exactly 1,852 meters (???).

That is actually defined by distances on Earth (which is of course an approximation, but still ...). So, 1 nautical mile equals to one minute in the 90 degrees hemisphere arc. It's approximately 10k km from equator to the pole, so 10,000km/90/60 equals 1.852km.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-26 08:22:46+00:00
There is no such thing as intent. That's retrofitted. Meaning only emerges from the variations of task demands. We know this now from allocortex studies. Sure we can simulate meaning from our PFC, but that makes little difference if the simulation has zip to do with the action and mapping.

The real problem is where does the post-hoc nature of words interact with the world of actions? They're highly separable. In one hand we have conscious will created by words, on the other is the wordless world of memory integration, consolidation, cognitive mapping, planning. All thought is wordless, we know this as of 2016 in aphasia studies, the question is if the words are arbitrary, what we doing using them in place of thought? Are we dumb, insane, or just wiling to live in slumber using them to go nowhere? If you look around carefully, nowhere is where we're going, and fast.
by h33t-l4x0r | 2025-09-26 08:23:03+00:00
Hmm, I don't know where you get that takeaway. For me, it's an edge cache, so it speeds up the internet.

It sits between user and origin, often many hops closer, and serves content cached according to rules set by customer.

When you're a CF customer they send you reports on how much bandwidth origin is saving and for me, historically, it's been most of it.

And they do all of it for free most of the time! There's not a lot of cloud providers that I will endorse highly, but I have only love for Cloudflare.

It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice.
by roncesvalles | 2025-09-26 08:24:27+00:00
I'd clarify if her "all the time" means a couple of times a week. For 99.9% of cases an ER doctor would just read what the radiologist wrote in the document.

It's sort of like saying "sometimes a cab driver talks to passengers and suggests a nice restaurant nearby, so you can't automate it away with a self-driving cab."
by cubefox | 2025-09-26 08:24:33+00:00
> Elaborate production values and doubled playtime helped make SNES PoP a huge hit. I especially loved the fantastic box artwork by Katsuya Terada.

For those who wondered:

https://www.therage.ie/products/prince-of-persia-snes-japane...

https://x.com/Danny8bit/status/1196862172174811136/photo/1
by Eji1700 | 2025-09-26 08:25:09+00:00
Glancing at it a chess players first instinct looks to be the "solution".

Assume all pawns are queens, then maximize queen moves, work backwards from there. Couple of other "obvious" assumptions such as minimal black pieces, which means shoving the king in a corner but somehow not in check, Rooks cover the next largest amount of space so they're going in corners, bishops will be mirrored, etc.

Not to say it isn't still impressive, but I always wonder how many "sane" positions there are for solving a puzzle like this in the first place. The paper quotes some huge number and someone else says it's a smaller, but still massive, number, but when you look at the stated goal and start from some obvious starting points, start working out rules (obviously 4 queens right in the middle blocks other queens and costs space), and eliminate symmetrical positions, well you're left with a decently solvable problem. At least compared to the kind of shit that's usually brute force solved.

Edit:

This is actually a fun one to think about for a bit the more I look at it.

It quickly becomes apparent that your basically getting 7 moves out a of a rank/column MAX, so you maximize for that first.

It quickly becomes apparent that the knights L move shape is also the optimal way to start tiling your 9 queens to maximize for squares taken.

As I said before the black position obviously has to be the dead minimum, and it makes sense that'd be a king and 2 pawns due to various end game stuff (basically impossible to prevent the king from being in check otherwise while taking up as much space as possible).

Once you know you're doing that with the black king you'll want to "block" the remaining space with pieces that can't threaten it, so you shove a bishop adjacent (which can still take the pawn), and figure you're going to mirror that bishop because that's kinda how bishop's work in play/mathematically.

It's actually quite neat to see how each step sorta leads you to the next one, like one of those metal puzzles or the sudoku's with unique rules and only 1 or 2 starting numbers.

Still i'm positive if I hadn't seen this picture first I probably NEVER would've gotten this answer correct, but I do think i would've come closer than I ever expected.

Edit 2:

Ahh i do see they have at least one or two solutions that are 218 where there's only 2 black pieces. I'm somewhat surprised that's a possible legal position but so be it. Interesting that still leads to the same net realestate. Thats the one area i'd expect to gain something if you could cheat.
by silverliver | 2025-09-26 08:25:29+00:00
I'll just repost what I posted in the last thread:

> There is no on-device scanning without compromising privacy. Scanning that can detect child abuse can also detect human rights activists, investigative journalists, and so on. I imagine this technology can be easily used by the government to identify journalists by scanning for material related to their investigation.

> On-device scanning is a fabrication that Apple foolishly introduced to the mainstream, and one that rabid politicians bit into and refuse to let go.

And I'll add this: Citizens lose of their right to privacy is the death of their democracy.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-26 08:26:02+00:00
Of course I've studied logic, particularly Eastern lack of requirement of logic. Language is inherently paradoxical, its inception, development defies logic in its endless contradictions. It can't be revealed by logic. The very idea that language has something called words that are scientifically visible in the label conduit metaphor paradox indicates that language is probably our biggest contradiction.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-09-26 08:26:04+00:00
Like the US, I think there are multiple interest groups, not all of whom are interested in seeing "aliens" on British streets. I was named a "Highly Skilled Migrant" by Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and paid a fair amount of money to the University of Liverpool and yet, never got the feeling I was in any way anything other than a foreigner.
by sadiq | 2025-09-26 08:26:38+00:00
I was a lot more optimistic about Gabriel's model than he was. It is essentially a presence-only species distribution model where accuracy depends largely on assumptions around prevalence and which really needs some presence-absence data to calibrate.

As I mentioned in one of the other comments, the model is also only pixel-wise. That is, it is not using spatial information for predictions.
by miki123211 | 2025-09-26 08:27:42+00:00
The problem with Cloudflare is that it does business everywhere, so it has to appease all governments.

If you're a news site registered in the US or a porn site registered in Canada, with relatively few ties in other countries, you have far much less pressure to comply with unreasonable demands from India or Bahrain. They just don't have that much leverage. If you use Cloudflare, they can put the pressure on Cloudflare instead.

To make matters worse, some governments will demand worldwide removal / blocking of certain content they don't like.

This is what makes the internet so weird and pre-internet intuitions about how governments work so treacherous.