MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-09-09 02:48:02+00:00
It's possible for it to be a facade, but also real.

Apple is a part of PRISM so there's approximately a 100% chance that anything you send to Apple via message, cloud, or whatever else, gets sent onto the NSA and consequently any agency that wants it. But the entire mass data collection they are doing is probably unconstitutional and thus illegal. But anytime it gets challenged in courts it gets thrown out on a lack of standing - nobody can prove it was used against them, so they don't have the legal standing to sue.

And the reason this is, is because its usage is never acknowledged in court. Instead there is parallel construction. [1] For instance imagine the NSA finds out somebody is e.g. muling some drugs. They tip off the police and then the police find the car in question and create some reason to pull it over - perhaps it was 'driving recklessly.' They coincidentally find the cache of drugs after doing a search of the car because the driver was 'behaving erratically', and then this 'coincidence' is how the evidence is introduced into court.

----

So getting back to Apple they probably want to have their cake and eat it too. By giving the NSA et al all they want behind the scenes they maintain those positive relations (and compensatory $$$ from the government), but then by genuinely fighting its normalization (which would allow it to be directly introduced) in court, they implicitly lie to their users that they're keeping their data protected. So it's this sort of strange thing where it's a facade, but simultaneously also real.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
by Someone1234 | 2025-09-09 02:48:43+00:00
The weakpoint is, has, and will always be people. They're cryptographic hashes of people's chosen passwords. You aren't attacking hypothetical mathematical entropy, you're attacking human imagination and laziness.

It isn't academic either. I have broken tons of cryptographic hashes in my career. Most of my colleagues have too. From DES through bcrypt over tens of years. The cost/performance has slowed, but the techniques haven't changed one bit because PEOPLE haven't changed one bit.

Obviously nobody can crack a sha512 hash likely containing a randomly generated cryptographic number. But that's irrelevant, because we're discussing the Plex security incident where humans created passwords, and humans today, tomorrow, and ten years ago are just as incapable of creating good passwords.

So their claim that these hashes "cannot be read" is inaccurate. If you have a modest budget and want to target a handful of accounts, there are multiple CHEAP cloud services that will happily sell you compute to do so.
by jorvi | 2025-09-09 02:50:44+00:00
Nice followup to your link: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter.

Personally I do not entirely buy it. Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency. The PC Snapdragon chips AFAIK also offer better performance-per-watt than AMD or Intel, with laptops offering them often having 10-30% longer battery life at similar performance.

The same goes for GPUs, where Apple's M1 GPU completely smoked an RTX3090 in performance-per-watt, offering 320W of RTX 3090 performance in a 110W envelope: https://images.macrumors.com/t/xuN87vnxzdp_FJWcAwqFhl4IOXs=/...
by darth_avocado | 2025-09-09 02:51:14+00:00
> My former Artnet colleague Tim Schneider’s analysis at the time of the deal revealed that the gallery was on the hook for $704,000 in monthly rent, or $8.5 million a year—$220 million over the course of the lease

Seems like it’s not an art problem but an art dealer problem. If you rent a $100k/month restaurant space that seats 20 people, is the food industry dying if you can’t turn a profit and close?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-09-09 02:51:22+00:00
There is no such thing as a “free or low cost tier” in AWS. Or at least there wasn’t before July 15th of this year when they actually added a free tier where you can’t go over $200.

There are services that give you a free year and there are services that give you a free amount every month.

If you want AWS with training wheels, use AWS Lightsale

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
by cryptonector | 2025-09-09 02:52:11+00:00
> - There is no backward or forward compatibility by default.

ASN.1 in 1984 had it. Later ASN.1 evolved to have a) explicit extensibility markers, and b) the `EXTENSIBILITY IMPLIED` module option that implies every SEQUENCE, SET, ENUM, and other things are extensible by default, as if they ended in `, ...`.

There are good reasons for this change:

- not all implementors had understood the intent, so not all had implemented "ignore unexpected new fields"

- sometimes you want non-extensible things

- you may actually want to record in the syntax all the sets of extensions

> - Tools are bad.

But there were zero -ZERO!- tools for PB when Google created PB. Don't you see that "the tools that existed were shit" is not a good argument for creating tools for a completely new thing instead?

> - Honorable mention: using "tag" in TLV to describe only the type and not field name - that SEQUENCE(30) tag will be all over the place, and the contents will be wildly different. Compare to protobuf, where the "tag" is field index, and that's exactly what allows such a great forward/backward compatibility.

In a TLV encoding you can very much use the "type" as the tag for every field sometimes, namely when there would be no ambiguity due to OPTIONAL fields being present or absent, and when you do have such ambiguities you can resort to manual tagging with field numbers or whatever you want. For example:

Thing ::= SEQUENCE { a UTF8String, b UTF8String }

works even though both fields get the same tag (when using a TLV encoding) because both fields are required, while this is broken:

Broken ::= SEQUENCE { a UTF8String OPTIONAL, b UTF8String }

and you would have to fix it with something like:

Fixed ::= SEQUENCE { a [0] UTF8String OPTIONAL, b UTF8String }

What PB does is require the equivalent of manually applying what ASN.1 calls IMPLICIT tags to every field, which is silly and makes it harder to decode data w/o reference to the module that defines its schema (this last is sketchy anyways, and I don't think it is a huge advantage for the ASN.1 BER/DER way of doing things, though others will disagree).

> (Could ASN.1 fix those problems? Not sure. Yes, maybe one could write better tooling, but all the existing users know that extensibility is for the weak, and non-optional SEQUENCEs are the way to go. It is easier to write all-new format than try to change existing conventions.)

ASN.1 does not have these problems.

Better tooling does exist and can exist -- it's no different than writing PB tooling, at least for a subset of ASN.1, because ASN.1 does have many advanced features that PB lacks, and obviously implementing all of ASN.1 is more work than implementing all of PB.

> It is easier to write all-new format than try to change existing conventions.

Maybe, but only if you have a good handle on what came before.

I strongly recommend that you actually read x.680.
by CydeWeys | 2025-09-09 02:53:16+00:00
I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP. The bursting of the art market bubble in mid 2022 coincides exactly with when interest rates started rising following the 'transitory' inflation caused by pandemic relief measures. This was also the same time that we started seeing hiring freezes in tech, the bursting of the luxury watch bubble, etc. It's all tied together, and has the same root cause: It stopped being cheap to borrow money, and it started being lucrative to lend it out for guaranteed returns (e.g. by buying Treasuries) rather than speculating on artworks, or NFTs, or whatever.
by viceconsole | 2025-09-09 02:53:49+00:00
I'm not aware of any other country besides the US that has a blanket policy of requiring at least one interview in almost all cases.

That said, back in the 2000s I had to apply in person at the French embassy for a student visa, in in the 2010s I had to apply in person at a Chilean consulate for a special visa.

Many countries have outsourced the bulk of their processing to contractors like VFS or TLS these days. But also, our experience as Americans is not representative as we generally have fewer visas we need to bother obtaining, and face less scrutiny when doing so.

I'm not sure if the US interview requirement makes it "harder" to get a US visa - it may be that getting a US visa is just harder than getting another country's visa, which might still be true even if we didn't interview people. The big thing that makes getting non-immigrant visas to the US difficult for many people is that, unless shown otherwise, US immigration law assumes you are an immigrant.
by snkfr | 2025-09-09 02:54:00+00:00
Having been a happy user for a number of years I'm sad to see the tool going away. It was the only SQL tool that was able pull me away from just using PSQL directly.

Curious what recommendations people have for replacements? I don't leverage most of the advanced features, I just like having a scratchpad for queries, execution history, and the occasional basic bar/line chart for a query.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-09-09 02:54:03+00:00
I'm the person you replied to. I've been developing software for >30 years now. In this case I have domain knowledge, architecture knowledge, experience with the type of systems we're building, but not the language (it's an odd situation). I'm using an LLM to avoid the weeks/months of getting up to speed with Ruby myself, and it appears to be working.

To address your comments about PRs: without the LLM I would be submitting shitty PRs with lots of basic Ruby mistakes. With the LLM I am submitting PRs that are on a par with everyone else's PRs (Ruby has many ways of doing the same thing, so most suggested changes to my PRs are the usual "or you could do it this way and that might be more elegant" discussions). It's not that the rest of the team are picking up my slack, it's actually better this way.

I was a bit sceptical when I started, and like you I assumed that I would end up having to learn Ruby, but in fact it's working well.
by gobdovan | 2025-09-09 02:54:26+00:00
Hinton is too speculative and inconsistent for me. A reporter outside the AI field even called him out for saying with confidence that only blue collar work will survive AI by pointing out a few years back he said with the same confidence that only creative work will survive.

I can't but compare his takes with Stuart Russell takes, which are so well grounded, coherent and easily presented. I often revisit Stuart Russell discussion with Steven Pinker on AI for the clarity he brings to the topic.
by nerpderp82 | 2025-09-09 02:55:46+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P6_(microarchitecture)

The P6 is arguably the most important x86 microarch ever, it put Intel on top over the RISC workstations.

What was your favorite subsystem in the P6 arch?

Was it designed in Verilog? What languages and tools were used to design P6 and the PPro?
by Ferret7446 | 2025-09-09 02:56:01+00:00
I hesitate to call Doom and Apex movement fluid. Well, it is fluid in the sense that it feels like you're on cart with exquisitely greased bearings and futuristic servos. FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that. That's not to say they don't control well, but they don't control naturally. Third person games can actually flow naturally, because you can animate things like turning around, changing direction, momentum, etc.

FPS characters have invisible crab legs.
Ask HN: What if your team chat organized tasks for you?
by PaulShin | 2025-09-09 02:56:42+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re working on a new tool and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The idea is simple:

- Imagine WhatsApp-style team chat.

- Every conversation automatically turns into action items (tasks, docs, calendar events).

- An AI “coworker” lives inside the chat: it organizes tasks, reminds you of deadlines, and can even take care of simple work on its own.

- You can also record voice conversations, and the AI will generate a summary doc + extract action items into tasks.

Looking ahead:

- Those generated tasks themselves can become prompts, so the AI can proactively resolve what it can.

- We plan to connect this with MCP to let AI agents handle tasks directly across tools and services.

So instead of endless messages being buried, the chat itself becomes your task manager, doc hub, and meeting note system with AI doing the heavy lifting.

We’re still early, but I’m curious:

- Would you try a tool like this?

- In your workflow, what would make an AI teammate inside chat actually useful (vs distracting)?

Any feedback would be super helpful as we shape the product. Thanks!
by unsnap_biceps | 2025-09-09 02:56:47+00:00
Without the EDID cloner, when you switch the KVM away from the system, it receives a monitor disconnect event. When you switch it back, it receives a monitor connect event. There are OS settings that help make it so that the windows end up back where they started, but not all programs support this well. With a EDID cloner in place, the computer never detects that the monitor shifted at all and so nothing gets repositioned and apps just carry on.
by monocasa | 2025-09-09 02:57:51+00:00
> x86 decoding must be a pain - I vaguely remember that they have trace caches (a cache of decoded micro-operations) to skip decoding in some cases. You probably don't make such caches when decoding is easy.

To be fair, a lot of modern ARM cores also have uop caches. There's a lot to decide even without the variable length component, to the point that keeping a cache of uops and temporarily turning pieces of the IFU off can be a win.
by bnchrch | 2025-09-09 02:58:06+00:00
> The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise

> - Socrates (399 BC)

> The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress

> - Peter the Hermit (1274)
by Tiktaalik | 2025-09-09 02:58:18+00:00
> Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard.

Just one example, one of the biggest Canadian collectors of contemporary art is condo marketer Bob Rennie, who during the foreign wealth lead boom in Canadian real estate, was making so much money that he opened up an entire personal downtown museum to show off his art works.

After layers of regulation against foreign buying amongst many other shifts in the economy (hi interest rates), condo sales are now in retreat with developers on the ropes and Rennie Marketing laying off staff.

Things change.

(I have no idea if Rennie has stopped buying, but given the sorts of big shifts in his industry, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd eased off!)
by sfpotter | 2025-09-09 02:58:30+00:00
It's no more or less a good analogy than any other numerical or computational algorithm.

They're a fixed precision format. That doesn't mean they're ambiguous. They can be used ambiguously, but it isn't inevitable. Tools like interval arithmetic can mitigate this to a considerable extent.

Representing a number like pi to arbitrary precision isn't the purpose of a fixed precision format like IEEE754. It can be used to represent, say, 16 digits of pi, which is used to great effect in something like a discrete Fourier transform or many other scientific computations.
by zozbot234 | 2025-09-09 02:59:20+00:00
From reverse engineered information (in the context of Asahi Linux, which can have raw hardware access to the ANE) it seems that the M1/M2 Apple Neural Engine provides exclusively for statically scheduled MADD's of INT8 or FP16 values.[0] This wastes a lot of memory bandwidth on padding in the context of newer local models which generally are more heavily quantized.

(That is, when in-memory model values must be padded to FP16/INT8 this slashes your effective use of memory bandwidth, which is what determines token generation speed. GPU compute doesn't have that issue; one can simply de-quantize/pad the input in fast local registers to feed the matrix compute units, so memory bandwidth is used efficiently.)

The NPU/ANE is still potentially useful for lowering power use in the context of prompt pre-processing, which is limited by raw compute as opposed to the memory bandwidth bound of token generation. (Lower power usage in this context will save on battery and may help performance by avoiding power/thermal throttling, especially on passively-cooled laptops. So this is definitely worth going for.)

[0] Some historical information about bare-metal use of the ANE is available from the Whisper.cpp pull req: https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp/pull/1021 Even older information at: https://github.com/eiln/ane/tree/33a61249d773f8f50c02ab0b9fe... .

More extensive information at https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/tree/master/extra/accel... (from the Tinygrad folks) seems to basically confirm the above.

(The jury is still out for M3/M4 which currently have no Asahi support - thus, no current prospects for driving the ANE bare-metal. Note however that the M3/Pro/Max ANE reported performance numbers are quite close to the M2 version, so there may not be a real improvement there either. M3 Ultra and especially the M4 series may be a different story.)
by mrheosuper | 2025-09-09 03:00:32+00:00
There are countless different RTOS. The most polishing one is Zephyr. FreeRTOS is more like "Scheduler" than a proper OS.

Also am i correctly assume you want an OS that's truly "cross-platform", that can run on every architecture ? Or you just want to "have an app on ESP32 to run on Android" ? Because the latter can be done with proper abstraction layer.
by jader201 | 2025-09-09 03:00:43+00:00
> I'm just saying there are also people who are the opposite, and their way of doing it is also valid and works great for them.

Agreed, but if we’re here discussing ways to reduce distractions of smartphones, I think auditing our notifications and the usage of apps that send notifications, particularly of things that are more noise than signal, is worth mentioning.

> Also, stuff on HN and YouTube isn't for you personally, and it doesn't need your reply, so it's not really an analogy for personal messages.

Fair point, but I’d bet that 90% of most people’s email is also not personal messages, and just more noise.

Yes, we should unsubscribe from the noise, and I have, but I still have some things I get that I occasionally care about, just not enough to be notified.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-09-09 03:02:09+00:00
I feel like it's extremely common for the autofill to not work for various reasons even when you aren't being phished. I have to manually select the site to fill fairly often, especially inside apps where the password manager doesn't seem to match the app to the website password.

Passkeys seem like the best solution here where you physically can not fall for a phishing attack.
by unscaled | 2025-09-09 03:03:28+00:00
This may be nitpicking, but the complexity in OOXML is not "necessary", at least not in the sense of what Fred Brooks would call essential complexity. As OP clearly demonstrate, the complexity in OOXML is not artificial: there was never some grand conspiracy by Microsoft to create a format that competitors will find it hard to implement.

But very little of this complexity is necessary for a standard interoperable document file format. The background was that the EU started pushing for a standardized document exchange format, and several governments started implementing regulations requiring the use of this format — Microsoft now had some very big customers which urgently needed a feature: a standard document file format. Microsoft _could_ have implemented and submitted a new format that doesn't include slavishly reflect their in-memory object graph and legacy issues. Or they even could have just adopted ODF (shudder). But they've chosen the easy way, because, frankly, they probably just didn't have the time. They took the accidental complexity which was the hot mess Microsoft Office internals (like a buggy date format) and serialized it to disk. It was never an ideal solution, but this was quick to implement.

That's just a classic case of technical debt: Microsoft needed to deliver a feature fast, and they were willing to make compromises. The crazy political shenanigans Microsoft had executed to standardize their technical debt are ironically just another form of accidental complexity.
by monocasa | 2025-09-09 03:03:37+00:00
> While I'm not a hardware designer, my gut says that you can probably do x86 instruction length-decoding in one cycle

That's been my understanding as well. X86 style length decoding is about one pipeline stage if done dynamically.

The simpler riscv length decoding ends up being about a half pipeline stage on the wider decoders.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-09 03:03:55+00:00
Semi-relevant, not too long ago I started tinkering around with launcher ideas and almost immediately ran into headwinds when it turned out that the only way to draw the wallpaper the user has set in Settings is to use a magic method that doesn’t let the launcher actually do anything with the image and forces you to let the system handle compositing.

This is limiting and completely rules out implementing effects like blurs or a Liquid Glass lookalike unless you want to make the user set the wallpaper in the launcher separately. Totally killed my motivation to build further.
by jschveibinz | 2025-09-09 03:04:29+00:00
I can speak from experience by saying that SBIR awards/contracts can be an extremely effective way to develop commercial product technology while also satisfying the requirements of the SBIR customer. It just takes a good engineering approach to make this feasible.

And SBIR mills have been around forever. They usually have the inside track by writing the requirements (as white papers) for COTR's that then end up in the book a year later--sometimes without changing a word!
by ajross | 2025-09-09 03:05:23+00:00
Nah, they're still the best cars you can buy[1]. It's all down to Musk's political antics.

[1] Seriously, it's hard to be lacking in innovation when other brands still don't even have walk-up unlock or 360° cameras, much less drive themselves around or launch like rockets. And the repairability thing is a meme from back when they had part production lag due to crazy scaling. Getting a Tesla fixed now (and yes, I have) is like "click three buttons in your app and come in tomorrow".