MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by edent | 2025-09-14 20:07:51+00:00
It is perfectly possible to encrypt a message such that two different keys can decrypt it. There is nothing in modern encryption that makes that impossible. See https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~aboldyre/papers/bbks.pdf and many others.

So your chat app encrypts your message with the recipient's public key and the state's public key.

Hey presto, you have a message which cannot be read by someone who casually intercepts it. If the state seizes your message - or records it for later analysis - they do not need to break encryption. There's no plain-text version laying around for anyone to sniff.

Is this a good idea? No. Even ignoring the civil liberties aspect, we know that key management is extremely difficult. A leak of the state's private key(s) could be devastating.

But let's not pretend that this is somehow technologically impossible.
by thephyber | 2025-09-14 20:08:40+00:00
Different take:

At the risk of accidentally demonizing the poor, I remember reading a think piece that could be summarized as “morals/ethics are a luxury only the rich can afford.” The gist is that if you can’t afford to quit your job on the spot and not worry about paying rent this month, you will always be victim to your boss’s unethical actions lowering your ethical standards.

As an engineer, I have frequently challenged myself to empathize with the VW emissions scandal engineers, who were pressured to meet unrealistic emissions and deadlines. The managers didn’t have to explicitly tell them to build emissions testing defectors — they came up with that as an engineering solution to the requirements they were given. I ask myself: at what point would you have quit, and hopefully told the authorities?

Also more recent example is the staff of the submarine that went down to the site of the Titanic and imploded. The CEO was apparently an unbelievable bully and took extraordinary risks, but the staff didn’t quit. One of them was a Scottish immigrant who moved his whole family to take the job. He was also worried about being blacklisted from the entire private sector submarine industry. There was a lot of friction to being able to exercise his highest ethical standards.

Thailand is more or less at war with Cambodian war lords, who have tens of thousands of poor English speakers from around the world living in captivity, their passports taken away, running long term scams over the internet. When they have no money and no power to run, is it fair to blame the low level scammers for having fallen for a job scam months or years ago?

The more financial pressure you are under, the more likely you are to tolerate an unethical environment.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-14 20:08:43+00:00
In what bubble?

In 1990, everyone on my higschool that had access to computers was distributed between Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga, and PCs, with PCs being the minority.

Personally I only moved into PCs in 1991, with a 386SX.

Until then, I only used the PC1512 ones on the school lab.

I became part of the PC minority.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-09-14 20:08:47+00:00
> Danish Minister of Justice and chief architect of the current Chat Control proposal, Peter Hummelgaard:

> "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services."

> Share your thoughts via https://fightchatcontrol.eu/, or to jm@jm.dk directly.

https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115204439983078498
by psnehanshu | 2025-09-14 20:08:51+00:00
The android clients don't exist on play store[1][2]. And the client's website is also not reachable[3].

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=oppen.gemini.a...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.snoe.deedum

[3] https://oppen.digital/software/ariane/
by Y_Y | 2025-09-14 20:09:34+00:00
> It's now the GNU Emacs of all terminal emulators.

> (Linus Torvalds, regarding the fact that Linux started off as a terminal emulator.)

http://neil.franklin.ch/Jokes_and_Fun/Linux_Quotes.html

That's the best reference I can find, but even if it's totally legit it doesn't make any sense to me.
Show HN: Proxmox-GitOps: Recursive IaC LXC Container Automation
by stevius | 2025-09-14 20:09:45+00:00
I've built Proxmox-GitOps, a self-bootstrapping GitOps platform that automates provisioning, configuration, and orchestration of Linux containers (LXC) on Proxmox VE. It turns an entire homelab into version-controlled code, with a focus on deterministic, idempotent deployments. It's now updated for Proxmox 9.0 and Debian Trixie.

GitHub: https://github.com/stevius10/Proxmox-GitOps

*Overview:* It creates a self-sufficient CI/CD environment using Gitea, Act Runner, Ansible, and Chef (Cinc). Start with one command in Docker, which then deploys the full system to Proxmox. The control plane runs in containers it manages, ensuring reproducibility—no drift, easy rollbacks via Git.

*Key Features:* - *One-command bootstrap:* Deploys from local Docker to Proxmox via API. - *Monorepo structure:* Central codebase with submodules for modular container defs (e.g., Home Assistant stack: MQTT broker, Zigbee bridge, reverse proxy). - *Recursive self-management:* Pipeline runs inside its own containers; push code to auto-provision and configure. - *IaC consistency:* Ansible for provisioning, Chef for internal config; shared env vars propagate automatically. - *Extensible:* Add custom containers via Cinc (Ruby) cookbooks - *Stateless & reproducible:* Git as state engine; snapshots for backups/rollbacks.
by cianmm | 2025-09-14 20:09:58+00:00
If they invented this for shortsightedness, which I have very slightly, I would pay a huge amount of money (in European medical cost terms) for it.

I mildly dislike wearing glasses but need them or I have a headache within an hour, I can’t overcome my blink reactions to put in contacts (after several hour long sessions with my optometrist) and my shortsightedness isn’t strong enough to convince myself to go for laser eye surgery.
by quink | 2025-09-14 20:10:48+00:00
I'm not even talking about compilers though... all I want is a baseline standard that I can point to and say: "Here. This right here is where it says that 'curl' and 'wget' shall be available and in $PATH."

And some simple command for any Linux distro or macOS to install everything necessary to adhere to that standard, or a distro that conforms with that standard in the first place.
by jchw | 2025-09-14 20:11:52+00:00
Pretty sure GNU coreutils really does intentionally deviate from POSIX compliance in a handful of places, otherwise POSIXLY_CORRECT wouldn't exist. That said you're probably right, though I also suspect dealing with GPL licensing is another major reason they don't bother with things like GNU coreutils. (Obviously they definitely wouldn't have done it after coreutils switched to GPLv3, but I'm sure even before then they would've greatly preferred permissively-licensed software.)
by uptime | 2025-09-14 20:13:31+00:00
I really like using Observable. Coming from years of d3 and not having a lot of R or Python to do, Observable feels great and things look beautiful. Lots of examples and it is great to see what others are making. Also love that I can use SQL on data in the notebook. The Plot functions can make quick work of various charts. I am looking forward to the static output future, and to see what they mean by more vanilla js in the app.

Not saying it is better or worse than Jupyter etc. Just that it has been exciting to think I can make viz that would not look out of place in major pubs, etc.
Ask HN: Why does AWS Route53 price .click domains at only $3/year?
by michaelstewart | 2025-09-14 20:13:55+00:00
I noticed something odd while browsing AWS Route53’s domain pricing. Nearly all TLDs are in the $10–$50 range, but .click is listed at just $3/year—much lower than anything else they offer.

Here’s the pricing page (which links to the full PDF): https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/#topic-0

I can't find any evidence that Amazon owns the .click TLD. Does anyone know why .click is priced so much lower than every other TLD?
by numpad0 | 2025-09-14 20:15:26+00:00
> 3-4x less passengers than Shinjuku

Exactly what I meant by comparable - those are within 10x. The up to date, yet still suspiciously Japan-dominated table on Wikipedia[1] has couple Indian and Chinese stations within top 20s, as I suspected. The must be more complete data in some non-English forms that has not been pulled into the English bubble on the WWW.

I believe I've been to stations like Daimon-Hamamatsucho and I can sort of understand how such random commuter stops in Tokyo could tally up somewhat absurd passenger counts, but there was absolutely no way that rails in Japan is singlehandedly so ahead of everything in the world that not even any cutting edge Chinese cities compare. There should be more of those in the world, at least now and across Asia.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...
by nicce | 2025-09-14 20:15:29+00:00
Creating new words and definitions doesn't justify any initiatives. The point is that they try to mislead the common people. So we can't really say that "someone is confusing the terms", when the entity in question just created the new definition?

It works, because you already tried to argue with that. And it is not the Wikipedia. The whole existence of encryption is evolved around the concept of information. And even the government's definition can be argued, because the adversary is defined by the sender and the receiver, not by anyone else.

When there is law, then the definition matters and there is legal stand, but before that, it is just an initiative which tries to mislead.
by sl8s | 2025-09-14 20:16:15+00:00
All the logic and UI code of your application is in a single file, MainActivity.kt (not counting the app theme, those files are separate), which has 1073 lines of code. No services, repositories, models, utility files, and no design patterns to make your life easier. Conclusion: maintaining the project will be very, very difficult. I’m impressed by your iron nerves.
by MrJohz | 2025-09-14 20:16:54+00:00
Gleam is really interesting to me, because it's built on top of the BEAM runtime, but as far as I can tell, it does very little with the actor model that is the star attraction of BEAM/Erlang. There's a (non-built-in?) package that exposes some of the OTP and concurrency tools available, but it doesn't look widely used or recommended on the website. The linked recommends a talk that I hadn't seen before (and unfortunately can't watch right now on my phone!) but other than that there seems to be very sparse documentation available. Searching for "gleam OTP" mainly seems to produce a myriad of alternative OTP implementations and not much in the way of explanations or examples of common patterns or anything like that.

Some of this is obviously going to be the newness of Gleam, but I remember when Elixir was still brand new, and the OTP integration was one of the biggest selling points there, and a big part of their documentation and the ecosystem in general. Whereas with gleam, it almost seems like they're embarrassed of the runtime's distributed heritage? Whereas to me it seems like the OTP and the actors model in general would be the biggest selling point for a language like this.

Does anyone have any insight into why this is, or what concurrency practically feels like in gleam?
by ndriscoll | 2025-09-14 20:17:16+00:00
I'm not seeing the connection to censorship at all with the skincare and diet products. It's illegal to sell certain things to children because they've been deemed harmful. Same with legal (for adults) drugs. If you don't check ID before giving it to a child, that's a crime, and I expect you to be prosecuted, yes.

Actually the California bill seems absurdly weak, and it seems to be enough to just ask if they're 18.

The Washington bill is stupid for restricting creatine supplements, which the evidence indicates provides physical and cognitive benefits with no real drawbacks. It's the one muscle building supplement that's actually known to work, and should be excluded like protein powder. But otherwise restricting people from selling dubious dietary supplements to children doesn't seem terribly wrong on its face.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-09-14 20:17:27+00:00
It sounds like a great way to reduce the standard further with the justification that RO will solve the problems, leaving an even wider class divide having clean drinking water, creating haves and have nots in something so basic it's part of the table stakes to be considered a civilized country.

I say this knowing that many developed nations still struggle with this in specific circumstances, but it shouldn't be an issue nation wide.
by pfdietz | 2025-09-14 20:17:37+00:00
PV has improved in cost/W by nearly three orders of magnitude since it was introduced, and by an order of magnitude since 2010.

Nuclear fans could only dream of this rate of improvement.

Nuclear doesn't work in the sense of being competitive. It's behind and falling farther behind with each passing day.

The best time to have given up on nuclear was decades ago. The second best time is now.
by euvin | 2025-09-14 20:17:43+00:00
That's true, and it's also the reason why it's so important to ensure your information diet is of high quality. Any concept (especially harmful or radical ones) can be reinforced.

I had to learn this lesson a long while ago when I realized many sites I casually browsed were injecting and repeating many dark thoughts that weren't truly reflective of reality. I've been way more careful of my daily intake and the groups I associate with ever since.
by delusional | 2025-09-14 20:18:47+00:00
> IIRC, Law Enforcement is also exempt, and they never get up to any of that, no sirree...

The only place I have found anything about that is some random blog from NextCloud (and I don't know why I'd care what Katrin Goethals, Content Marketer for NextCloud has to say about politics but I digress) and the argument is flimsy at best.
by lurking_swe | 2025-09-14 20:18:57+00:00
death is a single sad event. A specific day.

Unexpectedly becoming the sole caregiver of an aging parent seems different to me. I can imagine some resentment, especially if it’s unexpected _and_ one is already the caregiver for their own spouse, children, etc. It changes your life plans, adds additional daily stress in your life, and may also add financial stress.
by keybored | 2025-09-14 20:19:34+00:00
> We push these one-size-fits-all suggestions, but we are never told who have they modeled from; not everybody is the same, and our minds are even more diverse than our biology.

You say that right after saying that phsyical exercise might be more for you. The modern one-size-fits all solution par excellence.

And exercise is not overrated. Like with meditation: you have to know what you are doing.

> Also, re: running on autopilot: the goal of mindfulness is to be aware of every waking moment, yet our biology is very much tuned to running on autopilot because it is so much more efficient and frees CPU time for higher processing—you don’t want to be focusing on every muscle when you walk now, do you? Is it such a great idea to overrule our energy conservation protocols our brains depend upon?

Do you call the constant idle mind-chatter and distractability of the not-mindful person “feeing up CPU time” (of course with the PC talk)? On what grounds?
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-14 20:20:03+00:00
Sweden has also had an explosion of organized gang violence; carried out by tech savvy teenagers using encrypted chats.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-viole...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-girls-hitwomen-sweden-orga...

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda/briefing/2025-...
by mmis1000 | 2025-09-14 20:20:49+00:00
That's exact why I reply this though (or probably I should reply to your parent comment?). The place these get used are mostly performance insensitive location, it don't really do anything except ruins the readability. And the project is not that old either(It's a past es6-era project), I don't really get why it is used at all.
by NumberCruncher | 2025-09-14 20:20:52+00:00
Making an industrial fortune is relative. It might just mean that jumping on the AI hype helps you preserve your fortune or position in the industry, while everyone else who misses the hype goes out of business.

I remember back in 2004, my first project was testing a teleconferencing system. We set up a huge screen with cameras at one of our subsidiaries and another at the HQ, and I had a phone on my desk with a built-in camera and screen. Did the company roll out the system? No, it didn’t. It was just too expensive. Did they make a fortune from that experience? No, they didn’t. But I’m pretty sure all companies in the knowledge industry that didn’t enable video calls and screen sharing for their employees went out of business years ago...
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-14 20:22:08+00:00
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about my approach to risk management[0].

I generally look at risk as a two-dimensional graph, with the axes being Probability and Severity, and the action strategies as being Prevention, Mitigation, and Remedy.

If we get realistic about likelihood and impact, we can figure out how to reduce the damage.

One trick a wealthy friend of mine uses, is keeping a small checking account, that he fills with just enough cash from his brokerage, so that even if his cards/accounts get pwned, he can't lose that much.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/risky-business/
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-14 20:22:16+00:00
My above example is end to end encryption compatible, it's just that you don't get to pick the end it might go to. However, the connections between ends are still encrypted. As such, it passes the technical mathematical definition (one end having a direct pipe to the second end, with nothing possibly in between), but not the philosophical one.

Governments have never cared about the encryption philosophy; only the math aspects and international risk - which, in this example, are technically satisfied.
by pbasista | 2025-09-14 20:22:34+00:00
> they still managed to not listen to anyone who knows anything about encryption and online safety

Why do you assume something like that? Do you actually know the arguments that the parties in favor of this kind of regulation are presenting? And can you dismiss them based on objective facts?

> The goal they are trying to achieve is good

That is what should be, in my opinion, the basis of this discussion. Assume good intentions and try to work out with the parties involved to achieve the goal in a reasonable way. This is the way, I believe.

Hand-wavingly dismissing other party's arguments would be in my opinion disingenuous.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-14 20:22:52+00:00
This thread is going to be 400 comments of people talking about how stupid this is, how it won't work and never will, how no sane person could possibly want this. And you know what, I agree with all of that.

But there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces who are pointing out that they're unable to track the activities of criminal organisations. For example, in the UK sophisticated gangs steal cars and phones and ship them around the world where they're resold. They locate a buyer anywhere in the world who requests a specific car, find that car, steal it and have it in a shipping container within 24 hours. It's impossible to know who's done it, or track any of the communications involved.

In previous eras it wasn't possible to create international criminal organisations of this level of sophistication because it was harder to communicate securely. Now it's possible and we all pay the price of increased criminal activity. Everyone's insurance premiums go up, making everyone poorer. UK car insurance premiums are up 82% between 2021 and 2024 and insurance providers are still making a loss.

Just to drive this point home - watch/rewatch The Wire (2002-08), except make it impossible to tap the communications of the drug gangs because they're all using encrypted messengers with disappearing messages. Immediately the people running the organisation become untouchable. The police likely can't even figure out who the lieutenants are, let alone the kingpin. At best you can arrest a few street level dealers and that hardly disrupts the criminals at all.

On HN everyone is going to say "everyone has a right to private communication, even criminal empires". And sure, I'm not going to disagree. I'm merely pointing out that private communication allows criminal networks to be much larger, more effective and harder to disrupt. And all of society pays the price when we're victimised by criminals.

Edit: I'm not saying breaking encryption is a good thing or that it will work, I'm only pointing out why police forces want access to communication records. They're unable to do their jobs and are being blamed for the rise in crime. To prove that you've actually read my comment till the end, please mention banana in your comment.
by gdubs | 2025-09-14 20:24:25+00:00
I wanted one of these so bad as a kid. Obviously the mystique was supercharged by their use in VFX, and how filmmakers would sneak them into various shots in movies. Wrote to SGI and they sent some brochures including for this machine. Printed on beautiful heavy stock. Very sad I lost it over the years.

What's amazing is how companies would invest in a whole fleet of these. You'd hear about this or that game development company ordering one for everyone on their team for a cool million or ten. In 90s dollars.

90s were a fun time in computing.
by colinmorelli | 2025-09-14 20:24:40+00:00
Fair, but I'd like to clarify that in my comment I had asked specifically for any sources indicating that the PFA limits were put in place by the prior administration, since you had made the claim:

> Trump's EPA created these PFAS rules

Your response was what I perceived to be a snarky comment that if only I had bothered to look, I'd have found the evidence, followed by a link that didn't say what was suggested.

> Look how many people on this thread actually believe that the Trump administration is literally trying to poison them. That's not crazy to you?

The claims made all over the place are insane to me. Yes, I doubt the Trump administration is actually trying to kill me. The world is not as polarizing and extreme as people on the internet want to make it sound like it is. Most people are far more docile in the real world, but the collective hive of the internet exacerbates tension. I have no clue what side of the political aisle you're on, but my guess is we probably agree about more things than we disagree about, if we could detach bullshit labels from it all.

But FWIW, the allegation that I wasn't bothering to learn or see if I'm wrong just raised tension further. I was genuinely trying to determine if the claim was true, the evidence I had found suggested it wasn't, and it seems like it in fact wasn't quite true, but perhaps that wasn't the point you were trying to make anyway.

All fine. My hope is that we can all turn down the tension and hostility a level or two. Might be the only hope we have.
by perihelions | 2025-09-14 20:25:19+00:00
It's all spinning around the BH, and spins faster the closer to the BH it is. It was actually the core point of this particular experiment to measure how fast it's spinning; the paper's title is "A direct black hole mass measurement...", and the way they're doing that is "dynamical BH mass measurement"—i.e. measuring how fast gas spins around it, and applying kinematic laws.
by mberning | 2025-09-14 20:25:26+00:00
I don't know what point you are trying to make. One person's "abusive and toxic work environment" is another's "results driven organization". If you find yourself in a role that doesn't fit you, or you have serious doubts about, my best advice would be to leave. You are unlikely to meaningfully change the culture. In fact it will probably achieve the opposite of what you want, and people will dislike you for trying.