MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ozars | 2025-09-01 08:03:46+00:00
Shared mutability can cause race conditions in single-threaded environments as well, if you need asynchronous contexts where mutations can be interleaved between suspension points. Think of events, message passing channels, I/O, timers, ticks...

If you're sure you're never going to need multi-threaded environment, you have an option as well: Replace std::sync with std::rc, Mutex with RefCell in the above toy example and that's about it.

If you want to use some asynchronous runtime, replace std::sync with tokio::sync (or std::rc), slap async/awaits along with a single-threaded runtime and that's about it.

Of course, the code above is just a toy example and business logic is much more complex in real world, but compare this to what it would take to write same C++ logic in async.

I found Rust's approach massively more ergonomic compared to C++ approach of passing closures around for asio-like IO contexts or coroutine compiler-magic which opens new novel avenues to shoot myself on the foot, well, to the extent I could grasp it.

It's true Rust forces you to pay all this cost ahead of time. It's also true most applications don't require this level of safety really, so it becomes ridiculous to pay it upfront. And even for some that require such high level of safety, you can skip bunch of bolts on a plane door and it will still be a billion dollar company at the end of the day, so...
by p2detar | 2025-09-01 08:04:29+00:00
My experience with several surgeries and going under full anesthesia every time hasn't been anything that dramatic. Sure, I could write a lot about the feelings I had and the thoughts about whether I'd actually wake up afterward and see my loved ones, but honestly, I find that unnecessary.

In my view, consciousness is completely an emergent phenomenon. What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.

I don't like this article because, like so many others, it tries to tell us how life should be lived, instead of facing the blunt truth: any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time, sad attempts to justify our existence. The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.

Let me finish with this: I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.

edit: paragraphs
by somat | 2025-09-01 08:04:41+00:00
Usb historically solved this with ended connectors It was why you had "A" and "B" sides. usb C has an awful lot of user hostile fallout considering it's stated goal of "a cable that just works for everything"

I think to solve it, while keeping all the other goals of usb C would be to orient the charging pins on the plug, not charging the direction you want? unplug then flip one side.
by felixyz | 2025-09-01 08:04:53+00:00
> There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time

True. But then again, there is nothing that persists over time. Entities with enduring identities - of any kind - are just abstractions that we superimpose on experience.

> Consciousness is just something that living beings do

To my eyes, you're switching over to another meaning of "consciousness" here. Sure there's no enduring self, but that doesn't mean consciousness (the capacity for experience, rather than mere behavior) is just something we do. We can understand feelings, thoughts, emotions etc as fundamentally "impersonal", yes, but that doesn't mean that they are not states of being. To me such states are about as real as anything. Again, it's two separate issues: 1) the nature of a persistent self, 2) the nature of mental states, not taken as "possessions" of such a self.

(Still, psychologically speaking, the sense of self is baked into even our most basic acts of cognition. When you see an apple, there is always an implicit "you" in relation to the apple. In practical terms, it takes a lot of effort to separate one from the other - yet another topic!)
by darkwater | 2025-09-01 08:04:54+00:00
For all the folks on the "reduce mental burden", "reduce cognitive load" train, are you all aware that this basically means you are exercising less your brain day in and day out, and in the end you will forget how to do things? You will learn how to guide an AI agent, but until the day an AI agent is perfect (and we don't know if we will ever see that day), you are just losing inch by inch your ability to actually understand what the agent is writing and what is going on.

I'm pretty radical on this topic but for me cognitive load is good, you are making your neurons work and keep synapses in place where they matter (at least for your job). I totally accept writing down doc or howto to make doing some action in future easier and reduce that cognitive load, but using AI agent IMO is like going to bike in the mountain with an electrical bike.

Yes, you keep seeing the wonderful vistas but you are not really training your legs.
by Turlututu | 2025-09-01 08:05:04+00:00
Have you heard about transversality of the fight? Do you have common ground with those farmers and coal miners? Do they have some with you. They are humans, after all. They feel and fear and hope.

I come from a place famous for social unrest. A successful protest is one uniting the student to the truckers, to the miner to the teachers.

Punching up. Not sideways or down. Their is a greater enemy than the farmers.
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-01 08:05:20+00:00
Regardless of the party line, in practice there's no big distinction between not caring if it works or not and not allowing it. The difference only matters for highly technical people with lots of time on their hands. For everyone else, if it's not a paved road it's not a road they can travel on at all, and so in practice Linux historically did not "support" third party software in any meaningful way.

And although I was making that argument to Fedora decades ago, it's only recently that this point has been accepted with official support by Red Hat for stuff like Flatpak. Of course other distros developed their own thing as always so it's still not really ideal. But at least the principle was now accepted that third party apps should have a properly supported way to thrive. Far too late, but it's done.
by aw1621107 | 2025-09-01 08:06:18+00:00
> trying to pressure KeepassXC to remove exporting passkeys in an open format

I'm not sure that's an entirely accurate representation of the request? At least from a quick skim the claimed issue is being able to export keys in plaintext. For example, from the issue author:

> I strongly recommend you temporarily disable this feature or at a minimum require file protection/encryption.

And later:

> > Besides, determined advanced users could just write code to decrypt the kdbx file and extract the passkeys anyway.

> That's fine. Let determined people do that, but don't make it easy for a user to be tricked into handing over all of their credentials in clear text.

> I don't quite understand why requiring file protection/encryption can't be a temporary minimum bar here.

To me that doesn't sound like they're requiring a proprietary format. Something like AES encrypted JSON sounds like it'd work as well, and that sounds pretty "open" to me?
by erulabs | 2025-09-01 08:06:25+00:00
Oh I believe in it. I can't experience it, and yet I believe completely. Yes, my argument is stronger than one who thinks the moon is a bowl of fire, but epistemology, science itself, unfortunately confirms that I do not know. My point is simply that this realization should give you sympathy to those who believe something different. My concern is not with my own beliefs, it's with the ability to bridge the gap with others. To heal the "crack in the cosmos", and to avoid the science-shock described in the article.
by bsder | 2025-09-01 08:07:21+00:00
And why can Netflix ignore everybody who doesn't have a bona fide Google or Apple phone?

Because the number of non-Google and non-Apple phones is a rounding error.

And why is that? Because, except for the incumbents, it is almost impossible to certify a phone.

We could have nice sub-$100 phones (remove camera, etc.) if people could get them certified. But they can't; so we don't.
by anatoly | 2025-09-01 08:07:36+00:00
The time-wise imbalance of deaths is a very basic fact about the ongoing war, I didn't realize you were ignorant of it and needed a verification. The Hamas-provided statistics are timestamped, you can look e.g. at https://data.techforpalestine.org/docs/casualties-daily/, download the CSV file, look in the cumulative deaths column, see that it's just over 60k for the entire period, and note that 30k occurs around 2024-03-01. So I was slightly off and it's a little less than 5 months (oct 07 to mar 01) out of a little less than 23 months (oct 07 to 2025-08-31) that account for 50% of the deaths.

There isn't any report that actually counts Gaza's population, the UN provided an "estimate" with no methodology, births are not mentioned, and it's built on figures including number of people who exited Gaza (irrelevant to the claimed decrease due to violent deaths). That's not serious.

There's no coherent notion of genocide that fails to reduce the population significantly. Yes, you can argue (and people have) that the legal definition, by using the "part of" wording, can conceivably apply to virtually any number of deaths, but again, that's not serious.
by jwally | 2025-09-01 08:08:36+00:00
This is constructive criticism. Thank you!

I completely missed that I could hand the merchant string to a friend with a bank account and have them sign it. Pretty obvious in retrospect!

Its not perfect, but maybe reasonable enough to prevent resale by using a salted hash of the users ip.

Wrt hash linking, theres chaums blind signature thing which looks solid. It feels like a cheap enough, private enough, and reliable enough solution is that can be rolled out in under 6 months is in this neighborhood; maybe this provides something to trigger someone who can do it to do it.
by realusername | 2025-09-01 08:08:47+00:00
> I'd like that security model to be the default for desktop apps on my computer as well. Its weird that davinci resolve and spotify and all the rest have full access to look through all my files.

That's how it works on Ubuntu, proprietary apps are usually distributed through snaps which are sandboxed. And unlike on mobile, the OS doesn't have an advertising ID or built-in ad networks.

Normal apps don't need that though because there's a chain of trust which doesn't exist on mobile.

> Probably just because so few regular people use ubuntu, scammers & malware authors don't bother targeting it. Still good for your parents though!

No, it's because the bar on publishing on Ubuntu is much much higher than on an iPhone. Nobody would ever accept those scam casino games on Ubuntu.
by shrubble | 2025-09-01 08:10:17+00:00
I could see myself supporting OpenFirmware which is a fraction of the size and complexity of UEFI and has a very limited attack surface. You could literally boot up a SPARC machine across the Internet with OFW in the mid 1990s, if you’re worried about functionality. And for configuring your system it’s simple and straightforward. The OLPC laptops used it, so it’s already somewhat proven on ARM.
by wordofx | 2025-09-01 08:10:58+00:00
> because my corporate code base is a mess that doesn’t lend itself well to AI

What language? I picked up an old JS project that had several developers fail over weeks to upgrade to newer versions of react. But I got it done in a day by using AI to generate a ton of unit tests then loop an upgrade / test / build. Was 9 years out of date and it’s running in prod now with less errors than before.

Also upgraded rails 4 app to rails 8 over a few days.

Done other apps too. None of these are small. Found a few memory leaks in a C++ app that our senior “experts” who have spent 20 years doing c++ couldn’t find.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-01 08:11:13+00:00
I don't understand the hatred for UEFI. It seems like people get irrationally disgusted when they find out that it's a big complex standard with lots of extraneous stuff that almost nobody cares about (on desktop, that is). Just give me text, a framebuffer, file system access, and a memory map. It's not difficult. Sadly I think that no one will be happy until there is some equally-overwrought spec on the ARM side.
by somat | 2025-09-01 08:11:25+00:00
Unrelated, but the title made me think of this video where AT&T failed over old switch frames to new ones by manually cutting all the cable bundles, very dramatic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saRir95iIWk (Speedy Cutover Service, SXS switching cutover to ESS filmed live at Glendale CA central office, 1984)
by chii | 2025-09-01 08:12:31+00:00
This reminds me of this nice video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGLNyHd2w10

basically, the state space of the game can produce some intuition on why certain games are hard, and is demonstrated as a clustering of various states that are only linked to the winning state by a very small number of edges. So a player can easily "get lost" in the maze.
by tadfisher | 2025-09-01 08:13:58+00:00
That threat has no teeth; anyone requiring attestation these days will cut out Apple users, because Apple will not implement it (for consumer use cases). If they don't block Apple passkeys, then KeePass can send Apple's AAGUID and the game is over.

I've complained about this GH exchange in the past and have come to understand that Apple is also part of the alliance, and the entire concept of blocking software-only password managers is just dead outside of enterprise situations where they mandate the hardware/software anyway. Mr. Cappalli might disagree, but he and his employer do not have the power to change this without breaking the standard and throwing away over a decade of work.
by GeekyBear | 2025-09-01 08:14:24+00:00
> What worries me is that Google has a fairly legit argument to say "then Apple should as well".

Not a legal argument, since Apple never claimed the iPhone was anything else but a walled garden, and walled gardens are legal as long as you are clear that users will be buying into a walled garden from the start.

(For example: Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox)

Legally, the only thing you could do is change the law to make walled gardens illegal, as they did in the EU.

The changes Google has proposed for sideloading are illegal under existing law, since Android was sold to consumers with the promise that it was the "open" platform that allowed users to run anything they like.
by paradox460 | 2025-09-01 08:14:37+00:00
I work for a company that has over 50 different jurisdictional variants, deployed across a reasonably wide geographic range.

We basically just build the app as a superset of all possible features, and then configure each different jurisdiction with what they can and cannot support. Currently this is done by a bunch of Helm templates, but there are many other ways to do it
by Earw0rm | 2025-09-01 08:15:13+00:00
IMO what's needed is less per-app sandboxing, and more per-context.

Think user accounts but for task classes.

If I'm doing development work, I want to be able to chain together a Frankenstein of apps, toolchain, API services and so on, with full access to everything else in that specific context.

But that doesn't need visibility of my email, my banking and accounting software should have visibility to/from neither, and random shareware apps, games and movies should run, like you say, with a browser tab level of permission.

Making this work in practice while keeping performance maximised is harder than it sounds, preventing leaks via buffers or timing attacks of one sort or another (if apps can take screenshots, game over).. for now I use user accounts, but this is becoming less convenient as the major desktop OS and browser vendors try to force tying user accounts to a specific online identity.
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-01 08:15:30+00:00
> Any program I run is allowed to silently edit, delete or steal anything I own ... there's currently no desktop environment that provides that ability

Putting aside the philosophical issues, that statement isn't true for a few years now. It's not well known, even in very technical circles like HN, but macOS actually sandboxes every app:

• All apps from outside the app store are always sandboxed to a lesser degree, even if they are old and don't opt-in.

• All apps from outside the app store may opt in to stricter sandboxing for security hardening purposes.

• All apps from the app store are forced to opt-in, must declare their permissions in a fine grained way, and Apple reviews them to make sure they make sense.

To see this is true try downloading a terminal emulator you haven't used before, and then use it to navigate into your Downloads, Photos, Documents etc folders and run "ls". You'll get a permission prompt from the OS telling you the app is requesting access to that folder. If you click deny, ls will return a permission error.

Now try using vim to edit the Info.plist file of something in /Applications. ls will tell you that you have UNIX write permissions, but you'll find you can't actually edit the file. The kernel blocks apps from tampering with each other's files.

Finally, go into the settings and privacy/security area. You can now enable full disk access for the terminal emulator, or a finer grained permission like managing apps. Restart the terminal and permissions work like you'd expect for UNIX again.

Note that you won't see any permission popup in a GUI app if you open the file via the file picker dialog box. That's because the dialog box is a "powerbox" controlled by the OS, so the act of picking the file grants the app permission implicitly. Same for drag and drop, opening via the finder, etc. The permission prompt only appears when an app directly uses syscalls to open a file without some OS-controlled GUI interaction taking place.

So, if you want a desktop OS with a strong sandbox that you actually control, and which has good usability, and a high level of security too, then you should be using macOS. It's the only OS that has managed this transition to all-sandboxed-all-the-time.
by anal_reactor | 2025-09-01 08:16:30+00:00
Just like in speech, people also have accents in writing. For example, despite having used English on daily basis for years, I can't tell when to use "a" and "the" even if my life depended on it. Native speakers pretty much never make this mistake, but they're likely to make other mistakes, like confuse "there", "they're" and "their", which never happens to me.

Not to mention the overall sentence structure even if my text is grammatically correct. I'm likely to build sentences in a way that mirrors my native language. Sure, after being exposed to tons of text in English I got rather good at it, but if you ask me to speak Spanish, I'll produce sentences that are grammatically correct, but a native would never say them because they prefer other structures to express the same ideas.
by wvh | 2025-09-01 08:17:06+00:00
What I like about your comment is that it points out that all technical work-arounds are moot if people as a whole are not willing to stand up with pitchforks and torches to defend their freedoms. It will always come down to that. A handful of tech-savvy users with rooted devices and open-source software will not make a difference to the giant crushing machine that is the system.

And I'm afraid most of us are part of the system, rage-clicking away most of our days, distracted, jaded perhaps, like it historically has always been.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-01 08:17:38+00:00
You can probably fit more than two Lunapillars, because the stuff they're moving masses the same, but weighs 1/6 as much, as does the machine itself. It's also always dry - no claggy clays on the moon. You may also want to source counterweight locally if you can. It'll be much less dense, but may an acceptable tradeoff to shipping tonnes of metal ballast by spaceship until you can refine out some low-grade iron from regolith.

Presumably also you make many things out of materials like composites, titanium, aluminium, magnesium and abrasion-resistant materials like ceramics to cut weight and prolong part life in an aggressively abrasive environment where your Cat rep and McMaster Carr are a bit more than a phonecall away. Which will be incredibly expensive, but even using Starship, a tonne landed on the lunar surface ain't exactly cheap and every kilogram counts.
by p_l | 2025-09-01 08:17:54+00:00
0) Assuming Oracle actually retains the stewardship of license:

1) Making CDDL compatible with GPLv2 puts everyone using CDDL code at mercy of Oracle patents

2) OpenZFS is actually not required to upgrade, and the team has indicated they won't. So you end up with a fork you need to carry yourself. Might even force OpenZFS to ensure that it's specifically 1.0.

Ultimately it means Oracle can't do much with this.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2025-09-01 08:18:18+00:00
> It's definitely a stimulant and can give you the kinds of side effects you might expect from any stimulant, including a raised BP and heart rate.

Sure, but people wouldn't downvote a comment suggesting having couple of cups of coffee per day to improve ADHD symptoms as hard, for example. And for me caffeine withdrawals symptoms have always been more difficult to overcome compared to nicotine.

For average tech worker HN user living a sedentary life-style, having stressful job in polluted city periodic usage of nicotine patches won't make it to their top list of health concerns IMO.
by choeger | 2025-09-01 08:18:41+00:00
The question is: What's ownership? How do I ascertain that I own a device and not, say, the guy who just robbed it from me at knifepoint?

From a government perspective, I think the issue is anonymity. In the long run, governments cannot accept ownership of a thing without being able to attribute usage of that thing. From that perspective, as much as you cannot anonymously own a warehouse, you cannot anonymously own a programmable radio device.

From the corporate perspective, it's even worse: They cannot accept you using a device freely if they license you software or data. They would probably be fine if you could prove to them that you were not violating the terms (or vice versa, they could prove when you did), but that probably has a massive impact on privacy.