MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bri3d | 2025-09-11 17:59:37+00:00
I don't think I agree with this assessment; I have a lot of respect for GrapheneOS but they are very prone to this type of puffery, especially in face of criticism.

The information in this and other GrapheneOS articles comes from a leaked copy of the Cellebrite support matrix which is shipped with their end-user (law enforcement) devices, so it's a point-in-time look at one vendor's capabilities in one product line.

At the time this article was written, Cellebrite had brute force-based passcode access to iPhones before the iPhone 12 (prior to the Secure Storage Component), and supposedly had support for the iPhone 12 on iOS versions prior to 17 in development (vs. just under research), while they had no access to bruteforce on Android devices using the Titan M2 (Pixel 6 and later).

The general trust model is pretty similar: the user's passcode is entangled with (predictable) secure entropy and used to derive a key encryption key which can unlock the filesystem. Firmware running on a secure processor rate-limits passcode attempts.

Apple's implementation is well-documented here: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-enclave-sec5... .

Google's implementation is called Weaver and I'm less sure how it works cryptographically, but it seems conceptually similar.

For more about the support matrix: https://osservatorionessuno.org/blog/2025/03/a-deep-dive-int...

Overall I would say that a modern iPhone running the latest iOS and a modern Pixel running GrapheneOS represent the absolute state of the art in protection, and seem to have pretty similar public support from forensic vendors. The article is right that essentially everything else is junk; hardware vendors by and large seem to really struggle to implement secure software (including ROMs and bootloaders).
Show HN: Testing Masterclass
by SonOfLilit | 2025-09-11 17:59:43+00:00
I ran this yesterday at PyCon IL.

It has some very nice exercises that you can try at home, especially the LLM evals exercise.

Posting it as a Show mostly because I'm proud of the Excalidraw aesthetics which many of you might appreciate.

If there's interest I can run it in English online. Shoot me an email if you're interested.
by Teever | 2025-09-11 17:59:53+00:00
Have you factored in the ability for humanoid robots to be able to do preventative maintenance and repairs on each other?

In many instances with repairing electronics and home appliances labour is the greatest cost, not the material. Sometimes it's as simple as replacing a 50 cent washer to repair something, or perhaps squirt some lube here or there regularly to prevent something from breaking down.

If it's the same for robot maintenance then robots being able to fix themselves and each other will change the equation on ownership tremendously.

Imagine if everyone had a domestic robot and if it broke down their neighbour's robot could repair it. That would be an extremely user friendly and cheap way to deal with the problem.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-09-11 18:00:04+00:00
If you selectively put words in [brackets] and remove others without adding ellipses you can alter anything to have any meaning.

I for one read this and assumed RFK was just discussing gun control in general, only weeks before he was killed. Adding in the context the speech was regarding MLK gives it a whole different meaning. Still powerful, but different.

Attributing “The only thing we [experience] is fear itself” to FDR suggests he said something a little different. That FDR needs to see a therapist for his anxiety.
by yongjik | 2025-09-11 18:00:05+00:00
> Sounds like he must have been a pretty bad guy.

So let me get this straight, you didn't know who was Charlie Kirk, you only decided to look him up after he died, and you're so noncommittal about it that after 24 hours you still have no idea who he was (and why people hated him), and at the same time you're invested enough to write passive aggressive remarks on his haters?

Someone's not being honest here.
by mock-possum | 2025-09-11 18:00:23+00:00
No, the question is “is Pluto a planet” and the answer is complicated, but if you take the time to read up on how the scientific community reached consensus, then chances are you’ll end up better understanding the nuance - and why the answer is simply “No.”

Define “woman?” It’s easy - it’s the traditional gender role for people AFAB. Do you understand how we arrive at that answer though?
by danans | 2025-09-11 18:00:26+00:00
> tax resources are limited and therefore all governments must ultimately allocate those limited resources and cannot simply spend unlimited amounts on any "good" projects that they'd like.

That's a strawman. There are no proposals for a 100% tax across tax types. There is an argument for reversing the direction of the last several decades in which taxes on the wealthiest have been dramatically cut.
by Nzen | 2025-09-11 18:00:33+00:00
Ah, Agility Robotics' Jonathan Hurst has a talk that I can't find (quickly) about the various benefits of a humanoid form. I could find a 90 second snippet [0] about why their robot has legs. In that case, they use legs to traverse terrain that is difficult for wheels, like stairs or with large debris on the ground. Of the other video, I remember them suggesting that arms help with staving off a fall or reaching above the center of mass. I think they said that they put a head with 'eyes' to give the sensors a better view and so on.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHmmySGdaoM
by bigyabai | 2025-09-11 18:00:41+00:00
It might help inform you, if you're unfamiliar with the sentiment Americans hold towards security?

Don't take my word for it, though. Scroll through the rest of the comments in this thread, I counted all of three unique users that took this article at face-value. The fact that we see this cognitive dissonance on HN should really reinforce how unimportant online security is to Silicon Valley.
by spott | 2025-09-11 18:00:45+00:00
The key here is in the cache lines.

Sorting (really scanning through an array) is very efficient in cache lines, while hash tables are very inefficient.

In the example, every memory access in hashing gets 8 byte of useful data, while every memory access in sorting gets 64 bytes of useful data.

So you have to be 8x more efficient to win out.

For this problem, the radix sort is log_1024(n) passes, which for a key size of 64 bits can’t ever get above 7 passes.

If you increase the key size then the efficiency win of sorting drops (128 bit keys means you have to run less than 4 passes to win).

Essentially the size of the key compared to the cache line size is a (hidden) part of the big O.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-11 18:01:09+00:00
I acknowledged that, but I was asking specifically about the article’s implication that phones were allowed in class. Read further down and there’s a comment from someone who said they finished their work and just had to stare at a wall instead of using their phone.

That’s what confuses me: Many of these articles are implying that phones were allowed everywhere previously, whereas my understanding was that the previous status quo was that they were only allowed in between classes, at lunch, or before/after school hours.
by _diyar | 2025-09-11 18:01:18+00:00
The problem with respect to what? The end-goal of self-driving cars (and humanoid robots) is to work in the environments created for humans. Otherwise we can just put down rails across all cities and call it a tram, or design purpose-built robots for all tasks.

Edit: Stated more explicitly: the human world is the way it is because of many reasons and can't always be changed naively (it's not like nobody in Cairo has thought about improving the traffic situation, or architects haven't thought about the ease of cleaning different flooring material). Robots which are general purpose with respect to their human-like capabilities must necessarily also accept a world in which humans live.
by RyanOD | 2025-09-11 18:01:34+00:00
Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand.

Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being.

Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
by thrance | 2025-09-11 18:01:46+00:00
Thank you for taking the time to develop your viewpoint in spite of my mildly aggressive reply. I'll try to reciprocate:

I completely agree on the issues you bring up but I disagree on their causes and what should be done to address them.

I don't believe Academia is to blame for all of this. Not any more than the rest of our shifting culture. Hyper-individualism is a symptom/goal of neoliberalism, the dominant ideology in the west for the past 50 years.

What you describe has a name in leftist theory: worker alienation. Workers are alienated from the purpose of their work, from their community and even from themselves. In these conditions, it becomes very hard to find meaning in one's life and even harder to get the will to do anything for the community.

The right has sold Americans on the idea of the self-made man, on self-reliance. They have basically destroyed syndicalism in the country and told workers they should simply perform better if they want a better life.

Everyone has internalized these precepts: that one's success and happiness in life are pure results of one's grit and dedication. You see it everywhere, in gym culture, in dating culture, in eutrepreneurship... "No empathy should be spared for the unemployed, they are all lazy and deserve nothing", or "Your coworker got fired? Good, one less to compete with".

And so, years after years, Republicans (mainly them, Democrats also helped) unwove the threads of our society one by one. Cutting into social security, healthcare, infrastructures... Slowly the country is crumbling under a severe lack of care.

All of this makes me grin when I hear Charlie Kirk speak of rebuilding the family and our communities. Why is he siding with the party that sold our country for tax cuts to the wealthy, then? Even now, huge tax cuts to the rich and defunding of important government programs are the centerpieces of Trump's economic policy. (See his so-called "Big Beautiful Bill.)

Trump and Kirk both support massive businesses extracting money from local communities. They both support this atomization of workers, this weakening of regulations in favor of employers. They both drank the Kool aid on exponential growth, which is why they reject the very real fact of climate change.

Now, what's the actual solution? Rebuild society's safety nets: stop people from being afraid of the future. Shame this culture of "grindsets" and "mogging": bring back kindness and empathy. Redistribute wealth, even if just symbolically: show this country's values actually mean something, and meritocracy is not just a lie invented to justify massive wealth inequalities.
by xvector | 2025-09-11 18:02:13+00:00
Slavery was obviously wrong but you cannot judge those that didn't understand this. Consensus matters. The morals of the time matter. It was a societal failing over a personal one.

If you think you can judge someone by the morals of today, you must then accept you are evil as well, since societal morals will continue to evolve.

You never answered the question: are you vegan, or do you contribute to the immense suffering and death of ~70b sentient beings a year? The suffering hours inflicted every few days exceed that of any atrocity in human history. It is the industrialized torture of billions of innocent beings for your pleasure.

If veganism becomes the norm, is it fair for future humans to judge your whole life by your consumption of meat, leather, or other animal products when there are so many people today that recognize it as a "unique and horrifying evil?"

It is a strange form of exceptionalism for you to judge those in the past but not yourself, because the delta will be similar over long enough timeframes, and if you do partake in any of these things you won't be seen as much different.
by jlev | 2025-09-11 18:02:14+00:00
I am an American, and most of the other folks on the project were as well. I did go through an interview with Customs officers when I returned to the US, but it didn't affect my ability to use GlobalEntry. I don't have clearance, but it might cause questions if I did apply for that in the future.

I've also been to Syria as a tourist several times, and at one point had to maintain a second passport for visiting Israel or the West Bank. You can't travel to most of the Arab world if you have Israeli stamps, but you can get another book from the US to keep them separate.

Sorry for your friend. Borders are bullshit.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-11 18:02:32+00:00
if you point a gun at someone and pull the trigger, then they die from injuries caused by the shot you fired, you killed them. what goes on in your little secret heart between you and jesus might matter to you, but to the real world everyone else lives in you killed them. whether you meant to shoot them in a non-killing way is irrelevant, doubly so if you never learned how to but decided you were qualified to do it anyway.
by acdha | 2025-09-11 18:02:56+00:00
> it does puzzle me how people who share far more political DNA with the Nazis keep declaring that others are the "modern Nazis" or Goebbels equivalents

This is a very strong claim to make without support, especially given the history TPUSA had with people who were at best pushing the boundaries of the right. No historical comparison is going match perfectly but it’s hard not to see parallels in the attempts to subvert a democratic political system, demonize minorities, or the justifications they use. TPUSA frequently provided a place for fringe right people to circulate with the larger Republican sphere so while there were worse groups, they certainly weren’t trying to fight that trend.
by hirvi74 | 2025-09-11 18:02:59+00:00
1. That is under the assumption that the Chinese government is releasing accurate data. I assume international entities are not granted access to Chinese prison facilities directly, but I could be wrong.

2. There are 'alternative' ways of dealing with suspects and criminals other than prison sentences. And on that note, if China has a lower per capita prison population than the US, then it makes China having the highest rate of capital punishments even worse.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-11 18:03:02+00:00
The contrary is literally written in a large yellow box on the page you linked: “Note: Google Translate works with all Assistant-optimized headphones and Android phones.”

But I mean, you are free to buy overpriced Apple headphones which sounds worse than Sony, only properly works paired with an Apple phone or laptop and whose killer feature was available on their competitors buds years ago if that rocks your boat.
by structural | 2025-09-11 18:03:27+00:00
A good simplification of what's going on is this little loop:

1. LLM runs using the system prompt + your input as context.

2. Initial output looks like "I need more information, I need to run <tool>"

3. Piece of code runs that looks for tool tags and performs the API calls via MCP.

4. Output of the tool call gets appended as additional context just as if you'd typed it yourself as part of your initial request.

5. Go back to step 1, run the LLM again.

So you can see here that there is no difference between "content" and "prompt". It's all equivalent input to the LLM, which is calling itself in a loop with input that it generated/fetched for itself.

A lot of safety here happens at step #3, trying to look at the LLM's output and go "should I actually perform the tool call the LLM asked for?". In some cases, this is just spitting the tool call at the user and asking them to click Approve/Deny... and after a hundred times the user just blindly presses Approve on everything, including the tool call called "bash(sudo rm -rf /)". Pwned.
Show HN: Kafkatop, top-like CLI for Kafka
by sivann | 2025-09-11 18:03:29+00:00
Hey HN, for those of you tired of running kafka-consumer-groups.sh and similar tools, here's a small real-time monitoring CLI tool for Apache Kafka, that displays consumer lag and event rates in a clean, top-like interface. You can quickly assess which consumers are lagging and when they will catch up.

I've made this to quickly assess the health of remote on-premises clusters which most of the time lack proper monitoring.

The tool can be found here: https://github.com/sivann/kafkatop

I'd be very interested to hear your feedback or any features you think would add value to this tool!
by vunderba | 2025-09-11 18:03:33+00:00
And that's perfectly fine.

But when we conceptualize something like music in the form of evolutionary computation then it is important to be able to define a good metric for the fitness function otherwise you might as well just take X pieces of music, normalize them to the same key signature/tempo/etc., and then randomly mash them together.

If you're just in the mood for something more exotic, I'm happy to go repeatedly sit on my piano for a few hours and send you the final samples.
by amradio1989 | 2025-09-11 18:05:18+00:00
First, my bad. I owe you an apology. I'm sorry for treating you like that.

There are millions of eyewitness accounts and personal testimonies about prayer. They are exceedingly well documented (esp. in books) and span nearly all of human history. Whether you believe them or not is a different matter. But at the very least, we can't easily dismiss prayer as something that "doesn't work".

Second, even if we accept that "prayer" works, there's a ton of questions that raises. Does all prayer work? What if the prayers are contrary? And who are people praying to? And do all receivers of prayer actually have the power to answer prayer? For those that do, what happens when prayers are contrary to each other? What happens when the prayers are contrary to the will of the one being prayed to?

I'm only bringing up these questions to illustrate that we can't say "prayer doesn't work" as a matter of fact, even in instances where it doesn't seem to work.
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-11 18:05:35+00:00
> If there's a UnitedHealthcare plan for Apple employees (and I don't know which company Apple currently uses) then Apple sets the policy for what is and isn't covered. UHC simply enforces the policy set by Apple so blaming UHC in that scenario is simply naive and displays a total misunderstanding of how the healthcare financing system actually works.

The reality though is that the employer generally doesn't want to pay 100% of all claims, all the time.

So they're left with "well, what do we pay, how much, and how can we use the insurer's negotiated pricing, etc., etc." and they ask UHC to provide plans that largely match UHC's plans, rules and the like, potentially with one or two little carve outs or exceptions, because UHC is the one that has done the math to make sure that balances cost/benefit for Apple. So a lot of time, they just "pass through" plans.

Which is why most self-funded plans look "suspiciously similar" to what you might find elsewhere in the market.

I wrote software for a healthcare claims benefit management company that drove insurance for direct insureres and TPAs for 12 years.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-11 18:05:54+00:00
Grid forming gets you part of the way there, but there are still things that the traditional synchronous machines provide that you cannot get. The instantaneous, control-free response mechanism is not to be understated. It is rooted in pure physics and electromagnetics. It is entirely automatic and error-free in its operation.

> And in an innovative twist, the battery site can also provide short-circuit current in response to a fault, just like conventional power generators.

Sure. But, how much? The turbine at a nuclear/coal/CH4 power plant can handle upward of 10x the rated current for several cycles. The amount of fault current that synchronous machines can provide will always run circles around solid state solutions. This capability is essential for stability in downstream fault scenarios.

You can't really "saturate" a synchronous machine in the same way you can a farm of solid state electronics. Certainly, the 1GW turbine will eventually fail from an overcurrent situation, but it's going to last way longer than a semiconductor junction in the same situation.
by philipkglass | 2025-09-11 18:06:33+00:00
Yes, both countries' nuclear weapons programs were extraordinarily expensive over time. The first underground reactor of the Mining and Chemical Combine was built in 1958, well after the USSR had started stockpiling fission and fusion weapons. The original Mayak production complex had ordinary above-ground reactors.

I believe that the the "AD", "ADE-1", and "ADE-2" reactors here are the only underground ones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project#Plu...
by dang | 2025-09-11 18:06:40+00:00
> This site is a consevative and fascist bastion

Passionate partisans see the site as biased against them no matter what their politics are. For example, the people with opposing beliefs to yours see it as outrageously biased in your favor. This is a well-established phenomenon, and has been for many years. If anyone wants further explanation, one starting point is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.

One can argue about why, but it seems clear that this is not an objective perception since it generates such contradictory conclusions.
by mothballed | 2025-09-11 18:06:43+00:00
I love how on HN I'm simultaneously "justifying this murder"[0] but also passive aggressive against haters. No matter what I say, there is a specious argument as to why I must just be a liar or a murderer-sympathizer and sometimes both at once!

The truth is I like to debate people, even if I am bad at it, my knee-jerk without more information is I don't like the idea of a guy getting shot during a live debate when I know little about him beyond that's the thing he does. I can tell you on what little I've gathered, I don't agree with the guy on much of anything except some of his pro 2A beliefs, I have no particular reason to cover for him.

I did watch a few of his videos shortly ago, he wasn't particularly persuasive and seemed to capitalize on debating people younger and less skilled than him, rather than attacking weakly defendable positions he just takes cheap shots at college kids knowing he's more polished than them. Still I'm not tracking why the world is a better place without him.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45212304
by petralithic | 2025-09-11 18:06:49+00:00
> I don’t agree with the statement that corporations are machines to absorb money, behind corporations there are people and people must have morale.

This is covered by the principle of the diffusion of responsibility. One person may have morals but spread over many, the entire structure does not. Those corporations that do have morals are outcompeted by those that don't, in terms of amount of money made, so over time corporations that are not moral do better.
by bflesch | 2025-09-11 18:06:50+00:00
MY PERSONAL BOTTLENECK between S3 and GPU is my credit card and not some new cargo module by some already-rich AI engineer and a fancy marketing website that must've cost a couple hundred grand.

And if this module provides a benefit I'm sure it will find its way into our stack, just like PostgreSQL did. And PostgreSQL never had $22M to begin with - no shiny marketing, just technological skills.

The whole "donated by spiral" on the vortex.dev website also gives big tax write-off vibes.

IMO best case is that this will be a mongodb scenario, but with the current track record of tech grifters enshittifying everything they might find a creative new way.