MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jwally | 2025-09-01 07:49:24+00:00
A little more aggressive than maybe necessary, but I do appreciate the sentiment. Truly.

My goal here is to try and point out that there is a solution that can be rolled out in under 6 months by leveraging existing kyc infrastructure.

IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS!

Can this be beefed up to make credential resale impractical, while still preserving anonymity in the face of collusion while still being legitimate enough to rely on as evidence that someone is over 18? Absolutely! Will it be perfect? No.

As a Texan, my rights are being eroded daily, bit by bit (pardon the pun). Its dog shit that my kids have to live in a world where my government is effectively legislating morality and enforcing it on technicalities by DDOSing the legal system. But this IS the world I live in.

My other options are what? Vote, move, or use TOR?

If you're so clever, help. Improve it. Create something better but don't sit back and shit on a first draft of something that is trying (admittedly poorly) to put a speed bump in front of our freight train to the Republic of Gilead.
by Antibabelic | 2025-09-01 07:49:57+00:00
I've always felt like stating percentages only provide an illusion of rigor. They're still based on vague intuition. I also think there's nothing wrong with sometimes thinking in absolutes. In some cases it's okay to think that you have enough information to tell that something definitely will or will not happen. Hedging your bets in every single case is a lack of optimization. You need to restrict the search space to save time and energy, like how we use the cut operator in Prolog.
by tromp | 2025-09-01 07:50:00+00:00
Amethyst-Cat apparently erased their github account, but the internet archive still has one snapshot [1]. The pdf link from there redirected to the davidtpeng account, but that github user no longer has a ChessComplexity repo and the internet archive only has a broken snapshot [2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201226113203/https://github.co...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240316015417/https://github.co...
by josephg | 2025-09-01 07:50:02+00:00
> I've just explained that sand-boxing causes issues with file access, clipboard sharing etc.

You've explained that flatpak has issues with file access and clipboard sharing. My iphone does sandboxing too, but the clipboard works just fine on my phone.

I don't think "failing clipboards" is a problem specific to sandboxing. I think its a problem specific to flatpak. (And maybe X11 and so on.)

> If you remove control, you remove people's freedom.

Sandboxing gives users more control. Not less. Even if they use that control to turn off sandboxing, they still have more freedom because they get to decide if sandboxing is enabled or disabled.

Maybe you're trying to say that security often comes with the tradeoff of accessibility? I think thats true! Security often makes things less convenient - for example, password prompts, confirmation dialogue boxes, and so on. But I think the sweet spot for inconvenience is somewhere around the iphone. On the desktop, I want to get asked the first time a program tries to mess with the data of another program. Most programs shouldn't be allowed to do that by default.

> Pretending you can make some theoretical system where those trade off don't exists just isn't realistic.

I think you might be arguing with a strawman. I totally agree with you. I don't think a perfect system exists either. Of course there are tradeoffs - especially at the limit.

But there's still often ways to make things better than they are today. For example, before rust existed, lots of people said you had to make a tradeoff between memory safety and performance. Well, rust showed that by making a really complex language & compiler, you could have memory safety and great performance at the same time. SeL4 shows you can have a high performance microkernel based OS. V8 shows you can have decent performance in a dynamically typed language like JS.

Those are the improvements I'm interested in. Give me capabilities and sandboxing. A lot more security in exchange for maybe a little inconvenience? I'd take that deal.
by tadfisher | 2025-09-01 07:50:11+00:00
I don't just imagine it, I do it, by using gpg-agent as my ssh-agent and using the private key generated by a Yubikey. Another way is to use tpm2-tools so only your laptop running your own signed boot chain can use the key. It is desirable to lock private key material in a physical thing that is hard to steal.

You can choose not to do this, and that's fine. Hardware attestation is dead because Apple refuses to implement it, so no one can force you to.
by Aachen | 2025-09-01 07:50:32+00:00
The OS they ship has Google services on it. They've previously chosen not to give you root access by default because Google wouldn't allow it: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fairphone-s-approach-to-root-o...

They'll make the same choice again because it's not really a choice. Nobody would buy the device, or could make much use of it, without Google services on it. They'd be out of business

Edit, to be clear: that is not to say I disagree with what they do. They allow you to unlock the bootloader and they even supply an open and degoogled version of the OS! That is more than any other vendor I'm aware of. Every time I need a new phone, I check if the latest Fairphone fits my needs, and even though it's a compromise, I've tried it out in the past for several weeks. It's really worth supporting. But Google's new restriction will almost certainly affect Fairphone users, too
by jeffwass | 2025-09-01 07:50:40+00:00
I’m curious to know what your diet is like. Eg, if you are only eating meat, do you eat more bones and sinews than the usual omnivore to get enough “roughage” for digestion?

Eg, birds at a falconry can’t be fed just the usual bird “meat”, they need to have the skin and feathers attached which is essential for their digestive tract.
by winter_blue | 2025-09-01 07:50:41+00:00
We need legislation mandating that all hardware[a] have at least one fully-functional[b] open source driver for any operating system[c]. And that any device with a microprocessor with writable memory permit custom software to be run on it.

[a] whether that's a single device like a fingerprint scanner, or a device like a phone or tablet

[b] no crippled or low-performance open source driver

[c] any OS, including Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, or some obscure minor OS as long as such OS is readily available for free or for a reasonable price
by adrian_b | 2025-09-01 07:50:53+00:00
The orbital angular momentum is quantized for the same reason as the spin, both are ratios between the phases of 2 separate rotation movements, the orbital rotation or the spin rotation and the intrinsic rotation corresponding to the de Broglie wave (whose phase is proportional to Hamilton's integral, i.e. the integral of the Lagrangian over time).

I have used "precession" for lack of a better term for suggesting its appearance, because while there is little doubt about the existence of 2 separate kinds of rotations in the particles with non-null spin, there exists no complete model of how they are combined.
by sethammons | 2025-09-01 07:51:11+00:00
Minor nit. I wouldn't call those failing systems tests integration tests.

Unit tests are for validation of error paths. Unit tests can leverage mocks or fakes. Need 3 retires with exponential back off, use unit tests and fakes. Integration tests should use real components. Typically, integration tests are happy path and unit are error paths.

Making real components fail and having tests validate failure handling in a more complete environment jumps from integration testing to resilience or chaos testing. Being able to accurately validate backoffs and retries may diminish, but validating intermediate or ending state can be done with artifact monitoring via sinks.

There is unit-integration testing which fakes out as little as possible but still fakes out some edges. The difference being that the failures are introduced via fake vs managing actual system components. If you connect to a real db on unit-integration tests, you typically wouldn't kill the db or use Comcast to slow the network artificially. That would be reserved for the next layer in the test pyramid.
by bigyabai | 2025-09-01 07:51:58+00:00
> Why not think "hey, maybe there is 10% we cure aging or 10% chance we all die and these are super important"?

Because "maybe there is 10%" of anything is an absolutely useless metric. It's even more useless as a projection of a future event contingent on unknowable future breakthroughs. A percentage doesn't offer any useful modelling in those scenarios.

Unless you believe in determinism or prophetic eschatology, knowing the percent chance that we "cure aging" is always a lie. The most powerful science and most accurate statistics can't read the future.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-09-01 07:52:13+00:00
Just another gimmick phone that sacrifices longevity, reliability and compatibility for the sake of a physical keyboard for an OS that isn't designed for it.

The 2010s era of wacky smartphones was in part enabled by the fact that everything was iterating so rapidly that it didn't matter as much that the OS stopped being supported in a couple years. I don't see the point of products like this, it's just ewaste.
by severak | 2025-09-01 07:53:31+00:00
That scheme of controlling amplitude with two DACs is crazy and wild. He should use some off-the-shelf VCA chip and problem would be solved.

Other than that Qweremin actually makes a lot of sense from musical POV (expressive somewhat synths are rare and expensive) and that rendition of Ave Maria is beautiful. I can definitely see something similar as serious instrument in the future.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-01 07:54:21+00:00
LLMs are tools. If you master your tools, you become more productive. I've had the same mixed experiences with LLMs that others have. Some good, some not so great. But I've been merging quite a bit of codex created PRs in the last weeks. Some needed manual intervention. Some were tedious to create. And some clearly saved me a lot of work.

I always have more work than I can handle. Part of my job is deciding what not to do and what to drop because it hasn't got the right priority. Me spending an afternoon on a thing that is fun but not valuable is usually a bad use of my time. With LLMs, I'm taking on a few more of the things that I previously wouldn't have. That started with a few hobby projects that I'm now doing that I previously wasn't. And it's creeping into work as well. LLMs struggle on larger code bases. But less so with recent model releases.
by kikonen | 2025-09-01 07:54:29+00:00
I guess the analogy is not perfect since when making a phone call you're using the network (which you're "renting"). In that sense the callers are blocked from using that network, which makes sense (this would be equiv from being banned from uploading malicious apk to an app store I guess)

What I am saying is that I have not been stopped from taking calls from unknown numbers just because the call might be a scam. Likewise I don't wanna be stopped from installing an apk just because it might be a scam.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2025-09-01 07:54:43+00:00
You are being down-voted by people making big claims ("pretty bad for your health and crazy addictive", "nicotine is ridiculously addictive") without any proofs. In fact, I challenge anyone making such claims to reference a scientific study proving either of major addictive potential or significant health concerns of _nicotine patches_ since OP specifically mentioned "not the smokeable kind" of nicotine.
by benrutter | 2025-09-01 07:54:44+00:00
Joining all the other comments agreeing completely with this take.

I think it's worth adding that this is fundamental enough to not just be a tech issue. There's a strong legal framework in almost all developed companies for regulating companies where acting in their self interest harms the consumer interest. Without which, lots of things we take for granted (electrical safety certification, usb c, splits between serviceand investment banking).

I think the key thing that's missing at the moment is that the types of restrictions OP is mentioning (DRM, blocking encryption) harm both consumer rights and economic development.

That's an argument that needs to come from people knowledgable about both the indistry, and the technology. Like a lot of the people reading this post.
by crote | 2025-09-01 07:55:37+00:00
> that could also be fixed by tweaking EV requirements. (More than likely by putting a country flag on the EV banner.)

Wrong. Company names are not guaranteed to be unique per-country.

The main issue you are missing is that putting undeserved trust in things like DV / EV flags greatly increase the value of such attacks. If users are trained to blindly trust that shiny green bar, the odd attacker will be able to walk away with an absolute fortune. Nobody will be suspicious about that page, because Green Bar. Why is the "bank" asking odd questions? Who cares, it had a Green Bar, so it must be legitimate.

Why bother with hundreds of small attacks when one big one will make you rich?
by sergiolema | 2025-09-01 07:56:09+00:00
We've all been there: a team of talented developers, all heads down, churning out features. On the surface, it looks like a productivity paradise. But if you look closer, you might see a team working in silos, each developer an island of their own making.

I've been on a team like that early in my career, and the results were predictable: standalone developments, poor communication, and a complete lack of shared architecture or security guidelines. The application became a monolithic mess, nearly impossible to evolve or fix. Now, of course, I would do it differently.

The common misconception is that adding more developers will automatically increase output. The reality is that without a unified direction, a team's potential is never fully realized. This is where the role of a leader becomes essential.
Ask HN: What do you think tech debt is? Why you think LLMs create it?
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-09-01 07:56:19+00:00
This is a two part question really. I left a comment in a thread a while back arguing that LLMs/Agents erase tech debt, not create more of it.

My reasoning behind the comment was that you can literally tell the agent "find all areas in the code that don't use the PatientManager interface and instead make direct SQL calls to the Patient Table. In places where the PatientManager does not have a useful function, create one and in the implementation class. Find all the places in the code and remove the tech debt you find related to directly modifying patients.

And in the past, this would potentially be hundreds of code locations, and often completely ignored by the dev team because its one of those tech debt items no one wants to do. Now, with Agentic LLMs, it's literally a question for Claude.

I was wondering if anyone else has examples of widespread using agents to clean up tech-debt quickly. And if not, and you think LLMs CREATE the tech debt, what exactly do you think is Tech Debt?
by wolvesechoes | 2025-09-01 07:58:01+00:00
In my country two groups most hated by educated, civilized and self-labeled liberal people are miners and farmers. There are good reasons to not like them, especially miners (they have lot of privilege and cost a lot of money, whereas our (coal) mining industry is useless), but I came to the conclusion that the actual reason behind the hate is the fact that those two groups are able to force government to do their will, even though they are a small minority in the overall population. They achieve this by blocking streets, burning tires and causing overall mayhem, and are very consistent about it. At the same time those educated, civilized and liberal people can helplessly complain between each other, and maybe write some hateful article in the newspaper.

Forgive me this seemingly unrelated introduction, but when I read such threads I don't have much hope something will change, for similar reasons. People that care about computer user's freedom and agency will write blog posts and create hundreds of comments about how things should look like, how government and corporations want to enslave them etc. And then do nothing to give those adversaries even a smallest inconvenience. Some will create a new "privacy-oriented" and "freedom-focused" project on GitHub, naively thinking it will solve problem that is not technical at all.

Those without power always become victims. If it is all bark but no bite, no one is going to back down.
by robocat | 2025-09-01 07:58:05+00:00
Ships are fantastic for moving bulk goods between countries.

I would guess they are not so useful in wartime because missiles and torpedoes are a lot cheaper than ships.

Plus ships can no longer use obscurity for security against large countries: modern satellites and floating drones will dox em quickly.

No idea about submarines: but extrapolating from knowledge of what is possibly with physics, I wouldn't want to bet I could hide em from any high tech country.

Disclaimer: I'm sitting in an armchair.
by jclarkcom | 2025-09-01 07:58:16+00:00
Windows uses memory mapped IO for loading all executable processes because it allows you to start executing a process after loading a few pages even if the exe is megabytes. You can use the same to reduce latency for starting to assemble data before the rest of the file loads, the rest can be loaded using more efficienct asynchronous mechanisms. Using for output also means your process doesnt waits on flushes that is also async. And in memory constrained environments the OS doesn’t have to write your data to swap, it can just reload it from the meeting mapped file.
by goku12 | 2025-09-01 07:58:44+00:00
Oh! I see what you mean. In that case, the book is probably not targeted at programmers at all, though nothing stops you from pursuing it. Design of coding schemes is a discipline of its own. Sort of like writing a simulation software. Implementing the software will need programming skills. But the design of the numerical algorithms is more in line with physics and mathematics than programming.
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-01 07:59:25+00:00
> The concern is that they are now doing this on Android

Even with this new policy there are still ways to install unsigned apps on Android e.g. via adb, reflashing to a different build of Android, and so on. But you're absolutely right that there's a spectrum of usability here, which is why "allow" isn't really a useful standard. Only iOS tries to set friction to 100%. Every other platform "allows" third party installation given enough work, which is why it's valid to compare the difficulty of doing so on Linux with other platforms.

Re: Steam. Microsoft absolutely does support that! If you install Steam, Windows breaks, and Steam isn't doing something disallowed like messing with internal data structures, then Microsoft will accept it as a bug in Windows. They work very hard to support apps even when they actually do mess with internals. It's the Linux world that shrugs if a change in Linux breaks Steam when Steam was doing nothing wrong.

Flatpak is a genuine improvement, yes. But for the rest, sorry, you have developer brain switched on! Pip! Easier to use than Android!? These tools:

• Only target developers, and as such regularly do things like try to compile software during install and then fail due to obscure compatibility or versioning issues.

• Have severe malware problems.

You couldn't present pip or npm to the Android team as a solution to the problem they're trying to solve. You blame Android for being "arduous" whilst desktop Linux has spent decades with <5% market share exactly because it's so incredibly arduous. Come on: even with these new policies it is much easier for both users and developers to access/make software on Android. I've developed and distributed software for every OS except iOS at this point, and the differences are clear.
by swiftcoder | 2025-09-01 07:59:59+00:00
Sometimes it confuses me how much we are just sort of treading water on the server performance front: the C10K problem was solved in 1999. WhatsApp was hosting a million TCP connections per box in 2011.

It is not all that hard to hit 10k requests/second on modern hardware. 100k requests/second is achievable with some careful technology choices.
by kdmtctl | 2025-09-01 08:00:13+00:00
They do not benefit from having control, they risk if they don't. This is fundamental.

I do love freedom but such freedom will come with a disclaimer. You do want to use a bank app unsigned and you do not want the bank to check your latest SIM card replacement. You understand and assess the risk and will not discriminate the bank for any loss occurred. Same with Netflix and piracy.

This is fair.
by lormayna | 2025-09-01 08:00:36+00:00
I have a FW provided by my provider, but I am not enforcing it too much.

For SSH access, I have fail2ban + access only via certificates. For the rest, I have disabled web access and APIs as I don't need them.

I also keep an eye on logs, but there is not too much there, besides some bots scanning for open relays
by digianarchist | 2025-09-01 08:00:52+00:00
I've been tasked with adding telemetry to an AWS based service at work:

CLI -> Web API Gateway -> Lambda returning a signed S3 URL S3 upload -> SQS -> Lambda which writes to S3 and updates a Dynamo record -> CLI polls for changes

This flow isn't only over HTTP and relies on AWS to fire events. I worked around this by embedding the trace ID into the signed URL metadata. It doesn't look like this is possible with all AWS services.

I wonder if X-Ray can help here?

It can also be tedious to initialize spans everywhere. Aspects could help a lot here and orchestrion [0] is a good example of how it could be done in Go. I haven't found an OTEL equivalent yet (though haven't looked hard).

[0] - https://datadoghq.dev/orchestrion/docs/architecture/#code-in...
by fcatalan | 2025-09-01 08:01:01+00:00
I have a Quest 3 and use it daily, but it's still a failure for Meta: I just click past their risible Horizons crap and use it exclusively for simracing, hooked to my PC.

When I get another headset it will be a PC-VR dedicated one, because my use case is clearly not what they intend. Their Link app is an abysmal experience and updates tend to break things and just make it worse. A third party app, Virtual Desktop, is plain better in every aspect, but still hampered by the general poor UX.
by cluckindan | 2025-09-01 08:01:15+00:00
As long as the hardware vendor and teleoperator are able to run arbitrary, closed-source code on baseband processors without the user even knowing that it’s happening, no mobile device is truly free (libre).

”In March 2014, makers of the free Android derivative Replicant announced they had found a backdoor in the baseband software of Samsung Galaxy phones that allows remote access to the user data stored on the phone.”
by smagin | 2025-09-01 08:01:27+00:00
author here (not super educated either). That's part of the idea — when cards are removed it becomes obvious that tags become the most noticeable part while not being the most (or any) important one. When you look at the cards you see cards and _something_ inside them.

So maybe if this post was in less flame-provoking tone I'd suggest trying to add cards back and see if it makes it better. It might, on landings there is a good chance it will.