MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by viccis | 2025-09-09 19:47:56+00:00
>We are an extension of their security team, which means they trust us with this access

So if <bad actor> in this writeup read your pitch and decided to install your agent to secure their attack machine, it sounds like they "trusted you with this access". You used that access to surveil them, decide that you didn't approve of their illegal activity, and publish it to the internet.

Why should any company "trust you with this access"? If one of your customers is doing what looks to one of your analysts to be cooking their books, do you surveil all of that activity and then make a blog post about them? "Hey everyone here, it's Huntress showing how <company> made the blunder of giving us access to their systems, so we did a little surprise finance audit of them!"
by panick21_ | 2025-09-09 19:48:08+00:00
Nuclear plants were already operated pretty safely and the saty was constantly improving as people were learning more and research was progressive.

You do not achieve safety by hard-coding all regulation to a specific technology and make everything else practically impossible.

It works like this:

"Your computer needs a C compiler with good error messages otherwise you can't build this",

"Ok but we are building a LISP machine, there literally is no C".

"We hear you but your C compiler needs good error messages".

"Ok, could you maybe tell us who you would accept from, we can show you our LISP compiler will have amazing error messages"

"MMhh sure we can do that, give us a full specification, and then we get back to you, but its going to cost you for every 1h we invest in that. And at the end, will tell you what we will accept as an application"

"Ok, how long will that take and how much will it cost"

"We can not give you a time or a cost, you will just have to wait (implied it will take at least many years and at least 100s of millions of $ with no outcome certainty what so ever)"

That's just the tip of the iceberg. And then each individual country has their own version of something like this.

So we have a market that is ultra heavy capital that needs scale. But scale is basically impossible to achieve.

Thankfully the US government has finally made some steps into relaxing some of these and adopting a smarter approach, but its like turning the titanic, see GAIN for example.

I am not suggesting we hand out plutonium the everybody who asks for it.

In fact what I dislike, is that anybody who even suggest that regulatory form is part of the solution people instantly bring out 'we need some regulation' or 'new regulation wont be magic'. Both are true, and both are irrelevant.

The de/re-regulation of many other industries has had dramatic effects, think of airlines, trucking, software, the Bell System and so on and so on. The current regulatory regime was created at a high point in panic and anti-nuclear sentiment.

What I would like to see is something like what NASA did, for commercial cargo and commercial crew. You start with something achievable (commercial cargo). Create programs where the government want's to achieve something, and has multiple companies bid in a technology independent way. Start with some smaller things, nuclear reactor for space, medical isotope reactors, off-grid nuclear and then do SMR.
by mlyle | 2025-09-09 19:48:29+00:00
Yup. Obviously you want to fix the bias in the early version of the numbers eventually.

But you don't want to change what you're doing all the time, so you stay an easy product for everyone else to use.

(Interesting that this "overreport jobs in the preliminary numbers" bias has showed up; in older data using similar methodology it didn't exist, but now it seems to...)
by nomel | 2025-09-09 19:48:30+00:00
Corporate analysts were "gifted" with a two impossibly rare step functions, that will probably never be repeated in our lifetimes: Near 100% -> near 0% percent in office, then 0% percent -> partial% in office. With most (all?) of the big companies following the same path, I think it's safe to assume the data points to the same conclusion: in whole, humans work better together.

It makes you wonder if it's a fundamental part of our evolution, or something. ;)

It would be very interesting to see their rational.
by adamrezich | 2025-09-09 19:48:46+00:00
Great to see people finally beginning to agree with this when I've been saying it for at least (according to comment history) eight years now.

It was always obvious that in a globally-connected Internet age, having universal, skintoneless glyphs that can be used to represent emotion and other shorthand (e.g. thumbs-up) was a decent idea, and that adding skin-tone modifiers was a bad idea:

- Five skin tones is insufficient to cover all possible present-day human use-cases

- Forcing users to make the decision between e.g. [thumbs up] and [thumbs up and also btw I'm white] is stupid (and possibly needlessly divisive)

- Skin-tone modifiers opened the door to all other sorts of modifiers

Now we're stuck with supporting all of this wholly unnecessary combinatorial complexity forever—awesome. What did we gain from this?
by bluGill | 2025-09-09 19:48:47+00:00
The problem with AI and Zillow is they forget "due diligence" matters. I know someone who sold a friend to Zillow for $20k less than market - they knew, as would anyone who did an inspection that there was rot issues and the correct value was around 100k less than market (which would then allow giving a builder $80k and 3 months to fix the issue before selling). Zillow tried to put a fresh coat of paint and sell the house. Now there is value in someone like Zillow coming in with $20k cash today to buy your house ($20k might be the wrong number, but lets accept it for discussion), and then selling it for market a few months later when someone wants it, but they need to do that due diligence.

That is why Zillow got out of the business even when rates were near zero, doing that due diligence is something they were not prepared to do since it requires humans to do work. (even if it is just taking pictures for the AI, to look at)
by michaelt | 2025-09-09 19:48:56+00:00
Sure thing!

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgleg70r7rno

> When Thames was privatised in 1989, it had no debt. But over the years it borrowed heavily and its total debt - which includes all of its borrowings and liabilities - now stands at £22.8bn, according to latest financial results, external.

> Its debt pile increased sharply when Macquarie, an Australian infrastructure bank, owned Thames Water, with debts reaching more than £10bn by the time the company was sold in 2017.

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41152516

> Macquarie and its investors paid £5.1bn for Thames Water, of which £2.8bn was money Macquarie had borrowed [...] £2bn had subsequently been repaid. Not by Macquarie and its investors, who had originally borrowed the money, but from new borrowings raised by Thames Water through a Cayman Islands subsidiary.

> Martin Blaiklock said: "That letter was a red flag to me because it showed clearly that the debt which Macquarie funds had used to buy Thames Water had been transferred over to Thames Water." [...]

> the total returns made by the bank and its investors from Thames Water averaged between 15.5% and 19% a year. Mr Blaiklock has 40 years of experience in such matters and said these returns were "twice what one would normally expect"

According to https://news.sky.com/story/approval-for-higher-bills-and-loa...

> The company, which has been crumbling under a £16bn debt pile, was due to run out of money in about a month's time. It has now received court approval for another £3bn loan [...] the company's gearing ratio is 80% and its annual debt interest bill is around £900m (about a third of the revenue it gets from customer bills) [...]

> The water regulator has sanctioned bill increases of 35% by 2030.

> However, Thames wants more. It is seeking a 53% increase, which would take the average bill to £677 a year

This stuff's all pretty widely documented and reported, if your idea of fun is getting angry and depressed while also reading about business accounting.
by notahacker | 2025-09-09 19:49:06+00:00
Providing vouchers to pay for daycare doesn't turn parenting into a profit centre. Providing parents with $12k per child per annum which they can either spend on daycare or anything else they want if they don't need daycare does (and has the opposite effect of the current policy: it keeps the opportunity cost of daycare the same and lowers the relative value of going back to work)
by hbn | 2025-09-09 19:49:09+00:00
>I personally think that Apple and other smartphone companies need to do a minor and major version release like you do with software. Every 3-5 year, do a major release.

That's basically what they've been doing. That's why people whine when they aren't blown away every year now.

You don't have to buy a new phone every year, and indeed most people don't. The changes are incremental, but if you buy a new phone after 3+ years, the new one will probably noticeably better enough compared to your old to make a difference to you.

The late 2000s - early 2010s were exciting cause there was a lot of room for improvement. It's not so easy now and that's fine, because if you buy a new iPhone, it'll last longer and be overall better than what you got a decade+ ago.
by mothballed | 2025-09-09 19:49:09+00:00
In AZ we offer ESA to homeschoolers, vouchers to charter or private school kids, and then normal tuition free public schools.

That way the service/resource is available to all children regardless of who the parent picks to provide it, according to what the family sees as their best option. It's not about who gets the money, just that the resources are available.

I think very rarely does the state or society have a better view in aggregate of what is best for each family, particularly when you consider the asymmetry of millions of families having time and information to contemplate their circumstance vs voters or bureaucrats having complete inability to put any real thought on the child on a per-child basis.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-09 19:49:23+00:00
> 1. What is your willingness to consider a candidate who does not match 100% of your requirements?

I'm not the person you were responding to, but in my experience most of the candidates aren't even close.

You post a staff position and get dozens of college graduates.

You post a job requiring some C++ or Rust and you'll get 50 people who haven't written anything other than Ruby on Rails or Python.

I'm always open to impressive candidates who don't have exactly the right skills yet, but the majority of the spam applications can't even show that they're impressive candidates. They're just spamming the same resume to every job they see.
by gnatmud8 | 2025-09-09 19:49:46+00:00
if only people knew how easy it is to implement the standard library and make it way simpler than what is usually provided, everyone would be writing their own standard libraries; you can implement one with string manipulation, files, memory management, threading, and basic timing, in less than 1000loc of c code, as i have done before, and the biggest parts by far were console printing and filesystem stuff, and it's mostly because of windows utf-16 conversion nonsense
by Mobius01 | 2025-09-09 19:49:53+00:00
I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that something else is needed. We spend our days at our desks, on Zoom calls. People won’t get up to join in person - mostly because the conference rooms are all blocked by “special projects”, but mostly due to the offshoring of positions and distributed workforce post-pandemic. We are all spending valuable time on commutes to do what was possible from home.

Now I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy, and I fully expect that their solution in this job market to be a 5-days, monitored attendance RTO soon. We are regressing at an alarming rate.
by CPLX | 2025-09-09 19:50:49+00:00
You’re using “pain in the ass” as a euphemism for “has labor laws and higher wages” which is a longstanding PR move that’s been going on forever.

They prefer to setup factories overseas because they like paying lower wages.

Productivity in the US is incredibly high. Our decision to allow manufacturing to be shipped overseas is a political one.

We don’t have to care what companies feel like doing. We have the customers and the money. We can insist.
by REPLicated2 | 2025-09-09 19:50:55+00:00
I always liked the file syncing part of Dropbox, and was considering their Family plan a few years back, until they increased the prices. If I remember correctly, their reasoning included all the additional features like Paper which you would get but that I never needed. It's currently at 203 EUR/year here - pretty steep if you only care about the core usecase of syncing files.
by viccis | 2025-09-09 19:51:03+00:00
I can't imagine pen testers would be able to work in the EU without being able to access individual workstations without the users' knowledge.

The key difference here is that pen testing, as well as IT testing, is very explicitly scoped out in a legal contract, and part of that is that users have to told to consent to monitoring for relevant business purposes.

What happened in this blogpost is still outside of that scope, obviously. I doubt that Huntress could make the claim that their customer here was clearly told that they would be possibly monitoring their activity in the same way that a "Content to Monitoring" popup for every login on corporate machines does it.
by johnecheck | 2025-09-09 19:51:28+00:00
1 is true, but this applies to all websites you visit (and their ads, supply chain, etc). Drawing a security boundary here means never executing attacker-controlled Javascript. Good luck!

2 is also true. But also, a zero day like that is a massive deal. That's the kind of exploit you can probably sell to some 3 letter agency for a bag. Worry about this if you're an extremely high-value target, the rest of us can sleep easy.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-09 19:51:35+00:00
> It's an allergy to diverting tax payer dollars away from public schools and into subsidizing religious indoctrination centers.

All schools are indoctrination centers. Some very progressive cities push a lot of political programming into their curriculums. Why does it matter if someone wants their child’s education to have THEIR flavor of religious indoctrination? The money follows the child. The money for kids staying in public schools stays with them. So it doesn’t divert anything away.
by kiitos | 2025-09-09 19:51:35+00:00
"open source" and "in the public domain" aren't like separate things from "copyright", they describe specific sub-sets of stuff underneath "copyright", which is a top-level category that establishes a meaningful definition of stuff like "your work(s)" in the first place

i.e. "copyright" describes a legal concept, "copyleft" describes a licensing concept
by sunshine-o | 2025-09-09 19:52:33+00:00
I sure hope you are right but I wouldn't trust too much the official numbers we are told. We know during a war every incentive is there too minimize the causalities of one side. The real number usually appear long after and are always much larger.

> Germany the country survived WW2, and about half of their male population died in the war.

One way to see it is Germany and Europe did not really even survived WWI. The demographic shock and the trauma then lead directly to WWII. At the end Europe has been a shadow of itself since. Most of the problems Europe have today are rippling effects of the deep traumas of the two WW.

Let's say just a third or half the men between 25 and 55 are dead/badly wounded/traumatized/addicted, it will destroy the next generation and society.

Just look on much smaller scale at what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did to the US in the last 20 years. Even the few professionals and volunteers who fought it abroad brought back a lot of problems still clearly visible in today american society.

This is why those type of wars need to be avoided or stopped at all cost.
by minimaxir | 2025-09-09 19:53:13+00:00
The failure of Mastodon to break into the mainstream especially in the wake of Twitter/X's debacles is a good example on how decentralized web is a good idea on paper but won't work in practice. It turns out that a) people will just join the largest instance/community possible for network effects b) internet discourse is bifuricated enough that preemtively banning instances just in case makes discourse even more bifuricated and c) maintaining and moderating said instances is expensive and time-consuming.

Even though Bluesky did break through to the mainstream with ATProto, it's unclear how ATProto is either a functional or competitive benefit, or if its users even know about it.
by noman-land | 2025-09-09 19:53:24+00:00
Everyone called us paranoid nerds and laughed at our concerns. We spent 20 years trying to tell the people we care about how to be safe and they didn't listen because the tech is ugly, with rough edges, and doesn't have rage bait and trillions of dollars of ad-tech money supporting it. I personally stopped advocating as loudly because I realized that it would take much, much more pain for regular people to get out of their comfort stupors and start giving a shit. Meanwhile, p2p tech slowly progresses in the shadows where the mainstream can't see it, can't support it, and doesn't care.

The best time for advocacy is when people get burned. It's not a matter of if, but when. People learn through pain.

New billionaire owner takes over your favorite microblogging platform? Pain. Your clubhouse has been destroyed. You suddenly realize you didn't own anything.

New billionaire owner decides they don't like the topics you talk about and bans you? Pain. Your ability to express yourself and communicate and make connections with like-minded people has been destroyed. You suddenly realize that you actually need to get permission to talk to the people you want to talk to.

Massive data leak that includes your intimate personal information, photos and videos? Pain. Your privacy and personal life have been irrevocably violated. You suddenly realize that you don't control any of your own private information, and it actually isn't safe out there in those clouds. Even your most intimate whispers are recorded forever and will eventually be listened to by strangers or published on the cover of the New York Times.

The list of reasons to get the fuck off these corporate, centralized apps is growing every day.
by tedggh | 2025-09-09 19:53:43+00:00
The EU has a very long history of killing entrepreneurship. It is not a coincidence the largest and more innovative companies in the planet are not from Europe despite having both the financial and human resources. This is very unlikely to change now, particularly in a domain so sensitive to data privacy like AI for which the EU parliament is very quick and efficient in launching new and more restrictive regulations. Thinking they are going to have a change of heart now is pretty naive. What ASML is doing is buying a seat in the AI train. They can now flex they are an AI company, and some investors love that. That’s all this is, forget about Mistral being critical to ASML R&D, it is not. Siemens would have been a much better fit for Mistral and vice versa, but that ship already sailed as Siemens is heavily integrated with OpenAI and Azure in the digital factory space.
by tolerance | 2025-09-09 19:54:01+00:00
> Where all these decentralization efforts fall down is that they tend to focus on content, the technical details of how they're going to spread bytes around, and nobody focuses on the task. It'd be interesting to recast the problem in terms of "Here's a common task of everyday life; how do you accomplish it in an adversarial environment where the government or major corporations are trying to shut off the Internet?”

Nice observation and can speak to why anyone intent on selling you content writes a “user story” to outline the tasks that lead to a purchase or engagement.
by ch4s3 | 2025-09-09 19:54:11+00:00
The idea of extending the program to pay people who aren't using the benefit directly sounds nice in theory but would cost way more and incentivizes people to not work. This necessarily makes the broader version of the program even more expensive than it appears at first. A working parent using a daycare voucher necessarily pays taxes back into the system and so does the day care. This offsets the cost a little. Giving essentially cash payments to people who stay at home has no such offset. So it is much more expensive and disincentivizes people working which might slightly offset the cost.

> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare

There is no way this is affordable to New Mexico. They're estimating the cost at $600 million a year, of about 6% of their total budget next year.
by adabyron | 2025-09-09 19:54:17+00:00
I’ve had the opposite effect. Meetings where everyone is on video run so much better.

More on task, plus transcriptions & other features dramatically improve the meeting. I can more easily understand accents, read when people talk over each other, ai generated notes and tasks, and I can rewatch parts of the meeting by searching for something said. Also easy to detect who dominates the meeting and who might need to be included in talking more.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-09 19:54:37+00:00
> You’re using “pain in the ass” as a euphemism for “has labor laws and higher wages” which is a longstanding PR move that’s been going on forever.

You are using “euphemism” as a euphemism for “dysphemism”. (Or, more likely, just using the wrong word; I doubt you are really intentionally trying to put a positive spin on it.)
by Aurornis | 2025-09-09 19:54:48+00:00
When they "open sourced" the Tesla Roadster the website only had a couple of mostly useless files. Discussion at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38383099

Despite not containing more than a few random files, there were headlines everywhere about the "Open Source Tesla Roadster". There were countless comments, Tweets, and posts about how amazing it was that the Roadster was now open source.

None of the people reporting on it or praising it actually looked at the files and realized you couldn't actually build anything other than the HVAC control board for the car.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-09-09 19:54:57+00:00
The real challenge is network effects. You can't fight it. If the top dog has a considerable percentage of the population trapped in their platform, then it is already too late.

The only way to get people off the platform is to literally get hired and "trip over the cord" on purpose.. which at this point is likely going to involve very elevated permissions, and a really high chance of jail time.
by at-fates-hands | 2025-09-09 19:55:08+00:00
>> In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless.

I fought for years and came to the same conclusion. I just focus on myself now and a few tight knit circles of friends. We still hang out together on Diaspora. We still muck and hack around with stuff like Ubuntu Touch and debate the latest Linux distros and see how long we can go without our smartphones.

A few of my friends have gone "analog" because of what's happened. They were there during the first dot com bust. They've seen what the internet and tech have become - they just want to opt out now. Kind of crazy the times we're living in. Decentralization was the dream - now its just a nightmare a lot of us no longer what to be apart of.