MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by piaste | 2025-09-01 11:58:34+00:00
What if the bank abstained from evaluating your own stuff, and instead provided you with whatever they consider a 'good' device? Like a powered-up version of the TOTP hardware tokens they used to provide 15 years ago.

Instead of negotiating over what you do with your own devices, when you open a bank account they loan you a small, cheap, ultra-locked-down phone-like device that only runs the bank app and biometric verification. You may still use a web interface for online banking if you want a bigger screen and keyboard, but regardless all transactions need a confirmation through the bank's device.

This way you're free to do whatever you want with your hardware (including even not having one!), without requiring every bank to support every possible platform under the sun.
by tananan | 2025-09-01 11:58:45+00:00
> That ‘glorious hope’ was quickly dashed, however. In Anaxagoras’s account, it seemed to Socrates, Mind had no agency other than initially setting things in motion, and no morality. ... For this reason, Socrates tells us plainly, he completely lost interest in the heavens, in science, and in physical reality (ta onta, ‘the things that are’).

> And so (as I’ve argued in more detail elsewhere) the first global franchise [Christian faith] was set up on an anti-science basis.

Supposedly, Socrates wasn't disenchanted with the disenchantment because he thought it was nonsense, but because it didn't address existential/moral issues that he found pertinent.

I'm not sure this drive is best characterized as anti-science. There's a difference between denying scientific research as today understood and denying a inherently materialistic worldview as one's overarching context of life. The latter is often married to science, but it doesn't have to be.

No shortage of science was and is done by deeply religious individuals. And indeed religions co-opted science in various ways. And we had materialist* views pretty far back (clearly in both Greece and India).

What's changed recently IMO, is that at those ancient times, a materialistic worldview was a sort of "Yeah, and?" sort of deal, since it offered little in terms of giving a direction to the life of an individual. Nowadays, there is at least a technological eschatology, with people expecting or looking forward to luxuries, longevity, and other such things as have usually been the promises of religions. Funnily enough, insofar as this eschatology contains a place for human agency, its mostly been taken up by organizations and corporations few would see as anything but morally corrupt. It's a weird eschatology where the idea is that if you pump enough juice in the greed machine, at some point a phase transition occurs and all of it can be converted in stable welfare for all.
by aorth | 2025-09-01 11:59:15+00:00
Very cool idea. Thanks for sharing. I made some minor tweaks based on feedback to your comment:

#!/usr/bin/env bash # # See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034496 bin=$(basename "$0") echo "===========================" echo "Wrapping $bin in bubblewrap" echo "===========================" exec bwrap \ --bind ~/.cache ~/.cache \ --bind "${PWD}" "${PWD}" \ --dev /dev \ --die-with-parent \ --disable-userns \ --new-session \ --proc /proc \ --ro-bind /etc/ca-certificates /etc/ca-certificates \ --ro-bind /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf \ --ro-bind /etc/ssl /etc/ssl \ --ro-bind /usr /usr \ --setenv PATH /usr/bin \ --symlink /usr/bin /bin \ --symlink /usr/bin /sbin \ --symlink /usr/lib /lib \ --symlink /usr/lib64 /lib64 \ --tmpfs /tmp \ --unshare-all \ --unshare-user \ --share-net \ /usr/bin/env "$bin" "$@"

Notably `--share-net` should be moved down since it is negated by `--unshare-all`. I also added a reminder that the command is being bubblewrapped, modified the second read-write bind to the current directory, and changed the final exec to use `/usr/bin/env` to find the binary so it can be more flexible. I tested it with npm and yarn just now and it seems to work well. Thanks!
by breve | 2025-09-01 12:00:35+00:00
No. I'm being practical. Here's what direct, in country, in person, actual skin the game has got done:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyrk2kxlngo

Indonesia and Indonesians must do more of that. Take that responsibility. Get the country under control. Improve the political culture. Get a better standard of democracy.

One of the reasons Russia, for example, is out of control is because Russians stopped taking responsibility for their own country. They surrendered to apathy and nihilism. Bit by bit they allowed authoritarianism to take over again. It's going to be hard to get a better political culture back in Russia. It will take a long time.
by cb321 | 2025-09-01 12:01:11+00:00
This is a decent overview, but misses a few nice things. Interested readers should not assume it is exhaustive (generally something they should not assume..)

E.g., because the feature is so rare (controversial?) it doesn't get mentioned much, but you can also define your own operators in Nim. So, if you miss bitwise `|=` from C-like PLangs, you can just say:

proc `|=`*[T,U](a: var T, b: U) = a = a or b

Of course, Nim has a built in `set[T]` for managing bit sets in a nicer fashion with traditionally named set theoretic operators like intersection, union, etc. https://github.com/c-blake/procs makes a lot of use of set[enum] to do its dependency analysis of what Linux /proc files to load and what fields to parse, for example (and is generally much faster than C procps alternatives).

This same user-defined operator notation for calls can be used for templates and macros as well which makes a number of customized notations/domain specific languages (DSLs) very easy. And pragma macros make it easy to tag definitions with special compile-time behaviors. And so on.
by stared | 2025-09-01 12:01:32+00:00
Sure, if one wants to move deeper then Feynman Lectures are a nice entry point - at least for some people, everyone has different background and taste.

For L&L - well, not sure which ones I read (or: try to read), but likely electromagnetism and classical mechanics.

For quantum mechanics, I used to suggest these: https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2016/08/quantum-mechanics-for-high-...
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-09-01 12:01:42+00:00
The theremin is cool because it’s weird though. And being able to play it is impressive in part because it is difficult.

But most of all what I like about the theremin is that it is an electronic instrument all of its own unique kind and not an emulation of the instruments that existed before electricity was usable by humans.

Saying that a cello is “strictly better” than a theremin kinda feels to me like saying that ice skating is “strictly better” than rollerblading. It’s just different activities that different people enjoy.
by benterix | 2025-09-01 12:03:32+00:00
Hetzner.

For most public cloud providers you have to give them your credit card number so they can charge an arbitrary amount.

For Hetzner, instead of CC#, you give a scan of your ID (of course you can attach your CC too or Paypal). Personally I do my payments via a bank transfer. I recently paid for the whole 2025 and 2026 for all my k8s clusters. It gives unimaginable peace of mind when compared to AWS/GCP/Azure.

Plus, their cloud instances often spin up much faster than EC2.
by blaze33 | 2025-09-01 12:03:39+00:00
> it becomes impossible to look at the crescent moon at night and not immediately triangulate the position of the sun

I do that too, like the moon is lit from the right, slightly from above so yes obviously the sun is over there, up, aaaand... nope, it's sunset. Something's not right, is the light curved?

Anyway, that's the day I learned about the lunar terminator illusion[1]. Honestly, even knowing about the phenomenon, it still feels quite mind-bending to think about it.

[1] https://chrisjones.id.au/MoonIllusion/
by monch1962 | 2025-09-01 12:04:26+00:00
Right now, DeepSeek feels like it comes from the most trustworthy source, which is not something I would've said a few months ago.

In the short term I'll keep using OpenAI, Llama, Claude and Perplexity for what each does best. In the mid term, I'm looking for replacements for all 4
by closewith | 2025-09-01 12:04:27+00:00
Come on. We’ve had decades of occupational-health research on cognitive load, stress, and hours. The pattern is clear. Higher demands and longer hours raise depression risk. Lab and field work shows day-long cognitive tasks produce measurable fatigue, decision drift, and brain chemistry changes. These are universally accepted.

And yet, you now want me to source individual studies on those effects in a HN thread? Yes, in this instance you are approaching flat-earth/climate-change-denial levels of discourse. Reducing cognitive load is an unambiguous good.

If you think routine coding itself improves brain health or cognitive ability, produce the studies showing as you demanded from me, because that is a controversial claim. Or you can crash out of the conversation.
by qwertox | 2025-09-01 12:05:59+00:00
These phones should offer 3 environments: The one which Google likes, where Banking apps and Wallets reside and only verified apps can be installed into, then the normal one, where our all crappy apps run, like weather, whatsapp, and an unrestricted one, where permissions aren't required at all. Though it should be hard to install an app in the unrestricted environment, like force the use of adb for the initial install. Unrestricted should hot have access to anything running in the secure environment.
by Anonyneko | 2025-09-01 12:06:25+00:00
I don't, I spend hours on YouTube every day even though I care very little about the content I watch and mostly do it just to hear some familiar voices in my head. Then I feel bad about it, go to bed, have terrible sleep, wake up with barely any energy to even get out of bed, and the cycle begins anew.

How I manage to actually get enough work done to keep my job is some kind of a miracle, I guess. I've long given up on personal projects or even anime and games. Everything requires too much energy that I don't seem to be able to find, so the comfort zone of YouTube or similar time wasters it is (browsing HN is my latest one, with all due respect to some of the really useful content on this website).

All I can say is, try not to be me if you can help it. Vicious cycle, this. Some find therapy or medication helpful, could be worth considering.
by benterix | 2025-09-01 12:07:03+00:00
> I’m a huge fan of Hetzner ... I don’t see how “bare metal” saves much engineering time.

I think you confuse Heztner with bare metal. Hetzner has Hetzner Cloud which is like AWS EC2 but much cheaper. (They also have bare metal servers which are even cheaper.) With Heztner Cloud, you can use Terraform, Github Actions and whatever else you mentioned.
by arcdocument1 | 2025-09-01 12:07:11+00:00
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by gspr | 2025-09-01 12:07:45+00:00
Luckily my bank still allows a fob type device as 2FA. But of course your point is valid.

It's a travesty that this behavior is allowed, of course, but as long as it is, I'd keep the cheapest possible regular smartphone around for this purpose alone. I'd try to think of it as an unwieldy fob-like device.
by grumbel | 2025-09-01 12:08:18+00:00
> There is not entity "Mastodon" that could decide anything.

mastodon.social is a server, if you have an account on there, they can delete it. If you don't have an account there, they can still block you by defederating whatever server you are on. This is no different from Twitter and Co. Simply put, look at this from an angle when it goes wrong, not when they go right.

> It's just a technical, UI problem, which anybody can solve, as it's free software.

No, that's a fundamental problem with how the data is organized and distributed. Without cryptographic signatures and unique message-ids, you are slave to the server, even if you get the data out of the server, there is no way to get it up on another. To see how broken the situation is just look at the URLs:

- https://feddit.org/post/18147843 - https://lemmy.zip/post/47572103

Can you tell that both are referring to the same post? Can you find the feddit.org post on lemmy.zip when feddit.org goes down? This is not a simple "we'll implement that later"-feature, but a fundamental oversight in how data and control gets handled in the Fediverse. That it violates European law, that explicitly exists to empower the user, ain't helping.

> This is why you need free software btw

Free Software is completely irrelevant here. This is about protocols, data ownership and control, areas that no Free Software license even touches on. It's somewhat ironic that GDPR got there first with actual law, while the Free Software world still completely fails to address those issues, despite them being around for 20 years.

> You can pay anybody in the free market to do your repairs or set up a Mastodon (or web) server for you.

Which is worthless, since the value is in the users and their connections, which are under the control of whoever is running the popular instances, not me.

> You can't freely move between them.

I can freely switch between facebook.com or x.com in my browser just fine.

> Once you leave them, you loose all your followers and specific features.

Yes, that's just the same on the Fediverse. When feddit.de went down, where did my data go? My feddit.de account doesn't work on other servers. feddit.org was recreated from scratch and everybody had to move over manually. Account migration requires two cooperating servers, which you don't have if one of them is down permanently.

> This is not even funny. Twitter promotes nazi content according to the latest investigations.

As said "On the Fediverse thought-policing is getting sold as a feature."
by ontouchstart | 2025-09-01 12:08:34+00:00
I’m at the same point as well. Doing more reading than writing.

Just want to add one more point: code is not fiction or even nonfiction, “good or bad” style can be subjective, but correct or not correct is not, regardless of the reviewer’s mental model.

The difficulty of reading code is to understand its logic and logical consequences. The more complex the codebase (not just the line we are reading), the more risky to modify it.

That is why I use LLM to write a lot of tests and let it review the logs to help me understand the logic. Even the tests can be disposable.
by t_mahmood | 2025-09-01 12:08:46+00:00
This costed around $10k. Which also includes work that is outside the reimplementation.

I do not know how much actually cost of the original application.

The app, that I was developing, was for another purpose, and the reimplementation was later added.

The app replaces an existing commercial app that is being used, which is $200+/m. So, may be 4/5 years to exceed the savings. They have been using the app for 3 years, I think.

And, maybe I am beating my drum a little, I believe my implementation works, and looks much better than the commercial or the first implementation.

So, I am really looking forward for this to success.
by nicce | 2025-09-01 12:09:22+00:00
I am not sure if we can change the definition of 2FA based on that.

What if compromising the laptop requires brute forcing something? Then laptop was protected by something the adversary did not know. If we expand this argument, there isn't secure 2FA in place. Maybe laptop compromise leads into situation they can compromise your phone over the same network and the argument is the same.

I would say that there is some additional factor if instead of just guessing or reusing leaked the password, they also need to compromise my laptop and likely get the privilege escalation before they can read the plaintext vault content. You are not allowed to guess anything in that process or that makes 2FA definition valid.

2FA in practice is just about increasing the entropy and protecting against guessing. Passwords can be leaked so we added additional entropy with seedable TOTP suffix. Every additional factor is just an additional entropy that adversary needs to guess and cannot directly obtain.

So for 2FA to be truly valid, we should not use password managers at all and maybe we should be also immune to xkcd comic 538.
by Liftyee | 2025-09-01 12:09:37+00:00
As you said, this might be a complex one to figure out. I am biased because I tend not to use customer support services (with more of a "figure it out" approach) and am confident I could replace parts myself, though the latter might be harder with parts pairing today.

Can see how people more interested in the software side of things would care about support from [parent company] though. "Lose all support if you bypass our restrictions" is the relatively straightforward approach, but the collateral damage might be quite high. In an ideal world, perhaps the network of third party repair services could take up the slack?
by oefrha | 2025-09-01 12:10:42+00:00
Yeah, and according to https://expo.dev/blog/precompiled-react-native-for-ios and linked https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr..., it seems moving off CocoaPods has barely moved past planning stage. Latest update from two weeks ago links to https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/52909 and says it’s very very experimental. Just great…
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-01 12:11:01+00:00
> We should be aiming to solve chess, but we are not even trying.

We know exactly how to solve chess, we have known for decades. The function f is called min-max, and can be optimized with things like alpha pruning. Given that chess is a bounded game, this is a bounded time and bounded space algorithm. The definition of `f` that you gave can actually be quite directly encoded in Haskell and executed (though it will miss some obvious optimizations).

The problem is that this algorithm seems to be close to optimal and it would still take some few thousand years of computation time to actually run it to solve chess (or was it decades, or millions of years? not really that relevant).

Now, of course, no one has actually proved that this is the optimal algorithm, so for all we know, there exists a much simpler `f` that could take milliseconds on a pocket calculator. But this seems unlikely given the nature of the problem, and either way, it's just not that interesting for most people to put the kind of deep mathematical research into it that it would take.

Solving chess is not really a very interesting problem as pure mathematics. The whole interest was in beating human players with human-like strategies, which has thoroughly been achieved. The most interesting thing that remains is challenging humans that like chess at their own level of gameplay - since ultimately the only true purpose of chess is to entertain humans, and a machine that plays perfectly is actually completely unfun to play.
by cousin_it | 2025-09-01 12:11:19+00:00
Yeah, I put it somewhere in the same category as unicycling, or playing a guitar with your teeth.

In fact I'd double down on the "strictly better" bit. There's an instrument that's literally strictly better than the theremin: it makes a very similar sound, looks every bit as cool and weird, but is much easier to play well. The musical saw! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7cMJn0HAdE
by Aachen | 2025-09-01 12:12:55+00:00
They said with the latest device release (like 2 months ago) that they're shifting their focus towards what you're saying (good quality without paying a huge premium), but it's still hard because what's good for you isn't good for me. I find the device too large and not fast enough; my partner would find the device already quite expensive as well as on the small side. The device won't work for everyone, even if they'd make it cost twice as much (and very few people are willing to pay even a 50% premium). Instead, they're trying to now please more people while making somewhat more compromises in the ethics department as compared to being more strict there and having it work for even fewer people

None of their previous phones were (at release) as close to competitive as the Fairphone 6 is today

We could have both an ethical/privacy device and many models at competitive price points, but that requires economies of scale to the same extent as non-fair competitors are doing. It sounded for a short time (like ten years ago) as though more vendors would go this route when incontrovertibly shown that it is possible and they merely need to tell FP's vendors "give some of that fairly mined Cobalt to us, too", but FP is here and history hasn't played out that way so this is what we've got. I assume this is the best that they were able to achieve with the resources they could muster. All we can do to help it grow is buy the device, or start a competitor or collaboration
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-01 12:14:04+00:00
> In theory EU can mandate open bootloaders like EU mandates USB-C charging, but they won't.

The EU cannot simply mandate random stuff, it needs to make a strong case and prove an economic benefit considering also the possible negative consequences.

Noone is forced to do business in the EU, so it always has to consider the cost and risk for a company vs. the overall benefit for a company of doing business in the EU.

Defining a mandate for "open hardware" is a MASSIVE undertaking, creating investment risks for innovators, potential security-risks for the entire EU, additional costs for development, maintenance, support for all manufacturers selling in that market.

What is the economic, technology-agnostic case in favor of open bootloaders which would make EU member-countries support such a regulation?

How much would a manufacturer be required to provide to be compliant? Continued operation even when the trust-chain is broken? Developer Documentation? compilable source-code? Hardware-warranty?

Should a car still be allowed to operate after it's unlocked? Should it behave somehow differently to ensure safety for its owner as well as others? How about an elevator? How about a Microwave?

What would be the tangible economic benefit of such a mandate to companies and citizens in the EU sector?

For a regulatory action, all of this needs to be described in an agnostic way, providing a clear path for a manufacturer to be compliant without creating too much burden on any party in the process.
by drankl | 2025-09-01 12:14:14+00:00
If you compare the female and male world records for pretty much any sport, you'll very clearly see the effect of SRY and other male-making genes.

The rationale for the female category is to remove this male advantage from competition. Allowing a subset of males who have the advantage of their sex to compete against female athletes, just because these males call themselves women, undermines the whole point of women's sport.

This is why we need such testing as described in the article. It's no different in principle to, for example, weigh-ins in boxing that enable fair competition in each weight category.