MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antonvs | 2025-09-09 20:43:15+00:00
They can detect the presence of phones, yes. But that doesn’t automatically mean being able to detect people that aren’t carrying phones. To do that, you’d need to integrate the phone detection data with some other source of data on people present in the area in question. I’m saying there’s no evidence of such a system actually being used in practice. The paper you linked doesn’t address that at all.

Btw, to help understand the technical challenges involved with this, the whole reason Tesla focused on vision-only for its self-driving was the difficulty of integrating sensor data from multiple sources, e.g. lidar + vision would be significantly more difficult to achieve. It’s not that this isn’t possible in theory - it’s just that there’s no evidence of anyone having done it for “lack of phone” detection, and that’s probably because it’s not really a requirement that’s in high demand.
by metasaval | 2025-09-09 20:43:23+00:00
Every time a new iPhone comes up people on hacker news pine for a new mini, which I understand. But everytime someone has to bring back up that the 12 and 13 minis were the worst selling sku two gens in a row, with at one point the 13 mini only attributing to 3% of 13 sales [1].

I'm sorry, but the market has spoken. And there's Android phones in that form factor if you really want it.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...
by ramesh31 | 2025-09-09 20:43:26+00:00
>I’d rather have the world with nice cameras on my phone than the one where the back is flat for aesthetic design reasons.

The argument is that you shouldn't need to pick one or the other. They got us used to the bump because it is cheaper and simpler for them to build. The same with literally everything now. No more striving for excellence, it's just "what can we normalize and force people to put up with so we don't have to fix the problem".
by ysnp | 2025-09-09 20:43:48+00:00
>Google took a great first step last year when they offered MTE to those who opt in to their program for at-risk users. But even for users who turn it on, the effectiveness of MTE on Android is limited by the lack of deep integration with the operating system that distinguishes Memory Integrity Enforcement and its use of EMTE on Apple silicon.

>With the introduction of the iPhone 17 lineup and iPhone Air, we’re excited to deliver Memory Integrity Enforcement: the industry’s first ever, comprehensive, always-on memory-safety protection covering key attack surfaces — including the kernel and over 70 userland processes — built on the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) and supported by secure typed allocators and tag confidentiality protections.

Of course it is a little disappointing not to see GrapheneOS's efforts in implementing [1] and raising awareness [2] recognised by others but it is very encouraging to see Apple making a serious effort on this. Hopefully it spurs Google on to do the same in Pixel OS. It should also inspire confidence that GrapheneOS are generally among the leaders in creating a system that defends the device owner against unknown threats.

[1] https://grapheneos.org/releases#2023103000 [2] https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1716946325277909087#m
by mike-cardwell | 2025-09-09 20:43:51+00:00
I recently doubled the thickness of my iPhone SE by adding an external battery. Fits in my jeans pocket fine along with several other things in the same pocket. If they can get it that thin, why don't they just add more battery and take us back to the time when we could run phones for weeks between charges.

[edit] I'll answer my own question. Nobody is going to replace an iPhone because it drops from 21 days battery to 14 days battery, but they probably will replace an iPhone that drops from 21 hours battery to 14 hours.
by ekidd | 2025-09-09 20:43:55+00:00
I've certainly seem some lovely PHP code. Even phpBB has been very clean for a long time.

But at the same time, you run into the same problems that you often see with C++. Yes, there's a clean, semi-modern dialect of the language that has 80% of what you'd ideally want. And 80% is often more than enough for practical engineering purposes. But the actual project you get hired to work on may not be written in that cleaner, modern dialect. The last C++ project I cracked open had gone almost 20 years since its last serious update. It wasn't terrible. But wow, did it take a lot of very tricky code to accomplish anything before boost and TR1 became popular.

And old PHP was one of the worst languages ever invented: the core C code was hopelessly insecure (I had to read it for a client during the dotcom boom), the database APIs were different for every single database (and all of them made SQL injection techniques too easy), the default configuration allowed hostile users to inject global variable values using CGI parameters, and I could go on for a week. Yes, I saw some ugly stuff in other languages during the dotcom boom. But ancient PHP was often on a whole other level.

And when a language's history includes that much ugliness, you need to be very careful about old production code bases. Maybe you get a nice Symfony app! Buy maybe you get mixed HTML/PHP/SQL with a hundred security holes inherent in the APIs being used.
Ask HN: Physical-Keyboard Phones
by uyzstvqs | 2025-09-09 20:44:27+00:00
Peak phone design, in my opinion, would be the BlackBerry Classic. My ideal phone would be that design + an OS that's fully open-source, optimized for the format, which has no more baked-in online services than OS updates, and a simple app store with a decentralized system similar to Flatpak. I'd also prefer it'd be fully repairable.

I feel like BlackBerry could still be very relevant if they went this way. So many people are dissatisfied with today's smartphones lack of privacy & user freedom, and I can't be the only one who prefers my phone's design to prioritize communication over entertainment.

Agree or disagree?
by bri3d | 2025-09-09 20:44:32+00:00
Substantially less complex and therefore likely to be substantially easier to actually use.

CHERI-Morello uses 129-bit capability objects to tag operations, has a parallel capability stack, capability pointers, and requires microarchitectural support for a tag storage memory. Basically with CHERI-Morello, your memory operations also need to provide a pointer to a capability object stored in the capability store. Everything that touches memory points to your capability, which tells the processor _what_ you can do with memory and the bounds of the memory you can touch. The capability store is literally a separate bus and memory that isn't accessible by programs, so there are no secrets: even if you leak the pointer to a capability, it doesn't matter, because it's not in a place that "user code" can ever touch. This is fine in theory, but it's incredibly expensive in practice.

MIE is a much simpler notion that seems to use N-bit (maybe 4?) tags to protect heap allocations, and uses the SPTM to protect tag space from kernel compromise. If it's exactly as in the article: heap allocations get a tag. Any load/store operation to the heap needs to provide the tag that was used for their allocation in the pointer. The tag store used by the kernel allocator is protected by SPTM so you can't just dump the tags.

If you combine MIE, SPTM, and PAC, you get close-ish to CHERI, but with independent building blocks. It's less robust, but also a less granular system with less overhead.

MIE is both probabilistic (N-bits of entropy) and protected by a slightly weaker hardware protection (SPTM, which to my understanding is a bus firewall, vs. a separate bus). It also only protects heap allocations, although existing mitigations protect the stack and execution flow.

Going off of the VERY limited information in the post, my naive read is that the biggest vulnerability here will be tag collision. If you try enough times with enough heap spray, or can groom the heap repeatedly, you can probably collide a tag with however many bits of entropy are present in the system. But, because the model is synchronous, you will bus fault every time before that, unlike MTE, so you'll get caught, which is a big problem for nation-state attackers.
by Calavar | 2025-09-09 20:44:47+00:00
I've heard that a lot, but my gripe with modern PHP is what's the hook? What feature does it offer that other scripting languages don't?

- Can you use the same rendering logic on client and server like JavaScript?

- Does it have the performance of Java or C# or Go?

- Does it allow for expressive DSLs like Ruby?

- Does it have an extensive, cutting edge ML ecosystem like Python?

Back in 2010, PHP's stand out features were very straightforward installation, good support for templating, and a large collection of C library wrappers (even if the interfaces were a bit raw). Those hooks were compelling enough to make people put up with the PHP4 core language.

But other languages have caught up on those three points, which leaves modern PHP utterly unremarkable. It doesn't have any feature that stands out enough to make me want to switch back.
by BoorishBears | 2025-09-09 20:45:03+00:00
This just goes back to my original point: you don't feel pressure to keep up with all the solutions out there, and are ok taking what's good enough.

Mistral can bank on others doing the same, and I have no doubt they'll be able to get along doing so. They're not in the most competitive home market either, so I do think they'll stay at the front of "EU-native" foundation models.

But last week a Chinese delivery app casually chucked a model that's stronger than anything Mistral has ever released on HF (with an MIT license). When that's the competition, their current strategy is rough to say the least.
by 6510 | 2025-09-09 20:45:11+00:00
yes, lots of stuff needs to be figured out. Like, you don't need decentralized auth servers.

bittorrent has webseeds. I dump large files and archives on my sever, give people the magnet or link it from an article, they download it fromthere. If for any reason I no longer want to host the file I just remove it. Usually I just want the space back, in theory there could be bandwidth issues or an excess of interested participants. You can put fairly interesting websites in torrents too! That no uninvited participant can find them is a feature not a bug.

Email does html too! PDF is also great for publishing. You can send people videos and even executables if you are close enough.
by kiitos | 2025-09-09 20:45:19+00:00
the link in the email went to an obviously invalid domain, hovering the mouse cursor over the link in the email would have made this immediately clear, so even clicking that link should have never happened in the first place. red flag 1

but, ok, you click the link, you get a new tab, and you're asked to fill in your auth credentials. but why? you should already be logged in to that service in your default browser, no? red flag 2

ok, maybe there is some browser cache issue, whatever, so you trigger your password manager to provide your auth to the website -- but here, every single password manager would immediately notice that the domain in the browser does not match the domain associated with the auth creds, and either refuse to paste the creds thru, or at an absolute minimum throw up a big honkin' alert that something is amiss, which you'd need to explicitly click an "ignore" button to get past. red flag 3

nobody should be able to publish new versions of widely-used software without some kind of manual review/oversight in the first place, but even ignoring that, if someone does have that power, and they get pwned by an attack like this, with at least 3 clear red flags that they would need to have explicitly ignored/bypassed, then CLEARLY this person cannot keep their current position of authority
by inanutshellus | 2025-09-09 20:45:29+00:00
Oh I agree. They're from the gold smiley face stickers extrapolated to more emotions. I meant that I _don't_ connect the gold to Simpsons and LEGO. I just connect the whole emoji concept to the Japanese and thus don't consider anything about it at all to be "white-centric". Once you do associate the smiley faces with LEGO/Simpsons then you do start to make these connections that... just don't need to be there and let the conversation get muddled in drama.
by jghn | 2025-09-09 20:45:43+00:00
> think women especially do not want a small phone because they carry it in a purse anyway

The correlation I saw a while back during one of the debates about the trend towards phablets was it depended a lot on your usage patterns.

Are you someone who tends to use your phone while sitting down? Larger form factor

Are you someone who tends to use your phone standing up, especially while walking? Smaller form factor.
by jdiff | 2025-09-09 20:45:44+00:00
Flat, closed-minded positions like this are why the USA is the only developed country that enjoys the privilege of regularly burying bullet-ridden children.

We can have gun control. We can limit the damage that civilian weapons can do, while also keeping hunting and defense, as many countries do. Anyone who says that guns have any legitimate purpose beyond that (overthrowing governments) is deluding themselves. We reserve plenty of weapons for military use only.
by kube-system | 2025-09-09 20:45:51+00:00
Insurance premiums for Teslas are well above the national average for insuring a new vehicle. Although, they've gotten better in recent years. The Model S used to be number one most expensive vehicle to insure in the US, even beating out exotic cars.

Repairability is a risk to insurance companies because they are liable to repair vehicle vehicles. When parts and labor are in short supply, they are more expensive. These expenses are something that an insurance company would pay in a claim for a vehicle they are liable to fix. Also, please remember that insurance companies also sometimes must pay consequential costs, e.g. a rental car, while vehicle repair repairs are pending.
by wongarsu | 2025-09-09 20:45:59+00:00
With tradesfolk you can choose who to call, and somebody from farther away will charge more for getting to your door. With workers that is not a consideration today (in most roles), but if companies had to pay for travel time it absolutely would be. But that leads to uncomfortable questions about moving. If you get children and move to an area with a better school, can and will your work now fire you because your commute got more expensive for them?

A fixed payment for office days would remove that, but then how do you determine the price of that payment?
by mothballed | 2025-09-09 20:46:07+00:00
So your position is what, the people who currently weren't getting free daycare don't need it because they were already getting by? You went straight to what people "need" but then ignored the whole schtick we're discussing was NM going from means-tested to universal childcare even for people that don't "need" it.

I'm willing to accept that position, I'm not necessarily for free childcare, only believe that if childcare is to be free it should follow the child. I don't see at all how a mom taking care of a child "needs" the money less than a daycare worker/company taking care of the child. What you're proposing is just yanking the money away from them in a tax, then lording it over them that they have to take the latter if they want the cash back -- trying to track to which caregiver the money goes instead of just providing the resources for the child and let the parents decide what works best for their family.
by joquarky | 2025-09-09 20:46:12+00:00
Do people still use bookmarklets?

I wrote this one to remove all <iframe> elements, which is where most of the worst distractions live. I mostly only use it when a site has gone too far.

javascript:(function () { const rm = () => document.querySelectorAll('iframe') .forEach(f => f.remove()); let timeout; const debouncedRm = () => { clearTimeout(timeout); timeout = setTimeout(rm, 100); }; rm(); new MutationObserver(debouncedRm) .observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true }); })();
by poniko | 2025-09-09 20:46:21+00:00
I got the Samsung 25 Edge and did move from a the regular sized phone to "plus" without the constraints and weight that usually follows. I can reach the screen edges that I can't on the same size plus version. Added bonus that i don't get a strain in my pinky from the weight and its still very pocketable. So I'm sold on thinner phones except the wobble from hell when its laying on the table.
by elgenie | 2025-09-09 20:46:35+00:00
These are numbers compiled by this administration about a period immediately before Trump imposed some very very very economically stupid tariffs. It's quite suspicious to have such a big drop timed precisely as if to serve as a handy baseline to minimize the perceived impact of that idiocy; it comes out of an agency (BLS) whose previous head was fired for the sin of a displeasing report and was replaced with a commissar.

Note that survey data about the present is collected and aggregated piecemeal by a sizable bureaucracy and is thus hard for a dedicated ideologue to systematically revise without that leaking. However, when the data about today comes in below estimates the number of people involved in reconciling and dating the discrepancy to ascribe it to the past is much smaller.
by rplnt | 2025-09-09 20:46:50+00:00
Well those are different things, aren't they? Empty slice/map is different from nil. So it makes a lot of sense that nil = null and []string{} = [], and you have an option to use both. That being said, it starts to make less sense if you work with go where the API mostly treats it as equivalent (append, len, []). So that would be my guess how it ended up the way it did.

Also, now that nil map is an empty object, shouldn't that extend to every nil struct that doesn't have a custom marshaller? It would be an object if it wasn't nil after all...
by STELLANOVA | 2025-09-09 20:47:09+00:00
That is really wrong way of looking at things. USB 4 support doesn't require ANY innovation from Apple, any extra $$$ (maybe pennies) - it's pure representation that they lost focus and simply don't care. That port is CRITICAL for many things they actually focused on in the prerecorded ads we all watched today - video. All add-ons, storage are in 99% of cases directly connected to the phone via USB-C port. To not support the latest technology available but charge premium is really disappointing...
by derefr | 2025-09-09 20:47:12+00:00
FYI, if you're on MacOS and the tiled preview of these stipples looks "weird" on your display, this is probably due to your "retina display" resolution not being an integer multiple of your panel's actual native resolution. (Some Mac laptops are set to such a non-integer-multiple resolution by default!)

Easy way to judge: when displayed without moiré on a modern 4K/5K display, the finest-grain black-and-white checkerboard pattern should actually appear to be a pure flat gray color, rather than having any visual "texture" to it.

To get a clear, non-moire view of these patterns, you have to check what your native panel resolution is (System Report > Graphics/Displays) and then set your display resolution to either that native resolution (with retina-scaling=off), or to exactly 1/2 the native panel resolution (with retina-scaling=on).

Note that one or both of these resolutions may actually be hidden in your display settings by default! (If so, option-click the visual resolution list to get a textual one, then enable the "Show all resolutions" box.)
by Theodores | 2025-09-09 20:47:18+00:00
It is a feature, not a bug.

For those that are not chronically online, a mobile phone from a decade ago has everything they need. If you only have to phone the family, WhatsApp your neighbours, get the map out, use a search engine and do your online banking, then a flagship phone is a bit over the top. If anything, the old phone is preferable since its loss would not be the end of the world.

I have seen a few elderly neighbours rocking Samsung Galaxy S7s with no need to upgrade. Although the S7 isn't quite a decade old, the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come since there is this demographic of active users.

Now, what if we could get these people to upgrade every three years with a feature that the 'elderly neighbour' would want? Eyesight isn't what it used to be in old age, so how about a nice big screen?

You can't deliberately hobble the phone with poor battery life or programme it to go slow in an update because we know that isn't going to win the customer over, but a screen that gets tatty after three years? Sounds good to me.
by closeparen | 2025-09-09 20:47:19+00:00
Then the work should be set up so that your teammates and project collaborators actually work from the same office, and not in the space that was most convenient to procure or in lower-cost offshore markets. But executives would pretty much always rather have you take video calls from your desk than incur any cost or inconvenience on their end. They're not acting like they believe this.
by 5f3cfa1a | 2025-09-09 20:47:41+00:00
Again, lazy!

Yes: if you have half of a billion dollars in BTC, sure – you're a victim to the wrench, be it private or public. If you're a terrorist mastermind, you're likely going to Gitmo and will be placed in several stress positions by mean people until you say what they want to hear.

Extreme high-value targets always have been, and always will be, vulnerable to directed attacks. But these improvements are deeply significant for everyone who is not a high-value target – like me, and (possibly) you!

In my lifetime, the government has gone from "the feds can get a warrant to record me speaking, in my own voice, to anyone I dial over my phone" to "oh, he's using (e2e encrypted platform) – that's a massive amount more work if we can even break it". That means the spectrum of people who can be targeted is significantly lower than it used to be.

Spec-fiction example: consider what the NSA could do today, with whisper.cpp & no e2e encrypted calls.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-09 20:47:49+00:00
People are running every element of the Bluesky / AtProtocol stack independently. Bluesky could disappear and it would continue to function as is (albeit with lots of Bluesky data lost).

PDS's to hold users data, relays/firehoses to aggregate & forward traffic, AppViews to create composite views of likes, replies, etc, resolvers to lookup DIDs, clients to access the network. Each of these has independent implementations. BlueSky is already decentralized & already has viable credible exit. It's not decentralized, and indeed the scalability & accessibility of having firehose consumers has the greatest scale out decentralization characteristics we've seen anywhere short of BitTorrent.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-09-09 20:48:09+00:00
I want you to think about, for a minute, the notion that you can have a number bigger than all of the atoms in the universe :-). From that, you can see that its possible to have more 'dollars' than there are atoms in the universe. Specifically, without defining 'growth' you can't reason about the limits on that growth.

The other point that simplified analysis fails to consider is that you are inside the system so as it "grows", it also "changes". If you lived in the 70's with the tales of how we're going to run out of fossil fuels by 2000, looking back you can see how things changed (cars got more efficient, other sources were discovered, etc).

My macroeconomics professor had a funny saying that you could take any segment of a sinusoid and use that to extrapolate forward and get the wrong answer about what the waveform was going to do. In my differential equations class we got to see how you could predict some things if you new both the initial conditions and you continued to refine your model. But to predict all things your model needed to take into account all variables and their impact, and it was the unknown variable problem that messed up predictions using that method.