MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rfoo | 2025-09-11 16:55:03+00:00
Well, anyone with actual root on a secure (locked, verified boot on) Android phone can hard brick it with a single command. Yes, you can yell at the user telling them it's their fault. Still something you usually do not want to support.

I don't think having authorized temporary root is inherently insecure, but on the other hand making sure it is secure could be a huge time sink.

Now, the original request here, modifying user app (I'd assume it's not system app) data, is reasonable. Designing a properly authenticated way to allow doing so would be an interesting challenge.
by taink | 2025-09-11 16:55:19+00:00
Exactly, I completely agree with you. This is what baffled me about the parent comment: "Unlike other human rights, the right to privacy has always been a bit fuzzy with a ton of exceptions and caveats".

Compare the right to privacy with other human rights, and I find it as clear and succinct as its counterparts (if not clearer and more succinct in some cases).

At the same time, given the international nature of these laws, I disagree with you on their problematic nature. They are (in my view) meant as a basis of diplomatic debate and not enforcement (which would be impracticable). They are to be complemented by organic law, because on their own they are unenforceable.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-11 16:55:28+00:00
The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 - https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2017-25.pdf | https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2017-25 - 2017

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650326 - June 2024 (148 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584 - May 2019 (260 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16078059 - January 2018 (151 comments)
by bregma | 2025-09-11 16:55:38+00:00
As surveillance increases the definition of crime will expand.

Consider the incentives. Surveillance is costly. The only way to justify increasing surveillance costs is to demonstrate increasing intervention in criminal activity. If traditional crime is reduced, new crimes need to be introduced.

Once all the enemies of the state have been eliminated, it becomes mandatory to introduce new enemies of the state so they, too, can be rounded up. Eventually there will be no one left to come for and the surveillance technology will go unmonitored.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-11 16:55:46+00:00
Proportionality is always approximate, and you can have proportionality without party votes by having multimember districts with a system like STV, with the degree of proportionality dependent on district size.

Now, with what I think of as probably the ideal manageable district sizes for voters (5-7 members) that is fairly chunky proportionality, so you might still want to do MMP to reduce underrepresentation of geographically diffuse minority positions.

OTOH, there are places which have STV (usually for a whole body elected at large, but you could do the same thing in districts for a larger body) with 20+ seats in a single constituency, and if you go that big per district, MMP is less necessary.
by ricksunny | 2025-09-11 16:56:15+00:00
The Atomic History Museum in LV does not allow casual perusing of their stacks, unfortunately. They will refer you to online NTS archives, and the vast majority of those available (post-declassification) are about radiation effects on biology particularly as regards historical incidents of radiation hazards. Oh, and, no index so you never know if you are seeing the entire universe of documents available. An archivist’s bugbear, IMO.
by zahlman | 2025-09-11 16:56:44+00:00
Radix sort isn't a comparison-based sort, so it isn't beholden to the O(n log n) speed limit in the same way. It's basically O(n log k), where k is the number of possible different values in the dataset. If we're using machine data types (TFA is discussing 64-bit integers) then k is a constant factor and drops out of the analysis. Comparison-based sorts assume, basically, that every element in the input could in principle be distinct.

Basically, the hashed sorting approach is effectively actually O(n), and is so for the same reason that the "length of hash table" approach is. The degenerate case is counting sort, which is a single pass with a radix base of k. (Which is analogous to pointing out that you don't get hash collisions when the hash table is as big as the hashed key space.)
by MrResearcher | 2025-09-11 16:57:10+00:00
I've been using KDE-Plasma on Wayland (Debian 13) since release as a daily driver, and I'm happy to report that it is super stable, has no problems with waking up from suspend and hibernate, and is a superb all-around shredder. I didn't notice any glitches, or flickering, or bugs so far, despite intensive daily abuse.
by skdjbd | 2025-09-11 16:58:20+00:00
> The motivation for 2%/year is that when inflation is lower, businesses and consumers tend to hoard more cash, instead of spending or investing it, reducing economic activity

That’s what they say. In reality, inflation is a permanent tax on those who earn money through labor. Every greenback they print makes 90% of us a little poorer, and conversely makes the capital holders richer.

Popular economists should be thought of as a priestly class employed to enforce this order with explanations like the one you gave above. Defending a system that has resulted in an ever increasing wealth gap and the proliferation of businesses who optimize for accumulating capital is indefensible.

There are other systems (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit). The economy should serve the people, not the elites. It’s hard to read a lot of economic discussion when the system is so fundamentally flawed. It’s not workable as is.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-11 16:59:11+00:00
> whole US economy is propped up by FAANG

This is nonsense. The stock market had been propped up by FAANG. But with AI we have a few trillion dollars of value being created by new entrants (e.g. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic) and legacy companies newly stepping on FAANG (e.g. Oracle, Perplexity).

It may all be a fever dream. But like the dark fiber of the 90s, it should—worst case—leave behind a lot of energy and datacentre infrastructure. (If Washington would get out of the way.)
by dooglius | 2025-09-11 16:59:28+00:00
̶F̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶p̶a̶r̶s̶e̶-̶m̶a̶t̶r̶i̶x̶-̶m̶u̶l̶t̶i̶p̶l̶i̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶e̶x̶a̶m̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶g̶i̶v̶e̶n̶,̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶-̶s̶o̶r̶t̶ ̶e̶a̶c̶h̶ ̶v̶e̶c̶t̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶n̶^̶2̶ ̶w̶a̶l̶k̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶p̶a̶i̶r̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶s̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶v̶e̶c̶t̶o̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶r̶a̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶(̶a̶s̶ ̶I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶l̶i̶e̶d̶)̶ ̶d̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶n̶^̶2̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶h̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶o̶r̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶r̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶?̶ ̶(̶F̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶w̶o̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶w̶h̶y̶ ̶s̶p̶a̶r̶s̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶t̶r̶i̶c̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶a̶l̶r̶e̶a̶d̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶r̶e̶s̶e̶n̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶s̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶-̶a̶d̶j̶a̶c̶e̶n̶c̶y̶-̶l̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶c̶e̶)̶ ̶

EDIT: ah no I'm being dense, you'd aggregate the union of all the set-columns indices across rows and the union of the set-row indices across the columns, keeping track of the source locations, and do the hashed sorting on those union vectors to find all the collision points. You could still get a small win I think by sorting the row-aggregation and column-aggregation separately though?
by avianlyric | 2025-09-11 16:59:32+00:00
> I mean, the risk was already socially acceptable

What society considers acceptable changes over time. Just because it was socially acceptable, doesn’t mean we continue to accept it forever. Don’t forget slavery, the idea of women as chattel, kings as having a god given right to rule etc etc were all “socially accepted” once upon a time. I doubt you would advocate for a return to medieval times on the basis that it was “socially accepted”.

> it has further been reduced as far as practicable.

This is obviously untrue. Car safety for drivers and pedestrians has continued to improve year-over-year (except in the U.S., where pedestrian safety has got worse). There’s no reason to believe the trend toward increased safety is suddenly going to halt now.

> I dont even know what point you are trying to make here. Seeing things a different way is not seeing things? Make it make sense.

Obviously, last I checked I spent my time looking out of the windscreen of my car when driving, not staring at a screen in the centre console. Being able to see everything by looking an out of a single window is always going to be better than having to swap between looking out the window, and looking down at a screen.
by Johnny555 | 2025-09-11 16:59:53+00:00
>...because it is doing far more hardening than iOS against these attacks. iPhones also have security element, but the companies developing attacks, had successfully bypassed secure element throttling from Apple for years (and are doing the same with Samsung and Qualcomm

Is it true that Pixels are more hardened against brute forcing the security module and that iphones (and other phones) are easily bypassesed by these hacking tools?
by BoorishBears | 2025-09-11 16:59:56+00:00
I've never heard of, or seen the tool, and I'm not particularly steeped in legacy software.

So I immediately got why this could be an example of "out of control UI/UX"... but immediately my eye was drawn to the bolded headings at the top of each section, and then the numbers next to them.

And so pretty much immediately after that it was clear how this worked: select the files I want to rename, checkboxes to select the transformations I want, and press the big Rename button when I'm ready.

Their redesign feels worse. Hiding the details of each transformation feels well intentioned, but it'd get very annoying having to open and close sections: never getting a full picture of the pipeline I'm putting together.

It also hides features I wouldn't expect to exist, like the Js renaming and translation.

I think if we hadn't let UI become implicit marketing and kept it highly HCI-driven we could have had the best of both worlds. But I guess the software industry decided we need new product releases to look different enough to warrant collecting more money, so we're deep down the current path.
by bigyabai | 2025-09-11 17:00:00+00:00
> why would you expect the US not to be the largest investor?

Mostly because $FAV_TECH_COMPANY constantly tells me they love privacy. They fight backdoors in court, they rush out security patches and closely coordinate with the government to ensure I'm safe. Every advertisement seems to reinforce the idea that they cared about my security, I guess I put too much faith in the principles of private enterprise.
by dadrian | 2025-09-11 17:00:20+00:00
This is an unserious article.

1) If you're counting investment, you should count it in dollars, not number of investors or corporate entity locations.

2) This is missing at least two extremely well-known CNE vendors, which makes me doubt its accuracy.

3) The takeaway from the graph on Mythical Beasts [1] should be that the industry is _very small_, not that it's very big.

4) Americans should be happy that the US government is the biggest player. Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player? Get a warrant -> own a phone is a very straightforward process that fits into existing models of civil liberties in the US.

[1]: https://mythicalbeasts.atlanticcouncil.org/
by nycdatasci | 2025-09-11 17:00:21+00:00
You can find a graph showing the relationships between investors and entities here: https://staging--atlantic-council-spyware.netlify.app/

The headline can't be taken at face value. "Largest" is based on the number of investing entities (including individuals), not something more objective like dollars invested. Also, the US is not making these decisions as the headline implies.
by superkuh | 2025-09-11 17:00:44+00:00
I hope it also means they've managed to do what no wayland compositor has managed in the past 15 years: have working accessibility (screen reader support, etc) that works with existing applications. Otherwise this is just another toy/demo distro.

And no, gnome's wayland compositor did not achieve it either. They threw away all accessibility support and then invented two new gnome-only protocols for it that no software except gnomes own compositor supports.
by ankit219 | 2025-09-11 17:00:54+00:00
there is clearly overhype. Given the influx of people building here (and i am not aware if it happened previously too), in a bid to differentiate from other startups building the same thing, many just stripped the nuance out of any technical idea, and made it a simple marketing term. As an exec where ten startups are promising you "training on your data" to provide the best chatbot, it's hard to tell the difference between who would be actually training and who would be just tweaking prompts. This has happened to other concepts too (anecdotally, most famous is how everyone is offering deep research). yes, it helps growth, but comes at the cost of trust. There is this startup which promised "experience based learning" when all they were doing is adding memory to the prompt to get it to perform better. (you can look it up, recenty raised series A).

This does not mean ideas are not working. I personally think pretraining has done its job. We did not know what the job previously was, but now we do given the way RL works. Pretraining and test time compute enables models to develop a generalized prior they can use to solve any given problem (much like how humans solve such problems). Sometimes priors are lacking so you need to train more using RLVR, and still early days, but directionally I think we have another scaling curve here.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-11 17:00:58+00:00
> If adults can't manage themselves with phones then down the road makes no difference

Adults today can’t manage. That’s a function of the people and context. Adults tomorrow might. Perhaps because we regulate it. Perhaps because they’re exposed to it more carefully.

> probably better to learn it when a parent can talk to him about these things rather than later in life when he is blowing his own money

None of this requires he have a smartphone at school.
by microtonal | 2025-09-11 17:01:20+00:00
I don't think it is laziness per se. It's a combination of having far too many models (just look at Samsung's line-up, more than ten models per year if we don't count all the F and W variants), using many different SoCs from different vendors (just taking Samsung again as an example, using Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Exynos, Mediatek Helio, Mediatek Dimensity, sometimes even a different chipset for the same phone model per region), each model supported for multiple years now on a monthly or quarterly update schedule (Samsung: recent A5x, Sxx, Sxx FE, Z Flip x, Z Flip 7 FE, Z fold x, Xcover x, etc. are on a monthly schedule). This across a multitude of kernel versions, AOSP versions (for older phones), OneUI versions (for phones that haven't been updated yet to the latest OneUI).

The must have literally over tens of different models to roll out security updates for, with many different SoCs and software versions to target.

And compared to other Android vendors, Samsung is actually pretty fast with updates.

It's true that other manufacturers have smaller line-ups, but they also tend to be smaller companies.

Compare that with Apple: every yearly phone uses the same SoC, only with variations in simpler things like CPU/GPU core counts.
by aurareturn | 2025-09-11 17:01:44+00:00
LLMs can be used to make software more robust and more secure. You can ask the very best LLM like o3 Pro, give it a lot of time, to look for potential security issues and bugs in the code. You can ask them to write extremely stringent unit tests.

And finally, humans should obviously review all the code in any critical system.
by 9rx | 2025-09-11 17:01:46+00:00
> youre talking about market value.

No. I am talking about price. Price measures what you are giving up to receive value.

> price is definitely set before the transaction takes place.

No. You're likely thinking of an offer. Offers are made before the transaction takes place. Offers are spoken of in terms of the price the seller (or buyer) hopes to see, but it is not yet set. Negotiation can still occur at this stage, as can rejection.

Vendors with a lot of traffic are able to gain a pretty good handle on what consumers are willing to pay, so often, for all intents and purposes, the first offer and price end up being equivalent. Perhaps that is what you are thinking of?

Regardless, CPI looks at what consumers are actually buying. No matter how you want to define price in some sort of vacuum, price with respect to CPI can only increase if the buyers are willing.
by ricksunny | 2025-09-11 17:01:47+00:00
Soviets also benefited a lot from German scientists pulled from post-WW2 Germany in their own version of a Paperclip-like program. Recommended reading: Forgotten Creators by Todd Rider. Free and online, over 4,000 pages including references and important appendices, so one has to navigate to the chapter / section of interest.

https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/
by cosmicgadget | 2025-09-11 17:02:20+00:00
> But I recognize that violence can sometimes become a necessity—which is why I say that people should forgo the use of violence unless all non-violent paths to resolve a conflict have either been exhausted or taken off the table.

This is admirable and works in a lot of situations. But exhausting nonviolent options can foreclose success and be abused by an opponent.
by spankalee | 2025-09-11 17:02:28+00:00
I'm curious... I'm not a database or AI engineer. The last time I did GPU work was over a decade ago. What is the point of the "saturate an H100" metric?

I would think that a GPU isn't just sitting there waiting on a process that's in turn waiting for one query to finish to start the next query, but that a bunch of parallel queries and scans would be running, fed from many DB and object store servers, keeping the GPUs as utilized as possible. Given how expensive GPUs are, it would seem like a good trade to buy more servers to keep them fed, even if you do want to make the servers and DB/object store reads faster.
by lolive | 2025-09-11 17:03:27+00:00
I am teaching asynchronous programming in typescript to junior developpers. And i find really tricky to tell them that async and await do MAJOR magic behind their back to make their code readable as synchronous code.

And then, I need to detail very precisely what "Promise.all()" (and "return") really mean in the context of async/await. Which is something that (I feel) could have been abstracted away during the async/await syntax definition, and make the full magic much more natural.
by snowwrestler | 2025-09-11 17:03:30+00:00
You don’t even need regional servers to do this.

I ran dozens of sites, some with significant traffic, off of 3 servers for years: a DB server, a web app server, and a server running Nginx and Varnish. All in a single data center.

Tuning the cache was a way better use of my time than trying to place copies in data centers overseas. A site has to be pretty darn fast to see a significant improvement from geographic dispersal alone. Most of the value people get from Cloudflare or Fastly is the caching, not geography.

But the downside of DIY is you have to do it yourself, including Linux sysadmin. Which is one reason we don’t do it that way anymore.
by philipallstar | 2025-09-11 17:03:37+00:00
> When you need to specify what kind of lineage a person carries people will commonly say a person is "african-american" or "native-american", but never say "european-american".

Well, as I say, Italian American is another one, and that's for white people. But more generally: these categories are (mostly) self-imposed (although I hear people who progressives would call "native American" actually call themselves "Indian"). African American is a substitute for "black", and driven by black Americans and progressives. It's a deliberate choice to enforce the label, just as it's a deliberate choice to have the n-word be, as they'd say, "our word". "people of color" is the same, although that's more an excluding category than an including one. This isn't coming from "systemic racism". It's coming from progressive academia, determined to re-divide America, and transitively everywhere else, in order to create some lovely social sciences problems to "solve".
by pxc | 2025-09-11 17:03:40+00:00
There was a school shooting on the same day as Kirk's death: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/students-wounded-shooti...

If he were still alive, he would be writing and speaking about how such violence is unfortunate but ultimately acceptable— even necessary— to "preserve our freedoms", brushing it aside to be forgotten. He of course did so many times in life, notably in 2023 when he was quoted doing so in the media:

https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-...

Kirk's death has already overshadowed the news of that school shooting, which will indeed be forgotten by most long before we stop talking about him.

One final victory for Charlie Kirk, I guess.
by leobg | 2025-09-11 17:04:17+00:00
What about book reading requires a large screen?

I find my phone much more comfortable to hold than a book. It fits my hand.

You only read one sentence at a time anyway. I rather scroll, keeping the current sentence in the middle of the screen than jump around with my eyes in an open book, and having to turn pages, or keeping them flat.

Am I missing something? (Real question. I read a lot!)
by jjk166 | 2025-09-11 17:04:50+00:00
> You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur."

These are one in the same. Economies of scale work because of specialization.

> Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more.

You didn't link to any specific study but that's the exact opposite of what the search results say [1]. The results suggesting that daycare has negative effects all seem to be from the Institute or Family Studies [2] which is a conservative think tank promoting traditional gender roles. If you have credible sources that state otherwise, please share them directly.

> Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on.

Yeah, you're gonna need a specific source for that claim.

[1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/children-youth/learning-deve...

[2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-o...
by dang | 2025-09-11 17:04:55+00:00
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. I'm not going to ban you for this right now because so many other accounts are doing that and worse in this thread, but I do want to let you know that it is a line at which we ban accounts - see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

The issue isn't just about one thread, it's about the overall pattern of using the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html