MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-25 20:52:49+00:00
> if you seriously think Apple was included in the old wiretaps but exempted from the new ones

Irrelevant to the inaccuracy of the statement “Apple is part of PRISM.” Present tense. (Emphasis mine.)

It’s important in these discussions to separate the nihilists who are convinced all is always lost from those who know what they’re talking about.
by tptacek | 2025-10-25 20:53:03+00:00
Again, implies there is such a thing as a "list of CTO responsibilities". Companies can decide to give their CTO x or y portfolio, but by the time a company reaches the point where titles matter, it's hard to think of an intrinsically "CTO" responsibility that isn't covered by a VP/E or VP/PM. The one thing I can think of is "organization-wide architecture oversight", which is a pretty toxic role to assign.

In orgs where the CTO does a bunch of stuff, I think it usually makes more sense to think of them as a VP/E with a different-shaped hat (or a VP/PM).

There's definitely an interesting article to write about the VP/E who still codes!
by throwaway290 | 2025-10-25 20:53:25+00:00
Totally I edited it to say that first.

Also, it feels like that guy is defensive and feeling butthurt. So op can try pretend he's awesome and give him all the difficult tasks to prove. If he fails you know what to do. If he is good then less work for you.

As the lead you don't need to be always the rockstar, the coolest managers are the ones create chance for teammates to be rockstars.

(I had bad leads where it just felt like what is the point for me existing here as a code monkey if this guy sorted it all. Tho I would never sabotage it. I just quit;))
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-25 20:53:57+00:00
In a major US city? More a coping mechanism.

I was caught up in an evacuation situation on Hilton Head Island where a hurricane turned unexpectedly and the island was evacuated. We were literally packing up to leave for our scheduled departure, so we were close to the front.

Within 15 minutes, the roads were bonkers. Gas stations were out of gas within an hour, and the traffic was beyond insane took about 3-4 hours to get out.

This was in the Fall in a well connected vacation town, not even peak season. People were not panicking. The police and fire departments were present, prepared and professional.

If it were an initial war scenario, maybe 5% of people would get out, and once electricity was disrupted, the whole thing would immediately freeze.

The Swiss/Finn model is the only credible one and addresses only certain threats. They’re looking at protecting against fallout and conventional bombardment. All of the old US civil defense plans were designed around the notion of Russian bombers attacking US cities with atomic bombs, and said bombers getting intercepted by nuclear SAMs and nuclear air to air rockets. NYC, for example, was ringed with Nike batteries so in a war scenario you’d be looking at fallout (even if every bogey was intercepted) and and a disrupted power grid. It went to the wayside once the Soviets deployed ICBMs and hydrogen bombs.
by fjfaase | 2025-10-25 20:54:25+00:00
Kaem is a very minimal shell, a program that can set environment variables and start other programs using Linux system calls.

To compile GNU Mes compiler you need a minimal C compiler. Half of the steps in stage0 consist of building that minimal C compiler through a number of steps starting with a very minimal assembler. I am working on an approach that use far less steps and is easier to review than the hunderds of files that are used now.
by mholt | 2025-10-25 20:54:28+00:00
I remember learning about Asimo in grade school. It felt like the future! Robots would be assisting me in daily life when I grew up.

Then like the space shuttle, it just disappeared. I feel like there was Asimo.... and then nothing for decades until now.

Sure I can have a robot do my dishes, but it's still more efficient to just use a dishwasher appliance.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-25 20:56:02+00:00
We've certainly come a long way from Asimo to robots like Boston Dynamic's Atlas doing parkour and backflips, but Asimo was SOTA when it came out - back in the day I took a trip from NJ to Philly to see him being demonstrated at the science museum there, doing things like jogging in a circle or climbing up a set of steps.

Now that the motion part of robotics is pretty much solved, we need grippers and sensors - still being worked on - then enough of a brain to be easily taught new skills and be able to perform them reliably in real-world conditions.

I know I'm going to be downvoted for this, but I have to say that Teslabot shuffling along with what appears to be clenched butt cheeks looks more Asimo era in terms of dynamics than SOTA. It's not even clear if it has dynamic balance or depends on keeping center of mass over its feet.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-10-25 20:56:16+00:00
I would like to have something like this if it helped me with e.g. shin splints, or similar, because I really love running, but I tend to overdo it and I don't have any other options than asphalt to run on. Not sure if this one would be good for shin splits though. I guess this could potentially just be a fun thing to run a bit faster, but that alone wouldn't be worth it for me. But if it allowed me to balance where the strain goes, then yeah.
by herval | 2025-10-25 20:57:27+00:00
I worked with plenty of founders like this - they carry a C level title, but never stop being just an engineer or sales guy or designer.

That’s all fine when you have no employees - C titles are bullshit when it’s just two bros in a dorm - but it invariably hurts the company prospects as the team grows.

The common hack is hiring a “VP of Eng” to take care of the actual C-level work.

Mind you, there’s absolutely nothing wrong in wanting to be the guy who sits in a corner and codes. Just don’t call it “leadership” or “chief” anything, since you’re sitting in a role and not acting the part.
by peter422 | 2025-10-25 20:58:19+00:00
The only title that a founder can have that matters more than "founder" is a CEO.

He calls himself a CTO, and that's fine, but he's really just a technical cofounder, and that's what he's acting like (and it sounds like it's a very positive thing for the company).

The CTO title and the whole point of the article are not really relevant, this entire situation would not be possible if he weren't a co-founder.

I think it is a good lesson that founders shouldn't necessarily be pigeon holed into roles they don't want, but the CTO title really has nothing to do with it.
by Reason077 | 2025-10-25 20:59:01+00:00
> ”Are you looking a at a heat pump heater? If so, how much of its energy would be pulling heat from the house that needs to be replaced by the home's heating supply anyway?”

Heat pump water heaters pull heat from the outside. Usually with a split outdoor unit, just like normal A/C and heat pump systems.

I’ve also seen models where the entire system (integrated storage cylinder for the heated water) is installed outdoors, but those are presumably meant for more mild climates.

In any case, they certainly don’t pull heat from inside the house.
by questionableans | 2025-10-25 20:59:07+00:00
If it’s important and it’s not getting done, yes.

Let’s take aligning divs.

What’s the real problem here? The front end looks really bad and it’s causing us to lose potential customers.

Why is that? Maybe we have a shortage of frontend devs. Maybe the frontend code is a mess and people are just hacking in small changes here and there to minimize the time they spend with it. (Maybe both.)

What do you do about it? Fix the alignment now to stop the bleeding. Through that exercise, understand what’s wrong with the front end architecture, get engineering buy-in on an easier approach, and train devs and/or refactor code (efficiently, prioritizing and allocating effort commensurate with the problem), pairing with some devs who have been suffering from the pain and are interested in finally being able to fix it. Advise management on whether we’ll need more frontend talent even after we fix the alignment issue. If so, suggest who might be a good candidate to transition to more frontend work, or else work with sales to lobby for hiring more front end devs even though we have zero headcount budget.

That’s principal level aligning divs.
by mh- | 2025-10-25 20:59:28+00:00
That is very different to my experience using it on the ship we were on. I was able to stream TV shows in full quality with no issues, took phone calls from work a few times over WiFi too.

I have never used Starlink otherwise and, frankly, expected much worse service - especially on a cruise ship.

I'd definitely be unhappy paying $50/day for what you described. But I paid less (there was a discount for buying a package ahead of time for my family's devices) and got better service it sounds like.
by tptacek | 2025-10-25 21:00:38+00:00
This does not apply at my current company, where the CTO has their title as an artifact of how the founding team was structured, but if I was founder/early at a company, progressed to a senior role, and then was told that I should take a role where I "set engineering strategy", I would immediately conclude that I was being managed out. "Strategy", in particular, is the kiss of death.
by hinkley | 2025-10-25 21:00:52+00:00
Brooks' idea is that the surgeon calls all the shots and everyone else is being orchestrated by that one person. There is only one person holding a knife at any point and that's generally the surgeon.

How many people are there besides the surgeon? About six? That's pretty much all one person can wrangle.

That's not enough for a large scale software project. We keep trying to make it work with Scrum teams but it is broken and we know it.

Most of the highest functioning projects I've been on have had a couple of 'surgeons'. And while they often work on separate 'patients', it's not always the case.

Aren't there some surgeries now where more than one surgeon is operating concurrently? All I can find is that there's an Insurance Code for it.
by cricalix | 2025-10-25 21:02:17+00:00
"FTP is dead" - shared web hosting would like a word. Quite a few web hosts still talk about using FTP to upload websites to the hosting server. Yes, these days you can upload SSH keys and possibly use SFTP, but the docs still talk about tools like FileZilla and basic FTP.

Exhibit A: https://help.ovhcloud.com/csm/en-ie-web-hosting-ftp-storage-...
by thegrim33 | 2025-10-25 21:03:26+00:00
For many years I used the stock Android alarm clock and couldn't believe how it was designed.

When the alarm goes off in the morning, I'm half asleep still, my eyes are blurry, and when I look at the phone to snooze the alarm, it has two tiny, tiny, like 15x15 pixel buttons with random icons, no text, on both sides of the screen - one button disables the alarm and the other snoozes.

There's no way in that tired, near blind, state that I could tell or process what I was looking at and would effectively end up just pressing a random button and hoping I remembered by instinct which one was snooze. It really felt like no one had ever actually used/tested the alarm.

In a recent OS update they changed it so that now it has two, much bigger buttons, which clearly state "SNOOZE" and "STOP", they finally changed it, but for all those years it was just atrocious.
by khuey | 2025-10-25 21:04:06+00:00
> There were a few summers leading up to that where all of the major metro areas shared concurrent record high heat days, and sometimes coincided with poor air quality from wildfires (meaning more people closed their windows and ran AC even if they wouldn't have otherwise.)

This is underselling it, if anything. The multi-day heatwave around Labor Day 2022 extended across most of the western US, not just California. The electricity demand during that event set what was at the time the all time record for the entire Western Interconnection (since surpassed in 2024) and set what is still today the all time record for CAISO.
by foxglacier | 2025-10-25 21:04:43+00:00
If nobody's reading them and nobody's writing them, then perhaps it doesn't matter. We could let Wikipedia-Greenlandic persist as its own evolved language that forks from the original.

> potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them.

OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use whatever languages are appropriate to them and we don't need to maintain them forever.
by jader201 | 2025-10-25 21:05:03+00:00
> on the other hand, here I am posting HN comments instead of doing something productive

I feel like there are worst ways to spend time on devices than reading/responding to HN.

I know it can be addicting/a distraction, too, and I try to limit my time with it.

But I don’t feel that the highs and lows are near as bad here vs. other forms of social media & content consumption.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-25 21:05:07+00:00
> We have a few servers in the UK, but they can be migrated on short notice.

You should do that as soon as possible. You don't escape past "violations" by dealing with them when they are discovered. Plus the presence of servers in the UK is easily enough for Ofcom to go after you, even if they ultimately lose their case. There's no benefit to keeping those UK servers.

> we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us.

> keeping internal estimates of our UK user base

The fact that you know you have UK users is also almost certainly enough for Ofcom to go after you. Did 4chan have any stronger links to the UK? I don't think so.

I'm not saying they should give in and follow the OSA but I think they're being pretty naive about how reasonable Ofcom is.
by japhyr | 2025-10-25 21:05:20+00:00
We had a largish cooler for fishing. I ended up putting a towel in the bottom of the cooler to absorb vibrations, closed the lid over the power cord. I checked the temperature a bunch at first to check for overheating, but it wasn't an issue.

We didn't keep at it long, but that kept the noise from being an issue. It was a slow, messy process and we were too busy to pay attention to it over long periods of time.
by YZF | 2025-10-25 21:05:29+00:00
In my view the abstraction layer should be in the domain of the application.

Let's say your software is HR software and you can add and remove employees. The abstraction is "Add an employee with these details". The data model should be completely independent of the abstraction. I.e. nobody should care how the model is implemented (even if in practice it's maybe some relational model that's more or less standard). Similarly for querying employees. Queries should not be generic, they should be driven by your application use cases, and presumably the underlying implementation and data model is optimized for those as well.

But I get it the GQL can be that thing in a more generic schema-driven thing. It still feels like a layer where you can inadvertently create the wrong contract. Especially if, as I think the case is, that different teams control the schema and the underlying models/implementation. So what it seems to be saving teams/developers is needing to spell out the exact requirements/implementation details of the API. But don't you want to do that?

How do people end up use GQL in practice? what is the layer below GQL? Is it actually a SQL database?
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-25 21:06:28+00:00
It's HTTP, of course there's an extension for that?

Sabre-DAV's implementation seems to be relatively well implemented. It's supported in webdavfs for example. Here's some example headers one might attach to a PATCH request:

X-Update-Range: append X-Update-Range: bytes=3-6 X-Update-Range: bytes=4- X-Update-Range: bytes=-2

https://sabre.io/dav/http-patch/ https://github.com/miquels/webdavfsl

Another example is this expired draft. I don't love it, but it uses PATCH+Content-Range. There's some other neat ideas in here, and shows the versatility & open possibility (even if I don't love re-using this header this way). https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-wright-http-patch-byte...

Apache has has a PUT with Content-Range, https://github.com/miquels/webdav-handler-rs/blob/master/doc...

Great write-up in rclone on trying to support partial updates, https://forum.rclone.org/t/support-putstream-for-webdav-serv...

It would be great to see a proper extension formalized here! But there are options.
by arjie | 2025-10-25 21:07:11+00:00
I'm a huge fan of "slightly better walking/running" kind of tech. Unfortunately, current technology lends itself to devices that are slightly too heavy. I have a pair of Shift Moonwalkers[0] that I was hoping would fulfill that role.

A motorcycle accident interrupted my fitness program and it took quite a lot of work to get back to where I am. During that period there were many times when I was (minorly) injured repeatedly since all my muscles were just not strong enough to do things and I wasn't disciplined about them.

I picked up some persistent tendinitis that is just healing with some physiotherapy. Things like this aren't terribly limiting in life but the primary problem is that a lot of the stuff you have to do is rest the appropriate body part! And to rest it, you need to not do things. I don't want to not do things. I want to do things while resting the appropriate part of my body.

And I bet as I get older, all this stuff will catch up. So anything that will extend mobility to my elderly years (still far away) is great. If I do the right things, my body will function well into my 80s and if the tech is there hopefully I'll walk around with my grandkids. All in all, I'm hoping that material science in batteries, motors, and frames and product design all do a big leap in this in the next 40 years. The market is likely there with our aging population.

0: Here's an example of me using them after I got used to them https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qc5PKbJ3tq4
by ratrocket | 2025-10-25 21:07:22+00:00
On digital ocean (at least) you can upload your own images and boot droplets directly from them.

In the past I've used a script called "alpine-make-vm-image" to run alpine images in digital ocean.

https://github.com/alpinelinux/alpine-make-vm-image

(Maybe that script does some magic to make booting a droplet directly from the image possible. On that I plead ignorance :)
by goononymous | 2025-10-25 21:07:49+00:00
Which is more indicative of psychological damage, really?

Enjoying sexual pleasure and comfort in a world otherwise not providing you any, or trying to live in supposedly "stable and robust mental health", defined as "being a father, small-business owner, being a dependable man in a hat riding slow commuter trains" with "mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawncare" "at doctor’s appointments and children’s piano recitals", when none of these things are attainable, or even desirable?

Is this lifestyle really a matter of being "psychically defenseless" or simply facing the reality of being ignored, unneeded and unwanted, living in a world that has never attended to, accepted, appreciated, encouraged or loved your self and its sexuality, ever, or like you always needed in your soul?

A world in which some gloat at their sexual power and freedom of choice, treating you like an option? It's love and war then. "I won't be your first choice? Then you will never be mine, or my millionth." It's a cold war of sexual status and insecurity, of the sacred and profane, of different upbringings and moral convictions, of regret and expectations. The plain brutality of sexual selection.

> Certain social systems had failed

"The child who is not embraced by the village will goon on its own to feel its warmth"

And now the village of late empathizers and never-loners lately realizes that they, too, might burn in the (goon)fuel. What they don't see are unaccounted and unforgiven (or unforgivable) deeds and insufferable realities of unfulfilled or unrequited love, which for some are deadly.
by Ostatnigrosh | 2025-10-25 21:07:50+00:00
I'd probably agree with most in the comment section. Comparing Rust & Zig is not productive. I spent the last month familiarizing myself with Zig after having done a 2 years stint with Rust and Zig is a much younger language with a far smaller ecosystem to work with. If I were to reach for C i'd recommend Zig. If I were reaching for C++ then it would be Rust.

Both are fantastic languages and I hope to see them both evolve in years to come. Zig has a longer road ahead but it really is elegant and simple to work with.
by dang | 2025-10-25 21:07:56+00:00
[stub for offtopicness]

(as gus_massa pointed out, it's a no-no on HN to do voting rings or have booster comments - this is in both the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and the FAQ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

but we do know that in many cases it's unintentional)
by righthand | 2025-10-25 21:08:10+00:00
This is all made up, unless you have studies and statistics to back this up, then the “theory” is not a theory, it’s a lie.

Pfizer never claimed to end covid, they were just the first one to make a vaccine. Do you remember there were 3 vaccines available and Pfizer was first to market?

The only public fool here is the one making false claims.
by commandersaki | 2025-10-25 21:08:55+00:00
MIE eliminates a whole class of bugs (memory corruption) and has demonstrated that it stops full chains but also renders them unusable if parts get swapped out.

See: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...

And some interesting excerpts:

Both approaches revealed the same conclusion: Memory Integrity Enforcement vastly reduces the exploitation strategies available to attackers. Though memory corruption bugs are usually interchangeable, MIE cut off so many exploit steps at a fundamental level that it was not possible to restore the chains by swapping in new bugs. Even with substantial effort, we could not rebuild any of these chains to work around MIE. The few memory corruption effects that remained are unreliable and don’t give attackers sufficient momentum to successfully exploit these bugs.

Notably, attackers confront Memory Integrity Enforcement early in the exploitation process. Although some issues are able to survive MIE — for example, intra-allocation buffer overflows — such issues are extremely rare, and even fewer will lend themselves to a full end-to-end exploit. Inevitably, attackers must face MIE at a stage where their capabilities are still very limited, leaving few viable avenues for exploitation. This leads to fragile chains where breaking just one step is often enough to invalidate the entire exploit strategy. When that happens, most of the chain’s components can’t be reused, and the attackers have to restart exploit development with entirely new bugs.
by javierhonduco | 2025-10-25 21:09:46+00:00
I am incredibly happy that Apple has added MTE support to the latest iPhones and perhaps the M5 chips as well (?). If that’s the case I don’t think any other personal computers have anything close to Apple machines in terms of memory safety and related topics (Secure Enclave etc).

Hope other vendors will ship MTE in their laptop and desktop chips soon enough. While I’m very positive about x86_64 adding support for this (ChkTag), it’ll definitely take a while…

In my opinion a worthwhile enough reason to upgrade but feels like a waste given my current devices work great.
by pas | 2025-10-25 21:10:22+00:00
WSGI is just the protocol for web request handling (like CGI, fast CGI), some implementations utilized subinterpreter support through the C API (which existed in its basic form since Python 1.5 according to PEP 554 or since 2.2 according to the current docs)

but before 3.12 the isolation was not great (and still there are basic process-level things that cannot be non-shared per interpreter)

https://docs.python.org/3/library/concurrent.interpreters.ht...