MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I report Discord (CDN) distributing malware?
by Benjamin_Dobell | 2025-10-23 16:09:02+00:00
An acquaintance of mine had their Discord account compromised. The compromised account struck up a conversation with me and requested I provide feedback on their new game.

The acquaintance does work in tech/gaming, so the conversation was at least somewhat feasible, but the request was odd and the website was obviously dubious. I've since reached out to the acquaintance who has confirmed their account was compromised.

DISCLAIMER: Do NOT run the executable available from the malware distribution website.

> https://[c][a][k][e][b][l][i][d][e].com/

Yes, I've obfuscated the link somewhat. I don't want any accidents.

What's particularly interesting here though is that Discord's infrastructure is being used to distribute malware OUTSIDE Discord. The website has a link to Discord's CDN, where the malware is hosted. In addition to this, due to the incompetence of the hackers, I was also able to discern they're operating out of Guild ID: 836403789183451196.

Anyway, I wanted to report this scam to Discord. In app there's no suitable way to report this. I can report my acquaintances account, but not the malware distribution. So I opened a technical support issue against the Guild ID on Discord's support website. There's no sane options to report this, but I did my best.

However, unsurprisingly, in typical brain-dead tech support fashion, the issue was closed and I was told to report the issue in app.

Anyone have any ideas on how this can actually be reported to Discord?
by lyu07282 | 2025-10-23 16:09:04+00:00
The way modern tokenizers are constructed is by iteratively doing frequency analysis of arbitrary length sequences using a large corpus. So what you suggested is already the norm, tokens aren't n-grams. Words and any sequence really that is common enough will already be one token only, the less frequent a sequence is the more tokens it needs. That's the Byte-pair encoding algorithm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-pair_encoding

It's also not lossy compression at all, it's lossless compression if anything, unlike what some people have claimed here.

Shocking comments here, what happened to HN? People are so clueless it reads like reddit wtf
by sharemywin | 2025-10-23 16:09:06+00:00
if you've ever shopped at Giant Eagle instead of Kroger you'll understand the flaw in the logic.

higher prices usually equals better service, less busy shopping. get in and get out.

so if your time is worth more than your money you aren't sensitive to price at the widget scale. most widgets are bundled with some kind of service.

I bought some printing and it was super cheap but no service not an email not a phone number nothing. not ordering from their again.
by tzs | 2025-10-23 16:09:21+00:00
Take a look at Extra too. You may find that it actually isn't much harder than General.

The Extra exam is 50 multiple choice questions broken down by category as follows:

6 Commission Rules 5 Operating Procedures 3 Radio Wave Propagation 5 Amateur Practices 4 Electrical Principles 6 Circuit Components 6 Practical Circuits 3 Signals and Emissions 8 Antennas and Transmission Lines 4 Safety

You need to get 37+ correct to pass. Another way to think of that is you can get up to 13 wrong and still pass.

Within each category there are subcategories. "Antennas and Transmission Lines" for example has 8 subcategories. The 8 questions in "Antennas and Transmission Lines" are one from each of those subcategories. The question pools for these subcategories each have 10-14 questions.

If you compare to the closest corresponding categories/subcategories from the General and Technician exam you'll probably find that there are a few cases.

1. The Extra is just more of the same. It's not harder per se. "Commission Rules" for example.

2. The Extra goes goes deeper and also adds new material that is more advanced.

3. The Extra is in new territory.

If you get to the point where the Technician and General are going to no problem, then you will probably have no trouble getting to the point where case #1 is also no problem, and case #2 is also well in hand. It is #3 where you might have trouble.

But remember that you can get 13 wrong and still pass!

Pick say 10 subcategories that are in case #3 that look like they would be the hardest to get good at and just write them off.

For example in "Antennas and Transmission Lines" you might decide that the "Smith chart" subcategory, which has a pool of 14 questions, would take a lot of time to get good at. So skip it. That's 14 less potential questions you have to be prepared to answer, leaving more time to study for things in class #2 and the class #3 things that look most doable.

It doesn't cost extra to take the Extra test at the same session that you take the Technician and General tests, and there is no penalty for failing, so might as well go for it.
by parineum | 2025-10-23 16:09:48+00:00
The actual support that matters is people's approval of the people they can vote for, ie, their own senators and congresspeople, which people (unsurprisingly, since they were elected) have a positive approval rating of.

> By more than two-to-one (56% to 26%), Americans say their local elected officials are doing a good job.[0]

Executive power is unchecked because people approve of their representatives not checking executive power (when it's their executive in power).

You can certainly argue that it's a matter of scale and "this time it's different" but it's always different and executive overreach is ever increasing. Trump is setting expectations for the next president, no matter which party they come from.

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-american...
by immibis | 2025-10-23 16:10:02+00:00
I'm permanently banned from the Play Store because 10+ years ago I made a third-party Omegle client, called it Yo-megle (neither Omegle nor Yo-megle still exist now), got a bunch of downloads and good ratings, then about 2 years later got a message from Google saying I was banned for violating trademark law. No actual legal action, just a message from Google. I suppose I'm lucky they didn't delete my entire Google account.
by syncsynchalt | 2025-10-23 16:10:07+00:00
One of my big problems with ASN.1 (and its encodings) is how _crusty_ it is.

You need to populate a string? First look up whether it's a UTF8String, NumericString, PrintableString, TeletexString, VideotexString, IA5String, GraphicString, VisibleString, GeneralString, UniversalString, CHARACTER STRING, or BMPString. I'll note that three of those types have "Universal" / "General" in their name, and several more imply it.

How about a timestamp? Well, do you mean a TIME, UTCTime, GeneralizedTime, or DATE-TIME? Don't be fooled, all those types describe both a date _and_ time, if you just want a time then that's TIME-OF-DAY.

It's understandable how a standard with teletex roots got to this point but doesn't lead to good implementations when there is that much surface area to cover.
by Joker_vD | 2025-10-23 16:10:27+00:00
Yeah, you can do all of that. But normally, you can (in fact, have to) chose a much more pragmatic computing substrate instead of graph-rewriting, so unless you're trying to poke at the theoretical limits of what is computability, it's mostly a party trick, and not even a very amusing one unless you attend a very peculiar kind of party.

And also; numbers. I would be impressed if you at least used two-complement integers, and decently effective destructors for your data structures.
by pizlonator | 2025-10-23 16:10:32+00:00
> It had an immutable IR and literally every one of the dozens of passes made basically an entire copy of it.

Yeah, this is what CPS is really all about. It's not like SSA at all.

Also, it's just a dumb way to write a compiler, and so nobody does that to themselves anymore, now that SSA is widely known.

The goofy "hot" takes about how CPS and SSA are the same are usually written by CPS apologists who want to make the rest of us believe that their work on CPS is somehow relevant when it really isn't
by georgemcbay | 2025-10-23 16:10:35+00:00
> we are making our own permanent oligarchy.

Attempting to, and might get away with it for a while.

But I suspect next time there is an inevitable "equal but opposite reaction" the guillotine plans will be optimized using LLMs with shared open sourced designs.

(And in the current political environment, I think I should clarify this isn't me threatening violence -- I don't want violence. It is me recognizing that history "rhymes" while the rhyming patterns tend to happen on a faster and faster pace)
by duped | 2025-10-23 16:10:55+00:00
The ABI isn't covered by C++ standards, it's target and architecture dependent. For the purposes of this discussion that ABI is stable for C++ vtables on the targets and architectures that VST3 supports.

If a compiler and linker don't follow those ABIs then it would also be close to useless for compiling or linking against shared libraries. So in the wild, all useful compilers do target the same ABIs.

gcc in mingw on windows is the odd duck, but most production software does not support it anyway.
by abdurrahman9955 | 2025-10-23 16:11:04+00:00
I’m the founder and builder of this platform. I created it after realizing how many startups fail because they lack the right tools and guidance to validate their ideas, research their markets, and build smart strategies.

Our mission is simple — help founders succeed where most fail. With AI-powered validation, in-depth research, and performance tracking for everything from marketing to product and cost, our platform acts as your operating system for startup success.

I’d love your feedback and thoughts! How do you currently validate or track progress for your startup?

Thanks for checking it out and supporting the launch.
by galangalalgol | 2025-10-23 16:11:17+00:00
The difference is that uneven enforcement is the tool of autocrats. Ignoring the law breeds contempt for it. Madison said requiring a supermajority for normal legislation would poison democracy, and I think the modern usage filibuster has proven him correct. I hope the GOP ditches the whole thing, not just for continuing resolutions. The senate will no longer have any excuses for abdicating its responsibilities. Thrashing laws are a small price to pay. I do wish judicial appointments still required a supermajority.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-23 16:11:24+00:00
Entitlements and interest on the debt itself make up the majority of spending.

Most corporations don't make extraordinary profits. They make enough to stay in business, and if you tax them too heavily they will either raise prices or just close. So higher corporate taxes will ultimately depress business and be paid for by the consumer.

A few corporations certainly do make a lot of profit, and various "windfall profit" or "excess profit" taxes have been tried, but that's more about politicians trying to earn favor than anything that makes a practical difference.

Spending is the thing that's out of control, so that's where the problem must be attacked.
by yieldcrv | 2025-10-23 16:11:30+00:00
anyone who is the bearer of a US Treasury bond that hasn't reached maturity

so if you have any investments even in your 401k, or hold any ETFs, much of it is invested in those

holders are individuals domestic and worldwide, retirement plans, foreign governments, banks, central banks like the Federal Reserve

the US government slowly pays people back with revenue and other people's money via newly issued bonds, over time, and does it very reliably, so people keep buying. The US government's revenue comes mostly from tax collection, followed and a few other sources, some private sector ownership in recent decades, and it pays the interest on all of the active bonds.
by dakial1 | 2025-10-23 16:11:40+00:00
The main difference here is that Trump is satisfied with the narrative/appearance of winning, and not really winning. There is no 4D chess on his side other than appear tough and a winner.

China is in it for the long run, they have a strategy and the poorly thought and planned actions of Trump have opened the world to China, so these 3 next years might be the definitive moment when China becomes the de-facto leader of the world.

I imagine that the nail in the coffin would be China managing to get the Yuan as the international currency to trade with its partners.
Show HN: An offline self-organising journal for work logging [OpenSrc]
by vermaabhishek39 | 2025-10-23 16:11:44+00:00
I'm making a completely offline, minimal, self-organizing journal (using lightweight, self-learning local AI models). That feels just like texting yourself.

Motivation: To avoid the organizational overhead (e.g., what page to use, where to place something), I'd often just text/slack the logs/notes to myself. However, this made it difficult to find the information later.

Idea: A simple text box. You can throw any information into it, and the app will make sense of it so you can find and use it later.

Offline and open-source: Because I wouldn't trust my work logs in anyone else's hands.

It's also extremely minimal on the surface. But when required, it has powerful features built in.

Happy to hear your feedback!
by jandrese | 2025-10-23 16:11:54+00:00
I suspect that is correct. There just isn't that much available energy to recover in most bike stops. The point about brake pad wear however is more relevant than you might expect. Bike brakes can be surprisingly expensive and on my e-bike I went through a full set in only 700 miles.

Of course there is the minor problem that the hub was mounted in the rear wheel so it's only good for gentle to moderate braking, but thankfully that is the vast majority of what you do.
by bradfa | 2025-10-23 16:12:05+00:00
In fiscal 2024 the US federal government brought in revenues of $4.9T and spent $6.8T (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185). Of that $6.8T, mandatory spending accounted for $4.1T (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61182). Mandatory spending is automatic, the laws are already in place and the money is spent based on the situation and natural demand.

Of the $2.7T of not-mandatory spending, $0.9T was servicing existing debt. Of the remaining $1.8T of actual spending, defense accounted for $0.85T. The final remaining $0.96T is what's actually voted on in any budget, which is about 15% of all government spending (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61184).
by kkukshtel | 2025-10-23 16:12:13+00:00
I've thought about this a lot, and it comes down ultimately to context size. Programming languages themselves are sort of a "compression technique" for assembly code. Current models even at the high end (1M context windows) do not have near enough workable context to be effective at writing even trivial programs in binary or assembly. For simple instructions sure, but for now the compression of languages (or DSLs) is a context efficiency.
by roywiggins | 2025-10-23 16:12:15+00:00
The first Starlink constellations didn't have inter-satellite links at all:

https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/

Also, people in Europe don't want to have to take a round trip to space via America just to pull up IKEA's website hosted next door. That's a lot of pointless latency when you could bounce it down to a nearby ground station instead.
by SrslyJosh | 2025-10-23 16:12:36+00:00
> An October 2024 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime described the use of Starlink in fraud operations. About 80 “Starlink satellite dishes linked to cyber-enabled fraud operations” were seized between April and June 2024 in Myanmar and Thailand, the report said. Starlink is prohibited in both countries.

They knew about it over a year ago.

From a Wired article ("Elon Musk’s Starlink Is Keeping Modern Slavery Compounds Online"):

> Starlink connections appeared to be helping criminals at Tai Chang to “scam Americans” and “fuel their internet needs,” West alleged at the end of July 2024. She offered to share more information to help the company in “disrupting the work of bad actors.” > SpaceX and Starlink never replied, West claims.

The whole article is worth a read.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-23 16:12:41+00:00
More specifically, Congress, which doesn't always align with the Executive. Congress largely sets the spending (or not) agenda. The Executive can ask nicely but Congress mostly does what it does.

Outside of retirees, much of the social safety net is funded at the State level. There is a wide variance in the benefits and quality of the social safety net across States.
by judahmeek | 2025-10-23 16:12:43+00:00
China doesn't have a strong internal economy. They probably have a lot of saving that might be able to be translated into an internal economy, but they seem to have a cultural leaning towards frugalness: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/business/china-economy-co...

China has a massive energy & manufacturing base, which can easily translate into military power, but until they decide to transform into a war economy, they need trading partners to keep their citizens employed, which is already a struggle for their young adults who I guess don't want to work in factories.
by wppick | 2025-10-23 16:13:10+00:00
Also upwards accumulation of wealth can sometimes mean less tax revenue. Middle class salary workers pay a lot of tax, so with more upwards accumulation of wealth (maybe accelerating due to AI) then what will happen to tax revenue? People getting laid off don't pay tax, and shifting that money to corporate, tax havens, and cap gains types of taxes will probably end up lower overall
by EvgeniyZh | 2025-10-23 16:13:16+00:00
> fidelity [across all qubits involved in the circuit]

I don't see a scenario in which the fidelity of 2QG between two far away qubits matter. Stress tests should be somehow related to the real tasks the system is intended to solve.

In case of quantum computers, the tasks are either NISQ circuits or fault-tolerant computation, and in both cases you can run them just fine without applying 2QG between far-away qubits that translate in large amount of swaps.

If you're interested in applying Haar-random unitaries, then surely QV is an amazing metric, and then systems with all-to-all connectivity is your best shot (coincidentally, Quantiniuum keeps publishing their quantum volume results). It's just not that interesting of a task.
by jimmar | 2025-10-23 16:13:41+00:00
U.S. government debt is the safest investment you can make today. If you "write if off" by simply telling debt holders you won't pay them, you'd make U.S. government debt the most unsafe investment possible. Nobody would ever buy U.S. government debt. That, and peoples' pensions and other retirement accounts that hold U.S. government debt would be hammered.
by dredmorbius | 2025-10-23 16:14:35+00:00
Answering this and other similar arguments/observations, and for the benefit of those unable to read TFA:

To answer one potential criticism, it's true that in some sense, blocking and so on for social reasons is not good and is in some theoretical sense arguably harmful for the overall web ecology. On the other hand, the current unchecked situation itself is also deeply harmful for the overall web ecology and it's only going to get worse if we do nothing, with more and more things effectively driven off the open web. We only get to pick the poison here.

(From TFA.)
by notmyjob | 2025-10-23 16:14:35+00:00
Well, I think just very rough numbers Biden added about 7 trillion, which was about the same as Trump 1, driven of course by the pandemic. I think we’re headed for another 6 or 7 trillion under Trump 2, give or take tariffs and whether we can Art of The Deal our way with Xi’s communist empire and enter some new era of AI driven prosperity. So if the total debt is, rough numbers, about 40 trillion, then the past 3 admins account for a substantial fraction 15-20 trillion, tough numbers, given that the economy has been objectively strong since Obama’s second term. We should have decreased to debt in those years of strength, aside from the short few months of the pandemic when vaccines were needed and temporary lockdowns had to be subsidized.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-23 16:14:36+00:00
> Plus I rebase a lot

Exactly, me too. Things like `absorb` I'll take, but I don't want jj's opinionated approach to version control. And not only do I not want it for _me_, but I also don't want it for newbies because hiding too much of the underlying design, design issues, etc., seems counterproductive to me.
by BizarroLand | 2025-10-23 16:15:00+00:00
I was just thinking about this. Costco either loses money on or just barely breaks even on their hotdogs, but they keep selling them at $1.50. It's a part of their brand.

It would be smarter for them to raise the price of their membership another $10/yr to offset the losses than it would to raise the price of their hot dogs another $0.50 to make them profitable.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-10-23 16:15:08+00:00
> Obama and Biden ran gigantic budget deficits

If you actually look at the deficit year by year, Obama and Biden each entered office with a huge economic crisis that ballooned the deficit, and then lowered it year by year. I mean, it was highest under Trump.

And if you look at Bush and Trump, they started with a lower deficit and raised it year by year.

If your marker is a "budget surplus", nobody does that. The only people that get close are Democrats because they literally reduce spending. And then a Republican takes office, bangs on about the deficit so they can slash social programs, but spends even more than they slashed on military. This is not hidden information.

I don't care that much about the deficit, it's not the cause of our most immediate problems. It's just something both parties bring up when convenient.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-23 16:15:18+00:00
Ah. The url, so I can substitute one difficult-for-human-readability with another difficult-for-human-readability, both of which are excessively long and opaque-by-design.

>choose your favorite hash function such that it is not too long

ISBN's 13 digits is about as long as is tolerable. Any time there is a list of authors six names long (academic titles) along with a subtitle, it's very easy to bump up against max filename size.

This isn't a problem I can solve on my own. Just trying to bring attention to it. My solution thus far is to just avoid publishers who are so unprofessional as to not provide numbers. It's not tough, Project Gutenberg does it. Anyone can do it. If you're some amateur whose entire catalog is 8 books published, you say "this book is 1, and this book is 2" etc, and it's a done deal. Again, I don't expect anyone to use ISBNs (in the US, you have to pay for them unless you're one of the big 5 publishing houses), but just use your own for god's sake.
by harrall | 2025-10-23 16:15:19+00:00
Laws can’t fix this problem. The branches check each other but citizens are supposed to check the branches. “Can’t fix a non-engineering problem with engineering.”

But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).

That’s why dysfunction in the branches can go so far. The basis of American governance, and probably any kind of governance to be honest, is vigilance. If everyone was fully informed on what was happening everyday and behind closed doors, everyone would vote differently.

Instead we vote based often on out-of-context bits that we hear, and surprisingly we all get completely sets of bits. The system — voting, checks and balances — is still solid but the input into it is not great.

The founding fathers did not anticipate the modern media world.