MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sillysaurusx | 2025-10-31 02:20:43+00:00
What happens if in the gag order they explicitly forbid the target from removing warrant canaries, and give examples of existing ones?

I’ve always wondered. It seems just as easy for authorities to forbid removing canaries as it is to forbid telling someone something.

EDIT: ah, this is explained downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763032
by webprofusion | 2025-10-31 02:22:31+00:00
This is a great idea and definitely useful, in particular this would make sense if it can take the build artifacts of recent github action builds and test them comprehensively, particularly to green-light a release. You can already pretty much do this using the standard agent tools and a set of test prompts so anything that makes it easier and repeatable is good.

The pricing sounds quite enterprisey, the risk there is that people will tend towards building their own.
by peanut-walrus | 2025-10-31 02:23:13+00:00
The KYC/AML dance is really annoying. The actual bad guys know exactly what they need to pass all the checks, while regular people, as in this case, often get caught in the wheels. Banks or fintechs rarely have the kind of investigative powers they would need to actually find the criminals using them, nor do they really want to spend their time playing police. So anything even remotely suspicious? You're now out of our risk appetite, bye.

For the actual criminals - if you're already doing crime, what's a little document forgery on top of that?

It's about time we accepted this fact and allowed money transfers, payments and banking to be neutral infrastructure.
by fragmede | 2025-10-31 02:23:19+00:00
I don't think it's any one thing. People like different kinds of alcohol, for different reasons. For someone who's alcohol cravings are based on the sugar in their preferred alcoholic drink, it isn't surprising then, that a medication that lowers their desire to ingest sugar lowers their desire to drink (their chosen sugary drink). Naturally this doesn't cover all alcohol drinkers, but it can't also be none of them.
by lateforwork | 2025-10-31 02:23:29+00:00
Databricks Neon [1] has a free tier for their Postgres service. Neon's strength that allows them to offer a free tier lies in their serverless, cloud-native PostgreSQL architecture with a separation of storage and compute resources. This allows Neon to scale compute to zero automatically when the database is idle.

[1] https://neon.com
by toast0 | 2025-10-31 02:24:49+00:00
> /etc/hosts works until you need to change an IP across 10,000 servers in under a minute.

I wouldn't use /etc/hosts for something with those needs, but pushing a smallish file to 10,000 hosts in a minute is readily achievable if you need it. I don't have an estimate kf the number of ssh handshakes per second a typical client machine could do, but if you run 512 pushes in parallel, I bet you can get it pushed in way under a minute; assuming you have sufficient bandwidth I would avoid trying to do a differential update because the interactivity is too many round trips and you'll blow your time budget, but you could keep several known hashes and differential update from those and full push if no match). Up to you if you want to also run a command to reload the file, or if you'd rather kqueue/inotify/just a periodic poll for change.

If you have frequent changes, you probably want to do a phone tree approach where you push to a few servers per location and those push to the local servers. And probably a way to do single name announcements. Or maybe something else.

But, if your system communicates by server hostnames and your server hostnames don't change often and ips of active servers don't change often, using /etc/hosts for that can be pretty useful. Everytime you get new servers, you have to repush the hostfile, but it's really not a big deal; and it changes a dynamic dependency to a static one. You can even run monitors to confirm your servers aren't resolving each other and that they all have acceptable host files.

(Late edit, composed while I lost connectivity) Also, if your scale is hundreds of thousands of hosts, it might get pretty nasty, but chances are you wouldn't resolve every name on every host, so something smarter is needed; which could be DNS or could be selective pushing or could be some other dynamic system that's not entirely DNS.
by acuozzo | 2025-10-31 02:25:33+00:00
This depends heavily on geolocation. Experiencing economic collapse in the Montana wildnerness would be very different from experiencing it in Washington DC.

I wasn't thinking of fighting off hordes or anything like that.

Ammunition can be used for barter, hunting, and self-defense. It can also be used as a tool to break locks, start fires, and send signals.
by bsder | 2025-10-31 02:26:45+00:00
The issue was that support for "Brexit" was a bad-faith fabrication by Murdoch-owned media with a dash of foreign-funded interference.

When you put down any specific Brexit implementation and asked people to vote on it, you generally got supermajority opposition.

This is similar to, for example, the nitwits in Kentucky who fiercely opposed Obamacare but were vociferously supportive of Kynect and the ACA--all of which are the same thing.
by DrewADesign | 2025-10-31 02:27:04+00:00
That might be the case for you, but something doesn’t need to be universally true for it to be true enough to matter. Find any thread about AI art around here and check out how many people have open contempt for artists’ skills. I remember the t-shirts I saw a few sys admins wearing in the nineties that said “stop bothering me or I’ll replace you with a short shell script.” In the decades I worked in tech, I never saw that attitude wane. I saw a thread here within the past year or two where one guy said he couldn’t take medical doctors and auto mechanics seriously because they lacked the superior troubleshooting skills of a software developer. Seriously. That’s obviously not everybody, but it’s deeefinitely a thing.
by socalgal2 | 2025-10-31 02:28:55+00:00
(1) Start by not using packages that have stupid dependencies

Any package that includes a CLI version in the library should have it's dev shamed. Usually that adds 10-20 packages. Those 2 things, a library that provides some functionality, and a CLI command that lets you use the library from the command line, SHOULD NEVER BE MIXED.

The library should be its own package without the bloat of the command line crap

(2) Choose low dependency packages

Example: commander has no dependencies, minimist now has no dependencies. Some other command line parsers used to have 10-20 dependencies.

(3) Stop using packages when you can do it yourself in 1-2 lines of JS

You don't need a package to copy files. `fs.copyFileSync` will copy a file for. `fs.cpSync` will copy a tree, `child_process.spawn` will spawn a process. You don't need some package to do these things. There's plenty of other examples where you don't need a package.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-10-31 02:29:29+00:00
I have nightmare stories to tell of Access Forms from my time dealing with them in the 90's.

The usual situation is that the business department hires someone with a modicum of talent or interest in tech, who then uses Access to build an application that automates or helps with some aspect of the department's work. They then leave (in a couple of cases these people were just interns) and the IT department is then called in to fix everything when it inevitably goes wrong. We're faced with a bunch of beginner spaghetti code [0], utterly terrible schema, no documentation, no spec, no structure, and tasked with fixing it urgently. This monster is now business-critical because in the three months it's been running the rest of the department has forgotten how to do the process the old way, and that process is time-critical.

Spinning up a proper project to replace this application isn't feasible in the short term, because there are processes around creating software in the organisation, for very good reasons learned painfully from old mistakes, and there just isn't time to go through that. We have to fix what we can and get it working immediately. And, of course, these fixes cause havoc with the project planning of all our other projects because they're unpredictable, urgent, and high priority. This delays all the other projects and helps to give IT a reputation as taking too long and not delivering on our promised schedules.

So yeah, what appears to be the best solution from a non-IT perspective is a long, long way from the best solution from an IT perspective.

[0] and other messes; in one case the code refused to work unless a field in the application had the author's name in it, for no other reason than vanity, and they'd obfuscated the code that checked for that. Took me a couple of hours to work out wtf they'd done and pull it all out.
by protocolture | 2025-10-31 02:30:32+00:00
Reminds me of DBAN/EBAN.

Was the case we had 2 really good options in enterprise data destruction. EBAN with a yearly license scheme, and BLANCCO with a per hard drive wiped license scheme.

BLANCCO buys EBAN, kills the product, but permits DBAN the open source variant to be available permanently, with no modern EBAN features, and no updates.

Of course they did make one change to DBAN, it leaves a small image on wiped hard drives advertising BLANCCO.

And ofc, there was nothing really preventing Blanccos per hard drive license from increasing.

I use both Affinity V2 and Canva. I used Affinity for finicky stuff, and Canva for pointy clicky template based construction when I need something simple, fast.

I detest Canva, despite using it. Everything is advertising for the premium version. And I expect Affinity to go the same way, Canvas elements will (if not already) be integrated, and those elements will in most cases advertise themselves as being paid assets. Eventually it will go the way of DBAN and just be an advertisement for Canva.

I will ride out V2 for as long as it continues to function. Then I will find something else.

This is a tremendous loss.
by aeonfox | 2025-10-31 02:31:38+00:00
> are the apps, previously free, significantly more limited than their prior free versions unless/until you also purchase a subscription for the CanvaAI portions?

I was curious too. The FAQ says this:

> Yes, Affinity really is free. That doesn’t mean you’re getting a watered-down version of the app though. You can use every tool in the Pixel, Vector, and Layout studios, plus all of the customization and export features, as much as you want, with no restrictions or payment needed. The app will also receive free updates with new features and improvements added.
by hmorgan | 2025-10-31 02:32:55+00:00
I think I see what you mean now, but what makes you think that the sun would be invisible at 544,000 AU?

Here are the numbers as far as I understand them.

Apparent magnitude of the sun: -26.74 Apparent magnitude of Sirius A: -1.46

Excepted magnitude of the sun after moving to 544,000 AU: 296 billion times weaker, leading to +1.96 magnitude, according to a calculator (https://www.1728.org/magntude.htm).

I don't trust that calculator a lot, so to check that math, I used a formula to calculate the difference between those magnitudes (https://lco.global/spacebook/distance/comparing-magnitudes-d...) and got a result of 23.34. Not far off from the expected 25x difference.

So the sun at 544,000 AU wouldn't make the top 25 brightest stars in the night sky, but it wouldn't be far from that (https://www.britannica.com/science/list-of-brightest-stars-2...) and definitely well within what would be visible (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting_magnitude).
Show HN: Sentient – AI-powered customer feedback analysis with 95% accuracy
by iedayan03 | 2025-10-31 02:33:09+00:00
We built Sentient to automatically extract themes and sentiment from customer feedback without manual configuration. The system processes documents in sub-second time while maintaining 95% accuracy.

Built with Next.js 14 and FastAPI, using fine-tuned OpenAI models trained on millions of feedback examples. Key features include automatic customer segmentation, multi-format support (PDF, DOCX, CSV), and real-time processing.

The core insight: most tools analyze individual reviews instead of understanding customer journeys and behavioral patterns. Sentient connects feedback sentiment to business outcomes through multi-phase AI analysis.

Technical approach uses theme detection, emotion recognition, and intelligent caching for enterprise-grade performance.

Try it at: https://data-decoder.vercel.app/
by devsda | 2025-10-31 02:33:29+00:00
Inspecting 10 layers of dependencies individually to install a popular tool or an lsp server is going to work once or twice. Eventually either complacency or fatigue sets in and the attacker wins.

I think we need a different solution that fixes the dependency bloat or puts more safeguards around package publishing.

The same goes for any other language with excessive third-party dependency requirements.
by antoniojtorres | 2025-10-31 02:34:11+00:00
It does read the way you describe in your question. My interpretation of OPs example is more about the asymmetry in how much more (relatively) feasible it is for one party to re-introduce a vote for something than it is to rally political will en masse in a way that reflects what the electorate ultimately wants.

An example that comes to mind is the string of legislation like SOPA that despite having lost, the general goal continued to appear in new bills that were heavily lobbied for.
by ricudis | 2025-10-31 02:35:53+00:00
Of all the places I've been, Singapore.

They have a population of 6 to 7 million people in an area of 700 square kilometers, resulting in a population density of 8300 people / km^2. Substantially more than that if you account for the fact that a large percentage of the island is still tropical jungle.

Despite that fact, their city planning is so good with large open spaces everywhere interspersed with greenery, that you almost never feel claustrophobic. Even the so-called "hearland" neighbourhoods with rows after rows of high-rise residential HDB buildings are quite pleasant.

The most claustrophobic place I've been in Singapore are the few squares in the center of CBD filled with skyscrapers that almost obscure you the view of the sky.
by ineedasername | 2025-10-31 02:36:16+00:00
16,000? Where are buying your GPU, or API calls? If you don’t want to wait for a bargain then $450 will get you the GPU, and even at that price you’d only be able to buy about 10,000 standard-resolution image gen api calls. Do you do design? Editing? Touch up? You can easily blow through a few hundred api calls an hour: “Turn the stitching green… slightly less saturated… now make the stitches more ragged… a little more… now just slightly less”.

Clearly you’re looking at the task through the eyes of a hobbyist or “of the month” project so the workflow and pace may not be obvious but API budgets spend fast. Just look at the benchmarks in this article to see how many tried some of these changes took- 47, there goes $3 in 3 minutes, or half that time if your quick on the keyboard.

And even then! Well, you’re limited aren’t you? Limited to the Gemini model, or OpenAI, or whoever, and you see the limits of any one model in the article as well. Or you plonk down for a mediocre GPU with some slight VRAM headroom and choose from dozens of models, countless Lora, control nets, and other options, infinitely flexible in painting and outpainting. Ahead of that you’ll need to budget at least a dozen hours to learn local genai tools, comfyui or others. Then, for under a $1 dollar in electricity, you can can queue up a dozen ideas overnight and get 1,000 variations on each of them handed to you in the morning to quickly triage over coffee and email catchup.

It’s not a one size fits all market though, and most professionals are likely finding they want both: A low-cost, high-control, high precision sandbox that isn’t as fast or scalable as the api, and the api for when fast and scalable is what you need.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-31 02:36:51+00:00
> Eyes Up provides a way for users to record and upload footage of abusive law-enforcement activity, building an archive of potential evidence. [...] Then, on October 3rd, Mark received a notice that Apple was removing the app from its store on the grounds that it may “harm a targeted individual or group.”

In other words, [0] somebody in Apple declared that ICE agents, on duty, operating in public, executing federally-authorized violence, have somehow qualified as a "targeted group" just like transgender people.

> Pressure on the tech platforms seemed to come from the Trump Administration; after a deadly shooting at an ICE field office in Dallas in late September, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said in a statement to Fox News Digital that ICEBlock “put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs.”

It makes for an extra-ridiculous backdrop, since absolutely nobody needed any kind of app to determine that ICE agents will be present at... the big building near the highway with a huge concrete sign on the lawn proclaiming "US Immigration and Custom Enforcement."

... I mean, what're the odds?

> Like other forms of self expression, digital-communication technology has become dangerously circumscribed under Trump; only the tools that exist independent of Big Tech seem like safe bets for dissent.

As these platforms start banning software written by private individuals, we'll have to see what kind of incident tracker some Democrats have promised to arrange. [1] I would expect the niche to be long-term documentation like the banned Eyes Up app, rather than real-time notification of, er, road conditions.

Either way, it highlights a different problem with Apple and Google working to prohibit us (users) from freely installing software we onto hardware we own.

___________

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/10/apple-decides-ice-agents...

[1] https://gizmodo.com/democrats-will-launch-a-master-ice-track...
by amluto | 2025-10-31 02:37:01+00:00
And that is why egress fees are anticompetitive. Azure forces their customers to demand that their service providers host in Azure.

In a less anti-competitive world you would be perfectly happy to use a database hosted in an Equinix facility or whatever next door. You could connect via a fractional 100Gbps link at a price multiple orders of magnitude below what Azure would actually charge for an equivalent amount of data transfer.
by ryao | 2025-10-31 02:37:37+00:00
This would be a great starting point to make a USB Ethernet NIC if someone were inclined to do it.

It could even have a very practical use if it were made to impersonate a USB Ethernet device that the Nintendo Switch / Nintendo Switch 2 supports. They only support gigabit NICs, but it should be easy to just pretend that the other side failed to negotiate gigabit and only supports 100Mbps.
Ask HN: Is Udacity now geo blocking countries?
by estebarb | 2025-10-31 02:37:39+00:00
I'm located in Costa Rica, and in the past I took in the past 3 nanodegrees there. Today I was checking the verification link and to my surprise I'm getting a geoblocked response, both on the verification links and even signing in to my udacity account.

Someone knows if this is a temporal issue, or a really strange comercial decision of the company to avoid having customers?

Afaik Costa Rica is not under any exports restriction list (or I should be worried?). Even Accenture has a lot of employees in the country.
by fragmede | 2025-10-31 02:38:12+00:00
Which is why GLP-1 are of such interest to some. Anecdotal reports aren't hey, I stopped binge eating but now I'm addicted to gambling, which happens in the world of addiction and addiction treatment. Instead some of the anecdotes are hey I'm not eating as much and I also quit smoking and didn't pick up gambling. Naturally, anecdotes don't prove anything, but there are enough, on this post, even, to warrant further study.

AA is many things. At its heart is a mutually supportive community. For some it works well; it works if you work it. For others, it doesn't. It isn't deep psychotherapy work with a licensed clinician, but the steps do resemble certain pieces of that and lead many to success. The problem is with the numbers, and how success is measured. Someone who's forced into the program, by court order, or by family, and just goes through the motions, counts in the statistics the same as someone that's going of their own volition and is truly committed to their own change.

One of those two people is more likely to succeed in getting dry/clean. The other, less so. It's a shame that both of those people get counted in statistics on AA's efficacy equally.
by eru | 2025-10-31 02:38:28+00:00
That's not actually true. To give a silly example: does anyone (seriously) claim that 'true fascism' has never been tried?

Or: liberal democracy (I'm sure you can find a synonym that ends in *-ism) has been tried. It's been doing ok-ish. Obviously it has warts and all. But more importantly: approximately no one ever seriously claims that 'real liberal democracy' hasn't been tried.

Similar for constitutional monarchy, or 'social market economy', or dictatorships, etc. People can mostly agree that the real deal has been tried.
by antidamage | 2025-10-31 02:40:36+00:00
It's about the annotation triggering a code pre-processor.

For example in Lombok, the @Data annotation will create a getter and a setter for every private member, and @Getter and @Setter will do the individual methods respectively.

Annotating a class will do every private member, or you can annotate a specific member.

A lens is a shortcut to making a getter/setter for something several elements deep, where instead of calling:

`parentObject.getChild().setChildAttribute()` you can call: `parentObject.setChildAttributeViaLens()`

and not need to write multiple functions in both classes, or even use multiple annotations.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-10-31 02:41:14+00:00
For brick and mortar retail that isn't fast fashion or supermarkets, dropping troublesome customers is generally extremely sensible.

Profit on most goods is low - single digit % typically - and a single return can eliminate the profit margins on a dozen sales. Sometimes cost can be reclaimed from goods providers - i.e. genuinely defective or manufacturer refurbishment programs - and sometimes they can resell the item as new. But if the item has been used, broken by the customer, etc. the loss is significant. It turns out that some people are more honest than others, and some people are directly trying to scam companies.

When one 'dodgy' customer can eliminate the value of 10 'real' sales with every return the maths say to ban people quickly.

A little anecdote - I have a distant relative who, circa 2005, would buy a vacuum cleaner use it, and then return it. He rotated stores (hardware stores, supermarkets, electronic stores) until he gradually got banned from them all. Once that happened he moved house. Not only had he almost certainly spent more in time and fuel than a reasonable vacuum would have cost him (which I will note he could afford); but the cost and waste he has incurred on both individual companies and society at large through that and similar schemes is staggering. I don't know if he's still at it - or alive - but the people he was surrounding himself with all saw such behaviour as reasonable.
by dfabulich | 2025-10-31 02:41:43+00:00
Your intuitions are what give you your axioms and Bayesian priors, the starting point of deduction and analysis, as well as your values and top-level goals.

You can't justify any belief at all without axioms/priors, or make any decisions about what to do without values/goals.

Intuition is the thing that gives you those axioms and values; it's really the "only game in town" for generating them.
by garganzol | 2025-10-31 02:42:03+00:00
Thanks for the tip. There are some predefined colors out there, but all of them either too dark (darker shades of gray) or too bright (white). My spatial brain needs #e5e5e5 to function properly, but it seems impossible to set that in Affinity 3.0.

Edit: never mind, found it at Settings -> User Interface -> Artboard Background Gray Level.