MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2025-10-23 23:20:26+00:00
> these past few administrations

I remain amazed at how, again and again, no matter how specific and unique an abuse by the Trump administration is, it is always, invariably, Really Joe Biden's Fault. Like, the frame has been adopted by the MAGA base, but also the cranky left. The media does it too. Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".

But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.

No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
by vilhelmen | 2025-10-23 23:20:37+00:00
Something I've long appreciated is a little Perl script to compute statistics on piped in numbers, I find it great for getting quick summaries from report CSVs.

#!/usr/bin/perl # http://stackoverflow.com/a/9790056 use List::Util qw(max min sum); @a=(); while(<>){ $sqsum+=$_*$_; push(@a,$_) }; $n=@a; $s=sum(@a); $a=$s/@a; $m=max(@a); $mm=min(@a); $std=sqrt($sqsum/$n-($s/$n)*($s/$n)); $mid=int @a/2; @srtd=sort @a; if(@a%2){ $med=$srtd[$mid]; }else{ $med=($srtd[$mid-1]+$srtd[$mid])/2; }; print "records:$n\nsum:$s\navg:$a\nstd:$std\nmed:$med\max:$m\nmin:$mm";
by simonw | 2025-10-23 23:20:46+00:00
Oh hang on, I think I've spotted a point of confusion here.

All three of the projects I described in this talk have effectively zero risk in terms of containing harmful unreviewed code.

DeepSeek-OCR on the Spark? I ran that one in a Docker container, saved some notes on the process and then literally threw away the container once it had finished.

The Pyodide in Node.js one I did actually review, because its code I execute on a machine that isn't disposable. The initial research ran in a disposable remote container though (Claude Code for web).

The Perl in WebAssembly one? That runs in a browser sandbox. There's effectively nothing bad that can happen there, that's why I like WebAssembly so much.

I am a whole lot more cautious in reviewing code that has real stakes attached to it.
by anal_reactor | 2025-10-23 23:20:54+00:00
The core of the issue is that many Americans do carry weapons which means that whatever the security system, it needs to keep in mind that the suspect might be armed and about to start shooting. This makes the police biased towards escalation because the only way against a shooter is to shoot first.

This problem doesn't exist in Europe or Japan because guns aren't that ubiquitous, which means that the police have the time to think before they act, which makes them less likely to escalate and start shooting. Obviously, for Americans, the only solution is to get rid of the gun culture, but this will never happen, so suck it up that AI gets you swatted.
by coastalpuma | 2025-10-23 23:21:08+00:00
> The benefits touted are very abstract

Not really? From someone's post here a year ago:

> The real innovation of a lot of these alternative DVCS systems is that they free the state of the source from being dependent on the history that got you there. Such that applying patches A & B in that order is the same as applying B' & A' -- it results in the same tree. Git, on the other hand, hashes the actual list of changes to the state identifier, which is why rebasing results in a different git hash id.

Anybody who's wrestled with reordering/rebasing git history or has done git archaology is able to understand this benefit.

From Pijul's site:

> Pijul is the first distributed version control system to be based on a sound mathematical theory of changes

After years of grudgingly tolerating using a deployed prototype for a VCS, yes, I want the mathematically sound alternative.

All that being said, I do wish you the best, because truly, I am tired of git and JJ does seems like an improvement.
by coderjames | 2025-10-23 23:21:31+00:00
I worked with ASN.1 for a few years in the embedded space because its used for communications between aircraft and air traffic control in Europe [1]. I enjoyed it. BER encoding is pretty much the tightest way to represent messages on the wire and when you're charged per-bit for messaging, it all adds up. When a messaging syntax is defined in ASN.1 in an international standard (ICAO 9880 anyone?), its going to be around for a while. Haven't been able to get my current company to adopt ASN.1 to replace our existing homegrown serialization format.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_Telecommunication...
by dmix | 2025-10-23 23:21:54+00:00
> The French approach of just rebooting and reinstalling the entire thing seems like a good idea at this point.

Do you mean the French Revolution? If you actually read the history on that (even basic stuff beyond the "Reign of Terror") I don't think any person would want to experience that for their country. It had tons of indiscriminate violence and took a decade of chaos before they sorted out into a real government, which then resulted in Napolean's coup
by cryptonector | 2025-10-23 23:22:10+00:00
That's roughly the same thing as saying there would not have been an Internet if the ITU/OSI crowd won. I think that's quite right. The yahoos at Berkeley and a bunch of other U.S. universities won, and I can just imagine how the Europeans who had high falutin ideas about how the Internet should be felt, and it's delicious.
by laterium | 2025-10-23 23:22:40+00:00
It already IS ubiquitous. What is the path to non-ubiquity then? Most people are depending on it in many personal contexts. A lot of people are even using it in their jobs whether others agree with it or not. Everyday it's becoming more ubiquitous than before.

Smart phones are this way for example. You may see them as just tools, but we became centaurs with our phones. I don't think being a "tool" precludes it from being a centaur or ubiquitous. I agree with you on some points, but I don't think the distinction you're making is valid here.
by apendleton | 2025-10-23 23:22:51+00:00
Oh for sure, I'm not claiming that CFS (or Tokamak Energy or Type One or whoever else) will for sure succeed, or if they do, that they've already solved all the problems that will need solving to do so. My only assertion/prediction is that I think if they end up succeeding, when future historians look back and write the history of this energy revolution or whatnot, HTSC magnets will turn out to have been the key breakthrough that made it possible.
by al_borland | 2025-10-23 23:24:35+00:00
Some of it is artificial. If I’m watching a Short on my TV and I miss a word, I can’t go back to hear the word again. I have to finish watching it and watch the whole thing again. People making the shorts do this on purpose so people re-watch.

90% of the Shorts in my feed aren’t original content, it’s some random nobody stealing someone else’s content and clipping it up for easy money, usually overlaying some random other content so avoid a copyright strike. They are the drop shippers of the YouTube world. They add very little value, and just milk it for profit while they can.

Some slight improvements to the main video experience would make most shorts irrelevant. Let me share a clip from a longer video with a start and end time. Then have a way to seep popular clipped content. This would keep the views with the original creator, give the viewer an easy way to keep watching to get the full context, eliminate all these bottom feeder accounts, and unify the experience so YouTube doesn’t feel like two different sites mashed together. This seems like it would be better in every way.
by bitpush | 2025-10-23 23:25:34+00:00
This question is valid only if Apple lets apps host their own apps, bring their own payment system.

Apple bans all such activities, has held the entire app ecosystem and seeks rent. If they think their offering is superior, then they should be OK competing. The fact that they have not opened it up says that they are happy to overcharge.

Remember, competition is always good. Let Stripe and Apple duke it out on payment processing, and let the best one win.

Let games me hosted both on Epic Store and App Store, and let users decide where to download it from.

That will be fair.
by xp84 | 2025-10-23 23:25:57+00:00
That's a great and terrifying idea. When that inevitably happens, you'll then have a couple of 13-year-olds: one dead, and one shell-shocked kid in disbelief that a stupid prank idea he cooked up in 60 seconds is now claimed as the root cause why someone was killed. That one may be charged with a crime or sued, though the district who installed this idiotic thing is really to blame.
by skygazer | 2025-10-23 23:27:10+00:00
I’ve noticed very recently (last several weeks) Siri (via my HomePod) is able to competently answer some very nuanced world knowledge questions that are sourced to random but still reputable websites — it appears to paraphrase enough to appear to be directly answering your question and then cites the source website. It only seems to get fouled up if it’s possible to confuse the question for something supposedly actionable that it chokes on. I have an Amazon Echo in the same room and usually direct such questions to Alexa, but trial Siri every so often to check for progress. And suddenly Siri just started giving appropriate answers with citations. It’s like they just hooked up something new to the Siri knowledge graph, and it’s pretty good.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-10-23 23:27:29+00:00
I heard the intention was that sometimes it's against the public good to prosecute some people even though they have comitted crimes. Good examples of it being used as intended was pardoning the perpetrators of the whiskey rebellion, the confederate army, vietnam draft dodgers and more controversially, Nixon. I guess it's also intended in cases where obvious miscarriages of justice have been committed. It made sense in 1785 or whenever but along with lots of the rest of the constitution it's long obsolete and has been twisted, stretched and mangled into a hideous caricature of itself over the centuries.
by daxfohl | 2025-10-23 23:27:29+00:00
Reminds me of the description of Peter Scholze as he was coming up with condensed mathematics. Didn't write a thing until he had it all worked out in his head (which is how he always works). Knew if he didn't get it worked out before the weekend he'd never be able to build it up again. Once he worked it out, he was able to retain it for months until finally writing it down.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/lean-computer-program-confirm...
by raincole | 2025-10-23 23:27:44+00:00
The honest answer is that Apple shouldn't own iOS and its main app store at the same time. But there is not legal / regulation framework to prevent that.

Case in point: Steam is taking 30% too. But you've heard much less fuss over it, right? Why? Is it because of players' cult-like behavior around Steam? (probably partially) But more importantly it's because Valve doesn't own Windows and Steam Deck is a far smaller fry.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-10-23 23:27:56+00:00
At least in socal with the way camera based traffic enforcement it has basically no teeth and plenty of ways like my quote to weasel out. You can actually ignore the ticket that is mailed to you. I’m not even sure HD cameras would help here. You even have options built into the ticket to say it wasn’t you driving or that it was someone else you know of in a sort of check a couple boxes and mail it back fashion. However if you actually look up the status of your ticket with the ticket number on the web portal, then it counts as being served a ticket and you do have to pay or show up in court.

Seems the way the law works is it needs some piece of two way communication. It doesn’t seem to work on a one way basis like it might in other countries. Maybe it is because most of our laws concerning technology are very much still structured for an analog world. E.g how in this case the old ritual of you being identified to have acknowledged the ticket by the cop writing it and handing it to you is preserved by you having to show you’ve actually received the ticket and consent to its validity viewing its status online.
by anigbrowl | 2025-10-23 23:28:05+00:00
Maybe we should move beyond binary thinking here. Yeah, it's worth sending someone to investigate but also making some effort to verify who the call is coming from - to get their identity, and to ask them something simple like to describe the house (in this example) so the arriving cops will know they go to the right address. Now of course you can get a description of the house with Google Street Maps, but 911 dispatchers can solicit some information like what color car is currently parked outside or suchlike. They could also look up who occupies the house and make a phone call while cops are on the way.

Everyone knows swatting is a real thing that happens and that it's problematic, so why don't police departments have procedures in place which include that possibility? Who benefits from hyped-up police responses to false claims of criminal activity?
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-23 23:28:25+00:00
> Apple lets apps host their own apps, bring their own payment system.

And also not require those apps to be also approved by Apple, which they are trying to do with AltStore and the DMA.

Users should be able to go to a dev's website, pay them directly, and download the ipa and install it with a click from the website. Having to go through any kind of "app store" at all should be optional.
by nomel | 2025-10-23 23:28:44+00:00
> refused a task from me because it would be too much work

Was this after many iterations? Try letting it get some "sleep". Hear me out...

I haven't used Codex, so maybe not relevant, but with Claude I always notice a slow degradation in quality, refusals, and "<implementation here>" placeholders with iterations within the same context window. One time, after making a mistake, it apologized and said something like "that's what I get for writing code at 2am". Statistically, this makes sense: long conversations between developers would go into the night, and they get tired, their code gets sparser and crappier.

So, I told it "Ok, let's get some sleep and do this tomorrow.", then the very next message (since the LLM has no concept of time), "Good morning! Let's do this!" and bam, output a completely functional, giant, block of code.

Human behavior is deeeeep in the statistics.
by tastyfreeze | 2025-10-23 23:29:41+00:00
I find it best to view parties like any other faction or gang. They don't want challengers to their current power. Primaries are supposed to be the democratic way to steer a party but we've seen how that goes. They aren't going to change unless it is from within. So,remove all obstacles to being on the ballot and let the existing parties whine about it when they start to lose.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-23 23:30:09+00:00
.

#!/usr/bin/env bash # # memo(1), memoizes the output of your command-line, so you can do: # # $ memo <some long running command> | ... # # Instead of # # $ <some long running command> > tmpfile # $ cat tmpfile | ... # $ rm tmpfile to save output, sed can be used in the pipeline instead of tee for example, x=$(mktemp -u); test -p $x||mkfifo $x; zstd -19 < $x > tmpfile.zst & <long running command>|sed w$x|<rest of pipeline>; # You can even use it in the middle of a pipe if you know that the input is not # extremely long. Just supply the -s switch: # # $ cat sitelist | memo -s parallel curl | grep "server:" grep can be replaced with sed and search results sent to stderr < sitelist curl ...|sed '/server:/w/dev/stderr'|zstd -19 >tmpfile.zst; or send search results to stderr and to some other file sed can save output to multiple files at a time < sitelist curl ...|sed -e '/server:/w/dev/stderr' -e "/server:/wresults.txt"|zstd -19 >tmpfile.zst;
by dekhn | 2025-10-23 23:30:14+00:00
I worked with a guy who advanced the state of the art for this- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooks_fluctuation_theorem which was used to measure breaking individual bonds while unfolding RNA: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16148928/ absolutely crazy stuff that I don't understand no matter how hard I try
by tadfisher | 2025-10-23 23:30:18+00:00
> I think it's possible to issue a one time use key that lets you sign a private/public key pair

Keys are just numbers, there's nothing inherent to them that prevents their reuse. These one-time-use schemes rely on out-of-band protocols to honor that they should not be reused, for example by trusting in a central authority to check and reject such keys, which defeats the purpose of using the cryptographic scheme in the first place.

> You know that the authority allowed the key to exist, but not who the key ties back too.

That's not the point of ballot secrecy. Under this scheme, I can be coerced into revealing my vote, because you can't create a control to prevent me from storing the signing key or signed keypair; either of which would suffice for a third party to find the public key on the chain which corresponds to my signing key. If you make these actions entirely remote, so I have no access to key material, then you are trusting the remote authority to issue me a secure keypair that can't be reused.

That said, there's no good reason to issue a keypair or use PKI for this, as there is no encryption happening and there's only one subject (the voter). A cryptographically-signed ID in this case can only be useful to tie votes to voters, which we have established violates the secret-ballot constraint.
by ignormies | 2025-10-23 23:30:20+00:00
> Omnilert later admitted the incident was a “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended,” saying its purpose is to “prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.”

This exact scenario is discussed in [1]. The "human in the loop" failed, but we're supposed to blame the human, not the AI (or the way it was implemented). The humans serve as "moral crumple zones".

""" The emphasis on human oversight as a protective mechanism allows governments and vendors to have it both ways: they can promote an algorithm by proclaiming how its capabilities exceed those of humans, while simultaneously defending the algorithm and those responsible for it from scrutiny by pointing to the security (supposedly) provided by human oversight. """

[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/
by JimDabell | 2025-10-23 23:30:52+00:00
> when every single business on the planet has to pay you 30% for access to mobile device users

That doesn’t describe Apple’s situation though. Most businesses don’t distribute software at all; those that do mostly don’t need to distribute native iOS apps; those that do mostly don’t need to pay App Store fees; those that do mostly have to pay 15%. It’s only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that need to pay 30%.
by zahlman | 2025-10-23 23:31:19+00:00
It's wrong (and coreutils get it right) but I don't see why it would have to be deliberate. It could easily just not occur to someone that the code needs to be tested with invalid options, or that it needs to handle invalid options by aborting rather than ignoring. (That in turn would depend on the crate they're using for argument parsing, I imagine.)
by buybackoff | 2025-10-23 23:31:25+00:00
It looks suspicious at 25x. Even 2.5x would be suspicious unless reading very small records.

I assume both cases have the file cached in RAM already fully, with a tiny size of 100MB. But the file read based version actually copies the data into a given buffer, which involves cache misses to get data from RAM to L1 for copying. The mmap version just returns the slice and it's discarded immediately, the actual data is not touched at all. Each record is 2 cache lines and with random indices is not prefetched. For the CPU AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D mentioned in the repo, just reading 100 bytes from RAM to L1 should take ~100 nanos.

The benchmark compares actually getting data vs getting data location. Single digit nanos is the scale of good hash tables lookups with data in CPU caches, not actual IO. For fairness, both should use/touch the data, eg copy it.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-23 23:31:50+00:00
They don't need to constantly change, it's just that yes: they're being outcompeted, and pretty hard.

The legacy automakers are fully in the game and everyone now remembers: oh wait, they know how to make cars. Tesla... ehhh

Kia, Hyundai, even GM are really giving Tesla a run for their money in every segment.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-10-23 23:32:25+00:00
You could sports bet in the US before this. The people I know now who are heavy into sportsbetting were using under the table bookies before legalization. You could also sportsbet in vegas. Lest we forget they were controlled by the mob and there was much less oversight into this sort of thing decades ago. Arguably old records are the ones that are most suspect either gambling or doping issues neither of which will probably ever be uncovered if they haven’t already by this point.
by neilv | 2025-10-23 23:33:22+00:00
There's a loosely related joke, which might apply a little...

A person discovers a genie in a bottle, and is given 3 wishes, but with the condition that their worst enemy will receive double the wish.

"For my first wish, I would like a billion dollars"

Genie nods. Person is surrounded by stacks of dollars and gold. "Your enemy gets two billion."

"For my second wish, I would like a mansion."

Genie nods. Person is transported to a beautiful mansion. "Done. Your enemy gets two mansions."

"Now beat me half to death."
by cyberax | 2025-10-23 23:33:34+00:00
The droplet manager failure is a lot more forgivable scenario. It happened because the "must always be up" service went down for an extended period of time, and the sheer amount of actions needed for the recovery overwhelmed the system.

The initial DynamoDB DNS outage was much worse. A bog-standard TOCTTOU for scheduled tasks that are assumed to be "instant". And the lack of controls that allowed one task to just blow up everything in one of the foundational services.

When I was at AWS some years ago, there were calls to limit the blast radius by using cell architecture to create vertical slices of the infrastructure for critical services. I guess that got completely sidelined.
by cleartext412 | 2025-10-23 23:33:36+00:00
For someone using sed often enough inventing prettypath won't make sense. However, if producing correct sed command, be it by remembering the options, reading manual or digging through the shell history, takes some amount of mental effort, your brain will happily stick "prettypath" into memory as long as doing so stays less mentally taxing than doing original task from scratch.