MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cryptonector | 2025-10-23 22:13:02+00:00
> Realistically if ASN.1 weren't as badly overengineered and had shipped only with some of the more modern of it's encoding formats we probably would all be using ASN.1 for man things including maybe your web server responses and this probably would cut non image/video network bandwidth by 1/3 or more. But then the network is overloaded by image/video transmissions and similar not other stuff so I guess who cares???!???

ASN.1 was not over-engineered in 1990. The things that kept it from ruling the world are:

- the ITU-T specs for it were _not_ free back then

- the syntax is context dependent, so using a LALR(1) parser generator to parse ASN.1 is difficult, though not really any more than it is to parse C with a LALR(1) parser generator, but yeah if it had had a LALR(1)-friendly syntax then ASN.1 would have been much easier to write tooling for

- competition from XDR, DCE/MS RPC, XML, JSON, Protocol Buffers, Flat Buffers, etc.

The over-engineering came later, as many lessons were learned from ASN.1's early years. Lessons that the rest of the pack mostly have not learned.
by cataflam | 2025-10-23 22:14:07+00:00
This comment[0] explains it.

The core bug seems to be that support for `date -r <file>` wasn't implemented at the time ubuntu integrated it [1, 2].

And the command silently accepted -r before and did nothing (!)

0: https://lwn.net/Articles/1043123/

1: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/8621

2: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/8630
by trhway | 2025-10-23 22:14:26+00:00
delegating decision to AI, excluding human from the "human in the loop" is kind of unexpected as a first step, as in general it was expected that exclusion will start from the other end. Sideway i wonder how is that going to happen on the battlefield.

for this civilian use case the next step - AR googles worn by police with that AI will be projecting onto the googles where that teenager has his gun (kind of Black Mirror style), and the next step after that is obviously excluding the humans even from the execution step.
by n4r9 | 2025-10-23 22:14:27+00:00
The UK has evolved a sophisticated detection and deterrent system: https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/licensees-and-business...

UK regulations are also more coherent, centralised, and strict than the patchwork US model.

The question is whether the US has the gumption and collaborative power to put something similar in place before the damage is done.
by nomel | 2025-10-23 22:14:52+00:00
Of course, it's not some hard rule. But it's very very consistent, in my experience, with all the pure software people who have come to work in all the hardware groups I've been in, throughout my career.

> but just because you never know when someone won't have

And, with that, you've shown mindset was not too far disconnected from reality. Now imagine not considering that someone may not have a constant internet connection, and you get this company, and closer to what I usually see.

edit: related, we have some air gapped systems. and wow do peoples brain implode with that constraint. from what I can tell, the whole concept of using/deploying compiled binaries/libraries is becoming a lost art.

If you're starting a company like this, hire a seasoned firmware engineer and make sure they have decision making power, and an adversarial relationship with the cloud team.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-10-23 22:15:04+00:00
> I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.

Trumps action with ICE will lead to waco situations. Undocumented immigrants can obtain guns in this country and will not continue to go quietly into the night. Seems to me that his actions are far more likely to lead to civil war
by gorgoiler | 2025-10-23 22:15:40+00:00
Is the answer clearer if you consider two changes, A to B and A to X? The conflict free result is to change A to BX, distribute this to every node, and let the people decide. (This is what Automerge does?)

(Deleting a word is just changing it from word to ~word~ with the option to render conflict free deletions as empty space.)
by latexr | 2025-10-23 22:15:50+00:00
> "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".

The likeliest outcome from that is the other person gets defensive and everything stays the same or gets worse. It’s not difficult to learn to be tactful in communication in a way which allows you to get your point across in the same number of words and makes the other person thankful for the correction.

Plus, it saves face. It’s not that rare for someone who blatantly say something is stupid to then be proven wrong. If you’re polite and reasonable about it, when you are wrong it won’t be a big deal.

One thing I noticed about people who pride themselves in being “brutally honest” is that more often than not they get more satisfaction from being brutal than from being honest, and are incredibly thin-skinned when the “honest brutality” is directed at them.

> The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus.

I don’t understand why people keep using Torvalds as an example/excuse to be rude. Linus realised he had been a jerk all those years and that that was the wrong attitude. He apologised and vowed to do better, and the sky hasn’t fallen nor has Linux turned to garbage.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...
by underlipton | 2025-10-23 22:16:26+00:00
Oh, right. That eg is more of an ie, though. Almost nothing Apple or other VisionOS developers have showcased has taken advantage of this capability. Not even, "If I throw one virtual app at another virtual app, they bounce off each other." I've seen some experiments, but nothing in production. Everyone seems to be terrified of making spatial apps that take advantage of the fact that they "live" in a "space" that we can move our bodies through.
by johncarlosbaez | 2025-10-23 22:17:03+00:00
This claimed proof is a bunch of baloney:

* First, it's written in the typical style of AI slop.

* Second, a mathematician I know and trust writes "I went straight to the technical part (Sect. 3) and randomly checked one of the results (Theorem 3.14), finding that it is obviously false. (The category Comp mentioned in the theorem is formally introduced and makes sense per se, but it is certainly not additive with the proposed definition, as claimed in the statement of the theorem)."

* Third, another mathematician I know and trust writes "I spent almost an hour poking through here carefully to see where the more central claims begin to fall apart. Theorems 3.24 and 4.1 brazenly contradict each other, proving respectively that problems in P are homologically trivial and that all NP-complete problems are homologically isomorphic to all problems in NP. Even more to the point, the proof of 3.24 really shows the lie where it says "The detailed argument uses the functoriality of the computational homology construction and the fact that homology isomorphisms preserve the 'computational topology' of problems." The last claim is, naturally, not mathematically defined. The computational chain complex also appears not to be genuinely defined, as far as I can tell. I haven't compared to see what the author chucked into the formalized definition."
by pfdietz | 2025-10-23 22:17:17+00:00
High temperature superconducting magnets are not a panacea for the problems with DT fusion. Those issues follow from limits on power/area at the first wall, and the needed thickness of the first wall; these ensure DT reactors will have low volumetric power density, regardless of the confinement scheme used.

With HTSC magnets, a tokamak much smaller than ITER could be built, but ITER is so horrifically bad that one can be much better than it and still be impractical.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-10-23 22:17:23+00:00
> Carrying your food will lead to restriction, naturally.

Eh. Yes, but people on the trail are still regularly eating > 6000 calories a day. If you talk with folks, the limit is often satiety even when not in town (people often simply cannot eat enough calories without feeling sick if they don't pace their eating accordingly), not pack capacity.
by shakna | 2025-10-23 22:17:50+00:00
Lazarus was around 4 years old when the first version of Pyscripter was released.

Porting to it, might be an option at some point, but changing compiler without breaking anything, is not a tiny task for Delphi things.

I'd say the biggest roadblock would be JEDI which assumes Windows everything.

https://wiki.freepascal.org/JVCL_Components
by btschaegg | 2025-10-23 22:18:02+00:00
If she has little experience with video games, Journey and Gris might be good candidates.

For a more "technical" argument how gameplay mechanics can be a unique way to deliver an emotion to the player (arguably a major part in the role of art): Brothers: A Tale of two Sons. You'd have to make sure that she finishes it, though (estimate: ~3h).

Two trippy games that defy categorization (but won't be good examples for someone not willing to learn mechanics/logic in depth): Thumper and Cocoon.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-23 22:18:27+00:00
> I am not voting for the people who send my friends death threats

Uh, then don't. I guarantee you have more people and issues on your ballots than the person who allegedly sent your friends death threats.

> neither party really supports what I want so voting for one would hurt the causes I want anyway

If neither party has any position you give any shits about, yes, I sort of agree you shouldn't be voting... (And I guess I'll concede you aren't voting against your interests and causes if you have no interests or causes.)
by ls65536 | 2025-10-23 22:18:29+00:00
I can certainly understand it for something like sudo or for other tools where the attack surface is larger and certain security-critical interactions are happening, but in this case it really seems like a questionable tradeoff, where the benefits in this specific case are abstract (theoretically no more possibility of any memory-safety bugs) but the costs are very concrete (incompatibility issues; and possibly other, new, non-memory-safety bugs being introduced with new code).

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm otherwise perfectly happy that these experiments are being done, and we should all be better off for it and learn something as a result. Obviously somebody has assessed that this tradeoff has at least a decent probability of being a net positive here in some timeframe, and if others are unhappy about it then I suppose they're welcome to install another implementation of coreutils, or use a different distro, or write their own, or whatever.
by tomhow | 2025-10-23 22:18:49+00:00
I only just saw this (having been less attentive on HN for the past week due to a family event). I've said upthread that you're welcome to discuss this via email, and it's a more reliable way of communicating with us than replying to a comment after several days (like everyone else we don't get alerts on replies).

> Here's a recent example [1]. Why isn't this dead as a violation of every guideline?

It is dead. It spent no time on the front page (hence we didn't see it) and received only one comment. This looks like HN's guidelines, systems and organic community processes working perfectly. What makes you think otherwise?

> Maybe you can explain your moderation philosophy because, based on our discussion here, it's completely opaque to me. And maybe that explanation should be included in the guidelines.

I'll repeat what I've tried to convey to you in this discussion:

- We moderate to retain the the trust of the whole community across the spectrum of opinion.

- Mainstream news, regardless of the topic, qualifies as being in-scope for HN if it is "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" (that's verbatim from the guidelines) and/or contains "significant new information" (that term is used routinely in moderator comments).

> There are many examples of posts which violate every one of the on-topic and off-topic guidelines. From what you've written here, it sounds like there's a shadow guideline - if enough people (i.e., a mob) want to see something here, then it stays, regardless.

I've responded to all the once you've cited. The one you cited above was dead. The ones you cited previously were (arguably) "significant new information", though we didn't give them front page exposure.

You haven't cited any posts that "violate every one of the on-topic and off-topic guidelines". I'm happy to respond to any further examples that you can cite.

And once again I encourage you to email us to discuss further, rather than adding more comments to a weeks-old thread that few people, including us, are likely to see. Several of the most active HN users email us regularly to discuss these matters.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-23 22:19:16+00:00
> Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution

No, it doesn’t.

It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution.

Any Amendments so proposed still require 3/4 of states to ratify them, either by votes of their legislature or by ratification conventions called in the states (at the option of Congress when calling the Convention at the request of states.)

Unless by "group of people" you mean not just the people in the national convention, but the people in the state legislatures or conventions, as well. But, at that point, you might as well say that by including an amendment process, the Constitution itself “gives a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution”.
by pyuser583 | 2025-10-23 22:19:21+00:00
I've used /dev/null for exactly this purpose. I have output that needs to go somewhere, and I don't want to worry about whether that somewhere can handle it.

Later on in deployment, it will go somewhere else. Somewhere that has been evaluated for being able to handle it.

In that way, /dev/null is to storage what `true` is to execution - it just works.
by sflanker | 2025-10-23 22:19:47+00:00
Presumably she is young enough to have completely missed out on Myst, which will be very dated now but was groundbreaking at the time and is most definitely a work of art.

These puzzle games are all very distinctive and beautiful in my opinion:

- Limbo - Manifold Garden - Monument Valley

I think on its face the question “can video games be art?” Is both absurd and obviously answered. The question are their games your partner will enjoy playing and want to spend time on is obviously totally different.
by marcodiego | 2025-10-23 22:19:56+00:00
No, not a good Idea. We did tons of efforts to achieve good multiplatform open source dev tools with exclusively FLOSS dependencies. Take dev-cpp as a remainder of what happens when people follow such path.

And this is a comment I often link whenever I ser any news related to Delphi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37520509
by bagnus | 2025-10-23 22:20:05+00:00
Paul Stephens contributions were incredible. His web design articles in PC Plus and those Lotus Screencam tutorials on the SuperCD were what got me started. They were my first proper lessons in building web pages, and they ended up shaping my whole career in software.

I still remember following Huw Collingbourne’s Delphi and C++ Builder tutorials too. I actually learned to write a word processor in C++ from those.

PC Plus was such a good magazine. I bought it religiously from around 1996-2002. Miss those days.
by derefr | 2025-10-23 22:20:06+00:00
> You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.

What's wrong with calling an idea stupid? A smart person can have stupid ideas. (Or, more trivially, the person delivering a stupid idea might just be a messenger, rather than the person who originally thought of the idea.)

Though, to be clear, saying that an idea is stupid does carry the implication that someone who often thinks of such ideas is, themselves, likely to be stupid. An idea is not itself a mind that can have (a lack of) intelligence; so "that's stupid" does stand for a longer thought — something like "that is the sort of idea that only a stupid person would think of."

But saying that an idea is stupid does not carry the implication that someone is stupid just for providing that one idea. Any more than calling something you do "rude" when you fail to observe some kind of common etiquette of the society you grew up in, implies that you are yourself a "rude person". One is a one-time judgement of an action; the other is a judgement of a persistent trait. The action-judgements can add up as inductive evidence of the persistent trait; but a single action-judgement does not a trait-judgement make.

---

A philosophical tangent:

But what both of those things do — calling an idea stupid, or an action rude — is to attach a certain amount of social approbation or shame to the action/idea, beyond just the amount you'd feel when you hear all the objective reasons the action/idea is bad. Where the intended response to that "communication of shame" is for the shame to be internalized, and to backpropagate and downweight whatever thinking process produced the action/idea within the person. It's intended as a lever for social operant conditioning.

Now, that being said, some people externalize blame — i.e. they experience "shaming messaging" not by feeling shame, but by feeling enraged that someone would attempt to shame them. The social-operant-conditioning lever of shame does not work on these people. Insofar as such people exist in a group, this destabilizes the usefulness of shame as a tool in such a group.

(A personal hypothesis I have is that internalization of blame is something that largely correlates with a belief in an objective morality — and especially, an objective morality that can potentially be better-known/understood by others than oneself. And therefore, as Western society has become decreasingly religious, shame as a social tool has "burned out" in how reliably it can be employed in Western society in arbitrary social contexts. Yet Western society has not adapted fully to this shift yet; which is why so many institutions that expect shame to "work" as a tool — e.g. the democratic system, re: motivating people to vote; or e.g. the school system, re: bullying — are crashing and burning.)
by cryptonector | 2025-10-23 22:20:09+00:00
> Realistically if ASN.1 weren't as badly overengineered and had shipped only with some of the more modern of it's encoding formats we probably would all be using ASN.1 for man things including maybe your web server responses and this probably would cut non image/video network bandwidth by 1/3 or more. But then the network is overloaded by image/video transmissions and similar not other stuff so I guess who cares???!???

For payment systems people really do validate messages' encoding.

> You seem to miss the entire point of XML schemas, or any schema really. Validating a document against a schema isn’t really for your code. It’s for documentation of what can be in a given document and how it needs to be structured. So others don’t need to read your code to understand that.

Schemas also let you parse data into ergonomic data structures in the host programming language. That's really the biggest win in having a schema.

Schemas and schema-aware tooling also help you not produce invalid messages that others then have to put up with and hack their parsers to handle when you present them with a fait accompli and you have the market power to make it stick.

Schemas also let you specify things formally rather than having to use English prose (or worse, prose in not-English, or even worse, having to produce prose in multiple languages and make sure they all say the same thing!).

The downside to schemas is that you have to do the work of writing them, and if you're the first implementor and you're using JSON and the messages are simple you just won't care to.
by mort96 | 2025-10-23 22:20:25+00:00
Untrusted input is often stored in files. Coreutils tools are often used to operate on those files.

As an obvious example, I sometimes download files from the Internet, then run coreutils sha256sum or the like on those files to verify that they're trustworthy. That means they're untrusted at the time where I use them as input to sha256sum.

If there's an RCE in sha256sum (unlikely, but this is a thought experiment to demonstrate an attack vector), then that untrusted file can just exploit that RCE directly.

If there's a bug in sha256sum which allows a malicious file to manipulate the result, then a malicious file could potentially make itself look like a trusted file and therefore get past a security barrier.

Maybe there's no bug in sha256sum, but I need to base64 decode the file before running sha256sum on it, using the base64 tool from coreutils.

If you use your imagination, I'm sure you yourself can think up plenty more use cases where you might run a program from GNU coreutils against untrusted user input. If it helps, here's a Wikipedia article which lists all commands from GNU coreutils: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Core_Utilities#Commands

EDIT: To be clear, this comment is only intended to explain what the attack surface is, not to weigh in on whether rewriting the tools in Rust improves security. One could argue that it's more likely that the freshly rewritten sha256sum from uutils has a bug than that GNU sha256sum has a bug. The statement "tools from coreutils are sometimes used to operate on untrusted input and therefore have an attack surface worth exploring" is not the same as the statement "rewriting coreutils in Rust improves security". Personally, I'm excited for the uutils stuff, but not primarily because I believe it alone will directly result in significant security improvements in Ubuntu 25.10.
by reorder9695 | 2025-10-23 22:20:27+00:00
To be fair the situation LMNT and alike is useful in isn't one where you just eat healthier in general, it's specifically useful when youre losing a lot of electrolytes usually during exercise, counterintuitively eating healthier may make that worse as healthier usually means less salt which is the primary electrolyte lost. LMNT and alike comes in there to replace electrolytes when needed without messing up your diet too badly, it's just 95% of the population don't exactly need this, but for people who do it's a genuinely valuable product.
by hex4def6 | 2025-10-23 22:20:30+00:00
Tangentially involved in that project.

One of the big issues with that phone was that in order to do dynamic perspective, you're having to run a 3D render at 60fps constantly. That's a huge power hog, and prevents you from doing many of the power savings techniques you otherwise could on a normal phone -- shutting down the GPU, reduced refresh rate, heck, even RAM backed displays.