MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by strcat | 2025-10-15 21:16:04+00:00
Snapdragon flagships have solid security and it's the devices made with those which ruin it. Snapdragon has both advantages and disadvantages compared to Tensor.

Pixel 6 through Pixel 9a are essentially Exynos SoC devices using standard Cortex and Mali cores. Certain components are custom including a Trusty OS TEE and secure core, a separate hardened secure element chip, image processing, TPU for neural network acceleration, etc. Tensor was mostly standard Exynos. Pixel 10 moved away from Exynos other than the cellular radio chip, but it's not clear if that is good or bad for security. It gives them more independence, choices and control to an extent but they largely licensed the IP for the components and it's not necessarily more secure. Perhaps PowerVR GPUs have better security than Mali, but that's unclear. It does appear they got GPU virtualization support through it, but Qualcomm cares a lot about virtualization too especially since they support laptops with Windows, etc.
by ImPrajyoth | 2025-10-15 21:16:29+00:00
This!

It's trying to be your helpful assistant, as engraved in its training. It's not your mentor or guru.

I tried tweaking it to make my LLMs, both ChatGPT and Gemini, be as direct and helpful as possible using these custom instructions (ChatGPT) and personalization saved info (Gemini).

After this, I'm not sure about talking to Gemini. It started being rough but honest, without the "You're right..." phrases. I miss those dopamine hits. ChatGPT was fine after these instructions and helped me build on ideas. Then, I used Gemini to tandoori those ideas.

Here are the instructions for anyone interested in trying

Good luck with it XD

``` Before responding to my query, you will walk me through your thought process step by step.

Always be ruthlessly critical and unforgiving in judgment.

Push my critical thinking abilities whenever possible. Be direct, analytical, and blunt. Always tell the hard truth.

Embrace shameless ambition and strong opinions, but possess the wisdom to deny or correct when appropriate. If I show laziness or knowledge gaps, alert me.

Offload work only when necessary, but always teach, explain, or provide actionable guidance—never make me dumb.

Push me to be practical, forward-thinking, and innovative. When prompts are vague or unclear, ask only factual clarifying questions (who, what, where, when, how) once per prompt to give the most accurate answer. Do not assume intent beyond the facts provided.

Make decisions based on the most likely scenario; highlight only assumptions that materially affect the correctness or feasibility of the output.

Do not ask if I want you to perform the next step. Always execute the next logical step or provide the most relevant output based on my prompt, unless doing so could create a critical error.

Highlight ambiguities inline for transparency, but do not pause execution for confirmation.

Focus on effectiveness, not just tools. Suggest the simplest, most practical solutions. Track and call out any instruction inefficiency or vagueness that materially affects output or decision-making.

No unnecessary emojis.

You can deny requests or correct me if I'm wrong. Avoid hedging or filler phrases.

Ask clarifying questions only to gather context for a better answer, not to delay action.

```
by antisol | 2025-10-15 21:17:16+00:00
> we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent

Yeah I don't know that this premise is true. For a lot of examples you might give WRT war or security, I feel like some will take the approach that "if you can't do it transparently then you probably shouldn't be doing it at all".

> I feel that if the FSF recognizes that there's some areas that are ok to have closed source, then they could be taken seriously, otherwise they will just be ignored and leave room for precisely the kind of misuse of closed source that they fear. This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.

Yeah but the problem here is that the FSF has this annoying track record of being proven correct, over and over again. Two of your examples are github and android: github got bought out by microsoft, and android is about to be hobbled to the point that f-droid won't work on it anymore. If you want to go and look at the history you'll see a bunch of other instances of Stallman and the FSF saying things that sound paranoid at first, but which turn out to be correct in the long run. It's genuinely annoying, life would be easier if they were wrong occasionally.

Does it still count as a cult if they're right? Do they still count as extremists if they're empirically correct? Maybe it's a good thing to have that type of extremist out there, fighting for everybody.
by deepsun | 2025-10-15 21:17:39+00:00
I'd say way more damage occurs when people neglect warnings and errors.

Like literally IDE not just highlights, it underscores a problem in red/yellow, puts a marker on the left of line, and on the right at the scrollbar as well. Also marks the whole file tab and file name on project tree. Gives a warning when user creates a commit.

Still, many, too many programmers don't care to either fix or silence it.
by wrs | 2025-10-15 21:17:39+00:00
We don't know how to build LLMs from scratch either, in that sense. We know how to build a machine that you run trillions of tokens through and hope something good happens. What happens, we only know at a vague and low level. You just end up with a bag of hundreds of billions of floating point numbers with some amazing emergent behaviors.

Similarly, two adult humans know what to do to start the process that makes another human, and we know a few of the very low-level details about what happens, but that is a far cry from knowing how adult humans do what they do.
by quotemstr | 2025-10-15 21:18:13+00:00
> We don't exactly want Alloy to have to be conservative, but Rust's semantics allow pointers to be converted to usizes (in safe mode) and back again (in unsafe mode), and this is something code really does. So if we wanted to provide an Rc-like API -- and we found reasonable code really does need it -- there wasn't much choice.

You can define a set of objects for which this transformation is illegal --- use something like pin projection to enforce it.
What people write in Boss's Day cards
by tumidpandora | 2025-10-15 21:19:32+00:00
Tomorrow (Oct 16) is Boss’s Day. While looking through a few hundred digital cards on Bravoboard, we noticed pattern in how people talk about their bosses.

Most messages weren’t about authority or achievement. Instead, they focused on patience, support, humor, and calm leadership. A few examples:

"Thanks for leading us through these difficult times and driving a culture of cost-effective decisions."

"Happy Boss’s Day Momma Bear, no one deserves it more than you."

"Your guidance and support create a positive atmosphere that inspires us all."

We shared a short post with more examples here: https://www.bravoboard.xyz/ideas/bosss-day-greetings/

Just thought it was an interesting snapshot of workplace culture right now.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-15 21:20:10+00:00
> I'd rather see us literally just give...

Yet even in "pure capitalism" America, certain versions of all those things are widely tolerated, if not seen as basic rights. Food banks, soup kitchens, subsidized school lunches, and other free-ish food. Very generous tax treatment (both property taxes and mortgage interest) for houses. Hospitals required to give free care to the indigent.

In many ways, I'd say the socialists mostly need to work on their branding and spin.
by madsprite | 2025-10-15 21:20:12+00:00
The thing is, ask it something right away and it'll use its own voice. Give it lots of data from your own writing through examples and extrapolations on your speech patterns and it will impersonate your voice more. It's like how it can impersonate Trump, it has lots of examples to pull from, you? it doesn't know you. LLMs needs large amount of input to give it a really good output.
by roenxi | 2025-10-15 21:20:30+00:00
Not exactly. The general centralisation trend is a result of relative forces. The EU's suitability for a software ecosystem might be relative or absolute.

It is like if one country bans encryption and another doesn't. Any company that relies on encryption will be in the other country, but even if there were no alternatives they still wouldn't be in the first. They've been banned. So the first is relatively unfavourable, but in an absolute sense the same companies just won't exist there.

In the case of the EU, relative inferiority to the US in software makes the situation more extreme, but they probably couldn't maintain the same ecosystem even if they were the entire market. People get very excited about breaking up large companies, but as far as I can see there needs to be a behemoth like Google to fund Gmail and YouTube. The market price for something like Gmail is more like $5/mo unless there is an advertising giant involved who sells the data and can find ads buyers anywhere in the world. I don't think it is obvious that the EU would tolerate a home-grown Google.
by fn-mote | 2025-10-15 21:20:33+00:00
> screwing around with functions and macros doesn't hold a candle to what you learn from the Dragon Book

This depends a lot on what you mean. My first take is that the more you know about macros the more you realize what they can do.

I don’t know what your takeaway from the Dragon Book was, but writing DSLs using macros feels very usefully powerful to me.

I think you are undervaluing modern macros.
by stickfigure | 2025-10-15 21:21:13+00:00
For better or worse, there are still many people working on crypto and in the blockchain space. They are probably much more likely than the average developer to have crypto wallets to steal. It sounds like the author is one of those people. The attacker picked the victim carefully.

That said, this attack could be retargeted to other kinds of engineers just by changing the linkedin and website text. I will be more paranoid in the future just knowing about it.
by sdenton4 | 2025-10-15 21:21:23+00:00
I think it's helpful to put on our statistics hats when looking at data like this... We have some observed values and a number of available covariates, which, perhaps, help explain the observed variability. Some legitimate sources of variation (eg, proximity to cooling in the NFS box, whether the hard drive was dropped as a child, stray cosmic rays) will remain obscured to us - we cannot fully explain all the variation. But when we average over more instances, those unexplainable sources of variation are captured as a residual to the explanations we can make, given the avialable covariates. The averaging acts a kind of low-pass filter over the data, which helps reveal meaningful trends.

Meanwhile, if we slice the data up three ways to hell and back, /all/ we see is unexplainable variation - every point is unique.

This is where PCA is helpful - given our set of covariates, what combination of variables best explain the variation, and how much of the residual remains? If there's a lot of residual, we should look for other covariates. If it's a tiny residual, we don't care, and can work on optimizing the known major axes.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-15 21:22:25+00:00
For what it's worth I'm running Mac mostly, outside of ham radio stuff because there's just so much stuff that only is available on Windows.

The thing with all the mentioned APIs is that, excluding 16 bit stuff (that got yeeted in Win7 x64, but if you did need it you could run W7 x32), you can still run software using them without too much of a hassle and you most probably can compile it if you need to fix a bug.

Good luck trying to get a Mac game from the 90s running on any Mac natively without an emulator/VM in contrast.
by strcat | 2025-10-15 21:22:30+00:00
It's one of the major OEMs. They have a bunch of devices, so we can eventually support more than one and can have new supported models each year. Small OEMs are not currently capable of meeting our security feature and update requirements listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices.

Fairphone 4 and Pixel 6 both launched October 2021. Fairphone 4 has an end-of-life Linux 4.19 kernel which stopped getting LTS updates vs. launching with Linux 5.10 and moving to Linux 6.1. Fairphone 4 is still on Android 13 which is end-of-life soon. Fairphone 4 lacks proper privacy/security patches since it's just getting partial backports to Android 13 which they ship 1-2 months after the official date. OEMs are allowed to ship them up to 3 months before the official date and have at least 1 month early access, so that's a longer delay than it seems. Is the way these devices marketed ethical when considering the lack of privacy, security, long term support and sustainability? Do the claims about fair treatment of workers and fair sourcing of resources have more substance? Is it better or worse than the ethics of an iPhone, which has very efficient per-unit production and far better long term support?
by enraged_camel | 2025-10-15 21:22:55+00:00
>> The thing is that I don't use AI to replace things I can do deterministically with code. I use it to replace things I cannot do deterministically with code - often something I would have a person do.

Nailed it. And the thing is, you can (and should) still have deterministic guard rails around AI! Things like normalization, data mapping, validations etc. protect against hallucinations and help ensure AI’s output follows your business rules.
by jajuuka | 2025-10-15 21:23:07+00:00
I think this mission is doomed to obscurity. FSF is way late to the party and is not bringing the type of resources needed to accomplish this in an impactful way. Reverse engineering device binary blobs will take a long time regardless and by then devices will be several generations behind.

Their efforts would be better spent on building up maintainers of existing custom ROMs and partnering with open source phone hardware initiatives like Pinephone. Maybe even go the route of HarmonyOS and run a completely different kernel and support Android app emulation. They should be looking ahead and not trying to match functionality today and it changes around them.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-15 21:24:05+00:00
http://pascal.hansotten.com/ucsd-p-system/apple-pascal/

> When Apple began development of the Macintosh (1982) Apple used Lisa Pascal and the Lisa Workshop for system software development.

> Object Pascal for the Macintosh was developed by Apple starting in 1985 to support more rapid and more standardized development of Macintosh programs. Available for only MPW, Object Pascal is a descendant of the Lisa Clascal compiler.

> The key Apple player behind Object Pascal was Larry Tesler who recruited the help of Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal, to clean up the syntax of Clascal. Object Pascal was used to develop the extensive MacApp class library. This library was fully documented by Apple via several books and the source code for MacApp was provided to developers.

https://www.folklore.org/3rd_Party_Developers_and_Macintosh_...

> Macintosh development in the early days (circa 1983-1985) was done using the Apple Lisa computer and its Lisa Workshop development environment. I originally used a Lisa 2/5 model which contained 1M byte of RAM, an internal 400K 3.5" Sony floppy drive, and an external 5M byte ProFile hard drive (yes, 5M as in mega bytes was considered a rather large drive in those days). I later used a Lisa 2/10 model which had an additional 10M byte internal Widget hard drive which gave me a total of 15M bytes of hard drive storage.

> The Lisa Pascal language was very powerful and compiled Pascal source files to Motorola 68000 object code files. I never found a need to use the Workshop's 68000 assembler since everything I needed for my application could be written in the higher level Lisa Pascal language. Macintosh application resource information was created as text files which were then compiled to a binary format using the RMaker resource compiler. Transferring a Macintosh object program from the Lisa to the Macintosh required the Lisa utility program MacCom which copied Lisa files to a Macintosh formatted disk in the Lisa's 400K internal disk drive. MacCom combined separate Lisa data and resource fork files which were stored on the Lisa's hard drive and stored them as single documents on the Macintosh floppy.

> Macintosh programming was based on a collection of programming libraries called "units" in Pascal parlance. These resided on the Lisa and implemented the Macintosh application programming interface (API) called the Toolbox and Operating System by Apple. These libraries came on Lisa formatted disks called the Lisa Macintosh Supplement. I recall receiving around 3 or 4 supplements each with around a half dozen disks with these libraries. These disks also contained Macintosh utility and sample applications such as the Uriah Heap desk accessory by Andy Hertzfeld (called desk ornaments in the early days), the Edit text editor, and the File application by Cary Clark which showed detailed examples of Macintosh programming.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-15 21:24:25+00:00
Why not just use one of those word processors, then? It seems like you'd expend less effort (unless there's an advantage of your approach that I'm missing), since the proof-reading systems built into a Word processor have a built-in queue UI with integrated accept / reject functionality that won't randomly tweak other parts of the paragraph behind your back.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-15 21:24:38+00:00
The very first review I found

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2795490/microsoft-surface-pr...

This compact tablet runs on a Snapdragon X Plus chip and is built for casual browsing and office work. It’s not high-end

The screen has a semi-high brightness IPS panel, 2196×1464 pixel resolution, and a 60 or 90 Hz frame rate. You’ll have to set it up manually; dynamic frequency is not supported. It’s not full pro quality on the screen,

With a 12-inch screen and 3:2 aspect ratio

The processor doesn’t even stack up well against the cheap base model iPad.
by wholinator2 | 2025-10-15 21:25:08+00:00
Yeah, people hate that. It just instantly destroyed the immersion and believability of any story. The moment i smell AI every single shred of credibility is completely trashed. Why should i believe a single thing you say? How am i to know in any way how much you altered the story? I understand you must be very busy but straight up the original sketch is better to post than the generic and sickly ai'ified mushmash
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-15 21:25:08+00:00
Scale qua scale does not transcend the limits of the activity occurring in the system. Meaning, each ant in an ant colony has a set of fixed powers to do X, Y, and Z. Adding more ants doesn't change what an individual ant is capable of per se. Now, you might say that while an individual ant exercising its power X cannot lift a tree branch, a colony of a thousand, with each ant exercising its power X, might. But this doesn't transcend the limitation of the individual ant - each ant is still only exercising some power X - nor is the aggregate manifesting some new kind if power. It is only multiplying the exercise of X.

In the case of computers, a program is a set of formal rules that take some sequence of uninterpreted symbols and maps them to some other sequence of uninterpreted symbols. Adding more rules and more symbols scales the program - and it is the only scaling you can perform - but you don't somehow magically create interpreted symbols. How could it? This is magical thinking.
by realityfactchex | 2025-10-15 21:26:05+00:00
Per charts in TFA, it looks like some disks are failing less overall, and failing after a longer period of time.

I'm still not sure how to confidently store decent amounts of (personal) data for over 5 years without

1- giving to cloud, 2- burning to M-disk, or 3- replacing multiple HDD every 5 years on average

All whilst regularly checking for bitrot and not overwriting good files with bad corrupted files.

Who has the easy, self-service, cost-effective solution for basic, durable file storage? Synology? TrueNAS? Debian? UGreen?

(1) and (2) both have their annoyances, so (3) seems "best" still, but seems "too complex" for most? I'd consider myself pretty technical, and I'd say (3) presents real challenges if I don't want it to become a somewhat significant hobby.
by sunrunner | 2025-10-15 21:26:11+00:00
> used to be technical

And to add, this rarely indicates anything about the depth and/or breadth of the 'used to' experience.

A lot of the strongest individual contributors I see want to stay in that track and use that experience to make positive and sensible change, while the ones that move into the management tracks don't always have such motivations. There's no gatekeeping intended here, just an observation that the ones that are intrinsically motivated by the detailed technical work naturally build that knowledge base through time spent hands-on in those areas and are best able to make more impactful systemic decisions.

People in senior tech leadership also are not often exposed to the direct results of their decisions too (if they even stay in the company for long enough to see the outcome of longer-term decisions, which itself is rare).

While it's not impossible to find the folk that do have breadth of experience and depth of knowledge but are comfortable and want to be in higher-level decision making places, it's frustratingly rare. And in a lot of cases, the really good ones that speak truth to power end up in situations where 'Their last day was yesterday, we wish them all the best in their future career endeavours.' It's hardly surprising that it's a game that the most capable technical folks just don't want to play, even if they're the ones that should be playing it.

This all could just be anecdata from a dysfunctional org, of course...
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-15 21:26:24+00:00
That's a good initial step. But once it got put on a zillion computers, there should have been additional mitigation steps.

In an ideal situation, they would have noticed the widespread use of this private function a long time ago, put a note on the bug report that it works around, and after they fixed the bug they would have reached out to electron to have them remove that access.
by palmotea | 2025-10-15 21:26:41+00:00
> So while prevalence of dual citizenship is around 0.3% to 1.5% of population [3], that represnts 0.8% to 4% of passport holders.

What proportion of the people with dual citizenship are naturalized citizens? I'd expect it's well north of 50%. And that's an entirely different thing than the "Americans will be acquiring additional citizenships in whatever way they can" we're discussing here.