MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-27 15:30:19+00:00
Back in 2007, I published the first YouTube bypass of the Master Lock #175 (very common 4-digit code lock), using a paperclip.

After the video reached 1.5M views (over a couple years), the video was eventually demonetized (no official reason given). I suspect there was a similarly-frivolous DMCA / claim, but at that point in my life I didn't have any money (was worth negative) so I just accepted YouTube's ruling.

Eventually shut down the account, not wanting to help thieves bypass one of the most-common utility locks around — but definitely am in a position now where I understand that videos like mine and McNally's force manufacturers to actually improve their locks' securities/mechanisms.

It is lovely now to see that the tolerances on the #175 have been tightened enough that a paperclip no longer defeats the lock (at least non-destructively); but thin high-tensile picks still do the trick (of bypassing the lock) via the exact same mechanism.

Locks keep honest people honest, but to claim Master's products high security is inherently dishonest (e.g. in their advertising). Thievery is about ease of opportunity; if I were stealing from a jobsite with multiple lockboxes, the ones with Master locks would be attacked first (particularly wafer cylinders).
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-10-27 15:30:26+00:00
He didn't assault anyone.

He said a bunch of things. They've all been collected here: https://stallman-report.org/

What I love about that report is that the author created it with the intention of making Stallman look bad. And if you look at the author's summaries, he looks bad. However, the author also made us the favour of collecting all the statements in one single place. And if you look at the things that Stallman actually said (as opposed to the author's summaries) he doesn't look bad, he looks strictly correct.
by lukeschlather | 2025-10-27 15:31:00+00:00
Just for a single point of comparison, California's alfalfa consumes 15% of the state's water. All that alfalfa is going to feed cattle. California only produces 9% of the USA's alfalfa so it's easy to say that this is a tremendous amount of water.

Almonds also consume 15% of California's water. But California produces 80% of the world's almonds. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in water consumption, almonds are far more efficient and beef is both far more wasteful and far more common.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-27 15:31:12+00:00
You’re not uncovering some grand flaw, you’re just mistaking noise for revelation. The yeast example doesn’t prove a lack of understanding, it proves that when the framing changes, the response changes. That’s not confusion, that’s how reasoning works. Humans do it constantly. Ask a question one way, you get one answer. Ask it another, you trigger a different heuristic. You’d call that “intuition” if it came from a person.

You talk about “valuing correctness” as if that’s a unique virtue, but what you’re really demanding is godlike infallibility. A human chef could have told you the exact same wrong thing with the same misplaced confidence, and you wouldn’t declare the entire field of culinary knowledge invalid. One bad answer isn’t a philosophical collapse. It’s just one bad answer.

You ask “where” and “by whom” the Turing test was passed, as if it’s some formal event with a ribbon cutting. It was passed the moment you needed to start asking that question. The line between imitation and understanding disappeared while people were still arguing over definitions. You don’t see it because you’re too busy guarding a finish line that’s already behind you.

And the “sales pitch” insult is just a refuge when the facts don’t bend your way. You can call it hype, but the work exists. The tools are shipping code, drafting legal arguments, summarizing research, and running quietly in the background of every major industry. You don’t have to like it, but pretending it’s all theater just makes you look like the guy on the shore yelling that the tide isn’t real.
by resoluteteeth | 2025-10-27 15:31:35+00:00
Even if they know they would lose in court, lawsuits are expensive enough that threatening to sue or filing a lawsuit is often enough to get people without deep pockets to do whatever you want.

I don't know if that was the reasoning in this case though, considering that they didn't drop the lawsuit once it was clear that the youtuber wasn't going to give in to their demands.
by jihadjihad | 2025-10-27 15:31:41+00:00
As a consumer, it is important to note that `pyrex` and `PYREX` are not the same thing [0]:

"Corning used borosilicate to produce all Pyrex products. However, the company that purchased the cookware products switched to soda-lime glass, adopting the name pyrex (spelled with all lowercase letters).

Corning continued to make its lab tools with borosilicate, dubbing these products to be PYREX (spelled with all uppercase letters)."

All of the glass examples in TFA are borosilicate all-caps PYREX, while most of what you can buy today in the store is lowercase pyrex (Europe is an exception where the all-caps variety can be found).

0: https://www.corning.com/worldwide/en/products/life-sciences/...
by stonemetal12 | 2025-10-27 15:32:02+00:00
>All of our tests and benchmarks account for repeatability.

What does repeatability have to do with intelligence? If I ask a 6 year old "Is 1+1=2" I don't change my estimation of their intelligence the 400th time they answer correctly.

>The machine in question has no problem replicating its results on whatever test

What machine is that? All the LLMs I have tried produce neat results on very narrow topics but fail on consistency and generality. Which seems like something you would want in a general intelligence.
by CloudWiseTeam | 2025-10-27 15:32:03+00:00
Caching Cost Explorer API responses seems like a no-brainer, but I learned the hard way it can introduce unexpected costs.

While building CloudWise, I discovered that aggressive caching led to stale data and increased debugging time.

The key insight: Over-caching can mask performance issues, making it hard to identify real bottlenecks.

My solution: Implement a tiered caching strategy with TTLs based on usage patterns. We used Redis for short-term caching and a database for long-term storage.

Results: Improved API response times by 30% while reducing data discrepancies by 50%.

The counterintuitive part: Sometimes, the simplest solutions like reducing cache duration yield better results than complex strategies.

For anyone dealing with similar challenges, the approach that worked was starting simple and measuring real usage before optimizing.

What's been your experience with caching strategies? Any gotchas I should know about?
by jeppester | 2025-10-27 15:32:05+00:00
It should not be normal that companies are trying to fool their customers. I may be wrong, but I feel that dark patterns have gotten worse and have become quite normalised.

I'm well aware that companies are not your friends, and they are only in it to earn as much money as possible etc. But in the ideal world it should never be a consideration to willingly deceive your customers. Then something is wrong that needs fixing.
by 827a | 2025-10-27 15:32:43+00:00
Yes: my understanding is that it’s rather common practice to at least make a best-effort estimation of all these secondary impacts.

It’s also absolutely true that “agricultural usage dominating data center usage” is a dirty little secret that a lot of people are very, very incentivized to keep secret. Amazon can’t outright say that, because uh whutabuht mah poor farmers.
by snickerbockers | 2025-10-27 15:32:50+00:00
Does the 0.3% figure include the massive US military presence? IDK if they count as "immigrants" under the strict definition of the term but most people would consider them immigrants and that might be where a lot of the anti-immigrant sentiment comes from. I would be very surprised if the total amount of immigrants in Japan when including foreign armed services and their family members is a mere 3/10 of a percent.

They get blamed for a lot of crime; idk if that's true or not but it probably is, in part because American culture has less respect for authority, in part because American culture has more respect for individual liberties, and in part because any time you have a large enclave of foreigners (regardless of where they come from or which host nation they're in) they always end up committing more crime than the native population. They also get blamed for driving up prices in the real-estate market (this is definitely true, the US Navy owns 20% of Okinawa).

Blaming "immigrants" instead of specifically blaming the US military is also very convenient for both the US and Japanese government because both governments are largely in-favor of continuing the status quo so it's not surprising that politicians would obfuscate the source of the problem by blaming immigrants as a whole.
by sponaugle | 2025-10-27 15:33:07+00:00
This is an interesting question - I am a CTO at >1B tech company and there is no doubt that part of my role is exactly this - Technology Strategy.

How do I do it?

(1) It is my job to be familiar with a wide range of technologies, which might include tech stacks, but us mostly tech offerings. The tech offerings means lots of meetings with companies that build tech that we might use. Some of those are useful, most are painful.

(2) Actually using technology - IMHO - This is one of the most important aspects of the CTO job. I code all the time, but not for any of our products or operations. I code to learn so I can help make better decisions. We use Kafka for instance, and when we first started using it I built a cluster in my homelab so I had a better idea how it worked. The same with Hadoop, Cassendra, and a few different flavors of Kubernetes. The T in CTO is for 'technology', but it really should be for 'technical'.

(3) Perhaps the single most important thing - I try to hire people that are much smarter than I am, always. The amount I learn from people that are smarter/faster/better is many orders or magnitude greater and more valuable than the reverse.

(4) All the rest of the CTO job needs to support this - so budgeting, head count plans, spending strategy, patents and IP, roadmaps, decisions, etc. All of these details have to roll up and hopefully support a strategy.
by shandor | 2025-10-27 15:33:08+00:00
This is a good take, and I agree that habits can do that to people.

On the other hand, the intention behind the habit/action easily twists it in actuality to something else.

I think the “fake it till you make it” I brought up upthread a great example of this. Yeah, it might end up with the fake becoming something valuable, or you building character, or whatever.

Or, the habit that is getting built isn’t positive hustle and tenacity, but just a habit of outright lying, constantly reinforcing itself.

Sometimes it’s impossible to see from the outside what is which until it breaks down.
by bilekas | 2025-10-27 15:33:17+00:00
This seems very un-American. The government dictating how you run your business ?

> “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?

I applaud them for taking a stand, it seems to be more and more rare these days.
by mrweasel | 2025-10-27 15:33:19+00:00
At what point does someone in management step in and kill of the product? 2% should be a pretty clear sign that the product is either price entirely wrong, or just not something that anyone wants to buy.

Are Microsoft just in to deep at this point? They killed one off their flagship brands (Office) in favour of Microsoft 365 Copilot, shouldn't someone be fired for that decision at this point?

I'm looking forward to the books and articles in 10 - 20 years time, attempting to explain what happened internally at Microsoft these past years.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-27 15:33:27+00:00
When you say "the only evidence that once existed to say they caused the damage used 100% faked results", that is the kind of claim for which there could be evidence. What's more, it's the kind of claim that you should present evidence for when making the claim, since it's an attack on the credibility and honesty of those doing the study.
by brendyn | 2025-10-27 15:33:34+00:00
So my friend and I were trying to learn some coding together. We had our laptops on the same wifi and I wanted us to use git without depending on GitHub, but I was completely stumped as to how to actually connect us together. I don't want us to setup SSH servers on each other's laptops, giving each other full access to our computers, and sending patches to each other across the living room seems overkill when we're just sitting around hacking away on our keyboards wanting to share what we've come up with every few minutes or so. I still have no idea how I would solve this. Maybe I'd just try coding with a syncthing directory shared between us, but then that's totally giving up on git
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-27 15:33:37+00:00
Yes, but that requires admitting that the employees are flesh and bones humans with human social relationships between them and this stuff can't be tabulated and accounted and bean-counted. And it's rather outright seen as a risk factor, makes people less fungible, there's a risk that they gang up against the management, or there could be legal risk if they build too much of an insider culture etc.

Highly aligned motivated and talented people with shared core values (like the pioneer ethos of hackers, tech optimism etc, and cultural references etc) can achieve so much. And they tend to work odd hours and overtime because they want to make the thing, and not because of hoping to get rich.

Now I have two things to say about this.

First, this type of passion is special and a manager can't hope to simply force it, and if it's demanded then all you get will be talkers who know the lingo of being so super passionate. The thing must be worth being passionate about and the team has to be aligned with the goal and have latitude to shape the project. This kind of work bes happens when the higher up kinda forget the team and they just intrinsically do it. It can't be planned.

Second, some people are very opposed to these hight effort, almost obsessed teams because they see it as unfair ideals or unfair competition, because obviously someone with a family who has to pick up the kids at 4 pm can't do this cracked push overnight and sleeping at the office etc. But greatness simy cannot be made from steady, fixed-pace 9-5 jobs with work life balance and atomized employees. And that's okay, for most things we don't need greatness just okayness. But often people still can't stand that there are such great teams and want to drag them down in one way or another.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-27 15:34:03+00:00
> To a laymen user, any software that is running without code signing has a much much much higher chance of being something that has gone wrong rather than Joe Public found a cool image editing app that doesn't want to be distributed via the Play store.

Don't give me these "political" answers. That's just another broadly-agreeable statement that's completely unrelated to the one I asked you to substantiate:

> Escape hatches are great, but each also represents a security weakness waiting to be exploited.

There are 3 problems here:

0. If Google genuinely cared about Android security to this degree, they wouldn't be giving threat actors 4 months to run wild with 0-days before publishing them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45158523

https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1964754118653952027

1. Crossing the escape hatch != security breach

Mobile security relies on sandboxing, not on Google's approvals. Even the most malicious app approved by Google shouldn't be able to steal information, access information from other apps without authorization, or execute actions on user's behalf.

Whenever this core principle is broken due to inevitable security vulnerabilities, it should be treated as such and promptly patched. Instead these shortcomings are used as convenient excuses to advance these political goals.

2. An escape hatch can be anything:

- "allow installation from unknown sources" like we've always had

- secret settings menu + PIN/password + require a switch to be flipped in the recovery menu during boot + require an ADB command to executed + warnings at every step.

- ADB commands + switch in recovery menu + time delay + require a full device reset with all data being lost

First one is somewhat vulnerable to social engineering though I've personally never encountered a device where someone was tricked into doing this, so it must be more resistant than downloading malware on Windows.

Second is close to impervious to social engineering. Grandma isn't going to be accessing the recovery menu or running ADB commands any time soon.

Third one, while far too restrictive in my opinion would still be better than nothing, it would be impenetrable to social engineering, and safeguard any existing data on the device even in case of a serious concurrent vulnerability in the Android sandbox.

Are all of these completely unacceptable?

On the balance of probabilities, "Joe Public" isn't being tricked into doing anything, he is trying to install ReVanced to get ad-free Youtube.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-27 15:34:39+00:00
As the recipient of a SLAPP lawsuit (~decade ago) for truth I published online, the biggest problem with Anti-SLAPP statutes is that laypeople (particularly poorer ones) have limited access to attorney representation... the judicial system isn't accessible/friendly to the pro se litigant.

So even if the case is clearly being used to strategicly silence you, it'll probably still work (from plaintiff's POV). Same for DMCA.
by coldpie | 2025-10-27 15:34:53+00:00
> I would say "I'm sure they mean well",

Yeah, I wouldn't say that. It's clear from their public comments[1,2,3] that the spec authors don't believe the private key actually belongs to the user to do what they want with. They see services restricting what users may do with their own logins as a feature of Passkeys. It's really a shame it went in this direction. Replacing passwords with an easy-to-use keypair auth system would be a massive security improvement. But the Passkey ecosystem is poisoned at this point. Unless they remove the client ID & attestation anti-features, it should be considered a proprietary big tech protocol.

[1] Threatening an open-source passkey client with server-side bans because they don't implement passkey storage on the client device in the way the spec authors prefer. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10406

[2] Maintaining a list of "non-compliant" clients, including the above open-source one, presumably for use in server-side bans. https://passkeys.dev/docs/reference/known-issues/

[3] While writing an article about this on my website, I actually emailed the two involved spec authors on the above issue, politely asking how their interpretation of the Passkey spec could possibly be compatible with open source software. Neither replied.
by greedo | 2025-10-27 15:35:11+00:00
This all sounds great in the abstract. But reality is different due to the power differential. McNally is just one dude (albeit with a huge following). Lee is obviously a toxic jerk and his attacks and mockery of McNally triggered both McNally repeatedly proving the flaws in Proven's technology.

McNally obviously did the correct thing it seeking counsel and basically demolishing Proven's case in court. Too bad the SLAPP stuff doesn't work with DMCA takedowns.

And everyone else cheering on the sidelines (who isn't a paid shill of Proven's like the guy making the "liberal" comment)? Well giving Lee's company shit is fine IMHO. Call up the publicly available phone numbers, make service requests to flood his business etc. Fine with me. You poke the Internet bear, you get some claws.

As to the threats? If they actually occurred (which is questionable considering the BS Proven has been saying), then let the authorities know about them. That's not on McNally at all, it's more Lee being a jerk who doesn't know about the Streisand Effect, combined with social media companies that allow stuff like that to happen. It's also a good idea to not expose too much info about your personal life on social media that can be linked to your business, opsec ya know?
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-10-27 15:35:23+00:00
Yeah yeah but the reason why I link to that, is that if someone is interested they can with minimal effort find by themselves all the information to understand it was just a smear job.

Like, someone says "C assaulted B". And Stallman says "If A forces B to offer herself to C, C didn't assault B". Which is obivously correct. It could only be incorrect if you were redefining words to serve your purposes.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-27 15:35:24+00:00
It’s already happening.

Many big institutions lean heavily on mobile apps and other gated computing.

I live in BC Canada and by far the easiest way to authenticate a login to provincial sources involves using the BC ID App as a second factor, even when logging in via desktop. Many banks now also use their app as a second factor, rather than a generic OTP option that can run on any hardware.

There were also issues like running Netflix DRM in browser on Linux for a while.

General purpose computers won’t go away, but they will continue to be gated from more and more services until you are more or less required to have a phone or locked down ecosystem device.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-27 15:35:30+00:00
This is a reaction to the unwarranted fear-mongering in the media over water usage by data centers. The amount of water is utterly inconsequential. Growing corn on the same land the data centers currently occupy would consume more water and provide far less value.

We should question the motives of whoever orchestrated a "story" out of this non-story and is pushing it in the media. It obviously isn't being done in good faith.
by benzible | 2025-10-27 15:35:31+00:00
If you enjoyed this, you might check out "Hackers" by Steven Levy. I read it as a kid when I was first getting into programming, and revisited it recently. It really held up for me. The book traces hacker culture from the MIT AI Lab through the Homebrew Computer Club to the early game programmers, and what got me excited then and now is the pure joy of building things in collaboration with like-minded people. I've managed to spend a lot of my career in early stage startups where this is still possible under the right circumstances.
by gruez | 2025-10-27 15:35:37+00:00
You might have a point if it was wheat for human consumption vs datcenter, but those aren't the water hogging plants, which are stuff like almonds, alfalfa (for export)[1]. Comparing those instead, it's unclear whether those are "more important and more beneficial to humanity" than AI, which also genuinely provides utility to people (as evidenced by its popularity).

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/09/1192996975/amid-a-water-crisi...