MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-14 02:03:45+00:00
Historically, it was called Windows XP and Vista about 15 years ago (Blaster, Sasser, MyDoom, Stuxnet, Conficker?). Microsoft clamped down, hard, across the board, but everyone outside of Big Tech is still catching up.

Despite Microsoft's efforts, 911 S5 was roughly 19 million Windows PCs in 2024, in news that went mostly under the radar. It spread almost entirely through dangerous "free VPN" apps that people installed all over the place. (Why is sideloading under attack so much lately? 19 million people thought it would make them more secure, and instead it turned their home internet into criminal gateways with police visits. I strongly suspect this incident, and how it spread among well-meaning security-minded people, was the invisible turning point in Big Tech against software freedom lately.)

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/how-to-identify-and-re...

> if someone can unlock your phone, go into the settings, enable installation of apps for an application (ex. a browser), download an apk and install it then they can do quite literally anything, from enabling adb to exfiltrating all your files.

Which is more important, and a growing threat? Dump all her photos once; or install a disguised app that pretends to be a boring stock app nobody uses, that provides ongoing access for years, with everything in real-time up to the minute? Increasingly it's the latter. She'll never suspect the "Samsung Battery Optimizer" or even realize it came from an APK. No amount of sandboxing and permissions can detect an app with a deliberately false identity.
by mikepurvis | 2025-10-14 02:04:14+00:00
I had a PS2 slim years ago and was annoyed that it wouldn’t let me use a “dual analog” controller I had kicking around to play PS2 games, eg for second player. Seemed like an unnecessarily hostile move to force an upgrade there when all the functionality other than rumble was clearly present.

But of course it’s the same now on PS5. I still have my PS4 pads and use them to round out 4p couch coop for broforce, overcooked, moving out, etc, but actual PS5 games will only work with PS5 pads.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-14 02:04:15+00:00
"If I can't do this anymore..."

How will Google force Android users to "update" so sideloadinng can be prevented

Non-updated versions of Android running non-updated versions of sideloaded apps will not have the restriction

Another example of how not every "update" is for "security" and "updates" should be optional

The computer owner chooses one version of an operating system, e.g., "I chose Android because I can sideload any app", but by allowing automatic updates, without reviewing them first, the computer owner agrees to let the operating system vendor change the software remotely to anything the vendor chooses. The computer owner goes along with whatever the vendor decides, letting the vendor take them for a ride

If the operating system gets _worse_ in the opinion of the computer owner, if it fails to meet their needs, e.g., "sideloading", then that's too bad. The computer owner chose one version of Android, but by subscribing to "automatic updates" they effectively chose all future versions as well

This is why I prefer BSD UNIX-like operating system projects where I can choose to update or not to update. Unlike the hypothetical Android user, the project does not decide for me

HN replies may try to draw attention to "security" and away from "sideloading restriction". However there is no option to accept "security updates" while rejecting "sideloading restriction updates". According to the so-called "tech" companies that conduct data collection and surveillance as a "business model" through free, auto-updated software, every update, no matter what it contains, is deemed essential and critical for "security"

Online commentators seem to agree that the computer owner should have the choice to install or not install _any_ software outside the "app store", so-called "sideloading". Perhaps this freedom to choose whether to install or not install software should also apply to operating system "updates"
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-14 02:04:17+00:00
You do realize macOS has used sandboxing by default for over a decade, right?

ChromeOS/ChromiumOS uses heavy sandboxing. Android currently uses sandboxing transparently, despite plans to iOS-ify the platform. Hell, Windows uses app isolation sandboxing these days.

All four consumer platforms let you run the software you want to and they provide sandboxing at the same time. They also let you configure sandboxes, too.

As for open source, consumer products like the Steam Deck use sandboxes, popular game launchers like Lutris use sandboxes, Firefox transparently uses sandboxing by default, as does Chromium/Chrome, anything installed automatically with Flatpak or Snap are sandboxed by default and AppArmor/SELinux works in the background automatically on most distros and are activated by default.

Saying open source projects like the Steam Deck, Firefox, Chromium, ChromiumOS and Android suck for consumers is a weird opinion, but you're free to have it.
by godelski | 2025-10-14 02:04:35+00:00
> Maybe spend more time reading a response than writing.

Quite ironic considering

> Yellowcake doesn't know what you are talking about either

I actually said

>> @yellocake seems to understand that "addition" doesn't mean 'addition'

Which is entirely based off of

>>>>>> Presumably you're overloading the addition symbol

I didn't assume their knowledge, they straight up told me and I updated my understanding based on that. That's how conversations work. And the fact that they understand operator overloading doesn't mean they understand more either. Do they understand monoids, fields, groups, and rings? Who knows? We'll have to let yellowcake tell us.

Regardless, what you claim I assumed about yellowcake's knowledge is quite different than what I actually said. So maybe take your own advice.

I write a lot because, unlike you, I understand these things are complex. Were it simpler, I would not need as many words.
by gritzko | 2025-10-14 02:06:08+00:00
More like a chat server or a sync server. Normal Web server connections are short lived. Flash crowds from HN would give 100K visits a day maybe, that is like 1 or 2 at a time unless you WebSocket them.

Imagine what sort of traffic you need to saturate 1000 conns with HTTP. Can your single thread app handle it? If you are not using nginx, that must be something less trivial than a reverse proxy. Nginx can do lots of things, by the way.
by shawntan | 2025-10-14 02:06:09+00:00
The question I keep coming back to is whether ARC-AGI is intended to evaluate generalisation to the task at hand. This would then mean that the test data has a meaningful distribution shift from the training data, and only a model that can perform said generalisation can do well.

This would all go out the window if the model being evaluated can _see_ the type of distribution shift it would encounter during test time. And it's unclear whether the shift is the same in the hidden set.

There are questions about the evaluations that arise from the large model performance against the smaller models, especially given the ablation studies. Are the large models trained on the same data as these tiny models? Should they be? If they shouldn't, then why are we allowing these small models access to these in their training data?
by Sean-Der | 2025-10-14 02:06:17+00:00
My 5 (at the time 4) year old always understood. We made a game out of it of ‘making new toys’ and she would tell me what it should say.

I would cut open toys and shove microcontrollers in them.

I think if you lie and tell a kid it’s a real person it would be damaging. My kid has fun role playing, she really suspends disbelief. When done she thinks it’s funny though/not confused.
by lgeek | 2025-10-14 02:06:29+00:00
From having worked on DDoS mitigation, there's pretty much no difference between CGNAT and IPv6. Block or rate limit an IPv4 address and you might block some legitimate traffic if it's a NAT address. Block a single IPv6 address... And you might discover that the user controls an entire /64 or whatever prefix. So if you're in a situation where you can't filter out attack trafic by stateless signature (which is pretty bad already), you'll probably err on the side of blocking larger prefixes anyway, which potentially affect other users, the same as with CGNAT.

Insofar as it makes a difference for DDoS mitigation, the scarcity of IPv4 is more of a feature than a bug.
by MountDoom | 2025-10-14 02:06:46+00:00
I remember people making the exact same argument about asking LLMs math questions back when they couldn't figure out the answer to 18 times 7. "They are text token predictors, they don't understand numbers, can we put this nonsense to rest."

The whole point of LLMs is that they do more than we suspected they could. And there is value in making them capable of handling a wider selection of tasks. When an LLM started to count the numbers of "r"s in "strawberry", OpenAI was taking a victory lap.
by kragen | 2025-10-14 02:07:43+00:00
It's fair that I'm conflating raw computational power with strategic usage of that power. And it is at least theoretically conceivable that brute force computational power is not something that could be replaced by clever algorithms.

But if you agree that with 10²⁸ more times more computational power we could almost surely cure cancer without gathering much more data, then you agree that we have enough empirical data and just need to analyze it better. We're sort of arguing about the details of what kinds of approaches to analyzing the data better would work best.

I'll continue that argument about details a bit more here. So far, even with merely human intelligence, hard computational problems like car crash simulation, protein folding, and mixed integer-linear programming (optimization) have continued to gain even more efficiency from algorithmic improvements than from hardware improvements.

According to our current understanding of complexity theory, we should expect this to continue to be the case. An enormous class of practically important problems are known to be NP-complete, so unless P = NP, they take exponential time: solving a problem of size N requires k**N steps. Hardware advances and bigger compute budgets allow us to do more steps, while algorithmic improvements reduce k.

To be concrete, let's say k = 1.02, we have a data center full of 4096 1-teraflops GPUs, and we can afford to wait a month (2.6 megaseconds) for an answer. So we can apply about 10²² operations to the problem, which lets us solve problems up to about size N = 2600. Now suppose we get more budget and build out 1000 such data centers, so we can apply 10²⁵ ops, but without improving our algorithms. This allows us to handle N = 2900.

But suppose that instead we improve the heuristics in our algorithm to reduce k from 1.02 to 1.01. Suddenly we can handle N = 5100, twice as big.

We can easily calculate how many data centers we would need to reach the same problem size without the more intelligent algorithm. It's about 6 × 10²¹ data centers.

For NP-complete problems, unless P = NP, brute-force computing power lets you solve logarithmically larger problems, while intelligence lets you solve linearly larger problems, equivalent to an exponentially larger amount of computation.
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-14 02:08:13+00:00
I’m not the OP. Heavy labor is… a lot of work. It’s rough in the body and some people aren’t cut for it.

In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They’d hire 4 crews of 4 guys each and we’d lose about half through the summer. They were great family to work for, but the work was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all day, and many of my former coworkers did.
by adabyron | 2025-10-14 02:09:05+00:00
That's fair & I get your point. Thank you. The parent link was really light on details. My link gave some opposition reasons but I could have summed them up or dug into them better. Since it's a very local issue, I assumed getting real info would be challenging without digging into local government minutes.

While I was just trying to help understand some opposing reasons, you're right that it didn't add much to the overall discussion.
by tsmango | 2025-10-14 02:09:08+00:00
I’m the author of the post.

I get the reaction. For something like a simple login flow, this probably looks like a lot of ceremony. The goal isn’t to over-engineer it, though. Each piece handles a single concern that may evolve independently over time (email normalization, authentication, session creation). Keeping those parts separate makes it easier to test, extend, and reuse.

And while the example is intentionally simple, the benefits show up more clearly in complex scenarios, like when workflows start branching, new auth methods are added, or the same logic needs to run in different contexts (web, API, background job, etc.). Having composable, consistent services keeps that complexity from leaking everywhere else.

It’s not the only way to structure things, but it works well for me.
by stlava | 2025-10-14 02:10:14+00:00
I had some experience with RTK and sensor fusion about 13 years ago on a college project. At the time the only people that were using RTK in real world applications were tractor companies because it kind of matters that you're precise when seed drilling. I'm not sure how far RTK has come but it had pit falls back then like base station drift when the set of satellites it saw changed due to them going over the horizon.

Tractors don't go _that_ fast but I'm not sure I'd rely on it in an actual car for anything but slightly better GPS.
by getpokedagain | 2025-10-14 02:11:00+00:00
I may be on the outside here but I am all for using the phone or any more mobile computer. Humans are not designed to sit at desks all day and having a good computer with me all day is something I want. Its just that I want it to read books and take notes or sketch to free my mind. Not slurp down rage bait wrapped up with some shop at target. Supporting computers by inviting in the marketing money was a big fuckup.
by maximus_01 | 2025-10-14 02:11:24+00:00
Except it isn't at all. The properties to buy all have a fixed price, costs of houses/hotels are fixed, rents are fixed and can't be adjusted, and most importantly, a) you can only buy a property if you randomly happen to land on it and b) people have no choice of what property to stay at (again, chosen by random dice)
by beloch | 2025-10-14 02:11:27+00:00
The problem is that people are still falling for exactly the same sort of comic-book evil even though it's every bit as obvious. e.g. Haitian's eating dogs, illegal immigrants scamming medical services, stealing high-paying jobs, etc..

A high percentage of people completely lack what Carl Sagan would call a "Baloney detection kit", and the current purveyors of baloney like it that way. That's why they're anti-science and anti-education.

I suspect we're seeing WWII anti-Nazi propaganda being promoted all over social media in an attempt to shock people into a moment of introspection. Someone watching this propaganda piece today doesn't even have to make substitutions. The man on a street-corner ranting about immigrants could be a talking head on certain current "news" programs. However, the shock relies on the viewer's perception of Nazi's as irredeemably evil.

Humans forget, and that happens pretty reliably when something passes out of living memory. There are precious few people left with first-hand memories of Nazi evil or who can remember fighting Hitler. For most living people, Nazi's are just comic-book and Hollywood villains. Comparing oneself to the people in this propaganda reel today undoubtedly has less impact than it did fifty years ago, and that impact will continue to fade. Society in certain countries is now clearly at the stage where painful lessons need to be relearned.
by gpm | 2025-10-14 02:11:33+00:00
I highly recommend watching the notjustbike video on autonomous vehicles. It outlines a disturbingly plausible path to a dystopia simply by following the lobbying incentives to logical conclusions. This feels like step 0. I'd strongly suggest that if this is coming to somewhere near you, you object, tell your city no, protest, etc.

Link to the start of where he starts outlining a path to dystopia (though the first half of the video is informative too) https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=_RPIAzkW9LGBJmmA&t=1683
by stinkbeetle | 2025-10-14 02:13:31+00:00
I think they'll start launching starlink v3 satellites pretty soon, before perfecting reentry let alone rapid reuse. They've demonstrated a zero-gravity engine re-light several times and deployed dummy sats twice, that's all they need to put real satellites in orbit. We could see it on the second or third launch of the block 3 rockets.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-10-14 02:13:54+00:00
I like to imagine that thermodynamics happened because industrial metallurgy and boiler design advanced to the point where people started asking "what are the fundamental constraints?"

There's a chance that it didn't actually happen that way, though.

edit: I also heard that Louis Pasteur did work for breweries, answering the question "Why do some batches come out nasty while most are fine, given the same inputs?"
by m0llusk | 2025-10-14 02:14:20+00:00
Keep the focus on the evidence and the science. We have Picketty's book on Capital, Peter Turchin's research exposing elite capture and elite overreach, and perhaps most important the experience of digging our way out of the great depression with strong regulations, high taxes, and pervasive unionization of labor. Promoting the idea that we understand what is going on, have been here before, and know ways out can be very empowering.
by ralnivar | 2025-10-14 02:14:51+00:00
I am a bit split this topic. There is some privacy concerns with using ipv6. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7721.html#page-6

Some time ago I decided for our site to not roll out ipv6 due to these concerns. (a couple of million visitors per month) We have meta ads reps constantly encourage us to enable it which also do not sit right with me.

Although I belive fingerprinting is sofisticated enough to work without using ip's so the impact of using ipv6 might not be a meaningful difference.
by pyuser583 | 2025-10-14 02:15:41+00:00
"We must never let ourselves be divided by race or by color or religion. Because, in this country we all belong to minority groups. I was born in Hungary, you are <unclear>. These are minorities. And then you belong to other minority groups too. You are a farmer, you have blue eyes, you go to the Methodist church, your right to belong to these minorities is a precious thing. You have a right to be what you are and to say what you think. Because here we have personal freedom. We have liberty. And these are not just fancy words. This is a practical and priceless way of living. But we must work at it. We must guard everyone's liberties. Or we can lose our own. If we allow any minority to lose it's freedom by persecution or by prejudice, we are threatening our own freedom."

I don't think anyone sees it this way anymore. We are much more "zero-sum," both right and left.
by brookst | 2025-10-14 02:15:42+00:00
It’s like defending a test showing hammers are terrible at driving screws by saying many people are unclear on how to use tools.

It remains unsurprising that a technology that lumps characters together is not great at processing below its resolution.

Now, if there are use cases other than synthetic tests where this capability is important, maybe there’s something interesting. But just pointing out that one can’t actually climb the trees pictured on the map is not that interesting.
by lmm | 2025-10-14 02:16:47+00:00
> The British, French and Israelis literally went to war against Egypt over the Suez.

> They only backed up when the US told the Brits and France they would tank their economies still on US life support.

But they did back off. The US was willing to stand up for Egyptian sovereignty even against their own allies. That isn't an example of non-western countries being unable to enact protectionist policies, it's an example of the opposite.
by gen220 | 2025-10-14 02:16:49+00:00
Have you considered that it doesn’t matter that what they’re doing is legal?

You don’t need to know if it’s legal or illegal to know that it is wrong. It is against the spirit of this nation (or, perversely, you could say it’s the intrinsic spirit of this nation coming out…). There are plenty of things legal which are wrong.

That anyone is defending these actions by claiming to do them “legally” is a means of saving face with the people in our society who are distant enough from those directly and indirectly affected, and who struggle to differentiate morality from law. This kind of thinking is a slippery slope that leads to the institutionalization of violence.

If it were legal for ICE to hold *humans* classified by the state as “illegal migrants” in concentration camps, would you continue to defend that policy as merely enforcing the law?
by filloooo | 2025-10-14 02:16:50+00:00
People like to play the victims, nobody else wanted to buy these unattractive companies back then, but once these companies are turned around or eventually fail, suddenly they are of national importance, we were ripped off.

The Google Facebook examples probably would hold better if the US hadn't axed TikTok, also, Google isn't banned in China, they refused to comply with censorship regulations and left themselves.

Rules only apply when the people that set the rules win, maybe China is to be blamed for seeing through this cruel world earlier.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-14 02:17:27+00:00
Discussion of a similar post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44957157 (163 point | 55 days ago | 73 comments)

My takeaway from a comment by Ultimatt:

> [...] This isn't some new miracle find this is a well described and growing phylum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanobdellota Having genome reduced symbionts of dinoflagellates is an even more common and general phenomena, it's almost the definition of a dino to have a weird zoo of peculiar friends and things becoming endo symbionts. This finding is definitely cool, but I don't understand why the article has to make out its a "breakthrough" or "astounding" rather than actually the more astounding thing is how normal this very weird thing is!
by chromatic | 2025-10-14 02:17:29+00:00
This is an embarrassing context to admit, but here goes.

Back when Parrot was a thing and the Perl 6 people were targeting it, I profiled the prelude of Perl 6 to optimize startup time and discovered two things:

- the first basic block of the prelude was thousands of instructions long (not surprising) - the compiler had to allocate thousands of registers because the prelude instructions used virtual registers

The prelude emitted two instructions, one right after another: load a named symbol from a library, then make it available. I forget all of the details, but each of those instructions either one string register and one PMC register. Because register allocation used the dominance frontier method, the size of the basic block and total number of all symbolic registers dominated the algorithm.

I suggested a change to the prelude emitter to reuse actual registers and avoid virtual registers and compilation sped up quite a bit.
by hinkley | 2025-10-14 02:17:56+00:00
There’s like this three way war in testing between people who think they’re terrible and write tests that are self fulfilling prophecies, people who think terrible tests aren’t bad and good tests are “too much work”, and a small minority of people that think different tests are just different work and only take a bit of practice to do decently.

It took me two mentors to feel like I could do tests worth having. Two more to feel I was good at it. And one more to realize everyone is terrible at them and I just suck less.

There is definitely something wrong with testing. But nobody has cracked the code so we do this even though we know it’s often suboptimal. I recently hunted down guy #5 and asked him about my conclusion and he agreed.