MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rstuart4133 | 2025-10-14 21:50:29+00:00
> Safe languages insert additional machine branches to do things like verify that array accesses are in-bounds. In correct code, those branches are never taken. That means that the machine code cannot be 100% branch tested, which is an important component of SQLite's quality strategy.

This is annoying in Rust. To me array accesses aren't the most annoying, it's match{} branches that will never been invoked.

There is unreachable!() for such situations, and you would hope that:

if array_access_out_of_bounds { unreachable!(); }

is recognised by the Rust tooling and just ignored. That's effectively the same as SQLite is doing now by not doing the check. But it isn't ignored by the tooling: unreachable!() is reported as a missed line. Then there is the test code coverage including the standard output by default, and you have to use regex's on path names to remove it.
by switz | 2025-10-14 21:50:47+00:00
I recently bought a robot vacuum, installed valetudo, installed tailscale onto the robot itself and now I can control it from anywhere through my personal mesh vpn.

It's pretty amazing. Valetudo is perhaps the most opinionated software I've ever used, which comes with the good and the bad. But overall, it works and it does what it says it will do.

I don't really need to access it remotely, though it has come in handy: when heading out of town I can turn off the scheduled cleans and just run it once on the day I'm returning home. Which is really the only functionality you would need the manufacturer-provided cloud connectivity for.

It's been fun explaining to people that it's "declouded", but I can access it from anywhere. Melts non-tech peoples' brains a little bit.
by Aerbil313 | 2025-10-14 21:50:47+00:00
HN is yet another infinite scroll feed.

It’s no different than traditional social media, except in intensity. It’s less intense, because of its text-based format as opposed to video, the clickbait-resistant culture, and the fact that while it’s very large, it’s not infinite. You can consume the top page under half an hour and there are only so many stories posted here a day.

Depending on where you are in the AuDHD spectrum, you can be as addicted to HN as a teenager with 7hrs daily Instagram usage. pg acknowledges this.
by dmurray | 2025-10-14 21:51:10+00:00
Type checking in Python involves guessing. Take a program like

x = [3]

Should the type checker guess that the type of x is list[Any], or list[int], or list[Literal[3]], or something else? Libraries you depend on will pose more difficult versions of this question.

So it's not possible to expect the tool to be "perfect", whatever that means - usually people think of it as meaning it allows all code that they think is idiomatic and reasonable, and disallows all code that could raise a TypeError at runtime. You can only expect the tool to be reasonably good and perhaps to have an opinionated design that matches the way you would like to write Python.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-10-14 21:51:34+00:00
Are there any apps designed to specifically gate every install, including background OTA installs sent by carriers, because I'm security conscious with my devices but I have family who very much are not.

Ideally, I can just nag my non-tech savvy relatives to let me install such a security app for them and then enjoy having peace of mind for their behalf.
by wtallis | 2025-10-14 21:51:35+00:00
LPDDR5x really just means LPDDR5 running at higher than the original speed of 6400MT/s. Absent any information about which faster speed they'll be using, this correction doesn't add anything to the discussion. Nobody would expect even Intel to use 6400MT/s for a product that far in the future. Where they'll land on the spectrum from 8533 MT/s to 10700 MT/s is just a matter for speculation at the moment.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-14 21:51:46+00:00
"No one gets paid until something get's sold".

I heard this from management over and over again during my engineering career.

It never occurred to them that nothing gets sold until something get's built. They took this part for granted.

The more pertinent question is why does American business culture emphasize and reward sales more than engineering?

In other words, how do you logically explain why the guy who sells the product gets a share of the revenue but the guy who built it doesn't?
by davidw | 2025-10-14 21:52:09+00:00
It's certainly not like it was perfect here in the past or that the mythology reflected reality, but it felt like there was a fairly long arc of 'getting better in fits and starts' The cold war was over and we stopped supporting heinous dictators. Everyone could vote. Gay people got the right to marry. Things weren't perfect, but we had the means to work hard to make them better.
by dijit | 2025-10-14 21:52:20+00:00
Nice try sneaking Slack into a 1:1 secure messaging debate… That’s like comparing a corporate chatroom (with admin access) to a personal diary.

Telegram’s client-server default, with optional E2EE, is closer to pre-Microsoft Skype: tight client/network control, 1:1 focus, no major leaks despite a major spotlight on it for a decade+

You dodged Skype because it’s not the piñata Slack is. Weak move.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-14 21:52:23+00:00
> I guess I'm old fashioned but I buy cars up front for cash.

A large portion of people buying cars barely have a couple thousand to put down for a down-payment.

When you add in registration fees, sales tax, etc - a large portion of car owners can't do this without financing.

Maybe none of them should be car owners - but most of them live in places where you have no option to get anywhere besides private vehicles, so...
by linsomniac | 2025-10-14 21:52:40+00:00
No, agreed that things do indeed cost a lot more. I don't see it in your example of parm, WalMart has it for $2-$5, which maybe is a lot more than it was a year ago, but also your finances may be a lot different than mine. Or maybe you're in a different parm bracket than I am. ;-) But also my family has been fairly fortunate, knock on wood, that the inflation hasn't impacted us much day to day, and also we have been able to have money to invest. I do realize that many, many people are not so fortunate.
by tptacek | 2025-10-14 21:52:49+00:00
That's exactly the security model of Telegram. If you want to say "Skype", fine, Skype is also not a trustable secure messenger. I think we've reached an agreement.

Honestly pretty satisfying, I've never managed to drive an argument about Telegram being OK all the way to "Telegram is just as good as Skype".
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-14 21:52:55+00:00
Also, the more you use your cloud vendor's various services in your code, the more subject you are to vendor lock-in.

I won't name any names, but I'm pretty sure this is a big part of the reason why a specific cloud vendor pushed so very hard for us to push a bunch of data into their highly advanced NoSQL big data solution, when the data in question was perfectly happy continuing indefinitely to exist as a few tens of megabytes of CSV files that were growing at a rate of a couple kilobytes per day.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-14 21:53:13+00:00
Is it possible the phreakers are so specialized they have no experience with cloud admin and just went with some copypasta from SO answers to get the boring shit done so they could get back to phreaking? Not everyone is an expert in cloud management. It is easy to bork something when you have no idea what you're doing because you don't want to be doing it. They could have also hired low level people to do something for them and just didn't spend enough to have it done correctly. There's many reasons for a very specialized group of smart people to do something utterly dumb and easy to avoid by people with other specialized skills. These people would probably look at you as silly and amateur for using SMS.
by vel0city | 2025-10-14 21:53:25+00:00
First, one doesn't need to be impaired to die from a drunk driver. Only ~60% of the people who die in DUI accidents are the impaired driver. You can do everything right, but you're constantly surrounded by people making mistakes. You are not alone on the road. And even then, nearly 70% of traffic fatalities did not involve any impairment!

You are still far more likely to die riding in any normal passenger car in the US on public roadways than you are by taking any commercial air traffic, even if you limit it to instances where the driver of the vehicle the deceased was in was not impaired. And that's deaths, ignoring how many people are severely injured. Throw that into the mix and its absurd how much safer airline travel is.

Next: take a look at death and injury comparisons of highways to light rail and other public transit.

(warning: pdf) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/public/publication/8135...
by zerof1l | 2025-10-14 21:53:30+00:00
How do these articles keep getting to the front of HN...

> The certificates provide no security: The way you verify your identity to Let's Encrypt... you place a file somewhere on your website, and they access > Automatic renewal is insecure: certbot ... downloads a bunch of untrusted data from the web, and then feeds that data into your web server, all as root...

False, this is NOT the only way. You can do it by setting a TXT DNS record. No files involved. Your server communicates with the registrar through API over an encrypted connection.

> Manual renewal isn't free...

You're not supposed to manually review Let's Encrypt in the first place. The whole point is that you set up cron job once and forget about it.

> HTTPS is a trap: Once you've moved your websites to HTTPS, there's no going back to plain HTTP...

Not true. You can run HTTP version of your website in parallel if you so desire.

> Let's Encrypt is founded on the benevolence of scoundrels: Let's Encrypt isn't free to run, either. Their 2019 operating budget is 3.6 million U.S. dollars. Most of that is donated by… guess who? _Your competitors_[1].

EFF and Mozilla foundation are not my competitors LOL.

[1] https://www.abetterinternet.org/sponsors/

>It's bad engineering: When you install a certificate with a three-month expiration...

https://letsencrypt.org/2015/11/09/why-90-days

https://letsencrypt.org/2025/01/16/6-day-and-ip-certs
by Aurornis | 2025-10-14 21:53:31+00:00
> Single cycle readings defeat the point of sigma delta ADC setups.

The ADC's internal delta-sigma ADC takes a lot of samples at a much higher modulation frequency and presents them as a single output value.

You do not get the direct delta-sigma output from an ADC like this. The internal logic handles that for you. It's okay to take single samples of the output.
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-14 21:53:47+00:00
> It's absurd, to be honest. We financed our last vehicle, because we got a price discount via financing. The FIRST payment term they brought us was 8 years. And this was for a 19k vehicle.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess it was a Nissan dealership. Nissan can’t sell enough cars without subprime lending, that’s my guess as to why you were offered a 96-month term lol.

With a prime credit score, Toyota offered a 3 year term loan to me which I changed to 5 years (2.5%, it’s free money)
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-14 21:53:52+00:00
As a desktop user I definitely have a lot of benefit of ZFS even with one drive. It's got bitrot check, copy on write (better crash protection than journals) and snapshots. All life savers especially on desktop. ZFS doesn't only shine on big arrays.

And yes you can do that but I don't use Ubuntu a lot and I hate gnome so obviously I tried setting it up through kubuntu when I wanted to give it a spin.

I'm not a fan of Ubuntu anyway due to systemd and snap but these days I'm on FreeBSD as daily driver and very happy with it. It was just when I was last deciding on an OS that I tried it. Also tried arch and manjaro and a few others but I didn't feel at home there either.
by thaw13579 | 2025-10-14 21:54:25+00:00
A summary from the Everytown report "The Impact of Active Shooter Drills in Schools"

"Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill. "

https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-active-sh...
by stronglikedan | 2025-10-14 21:55:15+00:00
> I don't really understand why you think this tool is needed and what exact problem/risk it's trying to solve.

They lay out the problem and solution pretty well in the link. If you still don't understand after reading it, then that's okay! It just means you're not having this problem and you're not in need of this tool, so go you! But at least you'll come away with the understanding that someone was having this problem and someone needed this tool to solve it, so win win win!
by varenc | 2025-10-14 21:55:55+00:00
Hijacking WhatsApp SMS authentication codes can be prevented by just adding a PIN to your account. Doing this attack also doesn't grant you access to someone's old WhatsApp messages, and contacts with "security notices" enabled will see that your device has changed. It's quite different than big gov just having access to all your WhatsApp messages. (But there might be other ways they can do this, but just SMS sniffing doesn't get you there)
by bitpush | 2025-10-14 21:56:00+00:00
> I worked for a few years inside one of the large teams at Google that touched Youtube’s product monetization roadmap.

A team that works on product monetization roadmap will be focused on increasing monetization. And that's by design. Their roadmap wont (and shouldnt) have other things.

Similarly, a team that's focused on creator features will only care about new features. You cant draw the opposite conclusion from creator features' roadmap and say "omg, they dont even think about monetization". Yeah, duh - it is a different team that's figuring that out.
by vacuity | 2025-10-14 21:56:01+00:00
This approach is brittle to upstream code changes, and I don't think it should be used, but at least there is an effort to avoid catastrophic behavior (unlike Linus's philosophy for Linux). Both panicking and arbitrarily-nested error bubbling are more standard and recommended, but I think they are still suboptimal, mainly for code quality/maintainability, and should be phased out gradually. I think the viable methods for robust software are promptly handling errors or making errors unrepresentable. To promptly handle errors, the program should be structured such that error bubbling nests shallowly. Unrepresentable errors work within type systems or formal verification, such as the classic advice of "parse, don't validate"[0], giving no way to speak of an error state (so hopefully a cosmic ray never causes it!). These latter approaches are more ideal, but can be a pain to implement.

[0] https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-va...
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-14 21:56:10+00:00
You're describing the classical dichotomy between progressives and conservatives, a dichotomy which extends far beyond the political sphere to which is usually is applied. Whether it is in the arts, in architecture, in engineering, in design or in software development. UI design in particular seems to attract the type of person who is among the first to pull down Chesterton's fence [1] with no though given about what might be lost by this action.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/chesterton-s-fence
by itsnowandnever | 2025-10-14 21:56:16+00:00
mostly because all the bones of all the dead were mixed in with all the others. implying no concept of "this guy was THE guy in my lifetime". but they presumably still had a meritocracy because while the bones were mixed in with all others of all generations, not everyone would have their bones were mixed in upon death. it was likely only the craftsmen or shamans that achieved that honor. but being honored is different from the "divinely ordained" hierarchy of god-kings that came later.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-14 21:56:35+00:00
> Horrifying that nearly banks still require you to use sms as a 2fa and do not offer any other alternative.

In my country banking applications are tied to your phone via IMEI, SIM and other hardware dependent information available.

Forget getting banking details and use another device without the user knowing, either.

If someone clones your SIM or gets a replacement in behalf of you, your all banking access is blocked until you enable them one by one with your ID card or other means.

One of the banks can use FaceID as a secondary factor, too.

So, other methods are possible. It's an "implementation detail" at this point.
by mc32 | 2025-10-14 21:56:37+00:00
Yes, people have ideas of what they would do, read and listen to in ideal form. That's what they tell themselves they would want. Reality or practice tells us what they idealize isn't realized by those people. They actually seek something different --often what they are presented in the news, in food, etc. Sometimes there are things that shift behavior (like physician tells them they need to change dietary customs or their psychologist suggests getting out of an echo chamber)
by walterbell | 2025-10-14 21:56:38+00:00
"Why the US still won’t require SS7 fixes that could secure your phone" (2019) https://arstechnica.com/features/2019/04/fully-compromised-c...

the group: - dragged its feet on resolving SS7 security vulnerabilities - repeatedly ignored input from DHS technical experts - [identified] best practices.. using different filtering systems - [but] pushed.. to rely on voluntary compliance
by Yoric | 2025-10-14 21:58:14+00:00
By the time a junior dev graduates to senior, I expect that they'll be more reliable. In fact, at the end of each project, I expect the junior dev to have grown more reliable.

LLMs don't learn from a project. At best, you learn how to better use the LLM.

They do have other benefits, of course, i.e. once you have trained one generation of Claude, you have as many instances as you need, something that isn't true with human beings. Whether that makes up for the lack of quality is an open question, which presumably depends on the projects.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-10-14 21:58:32+00:00
A simple answer to this is: I use local storage or end-to-end encrypted cloud backup for private stuff, and I don't for work stuff. And I make those decisions on a document-by-document basis, since I have the choice of using both technologies.

The question you are asking is: should I approach my daily search tasks with the same degree of thoughtfulness and caution that I do with my document storage choices, and do I have the same options? And the answers I would give are:

* As a consumer I don't want to have to think about this. I want to be able to answer some private questions or have conversations with a trusted confidant without those conversations being logged to my identity.

* As an OpenAI executive, I would also probably not want my users to have to think about this risk, since a lot of the future value in AI assistants is the knowledge that you can trust them like members of your family. If OpenAI can't provide that, something else will.

* As a member of a society, I really do not love the idea that we're using legal standards developed for 1990s email to protect citizens from privacy violations involving technologies that can think and even testify against you.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-14 21:58:44+00:00
>What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles.

In my honest, personally informed opinion, there is much to be said for ignorance of the subject - and I don't mean you personally, just generally - at large - human cultures have a very intractable level of mystery, among our languages and human history, as a whole.

In anticipation of this fact, I personally invest myself in certain mysteries. The Tepe civilisation is one - but the things to be learned at Narwala Gabarnmang, are .. personally, I admit .. astonishing.

We do in fact have tens of thousands of years of human history to comprehend.

The issue is, we rapidly discard a lot of it in the rush to preserve just a bit of it.
by Junk_Collector | 2025-10-14 21:59:17+00:00
Keysight at least, has a fab where they make their own ADCs. Those are something like ENOB 6, 10 bit raw up to 120GHz and are used in their oscilloscopes but can also be purchased standalone.

Oscilloscopes also have a significant amount of additional front end conditioning, probe control, channel timing, and analysis software built into them. Most of the math functions on oscilloscopes use custom ASICs that work off the raw bits coming from the 120GHz digitizer which is non-trivial even just to receive. Calling it a plastic case around a digitizer is disingenuous.
by agumonkey | 2025-10-14 22:00:55+00:00
my view of docker, as a who thought it was a shallow wrapper on linux namespaces, is that it was a good fit for the average IT shop to solve the deployment friction

no more handmade scripts(or worse fully manual operations) stupid simple dockerfile scripts.. any employee would be able to understand and groups can organize around it

docker-compose tying services into their own subnet was really a cool thing though
by nicwolff | 2025-10-14 22:01:08+00:00
Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis (who wrote The Hustler and The Color of Money, and Queen's Gambit, and The Man Who Fell To Earth – quite an oeuvre!) has long been one of my favorite books and it's been eerie to see how right he was about how eager mankind is to hand over all intellectual labor to the robots.

(The last level 9 robot that hasn't killed itself is now the Dean of NYU, and in the 25th century it hires the first man who has learned to read in 400 years – to translate the title cards in silent films. Hilarity ensues. Well, no, but there is kind of a happy ending.)
by jeffbee | 2025-10-14 22:01:27+00:00
They've been snookered by American culture into believing that the bicycle is useless, and/or they've become trapped in an American exurb where the bicycle is in fact useless. I have a car but it mainly just sits there and like you I refuse to buy anything that costs more than about $30k. I drive a Honda Insight which at the time was the cheapest car Honda was selling in this country. The new Civic Hybrid annoyingly has 18-inch wheels so if I was looking at cars today I would probably favor the Corolla Hybrid. It blows my mind that people will by a Rivian.
by Topfi | 2025-10-14 22:02:31+00:00
> [...] should I approach my daily search tasks with the same degree of thoughtfulness and caution that I do with my document storage choices [...]

Then treat them with the same degree of thoughtfulness and caution you have treated web searches on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or Kagi for the last decade.

Again, there is no confidant or entity here, no more so than the search algorithms we have been using for decades are at least.

> I really do not love the idea that we're using legal standards developed for 1990s email to protect citizens [...]

Fair, but again, that is in no way connected to LLMs. I still see no reason presented why LLM input should be treated any differently to cloud hosted files or web search requests.

You want better privacy? Me too, but that is not in any way connected to or changed by LLMs being common place. Same logic I find any attempt to restrict a specific social media company for privacy and algorithmic concerns laughable, if the laws remain so that any local competitors are allowed to do the same invasions.