MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by verandaguy | 2025-11-08 20:14:16+00:00
I've had to learn about TPMs to figure out if they're the right technology with which to integrate a product I've worked on. I don't agree that they're a "neo-clipper-chip" in any real way based on my exposure to them.

While I'm not a cryptographer... I never really understood the appeal of these things outside of one very well-defined threat model: namely, they're excellent if you're specifically trying to prevent someone from physically taking your hard drive, and only your hard drive, and walking out of a data centre, office, or home with it.

It also provides measured boot, and I won't downplay it, it's useful in many situations to have boot-time integrity attestation.

The technology's interesting, but as best as I can tell, it's limited through the problem of establishing a useful root-of-trust/root-of-crypt. In general:

- If you have resident code on a machine with a TPM, you can access TPM secrets with very few protections. This is typically the case for FDE keys assuming you've set your machine up for unattended boot-time disk decryption.

- You can protect the sealed data exported from a TPM, typically using a password (plus the PCR banks of a specific TPM), though the way that password is transmitted to the TPM is susceptible to bus sniffing for TPM variants which live outside the CPU. There's also the issue of securing that password, now, though. If you're in enterprise, maybe you have an HSM available to help you with that, in which case the root-of-crypt scheme you have is much more reasonable.

- The TPM does provide some niceties like a hardware RNG. I can't speak to the quality of the randomness, but as I understand it, it must pass NIST's benchmarks to be compliant with the ISO TPM spec.

What I really don't get is why this is useful for the average consumer. It doesn't meaningfully provide FDE in particular in a world where the TPM and storage may be soldered onto the same board (and thus impractical to steal as a standalone unit rather than with the TPM alongside it).

I certainly don't understand what meaningful protections it can provide to game anti-cheats (which I bring up since apparently Battlefield 6 requires a TPM regardless of the underlying Windows version). That's just silly.

Ultimately, I might be misunderstanding something about the TPM at a fundamental level. I'm not a layperson when it comes to computer security, but I'm certainly not a specialist when it comes to designing or working with TPMs, so maybe there's some glaring a-ha thing I've missed, but my takeaway is that it's a fine piece of hardware that does its job well, but its job seems too niche to be useful in many cases; its API isn't very clear (suffering, if anything, from over-documentation and over-specification), and it's less a silver bullet and more a footgun.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-11-08 20:14:54+00:00
1) It can't have closed source extensions if there's no longer any such thing as closed source. I'm not proposing that artists shouldn't bother with IP, I'm proposing that we build something new and once we have it working we abolish IP.

If it seems like I've beee avoiding 2, it's because the point I'm trying to make is

> IP isn't doing the job we want it to, we can do better.

To answer 2 I have to shift to:

> I can do better, and here's how.

My proposal is a bit lengthy for hn, so here's a gist: https://gist.github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/52b228cc3ffb624...

3) No, I was unspecific because the ideal payment depends on a variety of factors like whether their content bothered to share attribution with its source, whether it was supported or contradicted by more trustworthy evidence, whether it harmed or hurt the people who relied on it... things that you can't prescribe up front.

> artists have 0 say. They can only say "please" and "thank you".

That's been the case for every kind of artist ever since there was technology that could copy their work. The best we can do is find ways to ensure that it's more "thank you" than "please".

A) Do you know any artists who are making a living based on their art? (I don't). Do you know any who have tried and failed because it either wasn't enough money, or because they were too afraid that fluid definitions of "derivative work" might upend their business model? (I know several). The existing system is working only for incumbents.

B) Yeah, working on that

C) Like people going hungry because John Deere remote-killed a bunch of tractors on the basis of their copyrighted firmware having been tampered with. Like having billionaires instead of the masses in control of our elections because all information reaches the people through advertiser-controlled chokepoints. Like being spied on or sabotaged via back doors in our tech which were added to accept remote firmware updates related to content protection but are now being uses for other more nefarious things. Or having blind people be unable to navigate the internet because their screen reader software isn't compatible with the copy protection in place. Like having cures for diseases go unused because the patent on the treatment can still be squeezed for profit. Like having a brittle internet that is broken all the time because the rights holders needed single points of control, and now we have single points of failure. The list harms of the Advertising-IP partnership goes on and on and on. Cory Doctorow makes this point well in his (2011) talk: The Coming War on General Computation: https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4848-en-the_coming_war_on_genera...
by 0manrho | 2025-11-08 20:15:01+00:00
This is a persistent and pervasive problem that I have with nearly any of BigTech's framework/tooling flavor-of-the-month.

Not only are they often overengineered (at least, for the vast majority of people's usecases), but adopting them means you're adopting a consistently moving target who's priorities are chasing whatever trend BigTech has convinced itself is The Next Big Thing(TM) - often reinventing the wheel yet again in the process - whether you're on board or not. Not to mention possibly getting caught up in change-of-licensing issues (eg Terraform switching to BSL/BUSL) or cult-of-personality drama by the maintainers (Wordpress)

There is a place for these frameworks, even beyond their use in the house they were built at and for, but for the vast majority of usecases, they're not merely overcomplicated, but continually changing in their complexity to boot.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-08 20:15:22+00:00
I like https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/ and have used it for years and years, you can configure the look and feel pretty extensively.

Lots of ways to skin that cat (especially if you are a linux user) but focuswriter does everything I need, very little I don't and there is a frame/mindset shift to using the same tool for a specific task.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-08 20:15:27+00:00
It's important to remember that if people think of Firefox as a way to escape LLMs being pushed on them in Chrome, they might accidentally attract users from Chrome. It's the only possible reason why this wouldn't be a plugin. Why else would a user-focused browser consciously come up with strategies that attack user preferences?

You just don't understand the eleven-dimensional chess that you have to play to get from 30% marketshare to 2% marketshare. They have to think they have a winning strategy, judging by the way they talk to everybody who criticizes their decisions.
by iaaan | 2025-11-08 20:15:50+00:00
No heart attacks or strokes? I'm in the same boat (hereditary issue), and altering my diet has never had any substantial effect on my numbers. I'm not overweight and rarely eat red meat, but have had trouble keeping onto a primary care physician long term (the people I keep picking seem to move between clinics constantly) in order to retain consistent access to a statin prescription, but as I continue to age I've been getting increasingly anxious that my time is coming.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-08 20:16:25+00:00
> So what? I'm the one that's using it, I happen to be a human, my human factor is the only one that matters.

Yeah no you're right, if consistency isn't important to you as a human, then it doesn't matter. Personally, I don't trust my "humanness" and correctness is the most important thing for me when working with LLMs, so that's why my benchmarks focus on.

> At this point anyone using these LLMs every day have seen those benchmark numbers go up without an appreciable improvement in the day to day experience.

Yes, this is exactly my point. The benchmarks the makers of these LLMs seems to always provide a better and better score, yet the top scores in my own benchmarks have been more or less the same for the last 1.5 years, and I'm trying every LLM I can come across. These "the best LLM to date!" hardly ever actually is the "best available LLM", and while you could make that judgement by just playing around with LLMs, actually be able to point to specifically why that is, is something at least I find useful, YMMV.
by arcfour | 2025-11-08 20:16:38+00:00
I'm a security engineer, I have built things like this, and I made the original comment. A lot of my job revolves around developing automation for security needs.

Also, many of the top 100 domains serve user-generated content (like AWS/S3). Blindly trusting anything from them just because they are big is so woefully misguided it boggles my mind; I seriously doubt that anyone is actually doing what is described in the article.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-11-08 20:17:31+00:00
Mozilla seems to be an organization that is metrics driven to a degree that would make Robert MacNamarra blush.

I think this is why they keep shoving new features at users whether they want them or not, making them incredibly difficult to disable, rather than presenting an option try something new, or even making opting out of features easy and intuitive.

The latter two would lead to fewer users of the feature, which means it risks being removed for not being used by most users. Not to mention having an easy opt-out functionality means its usage can be tracked, which could generate unwanted statistics and make a stakeholder lose face.
by Zak | 2025-11-08 20:17:45+00:00
There seems to be real evidence[0] for the idea that focusing on nearby objects like computer screens for hours on end can contribute to the development of myopia. Breaks might help.

I don't see any reason to believe that making the screen transparent rather than looking to the side of it is a better way to look out a window for a break.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34622560/
by LandOfMightDev | 2025-11-08 20:18:03+00:00
So basically, i built this platfrom/webapp that allows users to take a list of video URLs and convert into into a sort of live-stream. The only issue i had was that when I tried to embed it into static html pages as a video player, the top banner for "create channel" and "support" would show in the videoplayer, which just looked gross.

After searching online, most people just said it goes against CORS to modify the elements in the iFrame, so here was my solution:

```<div style="position: relative;overflow: hidden;"> <div style="margin-top:-80px;"> <iframe src="https://livechannels.pages.dev/(ChannelName)" width="1300px" height="820px" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> </iframe> </div> </div>```

Basically, you just need to use two divs, one to set the overflow as hidden, and another to cut the portion of the page. In my case, I wanted to cut the nav bar, which was the first 80px at the top of the website. The end result was pretty much perfect.

Proof of concept websites:

https://animaxreboot.pages.dev/ https://cartoonnetworkhq.github.io/CartoonNetwork/
by toast0 | 2025-11-08 20:18:08+00:00
I feel like it's likely misleading, too. Eye breaks are about changing your focal plane, and if you're looking beyond the monitor to rest your eyes, you won't be seeing the screen.

You can experience this with a window with dry erase markers. Focus at a far off point and the dry erase is illegible and may not even disturb your far vision. Focus at the glass and you can read whatever you wrote (subject to penmanship).

Heads up displays often have optics to project onto a medium distance focal plane, otherwise your eyes have to work harder and you're not really able to see the scene and the display at the same time.
by groovetandon | 2025-11-08 20:18:31+00:00
An AI coding assistant deleted everything on our Mac so wanted to let everyone know so that they can be more careful

It created a config folder for MCP under /home/user/project/~/.cursor/mcp.json Best guess: We asked Composer to copy this file to “the correct location”.

It moved it and then attempted to delete the incorrect file. However, it got confused and somehow ran a delete on the ~ path which ended up deleting everything on our mac.

Privacy mode prevented the team from retrieving detailed logs to confirm exact commands. We’re now isolating AI coding tools in containers and tightening local safeguards.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-08 20:19:52+00:00
> However, if I discover I need to look something up, a hard block on internet access would be a problem.

When I'm in "writing mode", I forbid myself from doing quick lookups, because I can almost never stick to the "quick" part of the process, and end up chasing rabbits. Instead, I just put something like (verify) or (research to confirm yay/nay) while writing, and move on to what I can do in the moment. Then much later do I go through with a "editor" mindset and address all those things in one go, rather than in the moment.

I guess kind of like picking work into a queue rather than doing it immediately, and leaving it hanging until I can work through the entire queue in one go.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-08 20:20:06+00:00
No, pass-by-value means copying, which means whatever the copy constructor of the type implements, which for all standard types means a deep copy.

You COULD define you own type where the copy constructor did something other than deep copy (i.e. something other than copy!), just as you could choose to take a hand gun and shoot yourself in the foot.
by jsheard | 2025-11-08 20:21:04+00:00
Looks like it functions like a teleprompter. The actual display is flat on the desk facing up, and reflected at you through a piece of glass set at 45 degrees, with a second piece of switchable "privacy glass" behind it to provide an opaque backdrop when desired. Since you're looking at a reflection of the display, viewing it from the side as in that image breaks the alignment and cuts it off.
by kjs3 | 2025-11-08 20:21:43+00:00
That would be a 68LC060. And the 68EC060 was no MMU, no FPU. The RC just means it's a ceramic PGA package, so an MC68LC060RC50 would be a 68060 with MMU, without FPU, in a ceramic PGA206 package binned to run at 50MHz. If you have a 68060RCxx chip that doesn't have a (functioning) FPU, it's probably a relabled 'fake' LC, which is actually pretty common.

And, yeah, they're unfortunately crazy expensive, esp if you get stuck with one of those fakes.
by neilv | 2025-11-08 20:21:43+00:00
> Startups are fine scheduling candidates for 5-6 rounds of interviews,

Not all startups are like that, and you might not know in advance.

Though, incidentally, I did find one about a month ago, and I will take this moment of inspiration to complain about it, constructively.

I bowed out of an imminent offer, because I thought that the CTO's gauntlet of evaluation steps was a sign of the day-to-day I should expect: that I would only be valued like an untrusted junior commodity worker.

(I have a lot of experience, my detailed resume shows that, and I'd been patient and met more than halfway with the process.)

Meanwhile, the initial pitch about why I might want to work there had worn off, after 5+ calls and a takehome. I wasn't going to invest any more time+energy+soul, submitting to the final grilling/hazing step, of a job I no longer wanted.

ProTip: Unless you are a FAANG, or are paying FAANG-like money, don't act like one towards prospective hires/colleagues. Otherwise, you should expect to hire only people who are moderately good at interviewing (good enough to pass your nonsense, but not the nonsense of the people who pay more). And you should expect them to hop without loyalty, because you do FAANG arrogance and nonsense, without paying for the privilege.
by krona | 2025-11-08 20:22:10+00:00
clang-tidy has a check for this. https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/checks/bugprone/use-...

MSVC and the Clang static analyzer have a analysis checks for this too. Not sure about GCC.

It's worth remembering though that values can be reinitialized in C++, after move.
by evolving-silica | 2025-11-08 20:22:27+00:00
I'm not sure if I ever used any LLM features from Firefox besides exploring, but so far it seems great they're trying local approach instead of sending it to some "partner".

In the comment section here I see lot of people complaining about the fact it's enabled by default as well as some concerns about resource usage. Could someone experienced in desktop app architecture explain if disabling them functionalities makes Firefox that much faster or using less resouces? I'd assume that those functionalities are kind of loaded on demand?

"AI" became such a keyword that seem to instantly give either positive or negative response, it's also an advertised feature of every second app with many of them just forcing AI into you just because of hype. This doesn't seem to be a case in Firefox - so I highly disagree with the title - the features are there but they don't go into your way if you don't want them, therefore it's easy to just use it, only when needed
by nine_k | 2025-11-08 20:23:31+00:00
But that separation is sometimes the point. A designer tweaking the looks has no chance to break the computation logic, and an engineer tweaking the computation part won't disrupt the design by mistake.

Terseness is good for code golf [1]. I disliked CoffeeScript after writing it for some time: nearly any typo can result in another syntactically correct program which, of course, does not what you wanted the original program to do, or fails the compilation in an unrelated place. A practical language has safety margins, aka some redundancy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf#Dedicated_golfing_la...
by michaelbarton | 2025-11-08 20:23:50+00:00
Speaking from experience I was recently in a tiny fountain pen shop in Sendai[0] where the owner doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Japanese but we were able to talk for an hour or more about fountain pens and tomoe river paper alternatives using Google translate’s dialogue feature.

Maybe not massive commercial potential but it was pretty amazing and reminded me a bit of the Babel fish which use to seem like impossible sci-fi

[0]: https://share.google/64xTBRThXcFR72r3G
by sarchertech | 2025-11-08 20:24:40+00:00
>I have taken from the comments that it was only the case, that she rehashed ideas from other books, and I wanted to point out, that while this is a big deal for academic papers, it is not for books and basically expected.

In addition to near verbatim quotes, she is also accused of copying stories beat for beat. That's much different than rehashing a few ideas from other works. It is not expected and it is very much considered plagiarism by fiction writers.

As for the quotes she copied. That is likely both a copyright violation and plagiarism.

Plagiarism isn't just about ideas but about expressions of those ideas in the form of words.

Webster's definition:

"to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source"

"to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source"

Oxford learner's dictionary:

"to copy another person’s ideas, words or work and pretend that they are your own"

Copying verbatim or nearly verbatim lines from a work of fiction and passing them off as your own is both plagiarism and copyright violation.
by tolciho | 2025-11-08 20:25:05+00:00
> Honestly people who deny any usefulness of AI are getting dangerously close to flat-earthers by now.

This is a remarkably useless argument; "any" could be anything whatsoever, for example that the fuzzy logic of some prior AI craze ended up in certain rice cookers, while ignoring that the remaining 99.8881118881118883479075520881451666355133056640625 (or so) percent of AI is some combination of grift, wishful thinking, or both.
by tptacek | 2025-11-08 20:25:31+00:00
I'm having trouble even parsing what your comment is claiming that I believe, but either way, this thread is dealing in falsifiable statements, not psychoanalysis. Is this research being suppressed, so that new new science can be done it, thus justifying the claim that a study last updated over 20 years ago is dispositive of racial/genetic/intelligence causality? No, it is not.
by JohnBooty | 2025-11-08 20:26:16+00:00
"Antennagate" is the gift that keeps on giving. Great litmus test for pundits and online peanut galleries.

You are technically correct: it was a design flaw.

But folks usually incorrectly trot it out as an example of a manufacturer who arrogantly blamed users for a major product flaw.

The reality is that that essentially nobody experienced this issue in real life. The problem disappeared as long as you used a cell phone case. Which is how 99.99% of people use their phones. To experience the issue in real life you had to use the phone "naked", hold it a certain way, and have slightly spotty reception to begin with.

So when people incorrectly trot this one out I can just ignore the rest of what they're saying...
by ryandrake | 2025-11-08 20:26:24+00:00
The problem is how many people enthusiastically voted for this madness, lawlessness and cruelty, and are still cheering it on.

You can say "vote, vote, vote," and maybe it will work in 2026 or 2028, or 2030 or whenever, but the root problem is not going away: you are still surrounded by people all over the country who want this.
by SlaWisni73 | 2025-11-08 20:26:25+00:00
Thanks for checking this out. I'm the creator.

I'm a forensic pathologist with ADHD who lost hundreds of ideas using Roam, Notion, Obsidian. Realized the problem wasn't me - it was the design philosophy.

Traditional apps: Hierarchy. Linear. Enforced structure. ADHD brains: Associative. Network-based. Non-linear.

This tool flips that. No friction entry. Instant linking. Graph as first-class citizen.

Key decisions: - Single file (no complexity theater) - React+D3 from CDN (modern UX without build overhead) - Perfect export (zero lock-in philosophy) - Graph as first-class citizen (not bolted-on feature)

Happy to answer questions about ADHD design, technical choices or why punk rock simplicity beats corporate polish.

Code on GitHub. Free forever. MIT licensed.
by kragen | 2025-11-08 20:27:11+00:00
This is a towed light artillery piece, like the Gatling, not a heavy small firearm: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ametralladora_Maxim#/media/Arc...

Later versions did become more portable, but the Maxim was always a crew-served weapon. The advent of the fully automatic small firearm was really the Kalashnikov 60 atrocity-filled years later.

It's true that the Gatling required an operator to turn the crank and was significantly slower than the Maxim gun.