MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by varispeed | 2025-11-14 22:15:33+00:00
The irony is that we only get stuck in semantic arguments because the authorities refuse to treat this as the kind of act it actually is. If prosecutors applied their own standards consistently, we wouldn’t be debating vocabulary on a message board.

Germany’s criminal code already recognises coercion of a population for political ends as a serious offence. If a private organisation tried to impose a system that eliminated private communication, criminalised encryption defaults, and created a permanent climate of fear around ordinary speech, they wouldn’t get a policy debate. They’d get an arrest warrant.

The only thing making this “controversial” is institutional hesitation. Everyone knows issuing warrants against EU-level actors would cause political embarrassment, so we pretend the behaviour is something milder, something safer to acknowledge. That gap between what the law says and what the state is willing to enforce is exactly where tragedies start.

This isn’t about inflating the meaning of terrorism. It’s about refusing to downgrade coercion just because it comes from people in respectable offices. Words shouldn’t shrink to protect those in power. They should describe what is happening.

edit: and whilst we are at the semantics - the word “terrorism” comes from the French Reign of Terror, where the state used fear as an instrument of governance. The original meaning was quite literally state-driven intimidation of an entire population to enforce ideological conformity.
by baby_souffle | 2025-11-14 22:15:46+00:00
> It's just a jumble of poorly formatted text that isn't really contextually aware and is largely useless for the volume of textual documents.

I did a quick spot check and the lack of _clear_ date field is going to make contextualizing a bit trickier. It looks like most of the `email` have them but other types like `report` may have an unknown "first, created/circulated internally" date and a broader "the public can see it" date.

Nevertheless, it's only a matter of time before this gets loaded into a graph DB so the context becomes more apparent similar to what the journalists did for the panama papers.
by beloch | 2025-11-14 22:15:52+00:00
Satellites once used propellant for attitude control. When the propellant was used up, the satellite lost the ability to maintain or change orientation. Very much as this article describes, control moment gyroscopes took over because they didn't require propellant. They operate on the same principles that let a cat land on it's feet by twisting about as it falls.

However, there's a key difference between attitude control and movement. Changing your orientation doesn't involve changes in net kinetic energy, momentum, etc.. Changing speed (i.e. What a propulsion system does) does involve changes in these quantities, so Newtonian conservation laws come into play.

>"Genergo’s system generates thrust without using any propellant and without expelling reaction mass, by directly converting electrical energy into thrust through controlled electromagnetic impulses."

If this isn't hogwash, it might be something similar to an ion engine. i.e. It does operate by expelling propellant, but what it uses as propellant is background dust and ions, accelerated to a high velocity by electric fields and expelled.

If, as the site claims, this technology is currently working and produces non-negligible thrust, it could be very useful. They need to be very clear about what this is though, since vague and unscientific sounding claims will not attract clients.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-14 22:16:06+00:00
This is absurd. You have not told me (or anyone else for that matter) what to switch to and why.

You cannot be taken seriously. At this point I think you are full of shit.

If you care about security, you should care about people switching, but you do you. Keep it to yourself, keep it a secret, and keep bitching about OpenPGP, I suppose.
by mrandish | 2025-11-14 22:16:41+00:00
I agree with your points and would add one more: the TFA gives a second-hand recounting of what the various company's lawyers supposedly told the potential reboot licensor and quotes the erstwhile licensor's conclusion they were basically threatening legal action. But this isn't consistent with the companies also indicating they weren't sure what rights they may have (if any).

However, it IS consistent with a thing prudent lawyers would typically do when discussing an unknown future hypothetical. They'd reserve their client's rights should the client later discover they have grounds and wish to pursue it. Depending on how it's phrased, that could be confused with a 'legal threat', but I suspect the lawyers may have just been careful to not unintentionally relinquish any future rights.

I'm basing this on being involved in similar licensing discussions between lawyers. While some lawyers and clients are assholes, not all are. Even if they were trying to be 'good guys', it's not clear they could be in this situation. Since they don't even know if they have any rights, they don't have grounds to grant any kind of permission (and doing so in the absence of having any rights could make their client liable - at least in theory).
by throwup238 | 2025-11-14 22:16:45+00:00
I really hope they have because I’ve also been experimenting with LLMs to automate searching through old archival handwritten documents. I’m interested in the Conquistadors and their extensive accounts of their expeditions, but holy cow reading 16th century handwritten Spanish and translating it at the same time is a nightmare, requiring a ton of expertise and inside field knowledge. It doesn’t help that they were often written in the field by semi-literate people who misused lots of words. Even the simplest accounts require quite a lot of detective work to decipher with subtle signals like that pound sign for the sugar loaf.

> Whatever it is, users have reported some truly wild things: it codes fully functioning Windows and Apple OS clones, 3D design software, Nintendo emulators, and productivity suites from single prompts.

This I’m a lot more skeptical of. The linked twitter post just looks like something it would replicate via HTML/CSS/JS. Whats the kernel look like?
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-11-14 22:16:52+00:00
Huh, been offering VP level security roles for months with a pretty good package (certainly not dirt) and all we get are junior applicants with 4 years or less experience of work.

So yeah, maybe we need to offer even more - but it's not far off what I make after 30+ years in the industry. Expectations for pay seem to be very high even for people only just out of college.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-14 22:17:08+00:00
That's a fine opinion to have. You just have to fight a separate shoggoth of a mutable-root system, which mainstream Linux vendors like Google and Valve have avoided.

It's similar to the Rust situation in that many Rust programmers are simply tired C++ programmers fed-up with using Valgrind and Cmake. Nix is the retirement-home for people who clean up package pollution and just want stability at any cost.
by mcswell | 2025-11-14 22:17:26+00:00
The word 'word' is polysemous, and also vague. Polysemous: it can refer to written words or spoken words (or signed words, in sign languages).

Vague: does it mean all the inflected forms of a word, or just the stem without inflection? Example: is (are?) 'walk', 'walked', 'walks' and 'walking' four words, or one? What about "stand/stood"? (And languages where the bare root or stem can't appear by itself, like verbs in Spanish.) Derived words, like 'push' and 'pushy'.

Do compound nouns count as a word, or do only the parts count? Example: 'doghouse' (or 'dog house'). What about idioms? Example: 'to crane his/her/my/your/our neck(s)'.

What about different pronunciations? Is 'roof' pronounced to rhyme with 'aloof' the same word as 'roof' pronounced with the vowel of 'put'? And different spellings but same pronunciation: 'bear' vs. 'bare'.

What about words with different grammatical categories, like 'push' as a noun ("I gave her a push") or a verb ("I pushed her"). Or the same word with virtually unrelated meanings, "I pushed her on the swing" vs. "I pushed my ideas."
by lokicik | 2025-11-14 22:17:40+00:00
I built a small utility library for generating placeholder text from custom corpora. It has no dependencies, works in both Node and the browser, and supports deterministic output through seeding, which is useful for tests and reproducible fixtures.

GitHub: https://github.com/lokicik/placetext

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/placetext

Main features:

• zero dependencies

• corpus based text generation (multiple built in corpora)

• deterministic mode for consistent test output

• TypeScript implementation

• ESM and CommonJS builds

• small footprint

Happy to answer questions or hear suggestions.
by roenxi | 2025-11-14 22:17:44+00:00
If the political process gives unnecessarily, then it has also taken something from someone unnecessarily. So while it is a very accurate description of politics it doesn't really surface why that is at the root. The whole question being debated is what is necessary. That is what people are arguing over - are the wealth transfers actually required.

Eg, "oh no, the billionaires might get enormous handouts that they don't need!" is a rallying cry that should get people moving. If the option is there they will take it. If the idea that there doesn't need to be an accounting of why takes hold that is exactly where the US Congress will take it. And, in fairness, that mindset did take hold and the handouts to the wealthy is what then happened.
by mikemarsh | 2025-11-14 22:18:17+00:00
So how do we get from "machines may get really good at faking things to human perception" to "machines themselves can have human-like (or 'better') perception"?

The question is so-called consciousness arising out of machines, not machines deceiving human consciousness.

Even then, that deception still doesn't prove equivalency of simulated and real things, unless we're adopting an extreme and self-contradictory subjectivist epistemology.
by AgentMatt | 2025-11-14 22:18:22+00:00
Great article!

Regarding the generated cat image:

> Each and every rule specified is followed.

Not quite; the eye color and heterochromia is followed only so-so.

The black-and-silver cat seems to have no heterochromia; eye color could be interpreted as silver though.

The white-and-gold cat _does_ have heterochromia. The colors can be interpreted as "white" and "gold", though I'd describe them as whitish-blue and orange. What's interesting about this is an adjustment of the instructions toward biologically more plausible eye colors in the cat which also has more natural fur colors.

The last cat's fur colors are so "implausible" that the model doesn't seem to have problems taking exactly those colors for the (heterochromatic) eyes too!
by expedition32 | 2025-11-14 22:18:37+00:00
I had to pirate Xenosaga and emualate a PS2.

The reality is that the vast majority of entertainment is ephemeral. A videogame or movie get it's 5 minutes of fame. There are a few weirdos like me who want to play a 20 year old videogame but how much money can you get out of that and is it worth the trouble?
Ask HN: Interviewing currently (or recently)? how have interviews changed?
by akudha | 2025-11-14 22:19:40+00:00
Not many job openings available, pay is bad etc - that seems to be the current reality of the job market.

Those who are currently (or recently) interviewing, got job offers - what was the process like? Ignoring the FAANG companies for a second - how has the hiring process changed in the last 1-2 years, in the era of AI?

Are we still forced to solve leetcode type problems? Take home exercises? Could you please share your experience? Especially for mid-to-senior level programmers
by jcgrillo | 2025-11-14 22:19:40+00:00
I've heard the same breathless parroting of the marketing hype at large O(thousands ppl) cloud tech companies. A quote from leadership:

> This is existential. If we aren't early adopters of AI tools we will be left behind and will never catch up.

This company is dominant in the space they operate in. The magnitude of the delusion is profound. Ironically, this crap is actually distracting and affects quality, so it could affect competitiveness--just not how they hope.
by npteljes | 2025-11-14 22:19:55+00:00
Yes, I worded that too personal. Of course if you use it so much, consciously, you care about it. I'm in the same boat, and I use Linux for the same reason.

What I really wanted to say: "Most people don't bother with the OS, when it does its job, because there is a myriad other aspects of their life." And I do stand by this. Not because I like it, but because it's my experience with people. They don't rock the boat if not necessary, and frankly, I'm the same, just in different domains.

And so, these people are far from idiots. They just care about different things.
by herzzolf | 2025-11-14 22:19:56+00:00
> if given developer time continue to work.

well that's the root of the problem, no? there's no one who wants to maintain the complex lua written to make nginx cloud native. they were looking for maintainers for quite some time with no one stepping up

and I'm not surprised, their issue tracker always was full of very entitled people, so you would be doing a stressful/thankless job... for what exactly?
by lproven | 2025-11-14 22:20:15+00:00
There are 3 freeware versions of WordPerfect.

• The final version for classic MacOS, and there's a ready-made VM to run it on a modern Mac.

• The GUI version for Linux, and there's a site dedicated to helping you install it on a modern Linux.

• And Tavis Ormandy found and resurrected the final ever terminal-mode text-only WordPerfect for Linux, relinking it for x86 Linux.

I described how to get all 3 here:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_...
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-14 22:20:51+00:00
> The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.

You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/
by paranoidrobot | 2025-11-14 22:21:03+00:00
My experience is with Aurora MySQL, not postgres. But my understanding is that the way the storage layer works is much the same.

We have some clusters with very high write IOPS on Aurora.

When looking at costs we modelled running MySQL and regular RDS MySQL.

We found for the IOPS capacity of Aurora we wouldn't be able to match it on AWS without paying a stupid amount more.
by shkkmo | 2025-11-14 22:21:11+00:00
While the weapons systems work for an adversary is itself a little problematic, IMHO it is his role supervising work done with slave labor under horrendous conditions in concentration camps while rising through the ranks of the SS that makes him a completely unsuitable choice as a namesake.

At best it indicates a callous willingness to tolerate the extreme abuse of others in the direct pursuit of his personal advancement.
by EMM_386 | 2025-11-14 22:21:21+00:00
This isn't what I got from the Anthropic article.

It's the fact that somebody like NSO Group could create a Pegasys in much faster time without humans in the loop.

Write down everything your most brilliant hacker minds know - put it in some documents, feed it do the AI with the workflow you usually do and let 50 AI agents do them all at the same time.

Put the information in the documents about how you thought to come up with those exploits, how you tested them, how you explored the possibility. Tell the AI to do that too.

We're talking about speed and scale, not some dismissive "script kiddies were doing this in the 90s".

Yes, we were. But not at this scale - and this is just the early days of this sort of thing.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-14 22:21:35+00:00
> Did you not read the post I linked upthread?

Oh THAT is why you are steering people away from OpenPGP, gotchu. I have read it a long time ago. I remain to be convinced. The blog post just reeks of "I can't use it, too complex for me therefore it sucks". Yeah, it can be misused, I do not deny that.

(BTW I could not care less about e-mail.)
by ticulatedspline | 2025-11-14 22:21:43+00:00
Yeah, they're mostly fluff. Based on the title I'm a bit disappointed there wasn't more actual science here, like measuring bacterial content changes in the stool.

While I don't doubt the perceived changes and there is plenty of human research indicating that gut bacteria dictates more about us than we'd like to admit the graphs in this article definitely portray the results as having more rigor than they actually did.
by rkomorn | 2025-11-14 22:22:51+00:00
> Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch.

Man, comments like these compared to my 10+ school years in France really make me wonder wtf happened in my 3 different schools' cafeterias.

My 3 and change years in 2 US schools definitely had tastier food.

IDK if my expectations of food in France (my home country) were just higher and harder to meet. I don't think that was the case.
by anthomtb | 2025-11-14 22:23:37+00:00
The article resonated but I disagree with his terminology. To me, broke and poor are exactly the same thing. He can define them differently if he wants, of course, but what he calls "broke" I would call "feeling poor" and what he calls "poor" I would call "being poor".

I grew up in circumstances that were very much "broke"/"feeling poor" and it took a long time to learn that we really weren't poor. Some of the simple actions that are mis-directed towards the truly poor (second job, DIY car/home maintenance, better financial planning) would have elevated our circumstances quite a bit. Not to the point of being rich, but definitely to less precarious circumstances. And, selfishly, I would likely not have spent my childhood feeling like an impoverished outcast from my peers.
by Cpoll | 2025-11-14 22:23:49+00:00
Looking at the author's other posts: Very prolific, long articles, and weird outliers like https://lightcapai.medium.com/should-i-go-milan-211ef725bb71, https://lightcapai.medium.com/if-you-are-suicidal-read-this-..., and https://lightcapai.medium.com/alpay-algebra-solving-the-unso... (a weird take on the halting problem).
by srcreigh | 2025-11-14 22:23:51+00:00
Isn’t there precedent for many other governments secretly or openly doing exactly this? Snowden etc?

There’s an arms race element to this that I don’t see people discussing.

Do EU citizens have any privacy from US tech? Is there anything to protect?

Do we want the USA to have exclusive right to spy on the world?

Is it better to have 1 Big Brother or 10?
by eks391 | 2025-11-14 22:24:14+00:00
If the way you practice your religion is standardized by an authority across several churches, it is organized religion. For example: Catholic sects and Mormons are organized faiths. They have manuals for the priests to follow and you can go to the same one elsewhere and get mostly the same experience. Some small churches localized to a city are also organized. Islam sects in the Middle east are usually organized between Sunni and Shia. To my knowledge, Islam is not organized in the USA even though the Imam might align with a sect, because there is no authority they report to or strict standard for their patrons. Most Protestant churches are unorganized, and non-denominational are almost always unorganized because they are one-offs.

This is my informal understanding; I am not a religious scholar
by somat | 2025-11-14 22:24:19+00:00
If we are doing a survey I use spectrwm and it has empty/dedicated workspaces. It also has a concept of shared workspaces, windows there are present in all workspaces, used for fleshing out common desktop ui docks and the like. I have to admit that while I spent a couple of hours figuring it out one day, It turns out I prefer a really thin/bare desktop so don't use it.

Spectrwm is not well known, but it fits this sweet spot between super simple with few moving parts yet still configurable enough to work the way I want to. far simpler than xmonad or even I3 but with better defaults and more easily configurable than dwm.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-11-14 22:24:47+00:00
The A.I. economic bubble is a mad scramble to ride the crest of a wave of stock-pumping expectations before the inevitable collapse and dump. Trillions of dollars of "value" from bloviating promises. It's worthy of a new chapter in Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. [1]

> religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion

Religions have of course come and gone throughout human history. The preceding deities, temples, and artwork are called mythology by people inside today's temples of fervour.

But let's be clear, disparate local tribal practices and beliefs are only formalised by a power structure for the masked purposes of the power structure.

What springs eternal is the maintenance of control in political and tribal hierarchies.

> A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes

The fact that our species exhibits astonishing credulity is illustrated throughout history to the present day, not just in religious activities but in every context of economic scams and demagoguery.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...
by smartmic | 2025-11-14 22:25:25+00:00
I use XQuery to transform XML data. Whatever can be done with XSLT can also be done in XQuery. It is a functional language and, unlike XSLT, it is supported by more tools for newer versions (XSLT > 1.0 is only supported by Saxon, as far as I know). Overall, it feels much more modern and ergonomic for querying and transforming XML. Best of all: XQuery 3.1 supports JSON natively — I have also adopted it for JSON in some ETL pipelines.

Check Wikipedia for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuery
by dehsge | 2025-11-14 22:25:27+00:00
LLMs are bounded by the same bounds computers are. They run on computers so a prime example of a limitation is Rices theorem. Any ‘ai’ that writes code is unable (just like humans) to determine if the output is or is not error free.

This means a multi agent workflow without human that writes code may or may not be error free.

LLMs are also bounded by runtime complexity. Could an llm find the shortest Hamiltionian path between two cities in non polynomial time?

LLMs are bounded by in model context: Could an llm create and use a new language with no context in its model?
by dwood_dev | 2025-11-14 22:25:28+00:00
If you can't tolerate macOS, you can get a used M1/M2 which will run Linux really well.

That's a challenge this machine has, it has to compete with things like a used 64GB M1 Max Mac Studio for $900 when the equivalent config is $700. The M1 Max would be wildly faster in everything.
by skybrian | 2025-11-14 22:25:28+00:00
Lock-in is a valid concern, but on the other hand, for many apps, it seems like this can be fairly easily mitigated? If you can swap in a different LLM, I don't think it matters if it's running on Google TPU's or NVidia?

Meanwhile, at the hardware level, TPU's provide some competition for NVidia.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-14 22:25:49+00:00
Yup. Also: everyone reading this, celebrate that Flint, Michigan finally has water that's clean by Federal standards after just over ELEVEN. FUCKING. YEARS. That's right, America, land of opportunity, the wealthiest country on the face of the Earth (at time of comment), needed just over eleven years to get one city's inhabitants water that wasn't full to the tits with lead.

That's not NO lead, mind you, it's just now below the levels where the feds were willing to say it was a legitimate crisis. With a nod to who the feds are right now, and with a second nod to that's just at the supply line level, fuck knows how many homes still have lead pipes leeching into the taps.

Shocking absolutely no one who pays one damn bit of attention to this sort of thing: yes, Flint, Michigan is majority black.