MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ggm | 2025-11-24 04:19:37+00:00
I've always wondered what degree of confidence exists amongst the cogniscenti that a single photon event happened. I tend to think the criteria of measurement here would suggest the most likely outcome was a shitload more than 1 photon, and that all the "but we measured we can see one only" measurements are themselvs hedged by a bunch of belief.

That said, I do like the single photon experiment, when it's more than a thought experiment.
by ATiredGoat | 2025-11-24 04:20:11+00:00
For the past few years I’ve been building something a little unusual in 2025: a massive, fully hand-written, QBasic-powered text adventure game with over 4,000+ handcrafted rooms, branching paths, lore, and weird mysteries tucked into every corner.

To go along with it, I just launched a new video series called The Labyrinth Chronicles, where I walk through each map, talk about the design process, the inspirations, the constraints of building something old-school in modern times, and why text adventures still matter.
by astrange | 2025-11-24 04:20:25+00:00
> Or you can just sign your Linux kernel from macOS recovery mode, which is what the Asahi Linux installer does already. No need for weird hacks.

Does that work for USB boot?

> You also don't have "kernel access" in macOS. After boot, the memory region corresponding to the macOS kernel is marked as read-only at the memory controller level.

You can turn that off from recovery mode. (see `bputil`) It's needed to use dtrace.
by ggm | 2025-11-24 04:21:32+00:00
Can you explain which keys in the secure enclave make this work because it has at least two keysets: a public-private keypair locked to the root key Apple instantiated in hardware as fused links in the chip and so in theory this could include private keys common to all the devices in this chipset generation, and the locally generated unique keys which are tied to this specific device.

Using the first pair or products of the first pair, means in principle your private key is protected by the goodwill of Apple only: if you allow it to exist at rest in a form only this shroud protects, then Apple can read the private key unless the symmetric algorithm used to "unlock this private key with your password" is a good one, and you chose a password wisely. I haven't used the function so I can't comment how they constrain what you put in as a personal lock on these blobs.

I am not a cryptographer.
Ask HN: Anyone Know Anyone at Expedia?
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-24 04:23:11+00:00
So I was trying to book a reservation on hotels.com for some last minute travel and instead of the hotels.com web page, I got a "Sorry, we can't find that page right now" page. Seriously, I went to https://www.hotels.com/ and got a 200 w/ the "we can't find that page" message.

I looked around online and the only support number goes to reps in the Philippines with the script for what to do when someone wants to change their booking. I tried to explain to them that I was wanting to report a problem with the web page and they kept asking what booking I wanted to change. I don't blame them... they're paid to read of a particular script.

And the last couple of hours it pretty intermittent via Firefox, less intermittent on Chrome. Worse on desktop than mobile.

So if anyone knows anyone over at expedia, can you tell them that they may want to back out the last change they made to their reverse proxy.

Do Expedia and Hotels.Com support the web anymore or am I supposed to buy an iPhone to run their app?

(I should mention that after several tries on three machines and six different browsers I eventually was able to make my booking. But that seems a little excessive. And their site doesn't seem so complex it can't support plain 'ol HTML. Say what you will about Amazon, but it still works with Firefox.)
by Galxeagle | 2025-11-24 04:23:24+00:00
In my experience, having a fixit week on the calendar encourages teams to just defer what otherwise could be done relatively easily at first report. ("ah we'll get to it in fixit week"). Sometimes it's a PM justifying putting their feature ahead of product quality, other times it's because a dev thinks they're lining up work for an anticipated new hire's onboarding. It's even hinted at in the article ('All year round, we encourage everyone to tag bugs as “good fixit candidates” as they encounter them.')

My preferred approach is to explicitly plan in 'keep the lights on' capacity into the quarter/sprint/etc in much the same way that oncall/incident handling is budgeted for. With the right guidelines, it gives the air cover for an engineer to justify spending the time to fix it right away and builds a culture of constantly making small tweaks.

That said, I totally resonate with the culture aspect - I think I'd just expand the scope of the week-long event to include enhancements and POCs like a quasi hackathon
by dhosek | 2025-11-24 04:23:57+00:00
I just replaced my Jabras (from Costco) whose microphones stopped working. I tried Phonaks and found that the use of Bluetooth to connect to my iPhone was painfully flakey (there were certain locations in my neighborhood that every time I walked in front of a particular house, I would lose audio). I ended up returning them and the only MfI hearing aids the audiologist I went to (I was limited by what was in-network by my insurance and while the old insurance covered equally in-network and out, my new insurance covered 0% out of network so I was going to be looking at double the price to go to Costco). I ended up with Resound which are essentially the same as the Jabras.

The one thing that I find absolutely essential is using ear molds instead of domes. My cousin hated ear molds and gave up on them, but I definitely prefer them.

Incidentally, I would recommend the HA/hearing loss subreddits (r/HearingAids and r/hardofhearing) over HN for this discussion. The HA group can get a little rigid, but I really like the community at HoH.
by Semaphor | 2025-11-24 04:24:21+00:00
I’ll chime in with a sidebar: Anyone got any experience using hearing aids for the "hearing in noise" issue (aka. King-Kopetzky syndrome or lack of cocktail party effect [0], part of a whole bunch of things also called adhd for ears). Essentially I have filtering issues, as soon as multiple people talk, I can’t really understand anyone anymore, unless they very directly speak into my ears so they are significantly louder than other noises.

It’s a brain thing, my hearing itself is above average for my age (40), so I’m not sure what exactly can be done, but there was an article many years ago about someone (Bose?) working on aids for that issue, no idea what came of it. I guess all modern hearing aids have some focus mode.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder

edit: In case there’s an airpod suggestion, I’ll also need to know if that feature works on Android, it’s not crippling enough to make me use an iPhone.
by CommieBobDole | 2025-11-24 04:24:45+00:00
My 84 year old mom uses AirPods Pro 2 as an aid for moderate hearing loss and has been satisfied. As others have noted, the difference is night and day; I went from having to yell just to be occasionally understood to being able to have a normal conversation.

My understanding is they are pretty good hearing aids, but they don't have the battery life that purpose-built aids do (4-5 hours vs 18-24) so they're not optimal for full-time use. This is fine for her use case, since she only uses them when she wants to talk to someone, but could be an issue for someone who wants to wear them all day, every day.
by tbrownaw | 2025-11-24 04:24:58+00:00
Ignore the bit about food and multipliers. They're not really relevant.

This Orshansky person used estimates and approximations to come up with a rough "this is what it takes to not starve" number, in the absence of sufficient high-quality data to calculate something more precisely.

If you trust inflation / cost of living numbers, they're a measure of how expensive life is overall.

This is the correct way to do things. The methodology of the original SWAG is not relevant to how to update it over time.

.

If you take apart the original estimate into all the different things that made up household expenses, and adjust those separately for price changes and substitutions and such, and our or back together... you're just putting in a ton of extra effort to re-build the "adjust for inflation" calculation from scratch. With tons of room to make mistakes, as demonstrated in the article.
by pugworthy | 2025-11-24 04:26:48+00:00
I have the latest AirPods, and I do use them quite a bit for calls and noise cancellation when using power tools and such.

But irrespective of any capability to act as hearing aids from the acoustic perspective, I don’t think they are the same.

For me hearing aids are glasses for my ears. Like glasses they need to be “put them on/in and forget about it”. If AirPods would not fall out of my ears when I walk or put on a hat or pull on/off a sweater, I might consider them.

I wake up in the morning, grab them from the nightstand and put them in. And they stay there all day until I go to bed. Only come out if I’m taking a shower or in a loud environment.
by toast0 | 2025-11-24 04:27:12+00:00
$300k net and you want them to save $200k. $100k net goes a long way, but they're probably renting at least two places, a lot of eating away from home (much of which I'm sure gets covered by the team, but probably not all of it) a lot of excess transportation. Excess tax prep cause of all the working in multiple jurisdictions, etc. Things will add up; thankfully I have all the coordination of a newspaper so I don't have to deal with the accounting problems ;p
by sien | 2025-11-24 04:27:34+00:00
"While private passenger vehicles contribute 90% of the mileage in the U.S. transportation sector, their emissions share is only 58%. The remaining emissions come from public transit (27%) and other modes including airplanes (13%)."

From :

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
by yalogin | 2025-11-24 04:27:36+00:00
In a country like the US there are many opportunities like this to improve the overall status but other than small hyper local changes nothing will happen at a large scale because the powers be will not let it happen.

Problem is politcians and aspiring politicians/media influencers have figured out that the money is not in solving problems but keeping it in the news and agitating people. They will never do anything to solve problems but keep throwing wrenches and never let it be solved. Well, if it’s solved they need to find a new problem, worse still, what if people now expect things to be actually solved!
by littlecosmic | 2025-11-24 04:27:46+00:00
In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right? Trains get crowded but still workable. It’s not clear if people would start working 6am to 3pm or something if you did. Overall I think charging money made more sense when there were more private, profit seeking companies involved as it’s the name of the game… buts it’s cheap enough that it’s hard for someone with an ok job the get bothered about it
by thaw13579 | 2025-11-24 04:27:55+00:00
I wonder where they got their equipment and research space. A charitable explanation is that they purchased it out of their own pockets, but otherwise, they really should acknowledge their support if it's from a university, federal grant, foundation award, etc. In my opinion as someone with domain experience, they don't show any novel solutions to accomplish this, it's mostly just that they have the time and resources to experiment try out, so it's especially important to acknowledge who enabled it.
by vacuity | 2025-11-24 04:28:30+00:00
Your point about compile times is very dismissive and wrong, but I agree aside from that. It's worth noting that the Rust team explicitly tracks, monitors and limits regressions in, and actively optimizes for compile times, and Rust community surveys always ask for better compile times. This is clearly a significant issue, and while Rust is never going to compile as fast as C or Pascal, it can and will improve so that it becomes more usable.
by yanslookup | 2025-11-24 04:29:16+00:00
I'll take the L but it still sorta maps to where I was going with the Mormon angle.

I've been around Mormons, not a religion scholar, but it seems plausible to me the same "one upsmanship" mormons have with missions, large paternalistic families, avoiding "outsiders" (see: homeschooling), etc are common in other religious communities. Like maybe the protestant Christian one you are in?
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-11-24 04:30:23+00:00
> They [outages] can force redundancy and resilience into systems.

They won’t until either the monetary pain of outages becomes greater than the inefficiency of holding on to more systems to support that redundancy, or, government steps in with clear regulation forcing their hand. And I’m not sure about the latter. So I’m not holding my breath about anything changing. It will continue to be a circus of doing everything on a shoestring because line must go up every quarter or a shareholder doesn’t keep their wings.
by WalterBright | 2025-11-24 04:30:34+00:00
> The point is that the goal of making money is not necessarily meant at the cost of crushing employees or considering them disposable.

I never wrote that it was.

But as an employee, you and the business sign a contract in advance. The contract spells out the obligations of the company to the employee, and the obligations of the employee to the company. If you expect more than that, negotiate it as part of your agreement.

Also, if the company does not make money, how are the employees going to get paid? The company has to cut expenses, and that means some of the employees have to be let go. Companies also regularly evaluate employees, and if they are not delivering value in excess of what they cost, they'll be let go.

Yes, you can be let go. You'll also get the severance package you agreed to in your employment contract. You can also quit at any time for any reason. It's a fair arrangement. It's not a marriage.
by throwup238 | 2025-11-24 04:30:55+00:00
Exactly. The way it’s mostly been used so far is a poor abstraction over stuff you can just put in the context and have the agent run commands.

It really shines in custom implementations coupled to projects. I’ve got a QT desktop app and my mcp server allows the agents to run the app in headless mode, take screenshots, execute code like in Playwright, inspect widget trees, send clicks/text/etc with only six tools and a thousand tokens or so of instructions. Took an hour to build with Claude Code and now it can run acceptance tests before committing them to code end to end tests.
by cebert | 2025-11-24 04:31:04+00:00
I wanted to create a site or tool that aggregates news about Anthropic. It’s quite basic at the moment (I made it today), but I find it useful and wanted to share it with others. I was inspired to create this by Luc van Donkersgoed’s wonderful site, https://aws-news.com, which aggregates news related to AWS.
by zzrrt | 2025-11-24 04:31:28+00:00
Those “other genocides” aren’t funded by the US Congress, and the other countries aren’t US allies. It makes perfect sense for US students to focus on the Gaza war and Israel right now, as something that they could actually change by getting US politicians etc to listen. You seem to agree it’s a genocide, but you’re effectively defending it by acting like only shills want it to stop.

Maybe those investments are cause for concern, but it seems a stretch to say they are funding protests. And if Qatar is going to corrupt US democracy, I’d be a lot more worried about their recent “investments” with top US officials.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-24 04:31:35+00:00
At Amazon we had a bug that was the result of a compiler bug and the behaviour of intel cores being mis-documented. It was intermittent and related to one core occasionally being allowed to access stale data in the cache. We debugged it with a logic analyzer, the commented nginx source and a copy of the C++ 11 spec.

It took longer than 2 days to fix.
by pugworthy | 2025-11-24 04:34:14+00:00
Yea I gave up on the phone integration with mine. Whenever I’d get a call or some audio thing was going to happen, my HA mics would go silent and second or so later the audio would come in. So answering a call i would often miss the callers initial words. Or driving instructions would be “…in 1000 feet” with the “turn left” or “turn right” part missing.

I do participate in the Reddit subs but am interested in the technologists view of HAs I might get here. They are fascinating, necessary devices for myself.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-11-24 04:34:28+00:00
> The type that claims they're going to achieve zero known and unknown bugs is also going to be the type to get mad at people for finding bugs.

This is usually EMs in my experience.

At my last job, I remember reading a codebase that was recently written by another developer to implement something in another project, and found a thread safety issue. When I brought this up and how we’ll push this fix as part of the next release, he went on a little tirade about how proper processes weren’t being followed, etc. although it was a mistake anyone could have made.
by felipeerias | 2025-11-24 04:35:01+00:00
In your example, you could achieve a similar outcome with a skill that included a custom command-line tool and a brief description of how to use it.

MCPs are specially well suited for cases that need a permanent instance running alongside the coding agent, for example to handle authentication or some long-lived service that is too cumbersome to launch every time the tool is called.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-11-24 04:35:06+00:00
Idk, maybe I’m out of touch, i still think 100k for loving expenses is more than enough. A nice apartment in Mountainview is like $3500-$4000/month. If you have to rent two apartments, presumably you’re not renting both in such an expensive area. I’d think housing can be covered by 60k/year pretty comfortably.
by noduerme | 2025-11-24 04:35:34+00:00
I'm not saying otherwise. I'm a bit tired of the subject dominating the front page (and every industry conversation, and the news). Ten years ago, I would have asked with some suspicion "does this relate to blockchain?" Sign of the times. Just as bad as what, personally only being interested in something if it relates to the hot topic of the day? I asked a genuine question, without leaping to any conclusions about the OP. Seems everyone leapt to the conclusion about me which I refrained from.
by Uehreka | 2025-11-24 04:37:55+00:00
> It’s virtually impossible for me to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug, until the job is done.

In my experience there are two types of low-priority bugs (high-priority bugs just have to be fixed immediately no matter how easy or hard they are).

1. The kind where I facepalm and go “yup, I know exactly what that is”, though sometimes it’s too low of a priority to do it right now, and it ends up sitting on the backlog forever. This is the kind of bug the author wants to sweep for, they can often be wiped out in big batches by temporarily making bug-hunting the priority every once in a while.

2. The kind where I go “Hmm, that’s weird, that really shouldn’t happen.” These can be easy and turn into a facepalm after an hour of searching, or they can turn out to be brain-broiling heisenbugs that eat up tons of time, and it’s difficult to figure out which. If you wipe out a ton of category 1 bugs then trying to sift through this category for easy wins can be a good use of time.

And yeah, sometimes a category 1 bug turns out to be category 2, but that’s pretty unusual. This is definitely an area where the perfect is the enemy of the good, and I find this mental model to be pretty good.
by dangus | 2025-11-24 04:38:27+00:00
> if the entire premise of your employer is "here's the cheapest hot food imaginable”

My argument elsewhere in this thread is that this description is not what McDonald’s is nor claims to be. It might have been that at some time in the past but it’s now a relatively well-regarded and reputable option. Low end cheap would be a restaurant like Rally’s or Church’s Chicken.

Regarding your last paragraph, I think you’re completely misunderstanding what point I am making. I am not defending employers paying low wages or putting employees on food stamps. Our society shouldn’t work that way.

I’m just pointing out that whether an employee can afford a good their employer makes is essentially an irrelevant detail in isolation.

Even comparing McDonald’s to Walmart for this purpose is pointless because Walmart isn’t a franchise. McDonald’s restaurant wages are determined by local franchise owners and vary a lot.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-24 04:38:39+00:00
I do this frequently. But sometimes identifying and/or fixing takes more than 2 days.

But you hit on a point that seems to come up a lot. When a user story takes longer than the alloted points, I encourage my junior engineers to split it into two bugs. Exactly like what you say... One bug (or issue or story) describing what you did to typify the problem and another with a suggestion for what to do to fix it.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of industry best practice about how to manage this, so we just do whatever seems best to communicate to other teams (and to ourselves later in time after we've forgotten about the bug) what happened and why.

Bug fix times are probably a pareto distribution. The overwhelming majority will be identifiable within a fixed time box, but not all. So in addition to saying "no bug should take more than 2 days" I would add "if the bug takes more than 2 days, you really need to tell someone, something's going on." And one of the things I work VERY HARD to create is a sense of psychological safety so devs know they're not going to lose their bonus if they randomly picked a bug that was much more wicked than anyone thought.
by charcircuit | 2025-11-24 04:38:58+00:00
It literally wasn't. It's an urban myth.

>Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote computers.

>The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
by Hannah203 | 2025-11-24 04:39:48+00:00
I’ve been seeing similar issues with large travel sites lately, so your experience doesn’t surprise me. When the homepage returns a 200 but shows an error page, it usually means something broke in their reverse proxy or CDN rules. That tends to happen when a new deployment goes live without enough real-world testing.

Since most of Expedia Group’s support is script-driven, it’s almost impossible to report a technical problem unless you know someone on their engineering team. The shifting behavior across browsers and devices also makes it look like a bad A/B test or traffic-split configuration.

It’s not great when a company that size lets something this visible slip into production. Hopefully someone from their engineering team notices this thread and rolls back the change.
by thaw13579 | 2025-11-24 04:39:51+00:00
I agree there are some red flags here to me. One is the priority claim "As far as we know, no one seems to have done this kind of stimulation before - even in animals." The other is the definitive conclusion based on weak experimental design and documentation, "Can ultrasound make you smell things that aren’t there? Turns out, yes!"

These are big scientific claims, but the work is clearly too premature to make those conclusions, and it lacks the connection to prior work and peer review needed for making priority claims. It's really great hacker-tinkering work though, and it could turn into solid science if they take more care with it.

If this effect is real and truly novel, my cynical expectation is that someone already established in focused ultrasound will read this, apply a more rigorous approach, and get the recognition that they are hoping for through more establish channels.