MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BrenBarn | 2025-11-20 07:04:59+00:00
I more or less agree. And I also agree with the other commenter who says this may mean e2ee will never become mainstream. I think a lot of e2ee enthusiasts don't realize that the overwhelmingly most important feature for a messaging system is "when I log in, I can see all my messages". If there is a chance of that not happening, you're going to lose a lot of users.

I think there's the potential for a slight middle ground, but it would involve giving up a lot of the e2ee bells and whistles that privacy enthusiasts enthuse about (like perfect forward secrecy). You could image for instance a system where you have a single e2ee password and your data is encrypted on the server with that password. When you log in, you supply two passwords: your login password and your e2ee password. Then you have access to everything.

This tends to irritate people on both sides, since you can still lose your messages if you forget your e2ee password, and your privacy guarantees are also weaker, since the e2ee password can be a single point of failure that allows someone to read your messages. But people already rely on this level of security in other contexts. For instance, some cloud backup solutions encrypt your backup with a single passphrase. People are okay with having one password to unlock their entire hard drive's worth of data but not with one password to unlock their chat history?

I think it's worth exploring the space of e2ee solutions to find something that finds the balance between the levels of privacy and convenience that most users want. The thing is that existing apps that tout e2ee often do so to appeal to hardcore privacy advocates or people like dissidents in authoritarian states who are at risk of death if their messages are discovered. This level of security simply isn't a concern for the average person, and so they're not willing to take on the inconveniences that go along with it.
by g-b-r | 2025-11-20 07:05:08+00:00
I tried the current Element and Element X.

In short, the passphrase works with both and the recovery key with neither, specifically:

Element classic has two separate fields; if I input the recovery key (in the correct field), I get told "Backup could not be decrypted with this PASSPHRASE: please verify that you entered the correct recovery passphrase."

That's how it was the last time I used it, and if I'm not mistaken it's been for years.

Element X has a single field, that supposedly takes both passphrases and recovery keys, but if I enter the recovery key I'm directed to a "Verify with another verified device" screen, even if I had logged out from all other sessions.

Funnily, by the way, it seems that with Element X you can't do anything if you don't manage to get verified, there just doesn't seem to be a way to skip it.

Furthermore, after signing out from Element X I'm unable to even just logging back in, I get an error ("Sorry, an error occurred") after I enter the credentials; even after clearing all the app's storage. Very, very weird.

The new login-via-browser is pretty problematical, by the way, I could only make it work with Chrome.
by masklinn | 2025-11-20 07:05:16+00:00
I’m not talking as a user, I’m talking as a person who ported 350kLOCs of python from 2 to 3.

Django absolutely would have been ported: it was ported without six by Vinay Sajip (building on an earlier work of Martin von Löwis). In fact a limited shim layer was initially committed based on Vinay’s efforts: https://github.com/django/django/commit/5e6ded2e58597fa324c5...

The team ultimately decided to use and re-export six for the convenience of the ecosystem, not out of any sort of necessity.
by 01100011 | 2025-11-20 07:05:36+00:00
It's time to jump on the train. I'm a cranky, old, embedded SWE and claude 4.5 is changing how I work. Before that I laughed off LLMs. They were trash. Claude still has issues, but damn, I think if I don't integrate it into my workflow I'll be out of work or relegated to work in QA or devops(where I'd likely be forced to use it).

No, it's not going to write all your code for you. Yes your skills are still needed to design, debug, perform teamwork(selling your designs, building consensus, etc), etc.. But it's time to get on the train.
by overfeed | 2025-11-20 07:06:51+00:00
No one's switching to AI cold turkey. Think of it as training your own, cheaper replacement. SWEs & their line managers develop & test AI workflows, while giving the bosses time to evaluate AI capabilities, then hopefully shrink the headcount as close to 0 as possible without shrinking profits. Right now, it's juniors who're getting squeezed.
by exmadscientist | 2025-11-20 07:06:59+00:00
> If a safety indicator needs to be visible at a glance, why did it blink at all?

Beats me! But they've apparently flashed for ages and ages on these things, and somewhere along the line it got standardized.

> It seems like blinking to begin with is terrible design for something like this, or else having it be in the corner of your eye is the terrible design decision.

This is benchtop equipment, not cars, so "corner of your eye" has a little bit different context here. But, yes, I kind of agree.

It is also really important to get this one right since for this particular type of device, conditions are lethal (yes, genuinely lethal, no exaggeration) if you get cavalier with it.
by ggm | 2025-11-20 07:07:02+00:00
I'm not in the jewellery business but I would be very surprised if the diamond industry didn't have a pretty good idea where things lay. That kind of multi-caret stone has a premium. You need to know provenance. The risk it's a blood diamond or stolen is very high.

Lost to wider society? Yea, I can buy that but it's a stretch.

It's not "lost" the way a medieval triptych hanging in an alms house for centuries and found to be worth millions is a "lost masterpiece" or works coming out of safe deposit boxes where some GI has hoarded loot after ww2. The titular holders decided to put a time lock on their deposit box but had clear title to the assets.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-20 07:07:21+00:00
> first tail-sitter with a mass-production contract.

Just say you're not the first. This whole "with an X" or "to feature X" goalpost shifting is just unsportsmanlike and not to mention, embarrassing. The SNECMA Coléoptère could go get a "mass production contract" and burn it the next day, just to stick it's nose up at you all the way back in 1959.
by sheepscreek | 2025-11-20 07:07:24+00:00
Honestly I think Arrow makes Feather redundant. To answer your question, Parquet is optimized for storage on disk - can store with compression to take leas space, and might include clever tricks or some form of indices to query data from the file. Feather on the other hand is optimized for loading onto memory. It uses the same representation on disk as it does in memory. Very little in the way of compression (if any). No optimized for disk at all. BUT you can memory map a Feather file and randomly access any part of it in O(1) time (I believe, but do your own due diligence :)
by PierceJoy | 2025-11-20 07:07:38+00:00
Trump received 49.8% of the vote. Harris received 48.3%. Where is the bias?

Outcomes that don’t match with polls do not necessarily indicate bias. For instance, if Trump had won every single state by a single vote, that would look like a dominating win to someone who only looks at the number of electors for each candidate. But no rational person would consider a win margin of 50 votes be dominating.
by fsloth | 2025-11-20 07:08:16+00:00
(I’m going to reorder quotes from above)

” rest of us could be "off to the races" without the upfront cost ACIS or Parasolid.”

Just start coding your CAD tool dude if you want to! You can totally start with OpenCascade.

All these kernels do is they 1) define tensor product surfaces (usually NURBs) with trimming curves 2) join these surface patches to watertight solids 3) export STEP (non-AM) or STL (AM)

The question is which hardware manufacturing path is the one you know so well you know what the important things are?

And the dirty secret here is that the 3D is _not_ the hardest part (it’s hard sure). You soon end up with schema management and database management as well as domain model challenges that are quite complicated. The main problem here will be that you can’t just start coding without knowing where you end up. You need to know _every step_ or you will end up in a quagmire that is no better than existing tools (slow, buggy). It’s totally doable but the total complexity will be non-trivial and the decisions you make year 1 will come haunt you and bite you in the ass year 5. Be prepared!

And for those coming outside to this - I’m not being glib! A 3D design tool totally can be a one man show to start with (see NomadSculpt, Plasticity or MagicaVoxel for example).

” I guess what I mean is that if the likes of huge defence contractors / automotive industry etc…”

I’m not sure what you are getting at.

These companies created what we call CAD starting from the 1950’s or so (research Parson’s NC work at MIT, Bezier’s work later at Renault if you want a wikipedia tour of the early years).

The current industry isn’t shaped like this because Dassault, Siemens and Autodesk decided to go all incumbent. They were more or less pushed to do so by market forces and industrial history (and if it was not them some other company would be the incumbents).
by themafia | 2025-11-20 07:08:22+00:00
> Actually I am not willing to spend that much time reading "cloud" provider docs and best practices.

It doesn't take that much time just intentional reading to learn something new. Do you not read any docs?

> I value predictable and reasonable costs much more than "flexibility".

The point is that these aren't mutually exclusive.

> So real services go to dedicated hosts

And when it becomes overloaded, needs upgrading, or requires other maintenance? There's a problem I've completely left behind.
by renewiltord | 2025-11-20 07:09:47+00:00
Does anyone look at all these jewels and feel a bit dismissive? I get the idea for why they used to be valuable but they look incredibly gaudy and seem very much like trading beads to the Native Americans or whatever.

I get the historical significance but they don’t look good to me. Like Sue the T Rex looks cool from a distance but up close she’s got all these holes in her skull from parasites. Awful! I appreciate the beast’s skeleton for its significance but her skull is a horrid thing close up aesthetically.
by Vespasian | 2025-11-20 07:09:51+00:00
Not all bubbles burst, some deflate quite silently especially if people expect them to burst.

Microsoft didn't care to ask users when they put copilot into everything and they won't ask users when they'll "consolidate the experience" to whatever works.

And just so I can claim that I "knew it all along" in the future I'll say that some form of "agent OS" is here to stay when the dust settles.
by Jeevandigital | 2025-11-20 07:10:37+00:00
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by mock-possum | 2025-11-20 07:10:51+00:00
It’s so interesting to me that people find these short video clip formats ‘addictive’ when my reaction is the opposite - they repulse me, starting from the vertical video format, carrying through to the snappy cuts and… I don’t know what to call it, kooky sound direction? Anyway, it looks and sounds like something tailor made to annoy me, and even if I occasionally stumble across one clip that’s interesting, the next is sure to turn me off again.

You know what’s occurring to me though - is it just the radio all over again? I can’t stand listening to the radio - the experience of being fed content, and switching continuously without ever finding something worth listening to, completely ruins radio for me - gun to my head, I’d rather drive in silence than listen to the radio.

Maybe it’s a similar thing?
by crossroadsguy | 2025-11-20 07:11:33+00:00
Thunderbird is the only MOZ product that I still use daily - almost at par with Mail.app if not more, and I hope to keep using it unless they eventually release the iOS Thunderbird after making it unrecognisable to me and ensuring that some of the differentiating Thunderbird features are missing – like the ability to send email from any address on a domain by just editing the "From" field - of course, it will work only if you own that domain. But it's a feature I can't do without (and utilise it a lot on desktop). Then there are forever pending things like maildir support :)
by creer | 2025-11-20 07:11:59+00:00
> none of them supported mod_perl

Once mod_perl existed (it was late, after lots of CGI perl) - I feel that my clients and I never had significant difficulty in finding providers. PHP was all over the place - it felt - more because there was demand. But there was enough demand for mod_perl that it was always there when we wanted it. We never had to really hunt for a hosting vendor.
by renegat0x0 | 2025-11-20 07:12:50+00:00
- Companies had to go in that direction. You cannot just fall behind AI gold rush

- These solutions are easier for people, and therefore will win in the long run

- these solutions benefit companies because of the surveillance data they have access to now. They always had some data, but now they collect and process even more

- those who control AI will be the kings of the future, so naturally everyone will be running toward this goal
by toastal | 2025-11-20 07:13:01+00:00
> can run on such low resource hardware

This is what frees a barrier to decentralization & actually owning one’s data. A few of my friends are now running their own single-user or small XMPP servers since it doesn’t use much in terms of resources or storage in comparison.

> The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different doc

I believe this is what the Snikket project is trying to be. That said, XMPP servers are used for a lot more than just chat which is why most of them don’t have good defaults for merely chatting with friends since that isn’t the only or a generic enough use case (XMPP is behind Zoom, Jitsi, Fortnite, etc.).

> The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great

True. But I appreciate that there are many options & most features gracefully fallback even on TUI clients (like ‘reactions’ just being a message reply with a single emoji). If Element adds a feature (like polls), the other clients, the new feature just doesn’t show up. For a web client, the NLNet funding is really giving a boost to Movim as a reasonable alternative to Discord that is self-hostable & federated so users—taking back the meaning of “join my server” to literally mean someone’s server & without needing to create another account just to join that server.

As for the wish… this is what XMPP MUCs are—IRC with niceties like moderation, optional encryption, & file uploads. You said yourself the resources for servers is small & for your stated use case, most existing clients can handle being IRC+features while also not being centralized unlike IRC.
by atoav | 2025-11-20 07:13:13+00:00
Both sides of what? To the European observer the actual number of left leaning politicians in the US is extremely low. Someone like Biden or Harris for example would fit neatly into any of the conservative parties over here, yet if your LLM would trust the right wing media bubble they are essentially socialists. Remember that "socialism" as a political word has a definition and we could check whether a policy fits said definition. If it does not, than the side using that word exaggerated. I don't want such exaggerations to be part of my LLMs answer unless I explicitly ask for it.

Or to phrase it differently, from our perspective nearly everything in the US has a strong right wing bias and this has worsened over the past decade and the value of a LLM shouldn't be to feed more into already biased environments.

I am interested in factual answers not in whatever any political "side" from a capitalism-brainwashed-right-leaning country thinks is appropriate. If it turns out my own political view is repeatedly contradicted by data that hasn't been collected by e.g. the fossil fuel industry I will happily adjust the parts that don't fit and did so throughout my life. If that means I need to reorganize my world view all together that is a painful process, but it is worth it.

LLMs care a chance to live in a world where we judge things more based on factual evidence, people more on merrit, politics more on outcomes. But I am afraid it will only be used by those who already get people to act against their own self interests to perpetuate the worsening status quo.
by LaGrange | 2025-11-20 07:13:33+00:00
Hear me out:

Containers. Or even just go full VM.

AFAIK we have all the pieces to make those approaches work _just fine_ - GPU virtualization, ways to dynamically share memory etc.

It's a bit nuts, sure, and a bit wasteful - but it'd let you have a predictable binary environment for basically forever, as well as a fairly well defined "interface" layer between the actual hardware and the machine context. You could even accommodate shenanigans such as Aurora 4X's demand to have a specific decimal separator.

We could even achieve a degree of middle-ground with the kernel anti-cheat secure boot crowd - running a minimal (and thus easy to independently audit) VM host at boot. I'd still kinda hate it, but less than having actual rootkits in the "main" kernel. It would still need some sort of "confirmation of non-tampering" from the compositor, but it _should_ be possible, especially if the companies wanting that sort of stuff were willing to foot the bill (haha). And, on top of that, a VM would make it less likely for vulnerabilities of the anti-cheat to spread into the OS I care about (a'la the Dark Souls exploit).

So kinda like Flatpak, I guess, but more.
by raincole | 2025-11-20 07:13:36+00:00
When FiveThirtyEight claimed Harris has 50-in-100 chance, it didn't mean that she'd likely to get 50% of the general vote. It had already taken electoral college into account.

> if Trump had won every single state by a single vote...

Yeah sure but in the reality we live in, Trump didn't win the swing states by just one single vote.
by bennyfreshness | 2025-11-20 07:13:38+00:00
Basalt is stronger than glass fibers (made from silica / quartz / sand), but not as strong as carbon fiber. Also, its more expensive than glass, but less expensive than carbon. Generally considered eco friendly.

Interestingly where carbon fiber's failure mode is instant, failing catastrophically (like say chalk), basalt will be more gradual (like say wood), in some use cases that's an advantage.

Overall though its still not mass produced, uncertain if it will ever reach scale.

If interested in fibers and composites, the YouTube channel Easy Composites is really interesting / educational. For example you can use flax fiber.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD98L9XlCTU
by ggm | 2025-11-20 07:13:41+00:00
I'm not a cryptographer but sat next to three of them last week, and they were unanimous that quantum internet is a giant boondoggle to keep university researchers happily employed.

It has close to zero relevance for key distribution problems in the real world, as they see it.

Sure, if you have all day to share state you can either share it securely or know it's been compromised, and then.. what? What's your key renewal cycle to key lifetime looking like?

There aren't that many contexts for mass cryptography where the central problem is fixed by this method.
by DocTomoe | 2025-11-20 07:15:01+00:00
The 180 does not surprise me at all. GDPR and associated laws are a perfect example of the old 'Good intentions, unintended consequences'-pattern we see in laws all the time.

The results of the GDPR (and the unrelated Cookie Directive) on my everyday professional life are what made me - an European - from a flag-waving European-Unity-proponent to a heavy critic that dreams of a Dexit. And I know I am not the only one - public opinion is shifting - some because of cookie banners, some because of driving licenses, some because manufactuers have started to neuter their devices when sold to Europe, taking away features available everywhere else in the world, some because of the ridiculous VAT reporting regime that hits European businesses once they hit a 100k gross income mark, some for yet other reasons. And now they are trying hard to get the de-minimis-rule taken away, increasing trouble and cost for anyone who does cross-eu-border trading.

It's only been a matter of time even Brussles remembered that ultimately, their throne is built on sand, and that Europe has a history of getting rid of unreasonable leadership.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-11-20 07:15:04+00:00
Actually it probably is plebs using the cameras, mainly... I know what you're trying to say but it's a stretch to say that this is a class issue. It may be true that the camera companies have rich owners but that's only a tiny number of rich people. The cameras spy on everybody. The more you have, the more you have to lose from being spied on.
by calpaterson | 2025-11-20 07:16:46+00:00
A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it.

My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great.

But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on well maintained PHP stacks.
by bontaq | 2025-11-20 07:17:17+00:00
I'd say you identified a difference with modern names. This split has certainly grown wider in the "code is cheap" AI era and changed meaning.

I'm firmly in the camp of actually enjoying programming. To me it was interesting to hear that some people actually don't like it all, and it's much nicer to have something "just do it".

Over my career I've leant much more heavily into programming as the art.

I wouldn't even say "how do you balance" is too much of a problem, as we all can vary between needs, you know?
by moltar | 2025-11-20 07:19:18+00:00
When the Soviet Union fell apart BBC opened a number of journalism schools in Russia. The schools were sponsored by George Soros. My dad attended one of those and then was called into FSB office (former KGB) to be questioned.

My suspicion to this day is that these schools were both a spy front and long-game propaganda, where they were teaching how to make news more western-aligned.

Why would BBC want to teach their methods in Russia? How do they benefit from that? How does Soros benefit from that?