MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sryanpdx | 2025-11-01 16:57:02+00:00
Thanks for the detailed response - this is exactly the kind of domain expertise I need to hear. You're right that formal institutional workflows (courts, news organizations, professional photography) already handle chain of custody adequately through raw file retention and existing practices. I'm realizing my value proposition isn't for those contexts where authentication has always been critical and processes exist.

Where I see the gap is informal authentication at scale - the billions of images shared daily on social media, used in online discourse, spreading as potential misinformation. Your workflow (keeping raw files, institutional backing, forensic analysis when needed) works great for professional contexts. But:

How does the average person verify an image they see online?

- They don't have access to forensic analysis

- They don't know who has the "earliest/rawest version"

- Trusted institutions are too slow to counter propaganda at internet speed

- Even if institutions could authenticate on demand, would they scale to billions of images?

Blockchain provides automated, scalable verification: platforms could flag images as "no blockchain record found - likely generated/manipulated" without human intervention. Can't generate false positives (hash either matches or doesn't). This doesn't replace institutional workflows - it augments them for contexts where those workflows don't exist.

On the post-AI point: I actually think this is backwards. If we reach a world where we can't even prove "this camera captured this scene," then we have no ground truth at all. Hardware attestation becomes MORE critical, not less. Your blockchain record also includes geotags, timestamp, camera ID - significantly harder to forge a complete fake than just the image itself. Without some method of proving hardware capture, the only option is to stop using images for truth-verification entirely.

On ubiquity: Every standard starts somewhere. HTTPS, GPS in cameras, seatbelts - none were ubiquitous until they were. Even before universal adoption, blockchain authentication can prove a positive ("this image has verifiable provenance") even if it can't yet prove a negative ("this image was generated"). For law enforcement, that's still valuable.

On watermarking: Watermarks can be trained around - that's what GANs do. If you watermark with something requiring a key to decode, you're already halfway to cryptographic signing, just without blockchain's forgery resistance. They're complementary approaches, not competing ones. On qualitative vs quantitative: As an engineer, quantitative beats qualitative for anything requiring accuracy at scale. Expert judgment works for individual high-stakes cases but doesn't scale to internet-speed misinformation.

You've helped me clarify that my audience isn't professional photographers with institutional backing - it's everyone else who needs to distinguish real from fake at the speed of social media. That's probably a harder problem to solve, but arguably more important given how information spreads today. Does that reframing make sense, or am I still missing key limitations?
by leptons | 2025-11-01 16:57:24+00:00
You missed plenty, and you wouldn't even know it because you didn't even do the most basic research about where you were going. It's a very lazy way to travel, and I guarantee I got way more out of my travel than you did if we visited the same places. But I don't know you, maybe your idea of a good time is getting drunk in whatever corner bar there is nearby.

If I'm spending thousands on plane tickets and hotels, and taking time off from work, and I know I'll likely never visit a place again (because there are so many other places to visit), I can't understand not doing some basic research on the things that the area is famous for, to visit those things. But whatever, you do you.
by pornel | 2025-11-01 16:57:25+00:00
It's not a single return type T that is a sum type. It's two control flow paths returning one type each, and that's a major difference, because the types and control flow are complected together in a way that poorly interacts with the type system.

It's not `fn(T) -> U` where U may be whatever it wants, including Ok|Exception in some cases. It's `fn(T) -> U throws E`, and the `U throws E` part is not a type on its own. It's part of the function signature, but lacks a directly corresponding type for U|E values. It's a separate not-a-type thing that doesn't exist as a value, but is an effect of control flow changes. It needs to be caught and converted to a real value with a nameable type before it can work like a value. Retuning Either<U, E> isn't the `U throws E` thing either. Java's special alternative way of returning either U or E is not a return type, but two control flow paths returning one type each.

Compiler is fully aware of what's happening, but it's not the same mechanism as Result. By focusing on "can this be done at all", you miss the whole point of Result achieving this in a more elegant way, with fewer special non-type things in the language. Being just a regular value with a real type, which simply works everywhere where values work without altering control flow is the main improvement of Result over checked exceptions. Removal of try/catch from the language is the advantage and simplification that Result brings.

Result proves that Java's special-case exception checking is duplicating work of type checking, which needlessly lives half outside of the realm of typed values. Java's checked exceptions could be removed from the language entirely, because it's just a duplicate redundant type checker, with less power and less generality than the type checker for values.
by dns_snek | 2025-11-01 16:57:36+00:00
> If you use async I/O you can just use the Chrome JavaScript runtime as-is.

What do you mean? A JS runtime can't do anything useful on its own, it can't read files, it can't load dependencies because it doesn't know anything about "node_modules", it can't open sockets or talk to the world in any other way - that's what Node.js provides.

> I would claim it was the only low-effort model available to them and therefore not motivation.

It was a headline feature when it released.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100901081015/https://nodejs.or...
by chrisBob | 2025-11-01 16:57:58+00:00
My solar install is scheduled for December. Even if it ends up missing the cutoff for a tax break I still think it’s the right thing to do. The combination of investing in green energy and locking in my effective electric rate is the smart move right now.

… and I heard on Friday that OpenAI is planning a data center 15 miles south of me. That can only make things worse.
by tmtvl | 2025-11-01 16:58:06+00:00
As a GC language Common Lisp is slow as molasses. However, in the realm of languages which are slow as molasses it's got quite acceptable performance. I suppose it's in part because it's alien technology from beyond the bounds of the multiverse, but also in part due to the fact that we had really interesting tech back in the '70s and '80s that kinda got lost during the so-called AI winter.

To add on to that, with declarations the programmer can tell the Lisp compiler that (for example) a variable can be stack allocated to help improve performance. The fact that Lisp code is just data is another benefit towards performance as it means macros are relatively easy to write so some computation can be done at compile time. There are also various useful utilities in the spec which can be used to help profile execution of a program to aid in optimization, such as time and trace.
by cool_man_bob | 2025-11-01 16:58:32+00:00
> The founder is known con-artist involved in such other things as solving nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam.

Haha, am I still supposed to believe VC’s are competent, intelligent people who deserve their stature when they fall for scams that should be more obvious than a Nigerian prince scam.
by Detrytus | 2025-11-01 16:59:01+00:00
> The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.

That's not an alternative at all. Countries are built by certain groups of people (citizens), based on some underlying principles, culture, values. To preserve that, citizens have the right to decide what kind of people they want to let in. Immigrating to US is a privilege, not a right, as it should be. There's nothing wrong with deporting illegal aliens as long as due process is followed (which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion).
by illuminator83 | 2025-11-01 16:59:17+00:00
I think it's mostly the fact that C dependencies are much rarer and much harder to add and maintain.

The average C project has at most a handful of other C dependencies. The average Rust, Go or NodeJS project? A couple hundred.

Ironically, because dependency management is so easy in modern languages, people started adding a lot of dependencies everywhere. Need a leftpad? Just add one line in some yaml file or an "Alt-Enter" in an IDE. Done.

In C? That is a lot more work. If you do that, you do it for advanced for stuff you absolutely need for your project. Because it is not easy. In all likelihood you write that stuff yourself.
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-01 17:00:11+00:00
> Russia funds both leftist and rightist parties[...] The ideology does not matter to Russia anymore

Because in the last ~10-15 years or so, media and politics in countries like Germany(and US and most of Europe) have made sure to erase national identity and social cohesion, in favor of capitalistic globalism and mass migration, leading to a decline in the middle class standard of living and societal trust, and dividing people against each other instead of against the government/wealthy elite pulling the strings.

So when people are divided, they're not gonna want to play ball as a united team in face of adversity, but they vote less and more extreme, get less involved in politics, engage in more tribalistic behavior, etc and now that lack of national cohesion the leaders created, is exploited by Russia and other foreign actors too in their favor.
by impossiblefork | 2025-11-01 17:00:55+00:00
The rah-rah stuff on their homepage really put me off, as a European. I didn't expect it to be fraud though-- I thought it was rubbish, but that they actually had something somewhat useful, somehow, since I thought Peter Thiel was smart.

There are some strange things in this writeup-- I don't think it's clear that the machine they claim to intend to sell is supposed to be a direct writing machine, I assumed it was supposed to be like EUV but with X-rays and some kind of special x-ray tolerant photoresist, but the identity of the founders is at least quite damning, the electrostatic chuck thing might be damning I guess, unless there's some special concern. I assumed that even if it were sensible, it wouldn't work well enough, with damage to the resist or something else that manufacturers would find unacceptable, but this isn't my area, so I can't really judge.
by kbrisso | 2025-11-01 17:01:34+00:00
This is America and we shouldn't have to put up with this. We shouldn't allow mask men running around terrorizing people because of race. But we can't stop it. American freedom is about being free from this form of harassment. American freedom is about being left alone to make something for yourself and your family. America is built on a bad marriage and is not perfect but to let this administration continue to do these types of illegal acts and cause one constitutional crisis after another is the down fall of this country in my opinion. As far as I'm concerned there will be no more elections in the future. What do we do then?
by jayd16 | 2025-11-01 17:02:09+00:00
Yeah but to be fair, that can have adverse effects if you, say, busy wait.

The sync code might be running in an async context. Your async context might only have one thread. The task you're waiting for can never start because the thread is waiting for it to finish. Boom, you're deadlocked.

Async/await runtimes will handle this because awaiting frees the thread. So, the obvious thing to do is to await but then it gets blamed for being viral.

Obviously busy waiting in a single threaded sync context will also explode tho...
by hinkley | 2025-11-01 17:03:22+00:00
My dad got afib from doing a 24 hour challenge and I’m so glad I never participated. Be careful out there.

The only marathon I ever did was cram for a couple finals and playing computer games between them and after. I was working on 72 hours when the blue on my monitor started to ripple and decided it was time to go to bed… almost an hour after it started.
by Xylakant | 2025-11-01 17:04:06+00:00
If you’re referring to Ferrocene with the certified Rust fork, then I’d like to make the minor correction that we don’t consider Ferrocene a true fork, but rather a downstream distribution of the Rust projects compiler. There are very little changes to the compiler itself. Most relevant changes are documentation, build process and different test coverage - we do test architectures that upstream does not.
by matwood | 2025-11-01 17:04:11+00:00
Unemployment is the highest since 2021:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

Consumer staples have seen almost a 20% decline in EPS YoY:

https://ycharts.com/indicators/sandp_500_consumer_staples_ea...

A specific example is Chipotle. It could certainly be company specific, but could also highlight a consumer trend.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/chipotle-stock-falls-after-q...

Still, most analysts attributed the slowdown to industrywide challenges, not company-specific issues that Chipotle needs to address. Unemployment, increased student loan repayments and slower real wage growth accounting for inflation are weighing on consumers’ spending, according to Boatwright.
by wrs | 2025-11-01 17:04:16+00:00
There is one: tasks. But having the lower level (futures) available makes it very tempting to use it, both for performance and because the code is simpler (at least, it looks simpler). Some things that are easy with select! would be clunky with tasks.

On the other hand, some direct uses of futures are reminiscent of the tendency to obsess over ownership and borrowing to maximize sharing, when you could just use .clone() and it wouldn’t make any practical difference. Because Rust is so explicit, you can see the overhead so you want to minimize it.
by wtfwhateven | 2025-11-01 17:04:23+00:00
He didn't deliver. He should just link to the actual revisions that were reverted. The fact he refuses to is telling.

He was definitely not banned as a result of his story, he definitely did something egregious (such as repeatedly insulting people on talk pages or repeated vandalism) or was editing without an account and he is portraying a typical residential IP block ban as him being banned for "wrong think". It is purely dishonest.
by techsupporter | 2025-11-01 17:04:28+00:00
> A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.

No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.

> ...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...

What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.

People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.
by Herring | 2025-11-01 17:05:50+00:00
EY says

> Overall, underlying economic momentum remained steady in the first half of the year despite mounting policy headwinds. But with the impact of tariffs and policy uncertainty becoming increasingly visible, slower US growth and higher inflation are still on the horizon.

Trump inherited a good economy and set it towards decline. If that's still not clear stay tuned, there's more to come.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-11-01 17:06:03+00:00
This sort of thinking is kind of a retcon, no? The people who wrote the line you’re referencing also decided that none of the people ICE is involved with were even eligible for citizenship. If their rules held out, this wouldn’t even be a thing. I’m not arguing that their rules were correct, just that picking and choosing things they said feels intellectually dishonest.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-01 17:06:14+00:00
> you're the one that wants multiple subscriptions, you just dislike the cost/inconvenience. Economically speaking, there's no solution here that can satisfy you...

Yes there is, it's called piracy

> ... the cost to negotiate with all of them and consolidate on a single platform would be extraordinarily expensive, because that's what convenience often is: exorbitantly expensive. There's no game theory strategy here where you get everything you want, where all the production companies get everything they want, and it all happens at modest prices.

The music industry can do that just fine and there's a ton more content and parties to talk to.

> t's the same thing that people complain about with video games with the "why do I have to have internet for a single-player game" gripes.

Why is this an invalid complaint? I don't understand. I buy most of my games on GOG anyways. No DRM crap.

> In 1985, if I wanted shows, I did have to subscribe to cable... the infrastructure for shows was absurdly expensive, no individual could have it. Now? The big 12-bay NAS filled with hard drives, and I have copies of movies and television (and music and software and games and books) that my great-nth-grandchildren will be able to enjoy for free (16K ultra-giga-mega-gold-bluray re-re-remasters notwithstanding

Exactly! It's become accessible to everyone so companies like netflix and Amazon have to compete with piracy whether they like it or not. The sooner they get their heads around licensing content to each other, the sooner people will go back.

It's not even about cost. People pay fortunes for cable channel packs.

You can go like "business doesn't work that way" but yeah if it doesn't then it'll just get bypassed. It's as simple as that.
by thatguysaguy | 2025-11-01 17:07:08+00:00
Verification via LLM tends to break under quite small optimization pressure. For example I did RL to improve <insert aspect> against one of the sota models from one generation ago, and the (quite weak) learner model found out that it could emit a few nonsense words to get the max score.

That's without even being able to backprop through the annotator, and also with me actively trying to avoid reward hacking. If arxiv used an open model for review, it would be trivial for people to insert a few grammatical mistakes which cause them to receive max points.
by wtfwhateven | 2025-11-01 17:07:09+00:00
>Surely you can't deny that Wikipedia is biased against the so-called "right" side of the political spectrum, and biased towards the "left"?

You don't even name the article you were apparently having problems with. Not sure why anyone should just take the word of someone who is actively hiding the full story when it should be trivial to just link to.

It is obvious your story is either missing huge portions or you're just lying.
by uecker | 2025-11-01 17:07:20+00:00
I never found it hard to add a C library to my projects using pkg-config. And yes, when the package came from Debian I have some trust that it is not a huge supply chain risk.

I think the problem started with the idea over language-level managers that are just github collections instead of curated distribution-level package managers. So my response "C has no good package manager" is: It should not have a packager manager and Cargo or npm or the countless Python managers should all not exist either.
by darth_avocado | 2025-11-01 17:08:01+00:00
Lack of due diligence often gets characterized as a failed investment. And failed investments are often justified as a cost of running a VC firm, as long as one of them is a 100x success, the 99 failed ones don’t matter. But yes, you’d expect more due diligence from investors, but a lot of times it’s just about how likeable you are and who you know. We wouldn’t have VCs funding Adam Neumann’s new venture with hundreds of millions of dollars as soon as his Wework nonsense got exposed and collapsed.
by kylecazar | 2025-11-01 17:08:34+00:00
Understood!

It's an interesting question -- I've thought about it a lot in the context of some hypothetical brain interface. There are a lot of unknowns but I personally would go for it with the very hard constraint that it be the equivalent of read-only (no agents here) and local (no cloud).

As potentially scary as it seems, I would not be able to fight the temptation to participate under those conditions. It would make elusive thought a thing of the past.
by ramshanker | 2025-11-01 17:09:00+00:00
I have been thinking, if the "generate soft xray for lithography by particle accelerators" is remotely feasible as being claimed by substrate. I remember reading some chineese startup / university also trying to do so. ASML is best position to execute this. They have the money, cashflow and talent, R&D culture all available. ASML may very well be the one actually doing this.
by jcranmer | 2025-11-01 17:09:30+00:00
Right now, there are approximately five languages that are presumed to be acceptable for core applications in the base system: C, C++, Shell (which probably means specifically bash), Perl, and Python. The most recent language to be added to that list is Python, about 20 years ago. That's not to say that everybody likes those languages (indeed, there's quite a few commenters here who I think would be surprised to learn that not only is C++ on this list, but that it's been on it for at least 25 years).

There's other languages that are considered acceptable, even desirable, languages to write applications in (e.g., Java, PHP, Go), but Rust is really the first language to compete sufficiently close to C's competence for people to contemplate adding it to the base-system-languages list. I'd say only Go has ever come close to approaching that threshold, but I've never seen it contemplated for something like systemd.

Interestingly, I wonder if the debates over the addition of C++, Python, and Perl to the base system language set were this acrimonious.
by LexiMax | 2025-11-01 17:09:35+00:00
> I have no idea why you believe this.

Because I have thought about why people choose to hyper-focus on trans-folk, and it's one of the few explanations that makes sense, at least for men.

Why would someone say that they're "protecting" women, but advocate against abortion rights, divorce, sufferage, or higher limits on the age of consent to marry?

Why would someone say their religious views are incompatible, but have switched sects twice in the past decade because they disagreed with the direction their previous church was going in?

Why would someone claim to be protecting children from indoctrination yet vote for indoctrination of their own political views?

The contradictory explanations never made sense to me. The self-interested ones do.
by SR2Z | 2025-11-01 17:10:18+00:00
Yeah, it's amazing how many people are so eager to ignore things like "probable cause" and "protection from unreasonable search and seizure."

ICE is 100% going around with the fucking skin color card from family guy and harassing anyone darker than tan. I hope to god that people start pushing back - I saw a video of them doing exactly this to some high school kids and it made my blood boil.