MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fn-mote | 2025-11-15 19:43:27+00:00
Eyeballing the data [1], it looks like total fatalities in the low 1000s, and roughly 20 hijackings per year 1980-2000. Let's value each human fatality at $1M, and - lacking any knowledge about the subject - cargo also at $1M/incident.

That's about $1B in human life loss and $20M/year in cargo.

The 2025 budget for ths TSA was over $10B, so we're spending 10x the loss to prevent it. Value each human life at $10M? Then the total value of lives lost over a 20 year span is about one year of TSA spending.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/airline-hijackings-...
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-15 19:43:34+00:00
I think distinction needs to be made between:

* Polygraph “tests” presented as objective, independent evidence for the truth or falsehood of statements, and

* Polygraph used as an additional channel (similar to but on top of assessment of body language, voice tone, etc.) by an interviewer to determine how to guide an interview to elicit information from a subject, including information that they might prefer to conceal.
by Atomic_Torrfisk | 2025-11-15 19:43:48+00:00
Why the weird notation? Apart from very high net worth individuals, the metric seems pointless, navel gazing at best.

Aside from that, why not just use log10(<individual's wealth>/<average wealth>) as a function of a particular market like EU, USA, Greenland, whatever. That way the metric is agnostic to inflation and differences in currency value.
by pxc | 2025-11-15 19:43:51+00:00
IIRC there are some macOS APIs that you can only access if your app runs out of /Applications. There are some features of an app called "Secretive" (an SSH agent that stores keys in the Secure Enclave) that only work if you have the app installed under /Applications (whereas I'd normally install it under ~/Applications).

1pass probably does this to ensure that people can't accidentally install the app the "wrong way" and break some features.
by musicale | 2025-11-15 19:43:55+00:00
They moved to IP because it was improving faster in speed and commoditization vs. ATM. But in order to make it work, they had to figure out how to make QoS work on IP networks, which wasn't easy. It still isn't easy (see: crappy zoom calls.)

Modern circuit switched networks use optics rather than the legacy copper circuits which date back to telegraphy.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-15 19:44:30+00:00
An important difference between reinforcement learning (RL) and pre-training is the error feedback that is given. For pre-training the error feedback is just next token prediction error. For RL you need to have a goal in mind (e.g. successfully solving math problems) and the training feedback that is given is the RL "reward" - a measure of how well the model output achieved the goal.

With RL used for LLMs, it's the whole LLM response that is being judged and rewarded (not just the next word), so you might give it a math problem and ask it to solve it, then when it was finished you take the generated answer and check if it is correct or not, and this reward feedback is what allows the RL algorithm to learn to do better.

There are at least two problems with trying to use RL as a way to improve LLM reasoning in the general case.

1) Unlike math (and also programming) it is not easy to automatically check the solution to most general reasoning problems. With a math problem asking for a numerical answer, you can just check against the known answer, or for a programming task you can just check if the program compiles and the output is correct. In contrast, how do you check the answer to more general problems such "Should NATO expand to include Ukraine?" ?! If you can't define a reward then you can't use RL. People have tried using "LLM as judge" to provide rewards in cases like this (give the LLM response to another LLM, and ask it if it thinks the goal was met), but apparently this does not work very well.

2) Even if you could provide rewards for more general reasoning problems, and therefore were able to use RL to train the LLM to generate good solutions for those training examples, this is not very useful unless the reasoning it has learnt generalizes to other problems it was not trained on. In narrow logical domains like math and programming this evidentially works very well, but it is far from clear how learning to reason about NATO will help with reasoning about cooking or cutting your cat's nails, and the general solution to reasoning can't be "we'll just train it on every possible question anyone might ever ask"!

I don't have any particular reading suggestions, but these are widely accepted limiting factors to using RL for LLM reasoning.

I don't think RL for humans would work too well, and it's not generally the way we learn, or kids are mostly taught in school. We mostly learn or are taught individual skills and when they can be used, then practice and learn how to combine and apply them. The closest to using RL in school would be if the only feedback an English teacher gave you on your writing assignments was a letter grade, without any commentary, and you had to figure out what you needed to improve!
by pessimizer | 2025-11-15 19:45:05+00:00
You said "if buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist," somebody told you that's not what capitalism is, and you said "no true scotsman."

You have to do better than this to convince people of things.

If you had said "Buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist" rather than posing a pointless hypothetical, you would have had to defend that, and you weren't ready to.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-15 19:45:27+00:00
> You can literally break the law by just pushing your foot down harder. It's that easy!

How are you distinguishing that from any other law? You can literally break the law against theft by just picking someone's pocket. It's that easy!

But that was never the argument to begin with. They're proposing a law requiring websites to ban users who visit via a VPN. So to begin with we already have a major difference. The people subject to the law (websites) are different than the people who would be trying to circumvent it (users and VPN services).

Meanwhile websites have no actual means to know if someone is using a VPN. There are a zillion VPN services and anyone with an IP address can start one. There is no way for them to comprehensively ban them all. So now what happens? The website bans some VPNs -- they would be doing an incredibly painstaking job if they managed to get three out of every four -- and then the user just tries three or four random VPNs or VPN-equivalents until they find one that works and keeps using that.

At this point you could try to prosecute the website for failing, but then you'd be prosecuting everybody because nobody would actually be able to do it. Whereas if making an attempt is sufficient for compliance then they check their compliance box meanwhile everybody is still bypassing it. Which is why it's useless.
by revenate_ | 2025-11-15 19:45:30+00:00
Hi, I built a JetBrains plugin called Actionate that lets you run and inspect GitHub Actions directly inside the IDE instead of living in the Actions tab.

This post walks through the workflow I ended up with: viewing runs, full logs (no truncation), smart log navigation, jumping from logs into project files, manually triggering workflows, and inline autocomplete for workflow authoring.

I’d love feedback on whether this actually makes CI feel less like “another website” and more like a first-class part of the editor, and what’s still missing for your own workflows.
by chongli | 2025-11-15 19:47:03+00:00
We're talking about soldiers stalking the wilderness of Pliny the Elder's past, not the present-day United States where game populations have declined dramatically. Furthermore, the population figures are way out of whack as well. The city of Rome in early imperial times was at best half a million people. Pliny the Elder's hometown of Como in northern Italy might have housed up to 10,000. An army drawn from that city would have been a few thousand soldiers at maximum.

Armies in ancient times did NOT have the highly sophisticated logistics networks that we have in the modern day. Subsisting on hunting and gathering was a major part of the soldier's life [1].

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-...
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-11-15 19:47:25+00:00
What am I missing about how hard it is to enrich uranium? We did it in the 40s, having a significantly less solid understanding of all of the physics involved. Material science on containers, motors, energy generation, etc have all been significantly improved in the intervening decades.

Wikipedia says U235 is ~0.7% of earth deposits, and as little as 7kg may be required for a minimal nuclear device. Processing, 700kg of uranium does not sound insurmountable, even with a terribly slow and inefficient process. Just grinding it up and using some kind of mass spectrometer could trivially separate a 3Dalton mass difference.
by gishh | 2025-11-15 19:48:06+00:00
Capitalism and communism couldn’t be more different, in the true definition of the terms.

Communism is literally a ruling class dictating the lives of an entire country. Capitalism at least gives the opportunity of individual action.

You are allowed to hate capitalism, clearly you do, and advocate for socialism, et. al. Whatever point you think you just made with your post is completely devoid of substance.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-11-15 19:48:14+00:00
Thanks for the link. I agree that preparation time is an important consideration. I do think that the food desert criterion (> 1.6km to the nearest supermarket in urban centres) seems very restrictive -- this would make half of most suburbs "food deserts" in the affluent western country where I live.

I find the more recent concept of "food swamps", also explained on that page, to be a (perhaps unwitting) direct challenge to the theory that absence of nearby healthy food is the root cause:

> A related concept is the phenomenon of a food swamp, a recently coined term by researchers who defined it as an area with a disproportionate number of fast food restaurants (and fast food advertising) in comparison to the number of supermarkets in that area.[13] The single supermarket in a low-income area does not, according to researchers Rose and colleagues, necessitate availability nor does it decrease obesity rates and health risks

If this claim is true -- that is, if areas with 1 nearby supermarket have obesity rates no better than areas with 0 -- then it's essentially impossible to blame health outcomes on the availability of healthy food nearby. If an area has nearby supermarkets, it is much harder to make the case that obesity is purely the result of external factors outside a person's control.
by hinkley | 2025-11-15 19:48:41+00:00
> last possible second

Most of the people you describe here will try to start changes at the last possible second, and since our estimates are always wrong, and preemptions always happen, then they start all changes too late to avoid the consequences of waiting too long. It is the worst of all worlds. Because the solution and the remidiatiom are both rushed, leading to tech debt piling up instead of being paid down.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. But waterfall is not just a battle plan, it’s an entire campaign. And the problem comes both from trying to define problems we have little in house experience with, and then the sunk cost fallacy of having to redo all that “work” of project definition when reality and the customers end up not working the way we planned.

And BTW, trying to maintain the illusion of that plan results in many abstractions leaking. It creates impedance mismatches in the code and those always end up multiplying the difficulty of implementing new features. This is a major source of Business and Product not understanding why implementing a feature is so hard. It seems like it should just fit in with the existing features, but those features are all a house of cards built on an abstraction that is an outright fabrication.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-11-15 19:48:58+00:00
I think that nowadays "gene" refers only to a subset of a nucleic acid. Sequences of ACTG (or ACUG in the case of RNA) only, and only in that organism's chromosomes.

If you inherit a virus from your mother, for instance, I think most would call that non-genetic inheritance, even though viruses have genes too. Same goes for methyl and acetyl markers, transcription factors, nutrients, toxins, and whatever else comes along for the ride in the meiotic cell.
by ripe | 2025-11-15 19:50:21+00:00
Your points and examples are valid. However, when you say:

> I wouldn’t agree at all that wealthy people are inherently more resilient to stress

I beg to differ.

I think the OP is talking about growing up in poverty. Repeated stress with no relief, which is the condition of poor people in society, has been shown to affect their resilience. (Sorry, I don't have references handy, but these should be easy to find).
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-15 19:51:45+00:00
Plane hijackings used to occur because the SOP was to not resist and try to negotiate with the hijackers for the safe release of the passengers.

After 9/11 the assumption has to be that they're going to fly the plane into a building and kill everyone, so now if you try to hijack a plane all the passengers and crew are going to beat you to death with their fists and shoelaces like their life depends on it, which makes it a lot harder to hijack a plane. The TSA has approximately nothing to do with that.
Show HN: ZenPaint, a pixel-perfect MacPaint recreation for the browser
by allthreespies | 2025-11-15 19:51:52+00:00
I've been recreating the original MacPaint in the browser on and off for a few years. It's still alpha quality, but I'm finally ready to share it more widely.

The goal was pixel-perfect accuracy, so I spent a lot of time with Atkinson's original QuickDraw source code, emulators, and my iBook G3 to get details like font rendering and the shape tools exactly right.

Some technical notes:

- Font rendering was surprisingly tricky; understanding the original pipeline's quirks took lots of experimentation, and avoiding canvas smoothing/aliasing required careful handling.

- Written declaratively with React; performance is kept reasonable with a buffer pool and copy-on-write semantics. - You can share links to artwork from within the UI.

E.g.: https://zenpaint.org/#p=KQumBQ5x

- Mobile support was not considered here (for obvious reasons). It might still be usable on a larger phone or tablet but I have not tested this at all.

There's something magical about making art within MacPaint's constraints: the 1-bit graphics, the limited resolution, the peculiar set of tools that still feel surprisingly expressive.

Still some rough edges and missing features, but I'd love feedback from anyone who remembers the original.
by oliwarner | 2025-11-15 19:52:12+00:00
If breathlessness was a writing style. Seriously tiring when every other paragraph is a soft trailer for action much later on.

Which, by the way, is all conjecture. Even if everything happened as described (citation needed), they have no idea what the Russians knew. For a piss-them-off mission like this, watching the response and playing dumb seems far wiser than reacting.
by Cheer2171 | 2025-11-15 19:53:18+00:00
Yes, they are logging. I did not say anything about that.

I said it is absurd to think this is such a unique feature, it is absurd to think that the likely explanation is OpenAI stole it, rather than independently invented it.

If you're racing to develop AI interfaces, you should expect that one of the many people on the big corps many product teams have independently thought up obvious features like this, since before the engineering team even finished their proof of concept.
by grishka | 2025-11-15 19:53:22+00:00
Thank you very much for the observation about headers. I just looked closer at the bot traffic I'm currently receiving on my small fediverse server and noticed that it's user agents of old Chrome versions but also that the Accept-Language header is never set, which is indeed something that no real Chromium browser would do. So I added a rule to my nginx config to return a 403 to these requests. The amount of these per second seems to have started declining.
by hearsathought | 2025-11-15 19:53:43+00:00
> I will say that the "in/on US territory" piece is a very key detail.

That's the point. South korea is not allowed to build nuclear submarines in their own territory. They lack the sovereignty to do it. The US won't give them permission to build one on their own.

But you probably knew this and your comment is meant to distract.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-15 19:55:38+00:00
And are you aware of what exactly has changed?

One notable change is: reinforced cockpit doors that can't be forced open from the outside easily. Good luck hijacking with that.

But another notable change is that plane crews and passengers all understand now that plane hijacking is a life or death situation, and would fight hijackers to the bitter end.

Which is what happened on the very day of 9/11, on Flight 93.
by JustExAWS | 2025-11-15 19:55:40+00:00
You’re completely ignoring the knock on economic effects of lower confidence in flight safety, liability and the not so hypothetical ability of someone to take over a plane and use it to attack ground targets.

AirTran for instance went out of business because of one crash. If someone blew up a United plane, I can guarantee you that Delta would increase the security before you got on their flights to instill confidence on passengers.

And people act as if airport security and the TSA measures are unique to the US. My wife and I just got into a position where the stars aligned for us to fly a lot post Covid. But during that time the three countries that we have flown out of - London, Costa Rica and Mexico all have the basic same security measure with the slight difference that you can bring liquids on board from LHR because they have newer scanners that supposedly detect explosives.

And it’s not just airlines. We also had to go through the same type of security to get on the “Chunnel” from London to France.

The only thing that is really theatre is taking off your shoes in the US.
by coldtea | 2025-11-15 19:56:04+00:00
>"Software people" have an above-average understanding of probabilities overall. It's politicians who tend to think in absolutes.

If I had a penny for everytime a software person / nerd on HN and elsewhere made an argument that shows little understanding of probabilities and statistics, or perhaps only a theoritical understand that's context dependent (meaning they know the math, but magically forget them when discussing some specific topic), I'd be rich.

>"It works better for totalitarian regimes" is the argument for not doing it

Parent is not justyfing them doing it. They are explaining how little exhaustive their implementation can be, while still being effective for their goals.
by system2 | 2025-11-15 19:56:34+00:00
A foolish take, makes me believe you didn't really work in the real world. Because the entire global computer ecosystem is built on Windows-compatible software. Finance, accounting, medical, car diagnostics, and even HVAC software are built windows-compatible-only only.

Don't get me wrong, I use Xubuntu on my crappy old devices, Ubuntu on my secondary mini-pc, and switch between them with KVM while working. I tried to make Linux work for everything but missing industry software made it difficult.
by gopalv | 2025-11-15 19:57:18+00:00
> trauma that our parents, or grandparents experienced could lead to behavior modifications and poorer outcomes in us

The nurture part of it is already well established, this is the nature part of it.

However, this is not a net-positive for the folks who already discriminate.

The "faults in our genes" thinking assumes that this is not redeemable by policy changes, so it goes back to eugenics and usually suggests cutting such people out of the gene pool.

The "better nurture" proponents for the next generation (free school lunches, early intervention and magnet schools) will now have to swim up this waterfall before arguing more investment into the uplifting traumatized populations.

We need to believe that Change (with a capital C) is possible right away if start right now.
by saulpw | 2025-11-15 19:57:50+00:00
(author here)

Thanks for this comment. I am remiss to not directly address how this ties into Marxist theory. I'll consider how to add references on the next rewrite.

A key point in Mag Wealth is that there are several meaningfully different levels of both labor and capital. "Capital" is generally regarded as $^6 and up, whereas "labor" is below $^6. But just as there's a huge difference in the lives of a waitress vs lawyer (though both are "labor"), there's also a huge difference in the lives of a millionaire vs a billionaire (though both are capital). There are people who are unable to work and have even less opportunity than a minimum-wage worker; are they "labor", or maybe we should call them something else, like "destitute"? And there are people who have hundreds of billions of dollars who buy and control institutions of power; are they "capital" or do they become effectively "sovereign"?
by hearsathought | 2025-11-15 19:58:21+00:00
> I don't think any country has the right to demand that another country hands over enriched uranium and allow them to move into a shipyard so that they could build a nuclear sub.

The US won't allow south korea to enrich uranium on their own. Want to try again?

> I would recommend going beyond simply reading the headline.

Another intentional distracting comment.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-11-15 19:58:26+00:00
That was my first thought too -- but then why would the bot company care about a few false positives?

I suppose it could have an impact if 30% of all, say, Coca Cola mentions on the web came from that site, but then it would have to be a very big site. I don't think the bot company would notice, let alone care, if it was 0.01% of the mentions.
by nemomarx | 2025-11-15 19:59:02+00:00
Why would we buy south korean subs for this, especially ones south korea is building with us navy help? we have nuclear subs and the us is actually pretty good at building more of them. It's the cheapest kind of reactor we have and doesn't get protested by environmentalists.

The transmission from sub / ship to shore is not great I think, though. They're used for power during disaster recovery?
by bitwize | 2025-11-15 19:59:20+00:00
I actually find this rather interesting.

Gibson knew dick about computers in 1984, which makes his early cyberpunk works more interesting because so much of the technical stuff is pure imagination and guesswork. He peppered his 1980s prose with Japanese-sounding brand names because he assumed that the Japanese would dominate computing the way they dominated electronics for things people like William Gibson do—things like listening to music. And it didn't quite work out that way, because Japanese computer manufacturers tailored their output to peculiar Japanese needs (specifically, needing high resolution displays and lots of memory in order to draw kanji well and needing Japanese language support in the OS) rather than hewing to emerging industry standards. This kept prices of NEC, Epson, and Sharp gear high, and allowed American manufacturers like IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Apple to get a significant foothold in the emerging industry worldwide. Toshiba emerged as an early leader in laptops, but laptops wouldn't really find their market niche until the mid-90s or so. So these days, you go to like Den-Den Town in Osaka, and you will find Dells and HPs for sale, and of course all the pretty Japanese girls are all about their Apple gear, just like here. Even so, Japanese buyers tend to prefer Japanese brands, followed by other Asian brands, and Western brands (except for Apple) third. So I can totally see a Japanese executive rocking a Fujitsu laptop, but I haven't seen Westerners in possession of one.