MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-23 06:46:59+00:00
This is a problem, that the software will try to guess what you mean by such things like this (it is not specific to this feature, but other features of computer programs in general; this is one specific case of that). Just because you do not want it to translate such a language (or any other langage) automatically does not necessarily mean that you can read it or that you want to request documents written in that language. Fingerprinting is not the only issue with this.
by kijin | 2025-11-23 06:47:19+00:00
> Unless they found someone who really likes doing this kind of thing?

There are more people like that than one might think.

There's a sizable community of people who still play old video games. There are people who meticulously maintain 100 year old cars, restore 500 year old works of art, and find their passion in exploring 1000 year old buildings.

The HN front page still gets regular posts lamenting loss of the internet culture of the 80s and 90s, trying to bring back what they perceive as lost. I'm sure there are a number of bearded dudes who would commit themselves to keeping an old distro alive, just for the sake of not having to deal with systemd for example.
by Volundr | 2025-11-23 06:49:04+00:00
Original comment, written by you!

> ... At least the non-citizens typically still have a backup home abroad.

Next reply:

> having a backup home abroad does you no good if you are trafficked to a labour camp in some random hellhole country

Then the comment I replied to:

> Yes, you can imagine bad things.

(Implying this fear is unfounded)

Yeah man, I can read. We're very clearly talking about non-citizens. Your original comment did ALSO mention US citizens, but since we are talking about people with a "backup home abroad" the reply is clearly referencing the non-citizens in your original comment.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-11-23 06:51:33+00:00
That didnt stop the flow of Nobels

For work done after 1970 - optical tweezers,laser cooling, quantum hall, superres microscopy, quantum dots (NP 2023)

Not to forget Shor and Grover (1990s!)

Holmdel had the antenna of Penzias/Wilson

For me, this marked the end of Bell Labs (Murray Hill):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal#Beginning_o...

Not sure what the bottleneck was: https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2025/11/19/science-...
by zippyman55 | 2025-11-23 06:52:54+00:00
I'd drink 12-15 cups of coffee a day and start the day with 12 Oreo cookies and after I solve my first computer problem, usually in 15 minutes, I'd knock down another 12 Oreos. Now, its zero Oreos and one cup of coffee max a day, with many days, no coffee.
by buu700 | 2025-11-23 06:53:01+00:00
I would literally go days without drinking any water.

The idea of that is horrifying. I can't imagine voluntarily putting myself through that in the absence of some sort of extreme drought situation. Personally, I'd be miserable without 64 - 128oz of water first thing in the morning. I've long suspected that a lot of people who think they're addicted to caffeine are really just chronically dehydrated.
by integralid | 2025-11-23 06:53:12+00:00
This may actually be false! Owning a smartphone is so normal, even required, nowadays that people who don't even own one are often "edge cases". For example people who believe in fringe conspiracy theories, people with severe health problems, elderly people, etc. Even if resigning from phone helps by itself, "average people" rarely do.

Similar statistical effect happens with alcohol usage: from raw data it often looks like people who drink almost nothing - let's say one drink a month - are healthier than people who drink absolutely nothing.
by keepamovin | 2025-11-23 06:55:19+00:00
It's funny, I have a different view. Corporates often need LT maintenance and support for weird old systems. The majority of global programming community often chases shiny new trends in their personal tinkering.

However I think there's the retro-computing, and other hobby niches that align with your hacker view. And certainly there's a bunch of corp enthusiasm for standardizing shiny things.
by ta12653421 | 2025-11-23 06:55:49+00:00
From a thermodynamic perspective this is somehow true; but not regarding taste, structure etc. of the meat product: There is a clear difference between superlarge chickenfarms and my local farmer with only a couple of hundreds?

Also, depending on how the animals are fed, you have different substances in the final product, like Antibiotics.

So feel free to optimize only for the "thermodynamic calorie perspective" ;-)
by efitz | 2025-11-23 06:56:23+00:00
Large service providers hate you. Not just you; they hate all humans, especially those that they have to pay or those that cost them money.

They want you to pay them money and leave them alone. They literally don’t want to talk to you; the cost of the CS rep means that a call from you likely offsets most of all of what you pay them in a month.

The last thing they are going to do is hire more expensive people who can do more than just read a script “did you unplug it and plug it back in?”

Besides, they have very sensitive algorithms that don’t let things get bad enough that they risk losing customers. The algorithms understand their monopoly in your area (granted by the local government that you can vote out), and so “bad enough” is pretty bad compared to a place with real competition.

It sucks, but there it is.

Btw I had a similar situation with an ISP once; I literally sent them a traceroute showing a routing loop in their infra; they just don’t know how to deal with that kind of thing.
by HansHamster | 2025-11-23 06:56:50+00:00
Isn't Incus/LXD separate from and running on top of LXC? People sometimes seem to use the names interchangeably which can be annoying because I run just plain LXC but when looking stuff up and come across "this is how you do XYZ on LXC" they are actually talking about LXD and it doesn't really apply. I can't recall what is was last time, but this has happened a couple of times already...
by fsh | 2025-11-23 06:57:25+00:00
I hate the TDS2024 (early-2000s digital scope) with a passion. The LCD is awful, the power supply breaks all the time, and the sample memory is laughable compared to modern scopes, making it very difficult to use. Tektronix kept selling this thing (and similarly awful other ones) until not so long ago for an absurd price (~2000$). For some reason universities kept buying them instead of vastly superior ones from other companies. So now this piece of garbage is a absolutely everywhere.
by merelysounds | 2025-11-23 06:58:21+00:00
Good advice. I draw pixel art for an image logic puzzle game [1] and these resonate, especially 2. (Negotiate) and 5. (Constraints).

Another thing that helped me was to experiment with different canvas sizes and styles. I was surprised how changing these affects my process, speed and results. Then again, this can be difficult in an ongoing project.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748...
by knallfrosch | 2025-11-23 06:58:57+00:00
Typescript types often devolve into

keyof typeof[number] ? uppercase (myNum)

On the other hand, there isn't much Omit, readonly, mutable in existing code bases, so devs have nowhere to learn but documentation.

Then the ground shifts again and –what should be basic stuff – enums are banned, because erasableSyntaxOnly makes life so much easier.
by businessmate | 2025-11-23 06:59:10+00:00
New research from Berg, Lucena, and Rosenblatt (arXiv:2510.24797) shows that large language models enter a distinct behavioral mode when prompted into sustained self-reference. In this mode, models produce more structured and confident internal narratives, yet these narratives are controlled by the same sparse-autoencoder features linked to roleplay and deception. The effect appears across GPT, Claude, and Gemini.
by pjmorris | 2025-11-23 07:00:44+00:00
To your point...

1. "The Tobacco Institute was founded in 1958 as a trade association by cigarette manufacturers, who funded it proportionally to each company's sales. It was initially to supplement the work of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which later became the Council for Tobacco Research. The TIRC work had been limited to attacking scientific studies that put tobacco in a bad light, and the Tobacco Institute had a broader mission to put out good news about tobacco, especially economic news." [0]

2. "[Lewis Powell] worked for Hunton & Williams, a large law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. His 1971 Powell Memorandum became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council."

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.
by exr0n | 2025-11-23 07:01:25+00:00
That's a really interesting concept! The wiki page right now ends in "example of a combination of smells that neutralise each other", which makes me wonder if the "olfactory white" combinations are actually tuned to neutralize? I suspect what we're hitting is a bunch of receptors, and the brain is interpretting it as a common strong and evolutionarily important smell (which I assume has stronger pathways by default).
by beefnugs | 2025-11-23 07:01:30+00:00
There was just a youtube video of a penetration tester showing a screencap of some hacker: they used something called "octo browser" to act like their target as they used stolen cookies to login as hacked targets.

Seems like we all need to come together and use the same technique to "we are borg, we are browsing your internet as one, tracking is futile"
by ggm | 2025-11-23 07:03:04+00:00
Would be good to understand the relationship of this code original sox. It says it's a hard fork and integrates downstream bug fixes from code which depends on sox. What's the original sox author doing in this?

I only read the git repo text. Presumably one of the other docs or the ML discussed it.

The AUTHORS file is informative of course.

(Used sox heavily back in the day)
by mattwilsonn888 | 2025-11-23 07:03:12+00:00
The issue with this model in the most general sense is that it is zero-sum, and at the limit it doesn't provide hardly any security.

I delay the use of updated software by a week, and anyone that doesn't takes the risk. Therefore I, the user of the cooldown, enjoys reduced risk at the expense of everyone not implementing a cooldown.

If everyone simply delays their updates, then there is nobody to suffer an attack which notifies users of the cooldown (in this case, everybody).

The blog post makes the argument that the vendors are incentivized to discover these attacks in this time, but that's an entirely different argument and if that were true, they would already be doing that.

In fact, auditing updates for vulnerabilities is the general solution. The whole appeal of the cooldowns is that you don't have to do that - the cost is that it's a zero-sum game reliant on the suffering of those less wise.
by rkomorn | 2025-11-23 07:03:21+00:00
As you said, everyone is different. I drink coffee (~2 shots of espresso) almost at the exact same time every morning. Then again after lunch.

There's basically zero impact if I miss the morning one.

I've done multiple stretches of not drinking coffee (weeks/months), with also basically no noticeable changes: not more or less tired, no change in sleep, etc.
by Helmut10001 | 2025-11-23 07:09:07+00:00
(author of the blog post)

I fully agree with your argument: Hypervisor isolation is the best for multi-tenant security. In a single-purpose VM, the primary threat is often the application itself. There are two primary reasons for me to use docker in a rootless namespace:

1. It narrows the attack surface & simplifies operations: Running the Docker daemon itself as root presents a high-value target. A vulnerability in the daemon (like a flaw in the API, `containerd`, `runc`, etc.) becomes an instant "game over" for the entire host. The benefits of running the daemon in a user namespace are:

- Security: A privilege escalation vulnerability within the Docker daemon itself no longer yields root on the host. The attacker breaks out into the context of an unprivileged user (mastodon, keycloak, etc.), with no sudo rights and limited access to the filesystem. - Isolation: As a practical benefit, each service gets its own independent Docker daemon. If I misconfigure or crash the Docker environment for Service A, it has zero impact on Service B. This is a big advantage over a single, monolithic rootful daemon managing all containers. - File Ownership: It solves the persistent file permission headache. Data volumes or mounted folders are owned by the rootless service user (mastodon:mastodon) on the host filesystem, not by root, which simplifies backups, migrations, and debugging. This is actually the biggest advantage to me. I discuss this a bit in my original Mastodon post. [1]

2. A great tradeoff for resource-constrained environments: Yes, a fleet of single-purpose VMs is ideal. But it's often not feasible from a resource or cost perspective, especially in a homelab or small business environment. My stack is a compromise that layers security:

Proxmox (Hypervisor) -> Unprivileged LXC (OS-level isolation) -> Rootless Docker (User-space isolation)

This stack allows me to run ~30 distinct services across ~10 LXCs on a single machine with an average CPU utilization of just 1-2%. Achieving this level of service density with full VMs would be impossible on the same hardware due to memory and CPU overhead.

Rootless Docker is the final layer that provides meaningful separation within the cost-effective LXC containers.

Lastly: You're right to point out that the kernel can be a sieve. No single layer is perfect. But the goal of defense in depth is to force an attacker to defeat multiple, distinct security mechanisms to achieve their goal.

One last point: This principle is so important that newer tools like Podman were designed from the ground up to be rootless by default, which I'd recommend for anyone starting fresh today.

[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2023-12-12_mastodon-docker-rootless...
by exr0n | 2025-11-23 07:09:41+00:00
Woah I didn't know about that theory, that's really interesting! If I understand correctly, it's that the ligand needs to both fit "physically" and also have the right vibrational mode to have high binding affinity / trigger the receptor? Sounds like the relevant frequencies would be in IR range, or roughly 10-100 terahertz. We're at 300 kHz, so 9 orders of magnitude lower, so we're likely not activating the receptors directly with that mechanism. But, maybe the acoustic radiation force from the ultrasound gives existing molecules in the air enough energy to increase the coupling? And nobody seems to really know how ultrasound neurostimulation really works, so who knows—maybe something similar even happens with neurotransmitters in cortex...
by ted_dunning | 2025-11-23 07:09:50+00:00
The high capacity of an internet link does not translate directly into high bandwidth signals in the analog domain. The DOCSIS standard includes modulation patterns as high as 32768-QAM which allows 15 bits to be transmitted per symbol change. For 1Gb/s, that means that you only need <70M baud.

The upstream channels are squarely in the HF to VHF range. The downstream channels (which typically require more bandwidth) start at about the same HF frequency (42MHz) but can extend above 1GHz. Each channel, however, is relatively bandwidth limited.
by riffraff | 2025-11-23 07:10:29+00:00
More fun trivia about Garibaldi: he was elected to the french parliament, and he caused a stir when he showed up wearing his signature poncho rather than formal clothes. He was also the only french commander in the Franco Russian war to capture a Prussian flag.

Also, he was supposedly invited to fight in the American civil war but refused since he couldn't get the level of command he wanted, although there was a Garibaldi Guard in that war.

Queen Victoria wrote in her diary , about Garibaldi's visit to London, that most of the elite was far too fascinated with him. During the same visit, the servants at the house he was staying sold the water he used to wash himself to collectors.
by silisili | 2025-11-23 07:16:42+00:00
One common theme is that companies used to treat good employees as assets. Now they treat all employees as liabilities.

What changed? A lot. The underlying theme across all companies, to both employees and customers, has been "see how much abuse they'll take before they leave", which sadly has had marvelous results because the answer is... a lot. Notice that at least half of the largest companies by market cap have no actual support at all.

Add in that tuition has exploded, it became cheaper and quicker just to import people than to train them.
by isoprophlex | 2025-11-23 07:17:40+00:00
I was an organic chemist, and as such worked I've worked in various "wet" laboratories. All of them had store rooms and cabinets with hundreds or thousands of bottles filled with horribly smelling goop. Besides the occasional terpenoid (naturally occurring things smelling like menthol, cloves or cinnamon) nearly everything there was liquid death.

These smells have everything: Harsh solvent-like stuff like strong alcohol or glue, rotten fish amines, off-sweet halocarbons, things like burnt plastics, excrement, or stuff that defies description as to their lingeringly terrible sensation of olfactory wrongness (selenium compounds).

There is actually a thing called "cadaverine", that should tell you enough.

Still, every sufficiently large storage space I rememebet had this identical, not unpleasant, thickly sweet, but not easily defined smell.

So to conclude, I think it's a brain glitch when we input everything, all the smells, at the same time.
by exr0n | 2025-11-23 07:17:45+00:00
Woah, that would be wild! It seems like most neonatal ultrasound reaches peak internal pressures of few-hundred kPa to 2 MPa. We ranged from 150-250 kPa. So, a little lower than the lower end of prenatal diagnostic imaging.

So, the pressures are high enough to be stimulating them! But most diagnostic imaging happens at 1-20 MHz, while most neurostimulation seems to occur at few-hundred kHz (we were at 300 kHz, on the mid-high end). So I don't think it's likely that babies are being sent smells?
by mirzap | 2025-11-23 07:17:59+00:00
I don't find commit messages useful for historical reasons (git log), I squash them anyway when merging PR. Commit messages are very helpful to a reviewer to get a necessary context and intent behind the change. Without it, I need to figure out it my self when reviewing. It is very easy to get a habit of committing often and in AI era i don't write commits anymore. So there is no excuse.
by keepamovin | 2025-11-23 07:19:02+00:00
The real killer feature isn’t "more thorium than uranium" (thorium is already 4× more abundant). The real win is that thorium MSRs can eat the existing mountain of "spent" fuel rods from regular reactors and turn what we currently call high-level waste into electricity while leaving waste that’s safe in a few hundred years instead of tens of thousands. That’s hundreds of thousands of tons of "waste" suddnely becoming centuries of clean fuel. That alone flips the economics on its head.

Also: passive safety (the thing just drains and freezes if anything goes wrong), no pressure vessel, tiny physical footprint, way less long-lived actinides, and U-233 is basically proliferation-proof because of the hard gamma from U-232. Uranium feels cheap and plentiful right now exactly the way oil felt infinite in the 1950s. China is playing the long game, and this little 2 MW rig lighting up and breeding U-233 last month is the “Sputnik moment” for the thorium cycle.

So...Three decades? Maybe if the West keeps sitting on its hands. China says 10 MW by 2030 and 100 MW demo by 2035. I wouldn’t bet against them.

So yeah, exciting as hell actually.
by exr0n | 2025-11-23 07:21:15+00:00
Haha, luckily not! It's a very speculative link, so we didn't want to talk about "AI" too much in the main post. But we originally got interested in this concept because we are interested in other forms of input to the brain (other than the classic reading, listening, watching, etc). The nose is interesting because it seems to have many independent basis vectors and very sharp discrimination ability, so it might be a sensor into which you can pack many inputs. LLMs are just a proof-by-example that ~1k input dimensions is enough to really encode semantic meaning.
by djhedges | 2025-11-23 07:22:26+00:00
Reminds me of the cable internet I had in college. Every night it would drop for several minutes at a time. My homework included cisco labs using equipment we had to reserve remotely so loosing my SSH connections was maddening.

Numerous phone calls and technician visits. At some point was logging into the cable modem to measure the signal strength. Eventually a tech moved my coax connection at the drop? Problem went away, they said another tech would come back out and check on it.

One week later outages again. Lucky for me they offered one month money back guarantee. I returned that modem on the very last day to the dismay of the receptionist.
by Scottn1 | 2025-11-23 07:23:15+00:00
> In fact, that's how it already is for me at my job now. I have a MacBook Pro. Windows is just another app on my laptop that I open when I need it, and close when I'm done.

How? Windows as a VM? Or is Windows VM hosted somewhere and you are connecting to it via RDP? Either way everything we mention with the dark-patterns and bloat still apply. Someone has to install and maintain the OS whether you in the VM or the host in your hosted elsewhere VM.

Or are you talking about hosted Microsoft apps on your Macbook? Where the icon opens the app elsewhere and you are just getting the interface?
by beefnugs | 2025-11-23 07:23:53+00:00
Well for starters if some incredible change to capitalism doesn't occur, we are going to have to come up with never before cooperative software tools for the general populace to assess and avoid the most egregious companies that stop hiring people.

Tools for: mass harassment campaigns against rich people/companies that don't support human life anymore, dynamically calculating the most damage you can do without crossing into illegal.

Automatically suggesting alternatives of local human businesses vs the bigevils, or collecting like minded groups of people to start up new competition. Tracking individual rich people and what new companies and decisions they are making doing ongoing damage, somehow recognize and categorize the trends of big tech to "do the same old illegal shit except through an app now" before the legal system can catch up.

Capitalism sure turns out be real fucking dumb if it can't even come up with proper market analysis tools for workers to have some kind of knowledge about where they can best leverage their skills, companies get away with breaking all the rules and create coercion hierarchies everywhere.

I hate to say (because the legal system has never worked ever) but the only workable future to me seems like forcing agents/robots to be tied to humans. If a company wants 100 robots, they must be paying a human for every robot they utilize somehow. Maybe a dynamic ratio somehow, like if the government decided most people are getting enough resources to survive, then maybe 2 robots per human payed.