MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stevenicr | 2025-11-30 16:53:09+00:00
I sometimes wonder the firm defintion(s) of 'public social media'

If you post a blog on blogspot or similar it seems the point is to be public. (there could be settings there to make some things non public, I don't remember or know what is current)

If you post on a network that requires login to see the posts, is that public? (is twitter / tumbler / fbook all indexed via google / available without login?)

If you post on a social network inside a group that requires approval to join, but is free - is that public?

If you post something behind a paywall, is that public?

If someone shares a photo of you that you DMed a person using a social network..

Snapchat makes things disappear, whatsapp advertises that even they can't see your bad behavior.

Did you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in these places?

One could argue that stolen photos, texts, books, movies that are posted on a social network are now public.

And then I think about the number of people who don't understand what is public and what can be seen by others, and I feel that our apps and hardware should bear some responsibility to remind people that tapping like or making a comment may feel intimate / 1 to 1, but you may be questioned one day very publicly about why you were voting for one kind of thing while giving thumbs up and praise comments to twinks from your official account.

Then I wonder what kind of hybrid social systems will be a thing in the future - some sort of encrypted 1 to 1 and 1 to groups thing.

It's not just stories like this, but companies scraping tinder profiles and sharing the pictures and such..

People's expectation of privacy and the horrors of that not being a thing will likely cause more and more migrations into privacy proxy identity avatar agents;

which will likely lead to less data for the big companies where the data knowledge is the gold.
by salawat | 2025-11-30 16:53:12+00:00
>The primary role of a software engineer should be software engineering.

No. Before you were a software engineer, you were a member of society, choosing what to do, what not to, and who to trust. The software engineer exists on top of that person. We might want to constrain ourselves to that column of work, software engineering, but it is plain to see in just the last year where so many unethical systems have been unified and exploited that it is not sufficient to simply hand these powerful computational primitives out willy nilly without taking into account what is desired to be done with them. Politics is not above your pay grade, it is becoming the essence of your pay grade, because it is through technology that normal political systems are being upended or coopted beyond any intention of their designs, into which at their time of design, was factored in a degree of friction we remove in leaps and bounds, destabilizing the human systems underneath.

If you haven't been thinking a little bit about the ethics/political consequences of what you're working on, you haven't been doing your job.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-30 16:53:36+00:00
Keep in mind "Ayn Rand" ended up in the public safety net for care.

It is one matter to embrace selfish neo-libertarianism rhetoric, but the lack of resolve facing the awful reality these people eventually create for themselves is absurd.

Also, HP was a phenomenal company a long time ago, and lazy stewards burned that good will for short-term profit. Process people ruin every large company eventually, as priorities shift away from providing value to customers. =3
by danaris | 2025-11-30 16:53:36+00:00
I think that's underselling the importance of massive media consolidation and deregulation since the Reagan years in bringing us to where we are today.

If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.

The myriad effects of deregulation and massive consolidation that have cascaded in the past ~40 years (fewer companies owned by wealthier people, the destruction of local news, the erosion of norms protecting journalistic integrity, etc) are, IMO, very clearly hugely to blame for the modern state of political discourse. I'm not saying the internet didn't have an effect—it could hardly fail to; it's an enormous change in our world overall—but I have a very hard time seeing it as being more detrimental than these changes in how media companies operate.
by gruez | 2025-11-30 16:54:07+00:00
>TURN YOUR PHONE OFF. Your phone does more than track you - the Bluetooth and wifi beacon scanners are always running. When you come across another person, most phones track the intersection of your beacon with theirs making a new data point that compromises both individuals privacy. Now consider sitting at a stoplight; you and and the 10 phones around you have now correlated the time and position you were sitting there. The person jogging by with no phone(but a set of Bluetooth headphones) is also tracked by their Bluetooth signature. Terrifying.

All phones nowadays have bluetooth/wifi mac address randomization, so it's basically useless for tracking, not to mention google/apple conscripting every phone into a wardriving network will kill battery life. Moreover all this effort in avoiding being tracked doesn't really mean much when all cars have a very visible and unique identifier that's mandated by law (ie. license plate).
by pdimitar | 2025-11-30 16:54:16+00:00
> I feel like I could polish any code to perfection forever.

Then you know what to work on to become an even better engineer. My recursive function for improving code has clear exit conditions. One of them indeed includes aggressive timeboxing, so on that point we're aligned.

I feel you are trying to make an argument against better code. I get it, there are very fussy programmers out there who can indeed polish stuff until the heat death of the Universe (and still be unhappy) but bringing up extremes is not very interesting in a discussion IMO.

> Is it still bad after 5min? After 30? After an hour? After a day?

Generally, time spent on code has near-zero correlation with the quality you'll get. That correlation only becomes stronger when you have a lot of trust in the person writing the code (including yourself).

As above, don't try to make managers look like the reasonable people. I've met some and I adored them but the 99% are egotistical snowflakes that will fire you the first time you say "no".

---

Nobody is saying "accommodate the insufferable nerds and give them two weeks to do what junior Joe will do in 2 hours and it'll be pretty good" here in this entire thread. People are saying "maybe we the programmers should have SOME power in some decision-making as well". I am OK with my influence being somewhere between 10-15%; that's expected, I am neither a manager nor a financial stakeholder. What I am not OK with is when that number is 0-1% and sadly that has been the norm during my consulting and contracting period. And it's the main reason due to which I am trying hard to end this period right now and settle somewhere).
by mbac32768 | 2025-11-30 16:54:20+00:00
Last April I asked Claude Sonnet 3.7 to solve AoC 2024 day 3 in x86-64 assembler and it one-shotted solutions for part 1 and 2(!)

It's true this was 4 months after AoC 2024 was out, so it may have been trained on the answer, but I think that's way too soon.

Day 3 in 2024 isn't a Math Olympiad tier problem or anything but it seems novel enough, and my prior experience with LLMs were that they were absolutely atrocious at assembler.

https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/3
by worldsavior | 2025-11-30 16:54:28+00:00
Ok stop with the panicking.

What's wrong with GPS in vehicles? If it's not connected to the internet, there is no issue.

What's wrong with playing music from the phone on Bluetooth or Aux? Did you also know you can ride a horse instead of a car?

Bluetooth and WiFi isn't running if you turned them off. Bluetooth also isn't really used for tracking unless someone is looking for you or you're part of some service like AirTags.

> Ignore your car's complaints and error messages. Did you know Orange dash error lights are non critical?

What? Worse advice out there regarding cars.
by thepasswordapp | 2025-11-30 16:54:39+00:00
The car data collection story is concerning, but it's part of a broader pattern: credentials and personal data are scattered across dozens of services we interact with daily.

The automotive example shows how even "non-tech" products now collect and transmit data. Each service creates another attack surface, another set of credentials to manage, another potential breach vector.

What's frustrating is that breach response still falls on individuals. When one of these services gets compromised, it's users who have to scramble to change passwords across potentially hundreds of connected accounts. The "change your password" advice is good but wildly impractical at scale.
by palata | 2025-11-30 16:55:09+00:00
> I'm skeptical that Kotlin targeting multiple runtimes is a winning proposition

Kotlin multiplatform being adopted by Google for huge projects like Google workspace makes it sound like it may actually be a winning proposition, if you ask me. Kotlin is replacing the more-than-a-decade old, battle tested, Java-to-ObjC translation at Google. I find that very impressive.

> also Rust is probably the better choice than Scala Native for that kind of code anyway

For sharing code between e.g. Android and iOS, Kotlin multiplatform seems to become the better solution. If you use Rust, you still have to call it from Swift and you just introduced a 3rd language.

I have always hated multiplatform frameworks, but Kotlin multiplatform is actually something that I find interesting (and flexible enough that you can choose where it makes sense to use it instead of committing to a whole framework).
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-30 16:55:13+00:00
Yes, you are. That's the whole point of the law and what the precedents confirm. You have to assist to the extend of your ability too. If you witness something and don't call 112 (well 18), you are guilty. If you are a medic and don't do your best to stabilize the person, you are guilty to.
by thepasswordapp | 2025-11-30 16:55:48+00:00
Been "vibe coding" for 8 months building thepassword.app - AI browser automation that changes passwords across websites.

The enjoyment factor is real. The iteration speed with Claude Code is insane. But the model's suggestions still need guardrails.

For security-focused apps especially, you can't just accept what the LLM generates. We spent weeks ensuring passwords never touch the LLM context - that's not something a vibe-coded solution catches by default.

The productivity gains are real, but so is the need for human oversight on the security-critical parts.
by spinity | 2025-11-30 16:55:51+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! I’m pretty new to posting on HN, so the writing style might be a bit rough — still figuring out the “right amount of em-dashes” As for the video, it plays fine on my side, but it might be restricted by Vimeo’s region or Cloudflare settings on your network. I’ll double-check the permissions to make sure everyone can view it. Thanks for the heads up!
by tremon | 2025-11-30 16:56:42+00:00
I want to craft an environment where any program trying to read f.ex. anything inside ~/.ssh is automatically denied

That requires a MAC security model like apparmor [0] or selinux [1]. Those can deny filesystem access based on process environment data, such as the executable path or its security context. But these require the access rules to be enumerated externally, whereas landlock is about an application voluntarily limiting itself -- or limiting its children: e.g. it would be a very good idea for npm to restrict the scope of package post-install scripts to only the npm cache/build tree.

It seems that this software is well-positioned for us to write application launchers

Like OpenBSD's pledge[2], this API is primarily meant for application writers, not launchers. But where the Openbsd base system is maintained as a whole by the same group of people, Linux is a hodgepodge of different distributions using various software to construct a complete system. This means it's going to take a long while before landlock will reach anywhere close to the same coverage that pledge already has in OpenBSD. In the meantime, wrappers/launchers is the best that you can do on Linux.

[0] https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AppArmor_geeks#Anatomy_of_a_prof...

[1] https://manpages.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed/selinux-policy-doc/...

[2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/411157
by mrj | 2025-11-30 16:56:43+00:00
For real. I've been hearing the interface is slow and requires Javascript for years and never really paid much mind, it worked for me. But lately the page loading has gotten abusively slow. I don't think it can be simply blamed on React because that move was made long before this started.

I've taken to loading projects in github.dev for navigating repos so I pay the js tax just once and it's fine for code reading. But navigating PRs and actions is terrible.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-30 16:57:04+00:00
It feels like trying to crucify a man for not being able to bring a desired/claimed level of nuance, to what was a confusing emerging deeply troubled time.

You might be factually right that the story changed over time. But to me, none of these feel like misdeeds. They seem like reasonable & adequate (outright necessary?) steps taken along a hard road we all faced.

What would you have had Faucci do during #1 & #2?
by chneu | 2025-11-30 16:57:06+00:00
The even worse part of Flock isn't that they cooperate with the government, it's that there is(or was) basically no security in the service. Cops from one state can/could use flock services from other states. A few cops got caught stalking via Flock.

Flock takes the "do nothing until forced to" mentality.
by pxx | 2025-11-30 16:57:16+00:00
I don't know how much they "stand out" because their frequency makes it so that the optimal global leaderboard strat is often to just try something dumb and see if you win input roulette.

if we just look at the last three puzzles: day 23 last year, for example, admitted the greedy solution but only for some inputs. greedy clearly shouldn't work (shuffling the vertices in a file that admits it causes it to fail).
by ben_w | 2025-11-30 16:57:19+00:00
> The first country that implemented Chat Control would suffer immediate brain drain, and it would be a lesson to governments elsewhere.

I left the UK because of the Investigatory Powers Act, and because Brexit would make it hard to fight that act. I used my freedom of movement within the EU to get to an EU nation. Did the UK "suffer immediate brain drain"? Not from Brexit, from the Investigatory Powers Act.

The EU "lockstep" (except not really, see a few weeks ago) on stuff like this happen because the governments all talk to each other and negotiate their positions. It's not nefarious, it's basically the same as any other government having a debate in a parliamentary setting. Difference is, the EU needs either a supermajority or a unanimous result depending on the topic, it's not generally enough for them to have a simple majority like national governments do.

Chat control is QMV. Tougher to get that than any legislation in, say, the UK parliament.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-11-30 16:57:28+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

I think reddit's moderation guideline [that <10% of a users' posts ought to be related to product], along with time-limitations [see Y Combinator's own policy on its own incubated projects posting].

With exceptions for truly exceptional users (community concensus) // none granted, here.

----

New accounts ought to be able to downvote (currently 501+ karma) before they can ever submit new links (somehow no current restriction), IMHO.

----

OP: you are obviously new here (possibly AI translations, minimum, if not clanking-outright)... if your account isn't banned (which it should be IMHO, for at least a few months): don't post again until within the next monthly "What are you working on" thread, which is auto-generated (not by you).

This will require that you actually visit the homepage regularly, to wait for this thread... which might give you an opportunity to learn more about this community's culture / structure / rules.

At a minimum, give the bare minimum effort of abiding by this community's absolutely bare bones rules (publicly available).
by pillars | 2025-11-30 16:57:30+00:00
Sorry for offtopic, I want to share,

Some Machinist channels on youtube:

this old tony, Chronova engineering, cylo's garage, inheritance machining, breaking taps, blondie hacks, tarkka, dan gelbert, Jonesey Makes, Eric(with a K), Clough42, Alec steele, NBR Works, Not An engineer, Stefan Gotteswinter, oxtoolco, ROBRENZ, MrCrispin, Clickspring, Artisan Makes, MH Anything, Jellyfish machine,Maker B,

Check out this video on small rotor design , it is beautiful

https://youtu.be/CVszJMlvZcA?si=MEdoo_sHZcXezZtj

And also there is great course on precision engineering by Alex slocum:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLksE8LDXGXl_MQHKr2DqhfDC6...
by danaris | 2025-11-30 16:58:05+00:00
Everyone has the right to question scientific findings.

If they actually have scientific expertise to back it up.

Dropping that qualifier means you have to answer, forever, to every crank with an axe to grind, and treat them as if their criticism is just as valid as that of someone who's spent their life studying what you do.

Your* ignorance is not as valid as my knowledge, and I'm sick and tired of people acting like it is.

*: not "you" personally; the general "you"
by enraged_camel | 2025-11-30 16:58:20+00:00
America's post-war strength was built on unusually strong education. After the war, America had far more schooling overall than other countries. It was one of the many factors that made America a powerhouse in the 50s and 60s.

Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who are essentially the gold standard reference here, show that the US became the richest nation precisely because it led the world in mass education (first universal high school, then mass higher ed), not in spite of it.

>> America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people.

High-education countries don't look like basket cases. Among 25-64 year olds, the countries with the highest tertiary attainment shares are: Canada (64%), Japan (56%), South Korea (53%), USA (50%), and the Nordic countries hovering around similar rates. These are some of the richest, most technologically advanced societies in the world. If "credential worship" made a society brittle and unproductive, you'd expect these places to be obvious failures.

India's problem is not too much college. It's that gross tertiary enrollment ratio is only 33%, below the world average. The development-econ diagnosis of India is actually the reverse of your claim: too many people with too little quality education, especially basic literacy, numeracy and foundational skills, plus a small highly-credentialed elite at the top.

>> The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.

The GI bill massively expanded college. Half of all college students in 1947 were vets. It is widely credited with building the post-war middle class. The IQ meta-analysis you cite explicitly says the drop in average student IQ is a mechanical result of more people going to college, not evidence that universities got worse. The researchers in fact explicitly say this.
by eszed | 2025-11-30 16:58:34+00:00
I think you missed OP's point. "Leads to" is the key phrase, and they're talking about how both ("Great Man" and "Inevitable Forces") theories end up being used as propaganda to support political purposes. Both (as you point out) have some truth to them, and (as you do) can be addressed objectively, but both can be transmuted into ideology,
by kmeisthax | 2025-11-30 16:58:41+00:00
> We're forcing our allies to become more independent, because they got too soft and we need them hardened up. That only makes the US stronger, because strong allies are better for all of us. It makes us a better deterrent against war happening in the first place.

Translation: we are getting rid of our allies.

It does not make sense for a country to pay another country their "fair share" for military protection. That is literally why the American Revolution happened. Americans fought a war on behalf of the British and were thanked for their service with enough taxes to destroy the local economy. The push to make the colonies pay for "their war" drove the colonists to turn their guns inward and start shooting British regulars.

To be clear, it's one thing for NATO to tell countries to actually meet their 2% targets. But that is not what the current administration is doing. What it's actually doing is disrespecting them and foisting costs upon them. That is not how you run a military alliance.

> We are energy independent and are advancing even more ways to expand the dimensions of that. You can't destroy our government, because we'll just recreate it.

So our government is advancing the cause of energy independence by... what, exactly? Trying to shut down as many solar and wind projects as possible? Renewables (and, to a lesser extent, nuclear) are the best path towards energy independence, if not abundance, that we have. The current administration is bankrolled by Saudi oilmen whose only plan for energy independence is to shout "drill baby drill".

Meanwhile China is churning out solar panels like it's no tomorrow. This has some interesting effects. Like, there's parts of Africa that are just now getting reliable access to electricity because they can buy cheap Chinese solar panels and batteries. Renewables can be provided at basically any scale and can work without infrastructure. Which is making the current American governing coalition shit their pants because they're all oilmen. The American military is built to run on oil. And oil is going away.

> Meanwhile China is surrounded by countries that dislike it and don't trust it. Giving Canada and Mexico tough love is no comparison to the fundamental failures in the relationships China has with its neighbors in their region.

I'll give you that China is bad at making friends. However, for their hegemonic goals, they don't necessarily need big American style alliances. They just need America's allies to look the other way while they steal Taiwan.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-30 16:58:45+00:00
"Safety" is a magic word like "god" was a thousand years ago. If you say it just right you can manufacture an excuse to do all sorts of stuff that'll clearly lead to bad stuff if left to run.

They undoubtably said things like "if it saves even one person from falling asleep at the wheel it's worth it" or something along those lines.
by exhilaration | 2025-11-30 16:58:49+00:00
Disabling the hardware can be really hard, my 2025 Toyota Sienna is always connected. You can't just pull a fuse or rip out an antenna, I have to take the entire dashboard apart to reach the Data Communication Module (DCM) module. If anyone's curious what that looks like, it's a little bit easier on the Toyota Tacoma, here are some pictures of the process: https://www.tacoma4g.com/forum/threads/disabling-dcm-telemat...

It's complex enough that I haven't done it yet in my Sienna, but I plan to!