MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-23 17:55:25+00:00
> But what's the actual risk? The data that would be on a digital ID is just a certificate linking basic personal details and foreign keys to your records in various gov DBs (HMRC, NHS, etc). This is the same data every company already collects and has leaked dozens of times.

The risk is letting criminals/politicians correlate all the information on individuals and I can imagine that it'll be tied into age verification too ("protect the children"), so your browsing history could then be used to blackmail/compromise you.

> The actual ability to cryptographically prove your identity can't leak because it would be linked to possession of your private key (which is stored in your phone's HSM, or a smartcard, etc)... and even if the system did not use actual cryptography and just shared secrets and all of them were to leak, the government is just going to say that this iteration of digital IDs is no longer valid for ID verification and we're back to the current system of non-cryptographic document verification approaches.

I don't know how exactly that would work, but from my experience of linux admin, I don't share private keys between devices as that would prevent me being able to revoke any keys that may be leaked.

If the system could break in such a way that it was no longer valid for ID verification, then why are we wanting to pay lots of money for a fragile and possibly privacy invading system?
by vayup | 2025-11-23 17:55:35+00:00
You are absolutely right that it is easy to rule out obviously bad choices, such as 3 of 3. However, determining the actual quorum to use is a qualitative risk analysis exercise.

Considering that this is an election for a professional organization with thousands of members, I am going to go out on a limb and say that it should be easily possible to assemble a group of 5 people that the community/board trusts woudn't largely collude to break their privacy. If I were in the room, I would have advocated for 3 of 5 quorum.

But the lifecycle of the key is only a few months. That limits the availability risk a little bit, so I can be convinced to support a 2 of 3 quorum, if others feel strongly that the incremental privacy risk introduced by 3 of 5 quorum is unacceptable.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-11-23 17:55:38+00:00
For me, 2023 was an entire year of weekly demos that now looking back at were basically a "Look at this dank prompt I wrote" followed by thunderous applause from the audience (which was mostly, but not exclusively, upper management)

Hell man, I attended a session at an AWS event last year that was entirely the presenter opening Claud and writing random prompts to help with AWS stuff... Like thanks dude... That was a great use of an hour. I left 15 minutes in.

We have a team that's been working on an "Agent" for about 6 months now. Started as prompt engineering, then they were like "no we need to add more value" developed a ton of tools and integrations and "connectors" and evals etc. The last couple of weeks were a "repivot" going back full circle to "Lets simplify all that by prompt engineering and give it a sandbox environment to run publicly documented CLIs. You know, like Claude Code"

The funny thing is I know where it's going next...
by jallonclone | 2025-11-23 17:55:43+00:00
I have a similar problem with the power company. Every day starting around 2200 (excluding Saturdays and US holidays), there are irregular voltage fluctuations in the 118-124 voltage range, which cause really annoying light flicker and might be damaging my appliances (3 water heaters, 2 microwaves, and an air conditioner all dead in the last 5 years), some of them new. It affects other neighbors and is clearly coming from the grid.

Repeatedly calling support (which initially was promising, since they had an engineer look into it and replaced the transformer and ran a new service entrance cable when I upgraded my load center [400 A service, and cost me about $12,000 but I was desperate]), simply led to me probably being marked as a nuisance customer. For all the same reasons listed in the linked article, they simply aren't equipped nor motivated to do anything about it.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-23 17:56:17+00:00
> Like if oil were "banned", I'm imagining it's not illegal to possess oil, but rather oil companies wouldn't be able to drill it up and sell it anymore.

What does that have to do with anything?

It doesn’t matter where you ban it, if you turn off oil overnight a lot of people are left stranded from their jobs, sectors of the economy collapse, unemployment becomes out of control.

Banning things like this is just fantasy talk that only makes sense to people who can’t imagine consequences or think they don’t care. I guarantee you would change your mind very quickly about banning oil overnight as soon as the consequence became obvious.
by silexia | 2025-11-23 17:56:18+00:00
The argument that profit equals theft as a fundamental misunderstanding of system mechanics. The article relies on the outdated notion that labor is the sole input for value, ignoring the critical function of capital as fuel for risk. Investors and founders absorb the high probability of total system failure, which allows employees to receive guaranteed, low-latency salaries regardless of the product's success. If workers wanted the full residual profit, they would need to accept the full downside risk, including working for zero pay until revenue stabilizes.

The preference for traditional corporate structures over cooperatives is not a conspiracy but an optimization for speed and scalability. Centralized decision-making allows startups to pivot rapidly in competitive markets, whereas committee-based governance often introduces fatal latency. Furthermore, employment is a voluntary exchange where engineers trade skills for compensation, often including equity to align incentives. Labeling this voluntary cooperation as "evil" ignores that this model has driven the greatest reduction in information costs in history. We are not victims of a theft-based institution but participants in a high-performance engine that rewards efficiency and problem-solving.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-23 17:56:29+00:00
> It sounds like some of these companies call the OpenAI or Anthropic APIs directly from their frontend.

Which would be a major security hole. And sure, lots of startups have major security holes, but not enough that he could come up with these BS statistics.

I'm a little dismayed at how high up this has been voted given the data is guaranteed to be made up.
by tristan957 | 2025-11-23 17:56:45+00:00
I've used GNOME for years, and I'm not a heavy workspace user. I don't remember the last time I wanted a minimize action. If you really do want it, you can use GNOME Tweaks or Refine, which is the modern equivalent. Someone is working on an XDG Desktop Portal setting as well for the window actions.

I use macOS at work, and I've used Windows in the past. I still never use a minimize option. Maybe I'm weird, but I've never understood the use for it.
by mistrial9 | 2025-11-23 17:56:48+00:00
related -- State of California has spent over $500 million on a Next Generation 911 (NG911) system designed to modernize its emergency response network, which includes features like text, video, and precise caller location capabilities, and has already built a regional, multi-vendor network that is fully functional and tested in areas like Central and Los Angeles.

Despite this, the California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) has decided to abandon the existing NG911 system, which was designed with built-in redundancy to prevent statewide outages, in favor of a new single-vendor network.

This reversal will cost an estimated additional $700 million to maintain the outdated legacy system for another five to seven years while the new system is developed, with the total cost potentially exceeding a billion dollars. Critics argue this decision wastes taxpayer money, undermines public safety, and increases the risk of a statewide 911 outage, as the new single-vendor model lacks the regional backup that protects the current NG911 system.
by dkdcio | 2025-11-23 17:57:15+00:00
yep! it’d be hard, but we’re already at most people nodding their head when you say “social media is addictive, detrimental to individual mental health, and overall negative for society”

you just got to get enough people to nod at “…and this is caused by the underlying incentives from digital advertisement” then to “and the most effective course of action is to ban digital advertisement”

I truly don’t believe it’s a big leap, especially after a few more years of all this
Show HN: Genesis DB now provides a full gRPC API alongside HTTP
by patriceckhart | 2025-11-23 17:57:28+00:00
The Protobuf definition is published openly: https://github.com/genesisdb-io/genesisdb-io-proto

Genesis DB also exposes gRPC Server Reflection, so clients can introspect the service without needing the .proto file locally (useful for tools like grpcurl, kreya, or dynamic client generation).
by moooo99 | 2025-11-23 17:57:30+00:00
> while running Safari on iOS, or in Firefox on desktop, without installing various extensions that may not be available to users at work

Basically all browsers default to follow the operating systems appearance settings. I don't know why you're specifically asking to not change the OS settings, why would you prefer dark mode of your OS when you want the websites to be light mode?

To answer your question, I have no clue about Safari, but in Firefox you go to the settings page and right on the start page there is Language and Appearance where you can select your theme.

> when viewing specific websites that are hardwired to use it,

Yes, that is an issue. But that is not an issue of dark mode per-se, it is an issue with software quality and design decisions themselves. Some apps might implement their own theme switcher (which they should not do, but people seem to like making their own worse implementations of browser standards), others might not implement a dark or light mode to begin with.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-23 17:58:58+00:00
If these employees knowingly performed illegal acts, but believed that being close to Musk/Trump meant that they wouldn't face the music, then what kind of law enforcement/justice is there remaining in the U.S.?

It's also galling as it seems to be the opposite of the Nuremberg defense - employees can knowingly do illegal acts as long as their boss/commander wants them to. A complete lack of personal responsibility.
by theptip | 2025-11-23 17:59:05+00:00
> just prompt engineering

This dismisses a lot of actual hard work. The scaffolding required to get SOTA performance is non-trivial!

Eg how do you build representative evals and measure forward progress?

Also, tool calling, caching, etc is beyond what folks normally call “prompt engineering”.

If you think it’s trivial though - go build a startup and raise a seed round, the money is easy to come by if you can show results.
by ethin | 2025-11-23 17:59:08+00:00
I can't stand Gnome. I don't like how they dumped the desktop or the app menu, or really most of their decisions lately. From what I've seen they're trying to cater to some amorphous "new user" instead of just creating a good desktop environment. What is this "new user"? Nobody knows! Well, other than the Gnome developers, I guess. The sad thing is that attempting to cater to "new users" is just... Entirely unnecessary: you can put someone who's never used Linux in their entire lives in front of an XFCE desktop environment and they'll most likely figure it out quite quickly with little help from you. I think that this similarly applies to Mate or KDE as well.

My dislike with Gnome comes from the fact that I need extensions for what I would consider primitive things. Like an app menu instead of the dashboard/app launcher thing they have going. Or the fact that features like minimize are just... Gone. And when you complain, your just either told to do it some very counterintuitive way or to go get an extension. I would get an extension for something truly unique or something that extends the environment far beyond what anyone would expect, but an extension just to minimize a window? Nah, no thanks.
by hbarka | 2025-11-23 17:59:21+00:00
Don’t wonder, it’s obvious. When you turn on the light you see the cockroaches. Any transparency changes incentives. Look how the dynamics have changed overnight. Next, Twitter has to do something about the rage engagement payola.

Why product managers overseeing any forum platform have not implemented something easy and obvious as account location metadata is something sociologists need to study.
by ifh-hn | 2025-11-23 17:59:22+00:00
You can use Paint to forge official documents good enough for them to pass? That's some skill!

Like I said I'm not against forms of ID. If this was available and made stuff for me easier and wasn't tied to a device I'd use it, just like passkeys.

Unfortunately this will be tied to smartphones and that's if it actually works. I also have a suspicion it will be overly complicated and massively over budget, and likely fail. The digital equivalent of HS2.
by chmod775 | 2025-11-23 17:59:33+00:00
> Yeah, TBH my BS detector is going off because this article never explains how he is able to intercept these calls.

You mean, except for explaining what he's doing 4-5 times? He was literally repeating himself restating it. Half the article is about the various indicators he used. THERE'S EXAMPLES OF THEM.

There's this bit:

> Monitored their network traffic for 60-second sessions

> Decompiled and analyzed their JavaScript bundles

Also there's this whole explanation:

> The giveaways when I monitored outbound traffic:

> Requests to api.openai.com every time a user interacted with their "AI"

> Request headers containing OpenAI-Organization identifiers

> Response times matching OpenAI’s API latency patterns (150–400ms for most queries)

> Token usage patterns identical to GPT-4’s pricing tiers

> Characteristic exponential backoff on rate limits (OpenAI’s signature pattern)

Also there's these bits:

> The Methodology (Free on GitHub next week):

> - The complete scraping infrastructure

> - API fingerprinting techniques

> - Response time patterns for every major AI AP

One time he even repeats himself by stating what he's doing as playwright pseudocode, in case plain English isn't enough.

This was also really funny:

> One company’s “revolutionary natural language understanding engine” was literally this: [clientside code with prompt + direct openai API call].

And there's also this bit at the end of the article:

> The truth is just an F12 away.

There's more because LITERALLY HALF THE ARTICLE IS HIM DOING THE THING YOU COMPLAIN HE DIDN'T DO.

In case it's still not clear, he was capturing local traffic while automating with playwright as well as analyzing clientside JS.
by WD-42 | 2025-11-23 17:59:41+00:00
Most of the time I hear the “basic functionality” complaint about gnome it’s someone missing a start menu and taskbar. Which makes sense if you are a clicker stuck on the desktop paradigm introduced in the early 90s.

Gnome is very keyboard centric. If you actually take the time to learn it without relying on your mouse for everything it’s actually extremely efficient.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-23 17:59:48+00:00
> p.s. still would love to hear your constitutional argument against it!

You don’t need to hear my argument against it. The fact that advertising your services is free speech is well established. It’s a major challenge for movements like those trying to tackle pharmaceutical advertising.

Also, if you can’t see how I’ve been addressing your arguments and you think it’s all ad hominem then I don’t think there’s any real conversation to be had here. Between all the downvotes you’re collecting and the weird attempts to ignore everything I say and pretend it’s ad hominem as a defensive tactic, this is pure trolling at this point.
by godelski | 2025-11-23 17:59:58+00:00
I've never had that exact problem, but I often do <C-c> (copy) <C-k> (search bar) <C-v> <C-a> <C-x>.

At least in Firefox, pasting into the search bar kills all formatting. This motion is easier than it sounds and you can do it really quickly. Or, you can just use shift like the sibling suggests, but I never remember and it seems to still fail at other things
by _1tan | 2025-11-23 18:00:04+00:00
I am mainly working on B2B message exchange, e.g. via AS4/EDIFACT/ebix/CIM files and most parties seem to still work with a lot of batch processing. With the ongoing digitization of e.g. metering hardware and faster settlement times in the energy markets (EU-centric) I think this might not cut it anymore in the future.
by lxgr | 2025-11-23 18:00:53+00:00
> Knowing whether an image is degraded or not is the #1 important fact about an image for me

But how can you know that from the fact that it's currently losslessly encoded? People take screenshots of JPEGs all the time.

> After that comes whether it's animated or not, which is why .apng is so helpful to distinguish it from .png.

That is a useful distinction in my view, and there's some precedent for solutions, such as how Office files containing macros having an "m" added to their file extension.
by themgt | 2025-11-23 18:00:55+00:00
Feel like I've been reading Year of the Linux Desktop™'ers writing this stuff for the last 20 years.

A bit of a backstory. I’ve been using GNUplusSlashLinux for more than fifteen years. Most of the time, I used GNOME, starting from GNOME2, moving to Unity maybe for two years, then GNOME Shell, then KDE Plasma 5 for another two years, and switched back to GNOME Shell again. I’m not mentioning some of my at most month-long endeavors to other DEs, like XFCE, or tiling WMs, because they never stuck with me. So I’ve been there for most releases of GNOME Shell, followed them closely, even used to run Ubuntu GNOME when GNOME Shell became a thing, until it became the default in Ubuntu once again. Though by that time, I had already moved from Ubuntu to a different distribution for a variety of reasons.

I did, however, run Unity on my older PCs, as it was far less taxing on resources than early versions of GNOME3, but then it was discontinued, and long-awaited Unity 8 with Mir never became a thing. So, when I was fed up with GNOME being a resource hog, often crashing, and moving towards Wayland, which didn’t work as good as it was advertised, I decided to try KDE somewhere around 2018...

My backstory: I've been using MacOS X for more than fifteen years. Most of the time, I used MacOS X. Actually, all of the time. The end.
by t_mahmood | 2025-11-23 18:01:06+00:00
You don't move windows that you do not need right now to other workspace. You move to a new workspace with the window you are working on. Which is more logical, and workspace are cheap, and quick to navigate to.

There are even extensions, that opens new windows to a new workspace automatically.

But of course, I have few complaints about how multi-monitor workspace are handled in Gnome, I prefer how i3 handles workspace.
by mindcrash | 2025-11-23 18:02:20+00:00
After booting up the Linux kernel my current PC (Broadwell-E i7, Geforce 1080, built in 2016!) will launch into Hyprland with all necessary services running, Zen with about 20-30 open tabs and VSCodium with last nights hacking project still open and ready to go in less than 30 milliseconds or so.

That's when I personally discovered modern Windows is more or less fundamentally broken, and probably already was when Windows 10 was released (11 is still basically 10, by the way, look at the build number).

Also, it's amazing to discover how ridiculously fast "old" hardware still is in 2025 just by installing a non-Windows OS.
Ask HN: How do you teach a 7 year old visual editing on PC?
by stmL | 2025-11-23 18:02:22+00:00
Hi all. As stated in the title, I'm planning to teach my 7 year old brother video / image editing. We can't keep these kids from wanting to became a streamer and recording themselves, might as well get something useful from this.

I guess there are too many applications for mobile (heard something called CapCut) but i'd like to do this on a PC. I'm looking for something like Scratch for Premiere / Photoshop. Educational or just tool suggestions are okay, i can learn the tool firsthand if it's easy enough and teach him afterwards. Any suggestions?
by ekkeke | 2025-11-23 18:02:32+00:00
I work on low(ish) latency trading systems in FX. FIX is the standard communication protocol and familiarity with it is essential for me. Here you can look up the standard message types and tag values: https://fiximate.fixtrading.org/

They also have docs for the standard message flows you can expect during trading. I use it regularly.
by doe88 | 2025-11-23 18:02:38+00:00
This a kind of global app store all over again, where all these companies are clients of only few true ai companies and try to distinguish themselves in the bounds of the underlying models and apis, just like apps were trying to find niches in the bound of apis and exposed hw of underlying iphones. Apis versions bugs are now models updates. And of course, all are at the mercy of their respective Leviathan.
by martinald | 2025-11-23 18:02:46+00:00
When did I say that it was? I'm just saying it's hard to claim Comcast has a true monopoly anywhere now starlink exists. There's loads of issues with starlink, but it is a very viable alternative and is a big problem for incumbent US telcos as it caps what they can charge (there are a lot of telcos charging $100/month+ in rural areas for awful 2-8mbit/s DSL).

It's massively changed the market dynamics. And I suspect Elon will push the pricing down further and further.
by ultrahax | 2025-11-23 18:04:41+00:00
Related, to this day my Frontier connection black holes all my traffic a couple of hops inside their network if I do sustained line-rate UDP (WireGuard, for example) for more then three or four minutes. After some LinkedIn sleuthing I got in touch with their local NOC director who tells me it’s some piece of gear that hangs so bad he can’t remote into it and it stays down until the watchdog fires. Been that way for two years now.
by QuiEgo | 2025-11-23 18:06:08+00:00
That article needs way more meat.

I’d recommend this classic for a read: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/15142/whic...

Tl;dr dark text on a light background is usually easiest to read. Note in dark mode, you often see font bolded to compensate for the readability drop.

Almost ever major website dosent use dark backgrounds for text for a reason.

I personally like a dark mode UI (menu bars, dock, and so on), so it’s less distracting, but light mode for content.
by bofadeez | 2025-11-23 18:06:08+00:00
It started that way. I was responding to the assumption that time is the underlying variable of all economics. Then someone said everything reduces to time and they brought up Black-Scholes, a quant tool to price options. I didn't bring it up lol. My point is simply no, time is demonstrably not fundamental at all.

Edit: an LLM thinks I'm overly dismissive of: - Standard economic modeling - Dynamic macroeconomic theory - Agent-based economics - The legitimate uses of time in economics

This is true. I think causal inference in finance and economics is difficult. As Ludwig von Mises argued, mathematical models give spurious precision when applied to purposeful behavior. Academic ideas don't have a built-in feedback loop like in quant finance.