MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-23 23:46:49+00:00
To a billionaire, hiring a few hundred Nigerians to upvote and share their propaganda is so cheap that it’s like you buying a cup of coffee.

They use professional paid services from these low labour cost countries all the time for publicity or to control the narrative.

By some estimates 20-60% of everything you see on social media is generated by a bot farm, depending on the forum in question. An analysis of Reddit showed some subreddits are 80% AI generated.
by rogerrogerr | 2025-11-23 23:47:25+00:00
What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too.

Then if someone is habitually in the system for a significantly longer time than it reasonably takes to travel from point A to B, deactivate their access.
by slimebot80 | 2025-11-23 23:47:51+00:00
Why wait? Fix things now.

I brought a Pro Max last year, after owning a perfectly fine 13 mini for years, and just my luck the latest iOS seems to make everything worse.

Face detection. Navigating photos. Unresponsive Apps. Confusing as f*ck UI.

No idea why I spent so much money on a Pro phone, should of stuck with the 13 mini and refused to upgrade the OS.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-23 23:47:59+00:00
It’s not easy to shelter people.

In Ithaca we recently built this place

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115398619308992584

which is all low income housing on top of a conference center with maybe 1/4 of the units for people who had been unhoused. I think most of the people there are not criminally minded and keep to themselves but there are a few people there who are starting fires, dealing drugs, and causing damage. (Note a few windows in that image are busted out) Many homeless people have dogs that are important to them and wouldn’t be housed if they couldn’t bring their dogs, but… last year they had an outbreak of parovirus because dogs were having puppies and the puppies weren’t getting shots. A friend of mine got bit by a dog across the street from that place and thought it belonged to someone who lived there.

Some of it is people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be almost impossible to live with if they aren’t getting treatment and I’m worried that deinstitutionalization will have a even more profoundly negative legacy seen 50 years from now than it already does. Not least, a 20 year old today spent many years of their life in a classroom where a ‘special’ kid sucked all the air out of the room and will probably be highly receptive to the notion that if we ‘get rid’ of 5% of people we can live in a utopia. If being in public means being in a space dominated by someone screaming at the demons they hallucinated then people will move to the suburbs instead of the downtown, they will not support public transit, they will order a private taxi for their burrito instead of eating out. They’ll retreat to Facebook.
by accrual | 2025-11-23 23:49:01+00:00
> The door and the guard are both physical objects, both have momentum, they impart an impulse on each other

I wonder if the term "impulse" here has any connection to the various impulse commands available in the source engine. I remember using "impulse 101" and causing havok in the opening plaza area. Spawning zombies on the roofs, sending them after the combine, etc.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Impulse
by Jensson | 2025-11-23 23:49:19+00:00
> for any work involving computer imagery, a dark surround, i.e., dark UI, around the area of interest, e.g., 3D Viewport, 2D Canvas is a must so that to not bias the work

Depends on if you target a dark or bright ui. If you target a bright environment then you want to work in a bright environment and vice versa, otherwise you bias the work for the wrong environment as you say.
by keithnz | 2025-11-23 23:49:35+00:00
I had a similar experience when I wanted to draw a circle on my Atari 800XL. There's no prebuilt drawing function for circles, so I had to learn about sine and cosine with the help of my dad. I then figured out from there how to do 3d graphics. It was a great learning experience (for me at least!).
by o11c | 2025-11-23 23:49:40+00:00
From experience, $1 is not enough to keep out the people who spend the whole trip talking about where they want to go to jail for the winter.

And $1 is already expensive enough that if the destination is within 5-10 miles, driving is cheaper if you already have a car and parking, so you are keeping that class of people out.

Though really I find the main reason people don't take the bus is that there aren't enough buses (in time or space) for where/when people really want to go. This is an `m×n` problem.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-23 23:50:45+00:00
> "charisma" is more positive; it means your behavior attracts positive attention

More of an affect that induces positive feelings that inspire devotion or a desire to follow.

> our society's Judeo-Christian negativity towards sex

Christianity, certainly not Catholicism, does not have a negativity toward sex. That's a trope that's reinforced by both the sexually deviant and the prudish in their own particular ways.

Rather, if one takes the time to understand the moral presuppositions of Catholicism in this regard (which are not "sectarian", if you will, but fully accessible to ethics sans any appeals to revelation), you learn that what is recognized as vice are abuses of sex and the sexual faculties, which, where sexual seduction is concerned, is absolutely the case.

As I posted elsewhere, "seduce" is from the Latin "seducere" [0] meaning "to lead away, lead aside or astray". In this case, it involves, through the exploitation of another's weaknesses, the suspension of the rational faculties of another through the enticement of the sexual appetites for the purpose of obtaining something you should not, because it is immoral (think Mata Hari), or would not if the person were in full possession of their rational faculties. The use of sex to accomplish such an end itself entails the further abuse of the sexual faculties, as it frustrates the end(s) of the sexual faculties.

There absolutely is a sexual ethics. Being a sexually moral person isn't "sex negativity". On the contrary, only people who live sexually moral lives are able to truly enjoy the beauty of sex. The persistent lie that human beings easily believe is that you can "cheat" morality, but all this demonstrates is a profound misunderstanding of the good.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/seduce
by tomhow | 2025-11-23 23:51:59+00:00
You initiated all this. We've investigated and considered all your claims, established them to be unfounded or baseless, and still you keep going.

Your worldview is irrelevant to this discussion. This place’s entire worth is built on the fact that a broad range of worldviews and discussion styles is represented, and our moderation philosophy is intended to allow everyone’s worldview to be fairly represented.

We're responding to your claims only because if there is any basis to them we want to know so we can address any issues and reform the way we operate. We’re actively working to do that continually. But it’s increasingly clear that none of your claims hold up to any scrutiny and every additional comment just generates more noise and still no signal.
by LoganDark | 2025-11-23 23:52:07+00:00
That's great that you play a game that has a Mac port! I play at least TerraTech Worlds, Volcanoids, Space Engineers, Stationeers, BeamNG.drive, Avorion, Deep Rock Galactic, Dishonored, Cogmind, Pacific Drive, Risk of Rain 2, Just Cause 3/4, Scrap Mechanic ... all of which don't/won't have Mac ports and many of which won't run in CrossOver. Recently I've been getting into ARC Raiders too which definitely won't ever have a Mac port. But it's great that you don't have that problem.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-11-23 23:52:15+00:00
For a while I worked for a company that was doing some shady and unethical things, but just within the law.

I took em a while to understand how things worked and when I did I found a different job.

Now this enterprise I left, could never have done what they did it was not for the developers that made it possible.

When we talk about the giants on social media, it it us, the developers who make it possible for them to do what they do.

If you are frustrated about how they are not being stopped from doing what they do, encourage people to leave. They money is great, but doe sit make it worth it?

From the other side, let us say that the US shut down Meta and the rest of the social media beasts, how many developers would be out on the street?
by lapcat | 2025-11-23 23:52:17+00:00
So you wouldn't mind taking an 8.5% pay cut? Apple stockholders wouldn't mind an 8.5% drop in the stock price?

If Apple dropped the Mac, how many of those former Mac users would also drop the iPhone? (I would.)

And of course, Mac is the platform for writing iPhone apps. Indeed, Mac is the platform that Apple engineers use to write the iPhone operating system, which was based on and shares a lot of code with the Mac operating system.

The Mac is the lynchpin that holds the entire ecosystem together. It also provides a lot cachet to Apple. Most of the wealthiest and/or influential Apple users are Mac users as well as iPhone users. If Apple can't make a desktop computer anymore, the company's founding product, that would be embarrassing to say the least.
by agentifysh | 2025-11-23 23:52:49+00:00
I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged with non-American IPs running hugely popular accounts and it makes sense, why wouldn't you play both sides when you are paid for attention?

I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.
by lxgr | 2025-11-23 23:52:58+00:00
Probably for the same reason that OpenSSH's `sk` implementation also still needs a private key file (even for the "resident key" option): You need to be able to point OpenSSH's various tools to something in an identity context, and that something traditionally is a private key file.

The article even mentions that it doesn't contain any sensitive data:

> Note that the "private" key here is just a reference to the FIDO credential. It does not contain any secret key material.

It's a slightly different story for non-resident `sk`-backed keys; these actually require the private key file since the hardware authenticator itself is (or at least can be) stateless. (It's still not a security risk if it ever leaks, but it's an availability risk if it's ever lost.)

Not sure if macOS's backing implementation is stateful or stateless (or some unfortunate hybrid of both; i.e., it might just store a stateful wrapped key in some system-level keychain in a way that intransparently breaks if the OS is ever reinstalled, but also doesn't allow querying an intact system for any existing credentials).
by _jzlw | 2025-11-23 23:53:09+00:00
I acknowledge that Russian propaganda on Twitter/X is a problem, but that does NOT justify Elon up and deciding to disclose everyone's real location without notice or consent.

I know someone IRL who moved to another country to escape their stalker / abusive ex. This would absolutely put their life at risk. Even a country name, combined with other information, can be used to pinpoint someone's identity or precise location.

This move is reckless, inappropriate, and possibly even illegal in the EU. Honestly it should be (and used to be) unthinkable for a platform to do something like this, and it's insane that you believe otherwise. Frankly you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting it's ok for a tech company to suddenly leak its users' PII.

Not to mention the propaganda posters can just use a VPN, so in trying to stop Russia you've only succeeded in giving up your own privacy and putting innocent people at risk. Well done.
by cyberax | 2025-11-23 23:53:13+00:00
> They executed them due to treason, a law that the USA also has.

With full legal proceedings, lawyers, appeals, appeals to the European Court of Human Rights, etc.?

> The number of Palestinians executed is far less than those killed by Israeli aggression. Don't minimize the war crimes of Israel.

Yes, "aggression" that happened on its own, completely unprovoked.

But I'm sure that even if Israel had been provoked, then such a lawful and peaceful state as Gaza would have had no problems extraditing all the responsible criminals. Or maybe applying the same death penalty to them?

Surely, if they have the death penalty for treason, then they should also have the death penalty for terrorism?

> Your comment reeks of propaganda - or severe misinformation at the least.

You are seriously justifying rampant murder by terrorists.

Sorry, but if this IS what Gaza stands for, then I sure as hell don't want it to be independent.
by anonymars | 2025-11-23 23:53:29+00:00
Indeed. Can I interest you in the good old USA project? https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d...

See exhibit 8 and such: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl

Or 10 which specifically talks about Twitter https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366191/dl
by duskwuff | 2025-11-23 23:53:42+00:00
> is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign

Speculation: they're resolving historical IP addresses against a current IP geolocation database. An IP which belonged to a US company in 2010 may have since been sold to a Nigerian ISP, but that doesn't mean that the user behind that IP in 2010 was actually in Nigeria.
by bofersen | 2025-11-23 23:54:09+00:00
Author here. First of all, thanks for the compliment! It’s tough to get myself to write these days, so any motivation is appreciated.

And yes, once all the usual tricks have been exhausted, the nest step is looking at the cache/cache line sizes of the exact CPU you’re targeting and dividing the workload into units that fit inside the (lowest level possible) cache, so it’s always hot. And if you’re into this stuff, then you’re probably aware of cache-oblivious algorithms[0] as well :)

Personally, I almost never had the need to go too far into platform-specific code (except SIMD, of course), doing all the stuff in the post is 99% of the way there.

And yeah, C# is criminally underrated, I might write a post comparing high-perf code in C++ and C# in the future.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache-oblivious_algorithm
by colechristensen | 2025-11-23 23:54:23+00:00
These aren't like a single real person pretending to be Americans because of their deep interst in American politics.

These are paid astroturfers probably more like call centers, paid for presumably by all sorts of interests from foreign intelligence services, to businesses (or select executives), to internal political groups or politicians trying to manipulate public opinion.

Both political extremes are suffering from this kind of manipulation where real concerns are twisted and amplified for lets say the more gullible half of the population (gullibility knows know political alignment exclusively). The excluded middle is afraid of the people who have been manipulated this way (death threats also know no political boundaries).
by duped | 2025-11-23 23:54:36+00:00
Cool. My local grocery store chicken is between $5-6/lb today. $2 if I buy a whole chicken and butcher it myself.

Whatever prices you're seeing are not my reality, living in a major urban area in the United States. Maybe if I bought at the Walmart in Iowa next to a factory farm I could buy it for $2.50/lb, but I can't.
by byko3y | 2025-11-23 23:54:48+00:00
On the other hand, lets face it: most of the time security in IT systems is the least priority. I mean after shipping fast, iterate fast, better performance, compatibility, architecture soundness (whatever it is), convenient tests, docs with UML diagram, well-designed interface — and somewhere in a distant drawer on the bottom you may find a note about security issues. It's often times people talk about importance of security after it destroyed the whole business.

We need more of the security. We probably don't need the Rust though.
by lxgr | 2025-11-23 23:56:25+00:00
> I can keep ssh-agent tunnels to remote boxes so that I can sign git commits remotely without having to worry about a rogue system getting complete access to key ops without me knowing what's going on.

I also really like secretive, but at least this part is not exclusive to it; OpenSSH's `ssh-agent` and `ssh-add` have long supported confirmation of each private key use with `ssh-askpass` (although it unfortunately can't distinguish between remote and local key uses).
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-23 23:56:32+00:00
Being locked into a set of a handful of vendors who offer "secure" sync (of course, this is not a true PKI and actual key material is being synced, meaning it's only as secure as the syncing protocol and your authentication to it).

Authenticator implementations who allow exports outside of the vendor cartel are threatened to be blacklisted: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

> My primary hardware key can be from a completely different vendor than the backup one, so I don't quite buy the conspiracy angle.

The fundamental flaw is that enrolling an authenticator requires it to be present, making a backup strategy much less resilient as it means your secondary device needs to be constantly present and thus exposed to the same local/environmental risks the primary one is (theft/fire/faulty USB port that fries everything plugged in and you only realize after nuking both your keys). It makes an offline backup scenario like with SSH (where you copy a public key and otherwise leave the authenticator out of reach in a safe place) impossible.

Making it hard/impractical to maintain a reliable backup yourself sure makes those proprietary sync-based services attractive, which also doubles as reducing security since key material is being synced and can potentially be extracted (impossible with a true HSM + PKI implementation).

> preventing anyone from creating "paired" hardware authenticators

Don't certain types of keys involve writing something to the authenticator, fundamentally preventing this (as the backup authenticator won't get this written value)?

> cabal

It doesn't have to be explicit coordinated action like intentionally wanting to prevent people from self-managing passkeys (in fact any hint of it being intentional would be a liability in a potential anti-trust situation, so that's a big no-no); it can be done by simply omitting this scenario, by accident or for "security" purposes, or deprioritizing it to hell. In fact the Credential Migration spec is still a draft and appears quite recent, despite passkeys being heavily promoted for a while: https://fidoalliance.org/specs/cx/cxp-v1.0-wd-20241003.html - you'd think that such as basic feature would be sorted before the push to switch to passkeys no?

In fact you see this exact strategy playing out: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/11363#iss...

> For the initial delivery of Credential Exchange, we focused on the most wide use case [emphasis mine]

"Initial" delivery focuses on the most widespread use-case (how convenient it also happens to be the most corporation-friendly use-case), with everything else coming "later", meaning never. I'm sure it'll rot in some Jira backlog as a liability shield so they can promise they did plan for it and just never got around to it, but everyone understands it will never actually get implemented.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-23 23:57:03+00:00
Going to paste a recent rant of mine about windows ux. The thread sank so i don't think anyone saw it and i don't want to write a new comment discussing things i hate about windows.

>It's worth pointing out what a hideous cludge lots of Win10 ui is. I remember some ui expert complaining how there are half a dozen (maybe more, i don't remember) completely different ui interfaces. The most prominent ones of course is that horrible rectangle thing that's meant to be the start menu. Windows 11 didn't do a worse job, that would be almost impossible, but it's not much better. Then there was openly breaking functionality and discoverability by having a settings app as well as the old control panel, which is an absolute abomination. The manager app probably looked old fashioned on Windows xp.

> All of that was ok, because Win10 looks and feels quite nice overall and was a significant upgrade compared to 7. Win11 has none of that saving grace. They needed to fix the many disasters of Win10, not introduce new ones.

I will add that the single feature i hate the most about Win10 when it dropped the previous useful start menu and adopting the horrible rectangle thing. The main function of it changed from helping you navigate windows to serving up ads for M$ products. No, i'm not interested in Xbox, if i want to buy your office suite i will. Don't show me a non functioning tile to remind me i don't have it.
by orwin | 2025-11-23 23:57:12+00:00
I know someone from Greece (then Malta) who produce ragebait/troll article farms since at least 2015, targeting the US in general, republicans in particular (I think he started "both side", but Republican ragebait used to draw more engagement). I don't know what he's doing now, but from 2015 to 2020, he made millions. It was mostly facebook at the time, but i wouldn't surprise his content is trending on X.
by theptip | 2025-11-23 23:57:19+00:00
The general pattern seems to be that LLM+scaffolding performs better than LLM. In 6 months time a new model will incorporate 80% of your scaffolding, but also will enable new capabilities with a new layer of scaffolding.

I suspect the model that doesn’t need scaffolding is simply ASI, as in, the AI can build its own scaffolding (aka recursive self-improvement), and build it better than a human can. Until that point, the job is going to remain figuring out how to eval your frontier task, scaffold the models’ weaknesses, and codify/absorb more domain knowledge that’s not in the training set.

You are talking about context management stuff here, the solution will be something like a proper memory subsystem, maybe some architectural tweaks to integrate it. There are more obvious gaps beyond that which we will have to scaffold and then solve in turn.

Another way of thinking about this is just that scaffolding is a much faster way of iterating on solutions than pre-training, or even post-training, and so it will continue to be a valuable way of advancing capabilities.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-11-23 23:58:07+00:00
yes, you can export keys using this method, and they will be simlarly secure as password encrypted keys you generate without the secure enclave with openssh, but with the convenience that you can decrypt the key using TouchID on macOS.

Such a setup is marginally more secure than just typing in the passwords, since it is much harder to intercept the TouchID chain from touch to decrypting the SSH key compared to your keyboard to the terminal.

All that said, here are the priorities of a few security technologies:

TouchID:

#1 environment integrity, that is to say, to protect Apple services monopolies and fees such as eliminating password sharing of services accounts, #2 convenience as an alternative to passwords reducing friction when you buy stuff, #3 security.

1password:

#1 convenience, #2 security

I cannot tell you really what is "#1" in security among packaged ready to buy commercial products, Everyone, practically, makes affordances for convenience ahead of security. I suppose there isn't really a great product for normal people that puts security first. Of course, there are an ad hoc collection of practices that amount to, #1 security. But a product? No. Even Apple Lockdown mode... well, they can still just push an update that makes it pretend it is enabled when it is not, so...