MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DontForgetMe | 2025-11-17 18:33:08+00:00
I'm baffled at the assumption that concrete and specific evidence of international (presumably) hostile espionage that is currently being enacted using X and Y software and Z specific techniques, would be publicly released in real time.

I can't think of a single situation in which it would be reasonable to assume that.

It's not like we even get governments or corporations saying 'oh hey, just raising the alarm that bad people are using this Photoshop feature to create fake cheques which they're then depositing into their accounts, so bank staff, be on the lookout!' Because yeah, that's a Photoshop ad.

And it's not like espionage is new, like the Chinese side have been ramping up for decades now, or like there has ever been an expectation that companies with suspicions or evidence of international subterfuge should... should lay it all out in a public report? Is that really what the article is expecting?

I don't even think the UK has got around to officially acknowledging Funny Business in UK-Argentinian relations in any documents or events during the 80's, and the secret was rather given away around the time we went to all out literal war. We know things must have built up before the day war was declared, but nobody expected every escalation of diplomatic unrest to be communicated to the entire nation in real time. Because that would be deranged.

Idk, maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the article. I feel like it isn't in my field, although I'm not entirely sure what field specific knowledge I'm missing to make sense of this.

I would very much like to agree with the sentiment, I'm always down for some AI-dissing and a bit of tin foil hat Big Tech Analyses.

But I couldn't get much more than "This company is lying because it didn't give me any Chinese State secrets, let alone explain how to get stars secrets using their software,' which feels so censored as to be pointless, or just kinda wildly petty and ill informed
by moron4hire | 2025-11-17 18:33:20+00:00
For anyone who likes the idea of better music "toys" for their kids (i.e. not toys at all, but still easy to use) but doesn't have the capacity to build stuff like this, my kids and I love the Korg Koassilator: https://www.korg.com/us/products/dj/kaossilator2/

You can usually get them on eBay for USD$60 - 70. You do need to bring your own speakers, but a pair of cheap PC speakers are good enough, and it's a good start on creating a whole synth + effects chain.

Speaking of which, there is also the Mini Kaos Pad, which is a dynamic effects processor: https://www.korg.com/us/products/dj/mini_kaoss_pad2/

This one is a little more difficult to figure out for the kids as it is a "modifier" in the chain and they haven't quite wrapped their head around that concept yet. But still, it works great, has lots of features, and is really inexpensive for such a thing.

And finally, they have a number of these mini-synths that are in the USD$30 - 50 range that are a ton of fun: https://www.korg.com/us/products/dj/monotron_duo/
by libraryofbabel | 2025-11-17 18:34:01+00:00
I expect the book itself (Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need, by David Edmonds) is good, as the author has written a lot of other solid books making philosophy accessible. The title of the article though, is rather clickbaity: it’s hardly “recovering” the origins of EA to say that it owes a huge debt to Peter Singer, who is only the most famous utilitarian philosopher of the late 20th century!

(Peter Singer’s books are also good: his Hegel: A Very Short Introduction made me feel kinda like I understood what Hegel was getting at. I probably don’t of course, but it was nice to feel that way!)
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-17 18:34:04+00:00
RSS and Atom feeds are at this point a solution looking for a problem.

I use RSS all the time... To keep up-to-date on podcasts. But for keeping up to date on news, people use social media. RSS isn't the missing piece of the puzzle for changing that, an app on top of RSS is. And in the absence of Reader, nothing has shown up to fill that role that can compete with just trading gossip on Facebook.
by joshred | 2025-11-17 18:34:07+00:00
I work for state government. We've used the ACS survey to try and determine whether we were unfairly targeting non-native English speakers with some of our decisions. It's also used a lot in academia.

If I had to guess, commercial organizations have access to more invasive and higher quality data that they obtain through credit card companies, lexus-nexus or other data brokers. This attitude mostly harms organizations involved in the social sciences.
by gruez | 2025-11-17 18:34:11+00:00
Drilling a few holes to mount a TV is so straightforward that nearly everyone can do it, in contrast to patching drywall, so excluding the cost of hiring a professional for that case is reasonable. Granted, you might be able to learn how to do it with some youtube videos, trips to home depot, and trial/error, but the cost of that will quickly exceed the cost of a handyman if you value your time at all.
by mrtksn | 2025-11-17 18:34:25+00:00
It may lead to optimal profit but immensely hurt the society. Not everything should be optimized for profit.

If you are going after full profit optimization we are leaving huge amount on the table by offering billionaires food at prices that are insignificant for tem. Maybe we should start optimizing for the million dollar burgers then?

If the average Brit is spending %10 of their daily income for a meal, obviously its suboptimal for a person making a million a day to eat anything for less than 100K. In fact, it doesn't even have to have anything to do with percentages, maybe the meal can be optimized up until 999910GBP. Even the rich guy needs to eat, optimize the prices to the point that he has to choose between starvation and 999910GBP burger
Ask HN: I almost lost my Apple account to phishing that exploited Apple Support
by emoret | 2025-11-17 18:34:33+00:00
Last Wednesday I nearly lost my Apple account to the most sophisticated phishing attack I've ever seen.

The attackers: - Created a REAL Apple Support case in my name (Case ID: 102750168703) - Generated legitimate emails from apple.com - Cloned Apple's support portal (appeal-apple.com) - Got me to enter my 2FA code disguised as a "ticket confirmation"

The vulnerability: Apple's support case system lets anyone create legitimate cases in others' names, generating real case numbers and official Apple emails.

I caught it when I saw: "Your Apple Account was used to sign in on a Mac mini (2024)" - a device I don't own.

Has anyone else experienced this? The exploitation of Apple's own infrastructure for credibility is what made this so effective.

Full writeup with screenshots: https://medium.com/@eric.moret/i-almost-lost-my-apple-account-to-the-most-sophisticated-phishing-attack-ive-ever-seen-cff92a470950
by mort96 | 2025-11-17 18:34:39+00:00
You're missing the point. The useful thing is to run some service on the LAN, be it a web interface for a NAS, a web interface to control some lighting, a web interface into a media PC to do remote desktop type stuff or control media playback, a debug interface into some embedded product I'm working on, or a whole host of other things. The thing that makes web technologies useful for this is that it Just Works, from any other machine on the LAN (my laptop, my phone, a guest's phone, etc).

By making technologies available only in a "secure context", they're blocking them out of this whole category of use cases.
by mindcrash | 2025-11-17 18:34:42+00:00
That's false. The only thing which slows things down is that Autoscaler is provisioning compute resources in a way which is dog slow.

If you add Karpenter (https://karpenter.sh) to the cluster it can scale based on the rules set out in the configuration and sends out requests directly to the underlying cloud orchestrator. Which in practice means it spins up new compute resources near instantly.

I see that they added support for Azure aswell recently (been a while since I used it)
by lesuorac | 2025-11-17 18:34:54+00:00
> The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor

Is that an actual EA argument?

The value is all at the margins. Like Carnegie had legitimate functional businesses that would be profitable without Pinkerton's. So without Pinkerton's he'd still be able to afford probably every philanthropic thing he did so it doesn't justify it.

I don't really follow the EA space but the actual arguments I've heard are largely about working in FANG to make 3x the money outside of fang to allow them to donate 1x ~1.5x the money. Which to me is very justifiable.

But to stick with the article. I don't think taking in billions via fraud to donate some of it to charity is a net positive on society.
by monocasa | 2025-11-17 18:34:55+00:00
The specific issue I'm talking about is how Apple for some reason ties the presence of RCS persistently to a contact that requires the user to manually go in and adjust, otherwise the conversation switches back and forth between SMS and RCS as each participant texts back and forth.

This is a problem no other vendors have, and is solely caused by Apple.

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-iphone-rcs-messagin...
by dpark | 2025-11-17 18:35:02+00:00
So this I agree with. Mocks are often used to over-constrain and end up validating that the implementation does not change rather than does not regress.

There are some specific cases, such as validating that caching is working as expected, where it can make sense to fully validate every call. Most of the time, though, this is a pointless exercise that serves mostly to make it difficult to maintain tests.

It can sometimes also be useful as part of writing new code, because it can help validate that your mental model for the code is correct. But it’s a nightmare for maintenance and committing over-constrained tests just creates future burden.

In Fowler terminology I think I tend to use Stubs rather than Mocks for most cases.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-17 18:35:12+00:00
I'm surprised that anyone has to ask, anymore:

- Locked, proprietary bootloader with no guaranteed Linux support

- No official Vulkan drivers, DXVK broken without downstream patches (unlike every other GPU I own)

- Every Docker solution runs worse than WSL (somehow)

- macOS is ad-ridden and genuinely intolerable

- APFS is borderline useless relative to EXT4 and NTFS, doubly so if you collaborate at work
by Sean-Der | 2025-11-17 18:35:33+00:00
I haven't used WebTransport myself, how much can you control? I wonder how often libwebrtc does stuff that wouldn't be allowed in Javascript. Things like probing and overshooting the window?

Since libwebrtc is all in C++ and 'trusted' it can do stuff like faststart or have error correction/bandwidth estimation that is codec aware.
by KPGv2 | 2025-11-17 18:35:45+00:00
I would guess there aren't as many because, in order to implement this, your language must already have an HTTP/3 library. My language of choice doesn't even support QUIC yet (so I'm writing the library for it, then for HTTP/3). I wouldn't be surprised if other languages are similar.

As of one month ago, Java still didn't have HTTP/3 support. Though it's apparently coming in March (with JDK 26).
by nearbuy | 2025-11-17 18:35:46+00:00
As I understand it, you don't want to posit the existence of a new particle, or new property of particles (e.g. particles have mass, charge, and some consciousness property), or a new field or anything outside of the standard model of physics. In other words, there is nothing special about the particles themselves that causes consciousness; they're just bits of matter that can push and pull on each other. And when you arrange bits of matter that push and pull on each other in just the right way, it somehow creates consciousness.

If that's all there is, it seems likely you could create consciousness out of marbles connected by springs. If protons and electrons don't have any special consciousness-related property other than pushing and pulling, we'd just have to recreate the arrangement of matter and the forces to get consciousness.

There is no way to make the leap from particles and forces to consciousness that seems intuitively right. No arrangement of dumb matter, whether marbles or protons, should be conscious.

On a somewhat related note: forces are rules that dictate how things move. At some level, position and movement is the only thing we can measure. When we measure something like voltage or charge, our measurement techniques actually rely on observing the movement of particles.

Consciousness doesn't seem like it's just movement. But if there were some other property of our universe that didn't cause movement, we would have no way to measure it. It would have no observable effect on matter. Which would make epiphenomenal consciousness seemingly impossible to prove or disprove even if it were some basic property of physics.
by Krutonium | 2025-11-17 18:37:44+00:00
That's only kind of true; Wine itself supports older versions of DirectX with the target API being OpenGL instead of Vulkan. It's just not quite super performant and kinda buggy. That said, there's other wrappers you can use to convert older DirectX versions into new ones, and if you can get to DirectX 8 or 9, now you've got DXVK.
by semi-extrinsic | 2025-11-17 18:37:45+00:00
As long as the small PCB is $40 it's fine. I had a central vacuum fail like that a couple of years ago, and the small PCB would have cost $350.

The PCB had already been replaced twice during the warranty period. Googled the major components and they were $3 - $5 a piece, just a couple of half bridge rectifiers, resistors and diodes.

Didn't want to risk a fire from a DIY job, which would have definitely voided my insurance, so I spent $400 on a new central vacuum unit (from a different brand).
by riverdweller | 2025-11-17 18:37:46+00:00
You keep saying that major models have "tool calling built in". And that by giving them context about available APIs, the LLM can "use the API".

But you don't explain, in any of your comments, precisely how an LLM in practice is able to itself invoke an API function. Could you explain how?

A model is typically distributed as a set of parameters, interpreted by an inference framework (such as llama.cpp), and not as a standalone application that understands how to invoke external functions.

So I am very keen to understand how these "major models" would invoke a function in the absence of a chassis container application (like Claude Code, that tells the model, via a prompt prefix, what tokens the model should emit to trigger a function, and which on detection of those tokens invokes the function on the model's behalf - which is not at all the same thing as the model invoking the function itself).

Just a high level explanation of how you are saying it works would be most illuminating.
by gruez | 2025-11-17 18:37:55+00:00
No, they're not.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

There's a spike and subsequent drop after the pandemic, but that was from service workers being forced out of the labor force by lockdowns. If you exclude that, it follows a steady trend up. And yes, the chart has already been adjusted for inflation.
by RickS | 2025-11-17 18:37:57+00:00
Cosmetically it's probably fine. The downsides all have to do with predictability and the ability to reason about what the wall is made of in the future.

A person who goes to eg hang a picture frame or shelf there will encounter a different material with different load bearing properties than expected. Pushing into the center of that area with EG a drill bit will not have the same physical response or give, and depending on how it was braced/integrated with the surrounding wall, the patch itself may be pushed or pulled out of place. Similar for anyone that leans on that area if it's at such a height.
by mrtksn | 2025-11-17 18:38:14+00:00
People can't go to concerts despite being just as hardworking or just as big fans and start shooting CEOs on the streets.

Some systems need to work and be accessible to everyone so we can sustain peaceful and healthy society.

This is not charity, this is to account for externalities and the miscalculations in the free market. Awful lot of people are underpaid and overpaid as they progress through their lives because the markets are actually not that efficient and prices are not formed under perfect information or instantly.

You want your mechanical engineers to be able to afford decent life even if all the market current wants is JavaScript engineers because when the tides shift you may end up needing mechanical engineers to produce physical stuff so you want them around and happy.

Also, the price could actually be too low too when its optimized for short term profits. Re-sell 100GBP tickets for 500GBP, filter for money and leave out the actual fans and maybe lose all the events for the next year. If you are going to do a daytime robbery, better not ever need money again from the people you are robbing.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-17 18:38:39+00:00
America used to have fairly everpresent public transport. Every city, including tiny ones, had public transport because the very concept of industrialization requires cities with lots of people in a small area that can easily get to work.

This absurd notion that it "doesn't make sense" for america is propaganda. Not only does it make plenty of sense in America, it was essential to the development of America!

We had robust, reliable, used by everyone public transport before we had trains! Our local agricultural fair shows off horse drawn busses that used to run in a microscopic but 300 year old agricultural community every single year! They even had instructions about how to behave to not upset the poor woman sitting next to your dirty worker self!

Public transport was essential to the north being industrialized enough to defeat the south in the civil war. Every former mill town in new england had robust public transport to keep the mills full of labor.

It was only with significant lobbying and marketing from GM and Ford that America suddenly decided that all this public transport infrastructure that we had for generations "doesn't make sense here" and they even helped rip it all up!

Read a history book.

It's frankly laughable. If public transport "didn't work" in the US, we would never have been able to industrialize before the car. But we did. We did it before the train
by kstrauser | 2025-11-17 18:38:45+00:00
You said:

> This particular compiler does require bootstrapping, and that's obviously what "the compiler" is referring to in that comment.

You have to pick an option: either it requires bootstrapping, or it doesn’t.

As it’s possible to write the C++20 compiler features in C++11 (or whatever GCC or Clang are written in these days), it factually does not require bootstrapping.
by creer | 2025-11-17 18:39:18+00:00
Civilian airports can "shut down" by telling all traffic to (glibly) find other things to do. The traffic is still around. How resistant is all this traffic to jamming? and what kind of jamming? You can probably experiment with that around an isolated military airport. Perhaps. "Perhaps" because you still have civilian traffic in line of sight. I don't know that it's an easy decision to screw around with jamming around a crowded civilian airport.

What you can certainly double down on is tracking and close to the ground monitoring. And it would be surprising if this did not give results (over hundreds of sightings) as to who is launching them and recovering some hardware. Drones fall off pretty easily and it might be hard to repeatedly recover drones without getting caught if there is a surge of police around.
by rconti | 2025-11-17 18:39:21+00:00
Iceland's hot water was a culture shock to me in 2 ways:

1. The host at our apartment encouraged us to leave the windows cracked and the heat on for good air circulation.

2. The hot water (at the taps) has a sulfer smell, because it's (also) piped geothermal water. My host explained they also had a water heater upstairs in their home because they preferred "heated cold water" over "hot water", which is a funny distinction to those of us who do not have the latter.
by gedy | 2025-11-17 18:39:55+00:00
You do, but the issue this helps with is it's difficult to get LLMs to return accurate unified diffs, which are valuable if you are editing some larger text via their APIs. The alternative of letting it send back the entire edited text is pretty slow. So them sending an accurate server-side diff (likely from some actual diff tool and not just LLM generated thing that sort of looks like a diff) is really helpful.
Show HN: Pixel Based Life Journal
by nizarmah | 2025-11-17 18:39:56+00:00
I'm trying to figure out how to make the best of my life.

I am lucky enough to have a job that allows me to focus on life, but I suck at living and I am trying to learn.

I used to take life for granted and lately losing people I care about and riding a motorcycle are really putting into perspective how easy it is to die.

So I'm trying to go on this memento mori quest, to make the best out of every week I have (considering we only have 4000 rougly).

This is my first week, and it has already started with: - 4 kind moments - 1 lucky moment - 1 dressup moment - 6 items gifted - 1 drinks shared - 3 games shared

I missed the sunset, but I'm definitely catching it tomorrow.

I don't know where this is going honestly, I'm going to try to tweak it based on how I feel. But I hope someone else finds a use for it. :)
by weinzierl | 2025-11-17 18:40:11+00:00
"[..] if you ask questions like “answer with a single word: were any mammoths still alive in December”, chatbots will often answer "yes". [..] I find this weird [..]"

I don't and it's the technically correct answer. Hard to tell what I had answered unbiasedly now but I think more likely I'd said "yes" too than not. Especially when thinking about it and expecting a trick question.
by nocoiner | 2025-11-17 18:40:16+00:00
The modern day example that really made Baumol click for me is child care, particularly day care. It’s a highly labor intensive with basically minimal opportunities for productivity enhancements (due both to regulation and parental preferences, as well as just baseline sheer human decency). As the rest of the economy becomes more productive, the relative cost of child care goes up and up and up - which is why we now see situations where two-earner households can an entire after-tax income consumed by child care costs once they need to put 2-3 kids into daycare.
by sunscream89 | 2025-11-17 18:40:20+00:00
> Satanism that never existed and was never happening

Never happened? Talk about cognitive dissonance, here’s a police training video from the 90s.

That Satanic sacrifice stuff was really real. “Satanic D&D” now that was a scare fad.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c5CgSLC7smM

As for that other stuff, a fine example how your brain which knows nothing is representative of public knowledge. I don’t care what idiots vote for. I’m talking about lawlessness and the threat to our public trust.

Why are you commenting?
by guyomes | 2025-11-17 18:40:20+00:00
This reminds me of a hoax from the Yes Men [1]. They convinced temporarily the BBC that a company agreed to a compensation package for the victims of a chemical disaster, which resulted in a 4.23 percent decrease of the share price of the company. When it was revealed that it was a hoax, the share price returned to its initial price.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110305151306/http://articles.c...