MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Klaus23 | 2025-11-20 02:43:29+00:00
It's pretty accurate. I was a bit shocked when I saw that room names were not encrypted. I thought that was such a basic privacy requirement, and it's not hard to implement when you already have message encryption.

Matrix seems to have a lot of these structural flaws. Even the encryption praised in the Reddit post has had problems for years where messages don't decrypt. These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.

They are slowly improving everything, with the emphasis on "slowly". It will take years until everything is properly implemented. To answer the question of whether the future of the protocol is promising, I would say yes. This is in no small part because there are currently no real alternatives in this area. If you want an open system, this is the best option.
by dgroshev | 2025-11-20 02:44:05+00:00
There is nothing stopping the industry from standardising on an alternative form of expressing consent, for example on browser installation. GDPR is agnostic to the form the consent takes, as long as it's informed and freely given.

However, by far the biggest browser is funded by a corporation that wants tracking data across the web. I'm not very surprised that the corporation haven't made it easy to refuse just once.

Thanks Google.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-20 02:44:22+00:00
So, so many glaring problems here:

1. Consumers can't just 'not use something' because of network effects, and you know that. Don't play stupid with me.

2. The service is scummy because they lie. That's the scummy part. Sit back and read what I wrote. I'm not saying services CAN'T commit crimes against humanity. They can! I'm saying they must DO IT HONESTLY.

If this is about choice, and you want users to choose what they want, then you have to be on my side. It's not optional. IF what you're saying is true, and consumers have the choice "not sign up service that scummy", THEN they must know if the service is scummy. Necessarily!

You are literally agreeing with me!
by rmunn | 2025-11-20 02:44:36+00:00
> USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.

Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.

I still remember a case from the early 2000's or perhaps late 1990's, which I can't dig up now since I don't remember enough keywords to get a search engine to find it for me. So no link, sorry, you'll have to rely on my could-be-missing-a-detail memory. But I recall reading a patent and realizing that under the complex language, it was essentially patenting scrollbars, which at that point had been around for years. But to someone who didn't understand programming terminology, they might have thought this was a novel idea, rather than a snowjob designed to hide the fact that prior art on this patent submission had existed for over a decade, making the patent submission invalid on its face.

There have been other patents which, when I read them, I realized were patenting something that had lots of prior art, but I don't remember them. Maybe someone has more examples. But that patent that boiled down to "clicking a mouse on a designated area to scroll a page" stuck in my mind for years. (At least two decades, in fact).
by ghm2199 | 2025-11-20 02:45:15+00:00
My head explodes when I read aabout the scamsters that are equifax and their so called "strategic partnership" with workday on payroll data.

We all should be aware that equifax — via their "strategic partner" with workday — has your ENTIRE work history with *each and every* payroll check AMOUNT ever sent to you by any W2 employer, the employer info, your address etc. It sells this info to god knows who. Its a shocking amount of info. Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753

I recall a year or so ago, I had frozen this info from being dissemenated to employers or sold to companies from https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/ link but it seems to ask me to re-register again with your SSN and DOB. WTF. That registration would still not stop them from collecting this info.

There is no way I can even partially delete any part of this data, like I dunno the dates on which I recieved each of my paychecks. Why the fuck is that in the report?
by rdtsc | 2025-11-20 02:45:18+00:00
I chose Perl first. At that time around early 2000s it was the more popular. I liked how my scripts were short and compact but then I I had noticed that I couldn't understand what I did week or so later. The "write-only language" joke was kind of true for me. Then remember finding Python and rewriting all my script in Python and have been using it ever since.
by llbbdd | 2025-11-20 02:45:38+00:00
Sure but in the most polite way, that's almost saying nothing at all. I just think it kneecaps any real criticism and real issues associated with this guy to go "okay that might be a joke, but it probably isn't because <legitimate evil reason>". Though I guess it encroaches on the definition of what a joke is and if it's defined by intent. If he meant it as one, but nobody took it as one, is it?
by flexagoon | 2025-11-20 02:46:25+00:00
As someone with no experience with either of those two services, I read that description and had no idea what Workday does. So I thought, maybe their homepage will explain it better.

> Manage HR, finance, and all your AI agents. All in one place.

> Elevate the potential of your people and boost productivity across your organization with human-AI collaboration.

> Turn AI into ROI faster and deliver transformational outcomes driven by trust, agility, and data readiness you can rely on.

> 11,000+ organizations worldwide trust Workday.

Huh?

Sure, whatever, I'm not even surprised about them trying to cram AI buzzwords into every sentence, I'm used to that by now. But what's the deal with enterprise products having marketing which only makes sense to people who already use the product? Not a single sentence on their homepage explains what their product does.

Ok, let's assume I've heard about Workday and know it's a tool for HR. I want to evaluate it, so, naturally, I click the "HR solutions" link on their homepage, and get to yet another page full of buzzwords that does nothing to help me understand the service they offer.
by mbreese | 2025-11-20 02:46:33+00:00
You could really make a business case study (well, a project management case study) out of the Python 2 -> 3 transition. It was a very well executed plan. It started with a clear definition of where they were headed (v3) with some good reasons for the technically minded. But the transition itself was really... really... slow.

It was methodical and deliberate, but slow.

But I think it really happened because developers wanted to move to 3. There was enough momentum and upside for moving to 3 that the Python core developers could keep the migration on track without having to drag people along from 2 -> 3 before they were ready. Making sure that the transition was optional for a long time helped tremendously.

I was quite happy working in Python 2 for a long time and only transitioned over to 3 for new projects or code that I thought would have a long lifetime. This was very much a reason why I moved to 3 instead of to another language.

At the same time, I'm not sure what language I would have switched to for the things I was using Python for... Perl was out as it had it's own disastrous migration. Ruby was an option, but never really hit the general-purpose scripting language mark for me.
by CharlesW | 2025-11-20 02:46:51+00:00
Hacker News should be removed from Y Combinator and handed to an independent foundation that manages it as an open repository of links and comments. YC can still have seat(s) on the board and would likely keep funding the infrastructure. Then "HN apps" could be built on top of that architecture with custom ranking, nicer UIs and their own moderation rules. But the core stream of stories and discussion would be free for any company/individual to use.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-11-20 02:46:55+00:00
Not according to the metrics proposed by Graeber & Wengrow in the last chapter of Dawn of Everything

> The three freedoms that most of our ancestors enjoyed, but which most modern humans lack are:

> The freedom to leave.

> The freedom to disobey an order.

> The freedom to create new ways of relating to one another.

https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/the-three-fundamental-hu...
by swatcoder | 2025-11-20 02:47:06+00:00
Fair enough.

Although it's sort of ironic that the living generation most famous for radically questioning the demanding society they were growing up into and opening their minds to escape and growth through hallucingens is the same one that's since been assigned a pejorative name by those same kids and cast by them as the great villian of our age.

So maybe something like that, if history repeats as much as it seems to.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-11-20 02:47:39+00:00
> If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more

Personally I'm long past hating AI

I am pretty much at the point of viewing AI research and development as a crime against humanity

I hope I will turn out to be wrong, but as things are going right now all I can see is this path leads to misery for the vast majority of living humans.
by FridgeSeal | 2025-11-20 02:47:58+00:00
If it weren’t so tiring having to wade through all the ai slop they add to products I’m forced to use, the fact that leadership in the field are getting petty and childish about how not everyone thinks their toy is shiny is a real “telling on themselves” moment.

If it actually, truly, world-changingly good as they are _begging us_ to believe they are, they wouldn’t need to care that people disliked it or chose not to use it.

But because they’re practically going red in the face screeching about it, it really comes off as “cope”, to use the hip new word.
by degamad | 2025-11-20 02:49:02+00:00
It does not seem impossible to anyone who has watched someone use a computer for a few minutes... A bright green button from google pay saying "click here to secure your interest in this car" is easily mistaken to mean "save to my interested list" rather than "place a deposit on this".

We know how hard it is to even find the download button on a website: https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-spot-the-real-download-butt...
by CursedSilicon | 2025-11-20 02:49:11+00:00
I got hired on as a 1099 to help implement some "Facebook clone but for your company's internal intranet" because they specifically needed a US citizen to do it for "compliance reasons" (energy company)

After coming to terms with their... questionable software stack (Apache on Ubuntu in which they rented AWS bare metal to then run ESXi???) they asked me if I knew anything about Azure, so they could broaden their cloud support

I had their entire stack transliterated and ready to run within hours the same day (their app really could just be on a VPS somewhere)

Despite this, I was told I'd have to apply for their Sysadmin job the same as anyone else. Okay. Fine

It later came back that I was pruned from even being shortlisted because "you don't have any Azure experience"

I ported your entire stack to it in mere hours but I guess not!
by spectralista | 2025-11-20 02:49:52+00:00
I absolute love KDE Plasma but I finally gave up for Mint Cinnamon LTS.

It has just been rock solid on any machine I have tried. KDE I was just always running into some kind of minor problem or something wouldn't work.

I have dolphin and konsole installed and open right now so once you get use to Cinnamon, it isn't really that much different but so rock solid with Mint.
by perryizgr8 | 2025-11-20 02:50:13+00:00
Microsoft is a multi-trillion dollar company. Is it too much to ask for them to develop and maintain two separate Windows flavors with different focus?

1. Windows 11 - keep doing what they are doing, add AI, ads, all sorts of guardrails, whatever the 80% of users need

2. Windows 11 Enthusiast - Bring back Win 2000 theme, no guardrails, best-in-class dev experience, hyper-optimised for gaming, no AI, no ads

I would pay significantly more for the special version that I did for my Win 11 pro copy.
Show HN: MCP Compact – Middleware to trim noisy browser/DOM/tool outputs
by sabareesh | 2025-11-20 02:50:14+00:00
Modern MCP agents often blow past context limits because tools return huge blobs (DOM dumps, network traces, screenshots, etc.). MCP Compact is a small proxy that sits between your agent and the upstream MCP server, forwards every tool call, and uses an LLM to summarize the response according to per-tool rules (token budget, fields to preserve/drop). It supports StreamableHTTP, tracks token usage, and can reconnect sessions, so you can keep agents focused without rewriting agent code or tools.
by osm3000 | 2025-11-20 02:51:20+00:00
I am not sure why you are mentioning historians here. A proper historical view/investigation is way outside of my scope.

My angle is simple: they said it was accurate, and Legasov did so and said that...and in his own words, he negated most of that.

Is Legasov a good guy? I don't know. Was he honest in what he said? I don't know...but he said what he said!

> cherry-pick inaccuracies

Feel free to go to the tapes
by pkulak | 2025-11-20 02:51:20+00:00
Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this thread, this seems reasonable. This seems to only prevent you from logging into your account, with only a password, NOT verifying it (by dismissing all the prompts asking you to do so), and then sending (and receiving new!) encrypted messages anyway. I've never used an unverified Matrix account in the 6 years that I've been an active user. Verification used to be a bit finicky, but it's pretty seamless now. And once the QR code login stuff is better supported, it will be dead easy.
by temp0826 | 2025-11-20 02:51:48+00:00
~25 years of linux experience, 8-9ish professionally here, my beard is a bit gray. 2 interviews in the last 11 months of looking for me. I am not being picky. (I'm at a little more of a disadvantage- I've been exploring another, non-tech career path since covid, which now shows as a five year gap on my cv).

(Any leads out there hn?)
by jdprgm | 2025-11-20 02:52:26+00:00
Promising looking tool. It would be useful to add a performance section to the readme for some ballpark of what to expect even if it is just a reference point of one gpu.

I've been considering building something similar but focused on static stuff like watermarks so just single masks. From that diffueraser page it seems performance is brutally slow with less than 1 fps on 720p.

For watermarks you can use ffmpeg blur which will of course be super fast and looks good on certain kinds of content that are mostly uniform like a sky but terrible and very obvious for most backgrounds. I've gotten really good results with videos shot with static cameras generating a single inpainted frame and then just using that as the "cover" cropped and blurred over the watermark or any object really. Even better results with completely stabilizing the video and balancing the color if it is changing slightly over time. This of course only works if nothing moving intersects with the removed target or if the camera is moving then you need every frame inpainted.

Thus far all full video inpainting like this has been so slow as to not be practically useful for example to casually remove watermarks on videos measured in tens of minutes instead of seconds where i would really want processing to be close to realtime. I've wondered what knobs can be turned if any to sacrifice quality in order to boost performance. My main ideas are to try to automate detecting and applying that single frame technique to as much of the video as possible and then separately process all the other chunks with diffusion scaling to some really small size like 240p and then use ai based upscaling on those chunks which seems to be fairly fast these days compared to diffusion.
by xethos | 2025-11-20 02:52:30+00:00
Respectfully, not even close. Verification is when I sign in from a new device, I use an existing device or second passphrase (either-or) to ensure that yes, it is me on both devices. I never have to reveal my ID, name, phone number, or email address to anyone. Not to Element, the Matrix Foundation, or the person running my home server where all my [encrypted] messages live.
by alister | 2025-11-20 02:53:01+00:00
But you had the option of having an unlisted or unpublished phone number. To give one datapoint, in Los Angeles in the 1980s about half of all numbers were unlisted. I would expect that the unlisted rate was much higher in big cities like L.A. compared to the rest of the country.

What I find fascinating is that people paid for privacy. Yes, indeed, people paid several dollars extra per month to maintain an unlisted/unpublished phone number. Today very few people are willing to pay actual money for privacy.
by rdtsc | 2025-11-20 02:53:39+00:00
> For me, expressiveness is fundamental. And perl 6 gives me that.

I saw Larry Wall at one of the conferences. He talked a about Perl 6 how it was progressing and such (it was before it was renamed) and year, expressiveness what stuck out. It certainly has lots of nice features, too. But at least for me, I realized with Perl 5 I wasn't smart enough for it. I would be lured by the clever short expressions and then sometimes later look back and had no idea what I wrote.

Larry is a great person, btw. During lunch at the conference sat at his table and he was very approachable and warm. I don't remember what we talked about exactly just that it I liked how down to earth and nice he was.
by tayo42 | 2025-11-20 02:53:42+00:00
I'll disagree, it's important to know the extent of what the bad market is. No replies in months means something else is up.

The job market is bad but people are still getting jobs and interviews. Months of silence is not normal

Ive also been on the applicant side and got interviews and call backs, also a handful of recruiters reaching out to me
by lotyrin | 2025-11-20 02:53:49+00:00
I caught my mom watching a bunch of AI impersonations of musicians on Youtube singing slop that rarely rhymed or had any kind of message in the lyrics and with super formulaic arrangements. I asked her what she liked about them and it was like "they seem well made" and I showed her how easy Suno is to use and then showed her some of the bad missed rhymes and transcribed the lyrics to where she could see there wasn't any there there to any part of it (and how easy it is to get LLMs to generate better). It seemed to have been an antidote.

This is stuff that used to take effort and was worth consuming just for that, and lots of people don't have their filter adjusted (much as the early advent of consumer-facing email spam) to account for how low effort and plentiful these forms of content are.

I can only hope that people raise their filters to a point where scrutinizing everything becomes common place and a message existing doesn't lend it any assumed legitimacy. Maybe AI will be the poison for propaganda (but I'm not holding my breath).
by ewoodrich | 2025-11-20 02:54:32+00:00
Agreed, some days I code for 4-6 hours with agentic tools but 2025 or not I still can't stomach using any of the big three LLMs for all but the most superficial research questions (and I currently pay/get access to all three paid chatbots).

Even if they were right 9/10 (which is far from certain depending on the topic) and save me a minute or two compared to Google + skim/read-ing a couple websites, it's completely overshadowed by the 1/10 time they calmly and confidently lie about whether tool X supports feature Y and send me on a wild goose chase looking through docs for something that simply does not exist.

In my personal experience the most consistently unreliable questions are those that would be most directly useful for my work, and for my interests/hobbies I'd rather read a quality source myself. Because, well, I enjoy reading! So the value proposition for "LLM as Google/forum/Wikipedia replacement" is very, very weak for me.
by theptip | 2025-11-20 02:54:58+00:00
Sure, ideally we can decouple the provider implementation and use a yubikey-type device if we want, or let the OS Secure Enclave handle it for the 99% of users that don’t care.

The main point is it should be a protocol from the PoV of the consuming site, rather than a cop-out requirement enacted on the easiest place to legislate.
by root_axis | 2025-11-20 02:55:23+00:00
> Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's "folk magic incantation"

It absolutely is folk magic. I think it is more accurate to impugn your understanding than mine.

> I don't know the merit to what parent is saying, but it does make some intuitive sense if you think about it.

This is exactly what I mean by folk magic. Incantations based on vibes. One's intuition is notoriously inclined to agree with one's own conclusions.

> If you put 5 instructions in the system prompt or initial message, where one acts as a canary, then you can easier start to see when exactly it stops following the instructions.

This doesn't really make much sense.

First of all, system prompts and things like agent.md never leave the context regardless of the length of the session, so the canary has absolutely zero meaning in this situation, making any judgements based on its disappearance totally misguided and simply a case of seeing what you want to see.

Further, even if it did leave the context, that doesn't then demonstrate that the model is "not paying attention". Presumably whatever is in the context is relevant to the task, so if your definition of "paying attention" is "it exists in the context" it's actually paying better attention once it has replaced the canary with relevant information.

Finally, this reasoning relies on the misguided idea that because the model produces an output that doesn't correspond to an instruction, it means that the instruction has escaped the context, rather than just being a sequence where the model does the wrong thing, which is a regular occurrence even in short sessions that are obviously within the context.
by osm3000 | 2025-11-20 02:55:26+00:00
Hey Nicolas! Very glad to hear from you :)

I honestly don't see a problem with dramatization (not my taste, but people are different I guess).

My issue is with Craig Mazin (the creator of the series) insistence that he stuck to the details and the truth in the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY0r1Ln6tkM
by jazzyjackson | 2025-11-20 02:56:16+00:00
Crypto has all the same use cases it's just that fiat is better at everything so long as the thing is blessed by the government

Given a government reflecting the will of the people, anything you need crypto for is de facto antisocial behavior

i think it's nice to have a plan B for when the governments idea of criminal doesn't line up with my own so much
by dmoy | 2025-11-20 02:56:44+00:00
> Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.

Yea that's exactly what I mean

One solution would potentially be to increase the USPTO budget by a lot. But... nobody does that I guess. So here we are.