MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kotaKat | 2025-12-12 14:04:49+00:00
Similarly, I had a workplace dental provider ship me a ‘smart toothbrush’.

Turns out they track the aggregate of everyone’s brushing and if every employee brushes their teeth, the plan gets a discount.

”Lower rate based on group's participation in Beam Perks™ wellness program and a group aggregate Beam score of "A". Based on Beam® internal brushing and utilization data.”
by tialaramex | 2025-12-12 14:05:19+00:00
There's no "nearly" in your statement. "a backdoor, or have the capability to add a backdoor in the hardware that generates those keys" is the same God powers claim again. If you now want to water it down with enough caveats it's nothing, this reminds me of how people go from "In lab conditions we can do a timing attack on the electronics from a FIDO key" to imagining that outfits like this just routinely bypass FIDO and so it's worthless.

It's very difficult and expensive to attack our encryption technologies, and so it's correspondingly rare. We are, in fact, winning this particular race.

Encryption actually works not because surveillance is now utterly impossible but because it's expensive. How you went from my pointing out that there's no evidence of this mass surveillance to the idea that I'm claiming these outfits don't conduct targeted surveillance at all I cannot imagine.
by kelipso | 2025-12-12 14:06:36+00:00
Because Ruby is nothing without the community around it. If they wanted to make Ruby and don’t care about the people using it, they should go private, shut down the project, or have someone else take over.

It’s wrong to shut down discussion like this with comments like “it’s their code”, “make your own fork”, etc. because Ruby is supposed to be part of the open source community, which implies collaboration, give and take, discussion of pros and cons, etc.

What you are doing is ignoring this major aspect of a programming language and taking this weird anti social stance on it.
by dachris | 2025-12-12 14:06:43+00:00
Its sister tunnel - the Semmering Base Tunnel [0] - is scheduled to be completed in 2030. These two combined greatly reduce the travel time from Vienna to Graz and Klagenfurt (combined 1h 15m time saving).

You don't hear that much about great engineering projects today, yet it's still an incredible feat to build those.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel
by gear54rus | 2025-12-12 14:07:39+00:00
> Buy a cheap smart TV

Why does it have to be cheap? What if I want a killer panel without all the bs?

> Use a small "air mouse" for control

An alternative is something like 'unified remote' on it, then you can even type from your phone without any pain.

> A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.

There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists. It would be ideal to send all the browser context with cookies etc so that you are logged in too and can just start playing whatever you found on PC.

Any for of cast is not an option, rendering has to happen on the TV PC box.
by Yokohiii | 2025-12-12 14:08:08+00:00
There is a option -smallframes that seems to be intended for conservative use cases. Below are the related configs and a test at what point they escape (+1).

// -smallframes // ir.MaxStackVarSize = 64 * 1024 // ir.MaxImplicitStackVarSize = 16 * 1024 a := [64 * 1024 +1]byte{} b := make([]byte, 0, 16 * 1024 +1) // default // MaxStackVarSize = int64(128 * 1024) // MaxImplicitStackVarSize = int64(64 * 1024) c := [128 * 1024 +1]byte{} d := make([]byte, 0, 64 * 1024 +1)

Not sure how to verify this, but the assumption you can allocate megabytes on the stack seems wrong. The output of the escape analysis for arrays is different then the make statement:

test/test.go:36:2: moved to heap: c

Maybe an overlook because it is a bit sneaky?
by d-lisp | 2025-12-12 14:08:27+00:00
You inspired me this joyful rewrite:

#define _(e) { e;}; #define r(e) _(return e) #define I(b, e) _(if (b) r(e)); #define W(e) _(while (1) _(e)); int main(int c, char **v) { _(I(c != 2, -1) _(c = 0) W(I(!v[1][c++], v[1][c - 2] & 1))) }
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-12 14:08:37+00:00
Fair enough, but I interpreted "for not entering Russia at a correct port of entry" as he had a visa to enter the country, but he just didn't land at a recognized "port of entry", which given he walked/swam across the Being Strait, is unsurprising. But I don't know the full details of the situation.
by nostrademons | 2025-12-12 14:08:47+00:00
Basically you're lending your name and identity as a front for someone with malicious intentions.

There are a few different angles to this. Other people have already mentioned the North Korean state-sponsored espionage, but honestly I think this is a small minority of this market.

The other two big ones are visa fraud and employment fraud. With the first one, you have a developer, possibly even skilled in a low-wage overseas company (say Thailand) that wants to make American wages. If he applies as who he actually is, he makes Thai wages, which can be as low as $10K/year. If he uses your identity to apply, he makes American wages, say $200K+/year. He can split that with you and make 10x what he would otherwise, while you get $100K/year for doing nothing (assuming he's honest enough to pay out, which is not a guarantee. There's no honor in thieves).

With the second, they use his interview skills and your identity to get the job, and then do nothing except get other jobs. It's remarkably hard to fire a U.S. employee without risks of lawsuits. If the employer does seem to catch on, he has a lawyer and a psychiatrist on the payroll too. The psychiatrist produces a doctor's note that you are disabled, the lawyer threatens to sue if you are fired. "You" go on disability, where you can stay for up to a year and they can't fire you. Collect the salary, move on after the year. In the meantime, "you" (or the organization using your identity) has done the same thing to hundreds of other corporations. I personally know 2 managers that have been victimized by this scam.

In all 3 cases, you're not the direct victim of the scam. They're using your identity as a shield to legitimize the scam. When it's discovered, it's you who suffer the reputational risk and/or criminal charges.
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-12-12 14:08:48+00:00
> you also need to restore the _qsort2_closure when done

No I do not. It will reassigned next call.

> But again you are reinventing dynamic scoping

No. I’m not reinventing anything. I’m using the existing feature of thread local variables.

The usage of such is entirely an implementation detail of qsort2 with the exception of recursion.

Dynamic scoping typically refers to defining variables which have scope outside of their call stack. No usage of this API requires it.

Can you just try to learn something new?
by bluGill | 2025-12-12 14:10:11+00:00
Note the US has the number one freight rail system in the world by most measures (there are lots of ways to measure this depending on how you want to abuse the statistics). Some of this is Europe has better river routes to work with (I don't know Asia), but some of this is Europe has focused more on passengers to the point where freight is unable to get through forcing trucks.
by sweezyjeezy | 2025-12-12 14:11:09+00:00
It's also really hard to make the tunnel remain a tunnel over its expected 150 year lifespan - given that it basically runs through a fault line. They had to study and test local geology for about 15 years, build certain sections to expect some movement over time, as well as kit everything out with a lot of sensors.

Overall an amazing achievement, and unsurprising it took this long to figure out!
Show HN: Change the model. Same output. The pipeline decides. VAC Memory System
by ViktorKuz | 2025-12-12 14:11:17+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with long-term memory architectures for agent systems and wanted to share some technical results that might be useful to others working on retrieval pipelines. Benchmark: LoCoMo (10 runs × 10 conversation sets) Average accuracy: 80.1% Setup: full isolation across all 10 conv groups (no cross-contamination, no shared memory between runs)

Architecture (all open weights except answer generation)

1. Dense retrieval

BGE-large-en-v1.5 (1024d)

FAISS IndexFlatIP

Standard BGE instruction prompt: “Represent this sentence for searching relevant passages.”

2. Sparse retrieval

BM25 via classic inverted index

Helps with low-embedding-recall queries and keyword-heavy prompts

3. MCA (Multi-Component Aggregation) ranking A simple gravitational-style score combining:

keyword coverage

token importance

local frequency signal MCA acts as a first-pass filter to catch exact-match questions. Threshold: coverage ≥ 0.1 → keep top-30

4. Union strategy Instead of aggressively reducing the union, the system feeds 112–135 documents directly to a re-ranker. In practice this improved stability and prevented loss of rare but crucial documents.

5. Cross-Encoder reranking

bge-reranker-v2-m3

Processes the full union (rare for RAG pipelines, but worked best here)

Produces a final top-k used for answer generation

6. Answer generation

GPT-4o-mini, used only for the final synthesis step

No agent chain, no tool calls, no memory-dependent LLM logic

Performance

<3 seconds per query on a single RTX 4090

Deterministic output between runs

Reproducible test harness (10×10 protocol)

Why this worked

Three things seemed to matter most:

MCA-first filter to stabilize early recall

Not discarding the union before re-ranking

Proper dense embedding instruction, which massively affects BGE performance

Notes

LoCoMo remains one of the hardest public memory benchmarks: 5,880 multi-hop, temporal, negation-rich QA pairs derived from human–agent conversations. Would be interested to compare with others working on long-term retrieval, especially multi-stage ranking or cross-encoder heavy pipelines.

Github: https://github.com/vac-architector/VAC-Memory-System
by tim333 | 2025-12-12 14:11:41+00:00
They have a strange attitude to the world and have had government funded people dedicated to attacking much of the world for decades. See this book review:

>“This must be the essence of our greatness. . . enemies everywhere” (p.20). The central thesis of Russia’s War on Everybody is that the Kremlin defines its enemies sweepingly, such that only a fraction of these “enemies” consider Russia to be their enemy. As Giles documents, “the Kremlin’s daily business” includes what some in the West would consider “acts of war” – poisoning dissidents, shooting down planes, election meddling, cyberattacks, and blatant political assassinations. Giles describes the Kremlin’s zero-sum worldview, in which anything benefitting others is a threat to Russia, and demonstrates that the Kremlin’s ambitions are far broader, and its methods more pervasive, than most realise. https://www.e-ir.info/2025/11/18/review-russias-war-on-every...
by colechristensen | 2025-12-12 14:11:45+00:00
Also it's a multi-species mutation that stuck in humans and the great apes which broke the urate oxidase enzyme.

If we fixed it, nobody would get gout.

I kinda wonder sometimes why medicine doesn't try to fix some of these species level genetic problems more broadly or more quickly. There's this enzyme every other mammal produces, why isn't there a fast track to engineering a micro-organ to produce it or inject an engineered version in gout patients (I did some research and yes people are somewhat doing these things... slowly)

Why can't I, a healthy adult, be genetically engineered to start producing my own Vitamin C like every other mammal?
by CodingJeebus | 2025-12-12 14:11:56+00:00
It also doesn't help that non-technical stakeholders sometimes want a say in a tech stack conversation as well. I've been at more than one company where either the product team or the acquiring firm wanted us to migrate away from a tried and true Rails setup to a fullstack JS platform simply because they either wanted the UI development flexibility or to not have to hire Ruby devs.

Non-technical MBA's seem to have a hard time grasping that a JS-only platform is not a panacea and comes with serious tradeoffs.
by naasking | 2025-12-12 14:12:27+00:00
> Graduate students aren't cited for coming up with innovations

Nonsense.

> the controversy is valid,

No. You can see both publications right here [1]. Watson and Crick explicitly say they are aware of the "general nature" of Franklin's results, but they are the only ones in that issue to propose the double helix structure with the specific features that explained all of the evidence, published and unpublished.

[1] https://www.mskcc.org/teaser/1953-nature-papers-watson-crick...
by yawpitch | 2025-12-12 14:12:51+00:00
There are incredible people along the way, there are also incredible people watching and cheering on people who vlog. Communities can — and very much should — be much larger than just who you happen to have found yourself physically near.

And yes, I can assure you, you can absolutely have both while engaging in blogging, vlogging, serialized writing, or any other form of serialized expression.

Not all of vlogging has any relationship to your straw man.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-12-12 14:12:59+00:00
I'm a huge fan of Brett Victor's previous work and a lot of it was a huge inspiration. I used to think Dynamicland was extremely cool and followed the updates excited where it would go but that was many many years ago now and honestly Dynamicland is the worst use of a major talent like that.

A mix of the worst of Academia where knowledge is trying to be locked to a single place and network for gatekeeping, a rebuild everything from scratch within that single place meaning all effort put in by anyone there only advances within those walls, locking everything within that system meaning the time and effort is ultimately wasted when the most beautiful thing about computing is 1 person can write something that empowers millions.

If the whole thing had been built with the ideology that the first Dynamicland was built to die as in the knowledge and idea should have had virality built in at its core by providing the tech and instructions for how to recreate it then yeah I'd be fine with the indulgent thing of it being the one phyiscal space.

Dynamicland by building with the ideology that it's building with if this idea ever takes off then it deserves to be a footnote while the system that manages to bring it to the masses deserves the credit.
by tn_ | 2025-12-12 14:13:49+00:00
You will need the macOS server app for this to work: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/argly-server/id6755750868 I built this project because I wanted to keep vibe :D coding at night, but didn't want to bring my entire laptop with me.

My new flow has become if I'm developing iOS apps:

1. I log into Argly from my phone, it connects/ screen-shares my desktop and I can control all the apps or send keyboard strokes

2. I'll have cursor open, feed it a prompt, wait for the changes to be applied

3. Then it deploys to my phone through wifi from across the house. This works decently

I would be interested in how this could be useful for you folks!
by sotix | 2025-12-12 14:14:04+00:00
That's fair enough! Most accountants I crossed paths with dislike the modern type of busy work. Lots of marking up spreadsheets and PDFs rather than crafting journal entries. Luckily for me, I switched into software engineering, and system design scratches that same exact itch. Now I build software for financial auditors to make their work less dreadful, and it's very popular with them because they don't have to do as much of the terrible, modern tasks that have befallen them with advances in accounting tech.
by sandworm101 | 2025-12-12 14:14:06+00:00
I had a professor once ask about the strip of duct tape across the back of my brand new laptop. "Well, thieves cannot pawn electronics with cracked cases. So all my laptops have at least some tape so they think it may be cracked." The next lecture, the prof had a strip of masking tape on his laptop too.

But slap a tux logo and an "i l9ve truecrypt" banner on you device and nobody short of the NSA would even attempt a maid attack.
by ta9000 | 2025-12-12 14:14:46+00:00
> If they were to admit applicants without considering their sex, the best schools in the country would end up with incoming classes that have an even greater predominance of women than they already do. So, largely unnoticed by the public, they have started to embrace a solution to this supposed problem that is simple, effective, and manifestly unjust: affirmative action for men.

If the situation were reversed, I’m sure the author wouldn’t care. For instance, look at nursing, where there doesn’t seem to be any rush to get more men into the field.
by Lex-2008 | 2025-12-12 14:14:52+00:00
interesting, but can't you use "Index On Expression" <https://sqlite.org/expridx.html>?

i.e. something like this: CREATE INDEX idx_events_type ON events(json_extract(data, '$.type'))?

i guess caveat here is that slight change in json path syntax (can't think of any right now) can cause SQLite to not use this index, while in case of explicitly specified Virtual Generated Columns you're guaranteed to use the index.
by FL33TW00D | 2025-12-12 14:15:55+00:00
The paternalistic state does not allow you autonomy over your own body.

e.g the amount of backlash thought emporium got when he genetically engineered himself to remove lactose intolerance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY

Risky, but it's his body!
by misterpurple45 | 2025-12-12 14:17:00+00:00
The author isn’t comparing apples with apples.

“Butterfly valve” is the name for a type of widget.

There are many instances of “butterfly valve”, some of which will have strange brand names.

Just like there are many “web frameworks”, each with weird and wonderful names (“Django”, “Rails”, “Spring” etc.)

We’re really not that different.
by rashidujang | 2025-12-12 14:17:26+00:00
Tangentially related, I have recently been using my S10+ as a makeshift media server running Jellyfin in Termux. The main problem I had was that it is unsafe to keep a device perpetually charging and my first thought was to create a Routine to turn on the charger when the battery is above a certain threshold and off when it is below. This post gives me an alternative idea to try.
by postexitus | 2025-12-12 14:18:53+00:00
Can be said for all monopolies. I am not arguing that Amazon is not successful. They are so successful that they are now showing monopolistic behaviour.

The MFN principle is enforced - but only for the same reseller. The same product may be sold in another channel under another reseller, Amazon cannot touch that. AliExpress is surely outside of that scope. Also, EU managed to "convince" Amazon to stop MFN in principle in EU countries, practice is different (they don't enforce it, but give credit breaks) - it's still being enforced in USA and subject to legal challenges: https://www.johnstonclem.com/news-insights/amazon-antitrust-...
by CodingJeebus | 2025-12-12 14:19:17+00:00
Agreed. Unfortunately, there's an entire content/bootcamp ecosystem pushing this stuff that came of age largely during the tech boom, as well as a bunch of early and mid-career devs and companies that are deeply tied to it. With major VC funding backing projects like Bun, Vercel, etc., I don't think this deeply flawed approach to development is going anywhere because the utopian JS fantasy of "it just works and runs everywhere flawlessly" is the ultimate myth of building for the web.
by tim333 | 2025-12-12 14:19:33+00:00
I'd go 25% NATOs fault. You'll note Ukraine didn't apply to join NATO, was not invited to join NATO so Russia saw it as easy game and invaded.

A problem with the west is they persuaded Ukraine to give up its nukes in return for a bit of paper saying the west would help protect it and then when push came to shove they were wimpy about it.
by sandworm101 | 2025-12-12 14:20:46+00:00
Hey, if you want a fast anonymity netowrk, there are commercial providers. Companies doing research on thier competition use these to hide thier true idents from targets. They are not cheap (not free but cheaper than AWS imho) but have much greater functionality than tor.

https://voodootomato.medium.com/managed-attribution-the-key-...

https://www.authentic8.com/blog/non-attribution-misattributi...
by wongarsu | 2025-12-12 14:22:05+00:00
Humans do a lot of post-hoc rationalization that does not match their original thought processes either. It is an undesirable feature in LLMs, but I don't think this is a very un-human characteristic

Not that it really matters. I don't think this paper starts from a point that assumes that LLMs work like humans, it starts from the assumption that if you give gradient descent a goal to optimize for, it will optimize your network to that goal, with no regard for anything else. So if we just add this one more goal (make an accurate confession), then given enough data that will both work and improve things.
by hatradiowigwam | 2025-12-12 14:22:08+00:00
I spent alot of time in Fairbanks throughout 2006 and 2008, doing aerial surveys from plane. Fairbanks was a good airport to get stuck at, and you do meet some interesting non-traditional travelers. I've never met the guy in the article, but I've met a few bike/hike travelers there who were either moving horizontally or vertically across Alaska (no small feat at all), and I always thought it sounded like an adventure.
by Yokohiii | 2025-12-12 14:22:22+00:00
The silly thing is that I've been the same when I started. A high energy kid playing around and celebrating everything fresh and new, with a big ego.

Probably a bad habit trying to stop them, they need to learn walking before they can sprint. The question is always how to put limits on them? I say it's overengineered, they say it's modern code and I am old. So what do you do if they send you a PR that is just plain wrong? I mean it seems like you delay the conflict from upfront design/planning to pull requests.
by x187463 | 2025-12-12 14:23:25+00:00
That's cool. I hadn't heard of that, before. I had a related idea for achieving plausible deniability of the key in full disk encryption or similar scenarios. The password would be derived from the position of sensitive, yet innocuous, elements on the device, ensuring that the seizure of the device would likely corrupt this relationship. For instance, a series of N-sided dice could be placed in specific positions on top of the device (in the case of a desktop computer, perhaps), and the password derived from their sequence. Consideration must also be given to the possibility of the device being photographed—likely from a single angle—before being moved. So, the dice would be positioned to include some amount of occlusion. Any dice-based algorithm would need to ensure the search space for the resulting key was sufficiently large.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-12 14:24:25+00:00
Let’s see where to start?

1. Email address - you have to use an email address to have an Apple account. How are they not going to have your email?

2. Devices registered - you mean when you log into your device, they keep track of your logged in devices!

3. Transaction history - they keep track of what you bought from them!

Must I continue? Every single piece of data that you named is required to do business with them.
by kotaKat | 2025-12-12 14:24:28+00:00
That one I’m starting to lean on getting closer to happening because we now have 5G RedCap out there for the ‘cheaper’ moderate-speed IoT data market.

https://about.att.com/blogs/2025/5g-redcap.html https://www.t-mobile.com/news/network/5g-redcap-powering-sma...

Wouldn’t surprise me to see modems and eSIMs and embedded PCB antennas some day down the line.