MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2025-12-20 08:21:53+00:00
I read that WSJ article before seeing this blog post. I found it mildly interesting and a little bit funny but unsurprising that the AI failed. However, I think this blog about the article misses a key point. Anthropic's goal was never to develop an AI-based vending machine. The WSJ clearly says:

> "Logan Graham, head of Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team, told me the company chose a vending machine because it’s the simplest real-world version of a business. “What’s more straightforward than a box where things go in, things go out and you pay for them?” he said."

This was a project of Anthropic's Red Team, not a product development team. Deploying the AI in a vending machine context was chosen as a minimal "toy model" with which to expose how LLMs can't even handle a grossly simplified "business" with the fewest possible variables.

> "That was the point, Anthropic says. The Project Vend experiment was designed by the company’s stress testers (aka “red team”) to see what happens when an AI agent is given autonomy, money—and human colleagues."

Anthropic had already done this experiment internally and it succeeded - by failing to operate even the simplest business but doing so in ways that informed Anthropic's researchers about failure modes. Later, Anthropic offered to allow the WSJ to repeat the experiment, an obvious PR move to promote Anthropic's AI safety efforts by highlighting the kinds of experiments their Red Team does to expose failure modes. Anthropic knew it would fail abjectly at the WSJ. The whole concept of an AI vending machine with the latitude to set prices, manage inventory and select new products was intended to be ludicrous from the start.
by Animats | 2025-12-20 08:22:37+00:00
No reports are from UFODAP sensors.[1]

UFODAP supposedly has about a hundred automatic cameras around the world, mostly in the US. You can buy the hardware. It's a pan-tilt-zoom camera under a plastic dome, with hardware that looks for moving objects in the sky, photographs, and tracks them. Analysis software recognizes birds and aircraft. If two sites connected to the same control program lock onto a target, they can triangulate. It's possible to use ADS-B data for filtering out known aircraft. The hardware is good enough to detect and track the International Space Station.

But they don't see to be catching much.

Incidentally, hobbyists have been flying triangular jet-powered high speed drones since at least 2017.[2] Watch the video. That would look like a UFO if it wasn't a clear day and the pilot wasn't making low passes. Many of the "flying triangles" are probably something like that.

Russia, Ukraine, and Iran all use something similar, in various sizes.

[1] https://ufodap.com/technology

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k
by culi | 2025-12-20 08:25:51+00:00
Here's a comparison including the big 3, ladybird, servo, and flow

https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&product=chrome&product...

To answer your question, yes. Apple requires 80% test passage of all the tests on web-platforms-test in order to be considered as a valid browser for iOS so they specifically targeted this suite to reach that milestone

It's a pretty silly requirement because wpt is not really meant to be representative of all web platform standards. It includes tests for non-standard features and the majority of tests are simple unicode glyph rendering tests.
by runtimepanic | 2025-12-20 08:26:55+00:00
Burp Suite can do much of this as well, but the intent feels different. Charles is very much about observing and understanding raw HTTP(S) traffic with minimal friction, which makes it handy for quick debugging, mobile app inspection, or client-side issues. Burp leans heavily into security workflows: interception, replay, automation, and attack surface exploration. That power comes with more setup and a more opinionated UI. I’ve found Charles useful when I want visibility without switching into “pentest mode,” whereas Burp shines when security analysis is the goal.
by dangus | 2025-12-20 08:26:56+00:00
Interesting, I have never seen CityNerd take a video down. I’ll summarize it below my next couple of paragraphs.

Criticizing a source for being in video format and therefore taking time to digest is an invalid criticism. If I linked you a scientific study you’d still have to take time to read it to properly evaluate it. Just because a source in video form doesn’t make it not a source, and it’s not asymmetric trolling warfare. I’m literally just providing a source that aligns with my perspective and opinion, and trying to have a good faith discussion.

I will also point out that every YouTube video provides a full automated transcript on the desktop version of YouTube.

The gist of the video was that some selected American cities presented in a “worst to best” list have an interesting effect going on where people who live in suburban car-dependent areas can potentially live in their metro area’s most walkable neighborhoods with rich urban fabric without sacrificing a lot of square feet or potentially even gaining more space in their home by removing the cost of owning a car and putting that into their rent instead. Ray Delahanty, a (former?) professional city planner, ran through some data on this based on median rent in various neighborhoods and an assumed TCO of personal vehicle ownership of around $750 a month. Metro areas like New York City fared poorly but others presented an interesting trade-off potential.

Obviously, it was something of a simplified discussion that doesn’t take into account every life factor that determines whether car ownership is a requirement, but he is a guy who lived without a car in Las Vegas of all places, so I think the general point was to present a thought experiment on what kind of lifestyle you can get if you change your perspective to consider the idea of ditching your car entirely and no longer pay the very high average costs that Americans incur to own, operate, store, and maintain their vehicles.
by sixtyj | 2025-12-20 08:27:43+00:00
GDPR has fines:

Up to EUR 10,000,000 or up to 2% of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher; applies to infringements such as controller and processor obligations, security of processing, record-keeping, and breach notification duties.

Up to EUR 20,000,000 or up to 4% of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher; applies to infringements of basic principles for processing, data subjects’ rights, and unlawful transfers of personal data to third countries or international organisations.
by Wilder7977 | 2025-12-20 08:27:57+00:00
Yes, accessing more than half of the market in US and about 25% of the worldwide one is surprisingly something businesses want to do.

Of course businesses do it because it's profitable. The point is that the market is ridiculously controlled while you are pretending that businesses can make _free_ choices, while for many of them they are not free or in some cases not even choices.
by runtimepanic | 2025-12-20 08:28:22+00:00
PDF files rely on compression algorithms like LZW and ZLIB to reduce size, but these choices can have security implications. In this post, I analyze CVE-2025-66019, a Denial of Service vulnerability in pypdf’s LZW decompression logic. I walk through how LZW works internally, why its dictionary growth can be abused, and why algorithms like ZLIB don’t suffer from the same class of issue. The article includes interactive examples so readers can experiment with compression and decompression behavior themselves.
by dangus | 2025-12-20 08:28:56+00:00
Ray is a reasonably well-known current/former professional city planner who does look at data to make his content.

The videos he makes do sometimes use napkin math but in the way a city planner does napkin math - with data.

They also don’t claim to be a comprehensive study and each video is accompanied by a pretty thorough disclaimer on what methods are being used.

Odd and unfortunate that this one was taken down.
by runtimepanic | 2025-12-20 08:29:23+00:00
What’s interesting to me is how functional this is, not just decorative. The fake food isn’t about realism for its own sake, but about reducing ambiguity: you instantly understand portion size, ingredients, and even relative price without sharing a language. In a way it feels like a very physical form of UX design, solving a real communication problem long before digital menus or translations were common. I’m curious whether this tradition persists mainly out of nostalgia now, or if restaurants still see measurable benefits from it.
by numpy-thagoras | 2025-12-20 08:29:39+00:00
I accept any and all downvotes, but...

It's not flying saucers, it's weird orbs / spheres. There is volume of footage, and sufficient quality. I think we're past the point of "is it real" and more at "okay so what is this really and what is it doing".

If we could take Tier 1 reports from NUFORC, have tons of metrics available with sensor data, we can make a better guess.
by zeristor | 2025-12-20 08:30:38+00:00
Impressive piece of work, first time I’ve heard of this.

I had heard that tunnels were a good first step for rolling out super conducting cables, but that doesn’t seem to be a thing.

Superconducting cables have progressed a lot. I’m assuming that setting up a cryogenic system to keep cables cool enough, in a confined space wasn’t thought to be worth it.

The tunnels look tight enough, and boiling liquid nitrogen from a leak could cause asphyxiation I imagine.
by armchairhacker | 2025-12-20 08:30:40+00:00
tl;dr “Privacy” = the data is private i.e. only on your devices. Or if the raw data is public but encrypted and the key is private, I think that qualifies.

“Anonymity” = the data is public but not linked to its owner’s identity.

If you’re sharing your data with a website (e.g. storing it unencrypted), but they promise not to leak it, the data is only “private” between you and them…which doesn’t mean much, because they may not (and sometimes cannot) keep that promise. But if the website doesn’t attribute the data except to a randomly-generated identifier (or e.g. RSA public key), the data is anonymous. That’s the article.

Although a server does provide real privacy if it stores user data encrypted and doesn’t store the key, and you can verify this if you have the client’s unobfuscated source.

Also note that anonymity is less secure than privacy because the information provides clues to the owner. e.g. if it’s a detailed report on a niche topic with a specific bias and one person is known to be super interested in that topic with that bias, or if it contains parts of the owner’s PII. But it’s much better than nothing.
by jibal | 2025-12-20 08:31:06+00:00
> I think we're past the point of "is it real"

Indeed, rational people know it's not real.

(Yes, there are almost certainly other intelligent lifeforms in the universe. No, they have not been here. In the 1950's my brother became very interested in UFO sightings and maintained files of 3x5 cards detailing them. Then he grew up.)
by binaryturtle | 2025-12-20 08:31:17+00:00
In my experience the small projects with actual volunteers have no trouble helping out here. They are happy to accept a patch too, f.ex.

It's the big "open source" projects with company backing (or other larger organisational structures) behind them which supposedly have a lot of "volunteers" (probably some paid folks, and IMHO lots of people that just slave away for free for someone else's gain) that often have trouble keeping 3 or 4 code lines for backwards compatibility.

I wrote hundreds of GitHub issues, send in patches too, etc., and most discrimination you get is from the bigger projects (not saying this is the case for Rust here; I simply haven't managed to get Rust going at all, so I couldn't even report an issue or send in a patch to fix something.) I do not use the term "discrimination" lightly either. Not everyone can afford to buy new hardware when Apple decides to abandon specific machines, often w/o true technical need (see OpenCore which proves this point). So this is essentially a discrimination of a poor minority.

For "infrastructure" projects like Rust and Go where a lot of other projects depend upon I generally would prefer a more conservative approach here, which doesn't seem to happen for some reason or another… "for the sake of 'progress'", I guess.
by acheong08 | 2025-12-20 08:31:24+00:00
I built a bad clone of Charles Proxy over the summer as part of another project (iOS VPN -> mitm with custom root certificate -> logging). It's surprisingly simple. It basically goes App -> Packet tunnel -> SOCKS -> a child process (I used https://github.com/AdguardTeam/gomitmproxy) to handle the sniffing and reencryption.

Did post the source somewhere at some point but my git server got corrupted and I haven't gone and fixed it. https://github.com/acheong08/apple-corelocation-experiments/...

I wonder if AI is good enough to vibe code my horrible hacks into a full clone of Charles Proxy these days.

Annoying fact: Apple requires you to have a paid developer account to access the Packet Tunnel APIs. You can't even test it in XCode simulator because of how networking works in there. It's insane that I can't even develop for my own phone without paying an extra fee to Apple. The error message when you sideload without a paid account doesn't make it obvious at all and it took me a good day or two before realizing .
by numpy-thagoras | 2025-12-20 08:31:44+00:00
This is great for skywatching but at 32GB it only takes brief photos, and rarely video.

A real setup needs multiple 4K cameras, some kind of LWIR, MWIR, etc. as well as SDR with proper antennae for each of their respective performance envelopes.

I think it's good, but it will not be good at picking up the "targets of opportunity".
by pjmlp | 2025-12-20 08:31:48+00:00
Most students in Portugal still deliver their work assigments in paper, and if they want a computer, parents buy one to have at home, usually shared by all that are going to school.

We have had national IDs since forever, with fingerprints, we don't go crazy about it like in some other countries, even though we suffered a dictorship with lots of human losses, colonial wars, and even though PIDE/DGS wasn't KGB or Stasi level, it also managed to impact our society.

I should know, I am part of the first generation to grow up in freedom, while hearing the grown up stories of how everything came to be.
by t43562 | 2025-12-20 08:32:22+00:00
The first computer I touched, and I'm not that old, had 1kb RAM (ZX81) so the pico is a supercomputer next to that. It has all happened gradually but in a way I feel a little bit sorry for the whippersnappers that haven't experienced the incredible advancements. Looking back is different to remembering how one looked forward and how the actuality beat one's wildest dreams.

There are still older people than me who experienced an even steeper curve but I hope that my daughter will enjoy the same thing - to live in a massively better world than the one she started in.

It's not better in the human ways - still lots of fighting and evil - but it's great to be able to stay in touch with one's family over huge distances and to be able to make boredom vanish at the touch of a button, to want to fix something and instantly get 100 videos of how to do it. To find some bit of code extremely boring to write and to get a machine to write it.
by neonsunset | 2025-12-20 08:32:31+00:00
Nim "cheats" in a similar way C and C++ submissions do: -fno-signed-zeros -fno-trapping-math

Although arguably these flags are more reasonable than allowing the use of -march=native.

Also consider the inherent advantage popular languages have: you don't need to break out to a completely niche language, while achieving high performance. Saying this, this microbenchmark is naive and does not showcase realistic bottlenecks applications would face like how well-optimized standard library and popular frameworks are, whether the compiler deals with complexity and abstractions well, whether there are issues with multi-threaded scaling, etc etc. You can tell this by performance of dynamically typed languages - since all data is defined in scope of a single function, the compiler needs to do very little work and can hide the true cost of using something like Lua (LuaJIT).
by snackbroken | 2025-12-20 08:33:54+00:00
In a newspaper the answer is simple. You linearly scan the leftmost column to the bottom of the page, then the next column, then the next, and so on until you get to the end of the page. At no point do you ever need to keep track of anything other than "this is how far I've gotten" to make sure you haven't missed anything. Columnar layout make sense in newspapers because both axes are fixed in size, so all you ever do is one long linear scan with wraparound.
by zeristor | 2025-12-20 08:34:37+00:00
Amazing visualisation, an excellent tool.

Are there other sites that can suggest how much of an issue it is, and how much flight plan tweaking could improve this.

Remember kids a 1° C rise in temperature can mean 7% more water vapour in the air, and with water vapour being a greenhouse gas itself this can cause heating and holding yet more water.
by vouwfietsman | 2025-12-20 08:35:30+00:00
> I think our other primitives (task queues, streaming, concurrency, rate limiting, retries) are more widely used than our `durableTasks` feature because of this very problem you're describing

Indeed, I'm happy to hear you say this.

I think it should be the other way around: if durable tasks are properly understood its actually the queues/streaming/concurrency/ratelimits/retries that can be abstracted away and ignored.

Funny, I never realised this before.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-20 08:35:40+00:00
There is no such thing as anonymity. With the number of bits required to ID a person and the fact that you are leaking such bits all the time you can simply forget about anonymity.

Many people online seem to think that they are anonymous and so were emboldened to do stuff that they might not have done if they had realized this. They continued to feel extremely good at this right up until the knock on the door.
by larusso | 2025-12-20 08:36:37+00:00
I don’t want to throw process at the problem. I think GH should provide a better system not the developers locking down dependencies and adding extra processes and steps to update the CI via a PR workflow. Not like PRs became the development bottleneck anyways for a lot of development teams these days. I wonder how we functioned 15 years ago with trunk based YOLO development. I also think that it wasn’t the best idea to base versioning on mutable branches and not introduce a registry in the middle. Think about it. The whole system is build on node anyways. But we pull “dependencies” via a weak git clone system.
by hnlmorg | 2025-12-20 08:36:45+00:00
> For one thing, the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist. Gaming is a market. There are many gaming platforms that are extremely popular. Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Steam, and then just open

Except there isn’t multiple stores on Xbox or PlayStation or Switch. Which is directly comparable to the iOS lock ins that Epic was fighting against.

> But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.

True but also irrelevant. Monopoly laws don’t make those distinctions.

> And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong.

Again, monopoly laws don’t make any distinction here. However to answer your direct point, some consoles are marketed as more general purpose devices for taxation reasons. All consoles support YouTube, most have other streaming services from Netflix to Spotify. They all come with a fully capable web browser. Even their hardware has been generic for the last few generations of consoles. So they are general purpose devices in all metrics aside from the variety of apps available. And you could argue the reason for this is literally because of their “App Store” lock ins. So your argument here is evidence against the point you’re trying to make.

> General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life.

That’s not the definition of a “general purpose computing device” and I reject the idea that iOS and Android are equivalent to water, roads and electricity.

I do agree that smartphones are a MASSIVELY useful asset, but you don’t actually need a smartphone for modern life. Plenty of older people still manage just fine without iOS nor Android. They’ll use a laptop or PC to access the same services via a web browser.

Furthermore, the companies who are fighting iOS lock ins are not critical services. Epic, for example, is a gaming company. They don’t provide health or banking services. You can’t do your taxes in Fortnight. You don’t book your car in for a service via an app built in Unreal Engine. Epic build games not essential infrastructure.
by anon7000 | 2025-12-20 08:38:50+00:00
Yeah, GHA has a massive plugin ecosystem. A common pattern is using an “action” from a plugin as one CI step/job. So these are dependencies that get resolved at runtime when GHA puts together your workload.

Other CI platforms have plugins, but the “plugins” in GitHub really get used as the core primitive of the system, which is part of what makes it so simple & easy to use… for really basic workflows. You just hook up a couple actions like this and you’re good to go, no shell scripting required. (Though you can totally do that too.)

I mean at the end of the day, it’s a big part of the value proposition, even if I prefer a much more bare metal approach. GHA is really not great at massive CI workloads.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-20 08:40:57+00:00
I think the theory is something like 'ok, the bucket will be smaller but we're the same so effectively we will grow' where 'we' is the wealthy assholes that power this movement.

The fact that a couple of million (billion?) people could die as a result of their landgrab is none of their concern. The billionaire class appears to be divorced from reality to a very dangerous degree, and there are enough useful idiots willing to hand them their support to make this a very dangerous time. I don't think we've ever been closer to potentially losing it all than we are right now.

You're looking at 'divide and conquer' on a scale that we have never seen before and there are enough dominoes falling already that I don't even know if it still can be arrested.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-12-20 08:41:30+00:00
The relationship to police is not bad in France. For the everyday Joe there are zero concerns.

You see people negotiating with police when pulled over, if this is in the typical "latin" way it is fair game.

I was taught as a kid to always go to police when in trouble. Taught the same to my kids.

Now, I live west of Paris which means that right from the start the relationship is better. In other places this may need very different.
by jokoon | 2025-12-20 08:42:42+00:00
I disagree

What really matters is judiciary due process and the legitimacy of a government.

Companies are the ones gathering data, it's not the government doing it.

Before the internet, governments already had data on their citizens.

The internet makes it more difficult for the government to catch criminals and fraudsters.

If you live in Russia or China or under Trump's administration, there are good reasons to hide.

If you live in a country where freedoms and due process are respected, there is no point in hiding, UNLESS you can really argue that due process and freedoms are eroding, but that's a different debate.