MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jtsummers | 2025-12-15 19:47:53+00:00
Not for people with just a BS, at least outside certain areas (DC) and roles (cybersecurity). GS-12 was a more typical "target" position (with GS-13 on occasion, like at some of the labs) back in 2010. A masters or a PhD could have bumped you up to GS-13/14/15 though.

Target: People typically enter, when coming out of college, at a lower grade in the GS-5/7/9 area with a target position of one of GS-11/12/13. IT (not CS) folks were often in GS-11 targeted positions, computer scientists and engineers often in GS-12 positions. They'd get promoted in two grade increases (5 to 7, 7 to 9, 9 to 11) or one grade increases (11 to 12, 12 to 13) until they hit their target grade. At a rate of either one increase per year or per 6 months depending on when they got hired, by what agency, and in what role. An IT person, usually one increase per year; engineer, typically two increases per year. Computer scientists usually got screwed and got one increase per year which meant you had fewer of them wanting to work for the government (they also, at that time, rarely got signing bonuses). This leaves a lot of the software shops in DOD (where I had experience) mostly filled with aerospace and electrical engineers.

"Cyber" roles (security; which could be a couple different job series) in some agencies jumped up faster or had a higher target grade due to the need (or perceived need) for more people.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-15 19:48:12+00:00
> D-Bus was introduced by GNOME folks about 20 years ago. For software made only 20 years ago, as opposed to 40 like X, it's surprisingly almost equally as bad.

That's not a surprise. The author of systemd, for instance, is working for Microsoft. Suddenly all those changes to the Linux ecosystem make a lot of sense. It became a corporate commodity, from A to Z. And when that is your objective, it kind of makes sense to have a unified system, even if it is crap.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 19:48:22+00:00
I guess this is one of the reasons, why I don't use C++. Temporaries is a topic, where C++ on one side and me and C on the other side has had disagreements in the past. Why does changing the type even create another object at all? Why does it allocate? Why doesn't the optimizer use the effective type to optimize that away?
by danaris | 2025-12-15 19:48:34+00:00
The switch away from teaching phonics, and the consequent drop in literacy, is real.

It is not particularly something that was pushed by teacher unions.

The "three cueing model" was being pushed for some time as being more effective due to widely-promoted misunderstanding and misinformation by one guy whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten (I was reading about this a few months ago, and don't have the references to hand). It correctly recognizes that highly adept readers do not mentally sound out every word, but rather recognize known words very quickly from a few individual aspects of the word. However, this skill absolutely 100% requires having first learned the fundamentals of reading through phonics, and its proponents thought they could skip that step.
by mattmanser | 2025-12-15 19:48:50+00:00
Aquavoice, YC company, really good. Got it after doing a bit of research on here, there's something for Mac that's supposed to be good too.

If you want local transcription, locally running models aren't quite good enough yet.

They use right-ctrl as their trigger. I've set mine to double tap and then I can talk with long pauses/thinking and it just keeps listening till I tap to finish.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-15 19:49:00+00:00
> Ever seen kwallet or gnome-keyring? Yeah, these things. These are supposed to be "secret storage" for things like signing keys, passwords, etc. They can be protected by a password, which means they are secure... right? [...] any app on the bus can read all secrets in the store if the store is unlocked.

Well, TIL. Looks like the default GUI for that is `seahorse`, so let's see what I've got on a relatively fresh installation... Looks like mostly Chromium stuff where there's a key that unlocks something more application-specific (e.g. for Discord) and an access token for my JetBrains account.

So no plaintext passwords per se, but now I wonder what a malicious app might uncover if it pursued the local Chromium stuff.
by IIsi50MHz | 2025-12-15 19:49:38+00:00
But…LAMBDA()! And LET() and friends.

Also, the Excel Labs formula editor. But it needs a way to tell it "I know I have too many cells! Just let me trace over the 100 nearest rows."

The old scripting language can still be handy if you can keep people from opening the online version of Excel. Especially if you have a certain debugger addin[1]. Excel's JavaScript features are of limited use, if you're offline.

I keep wishing for a spreadsheet to implement all its scripting and formulas in something like Forth behind the scenes, so that every time a competitor announces n-more functions, we can just be like "Oh, really?" and add it.

[1] Related to waterfowl of the plasticised yellow variety. I'm not sure I can mention the name in a post anymore, since ages ago when I tried multiple times to post a properly-referenced (overly-hyperlinked?) message while my connection was very flaky. Note to self: should probably mail dang about this, some day.
by judah | 2025-12-15 19:49:40+00:00
Israel does have a military presence in the West Bank due to the monthly terrorist attacks on Jewish citizens in the West Bank and Israel, currently at 57 attacks per month this year.

As for settlers, I ask readers to observe the double standard: Jews who live in Palestinian areas are "illegal settlers" and "stealing land", but Arabs who live in Israel are entitled to free education, healthcare, citizenship, voting rights, and representation in the government.

Why the double standard?
by ratsbane | 2025-12-15 19:49:44+00:00
https://provenancevault.com/

I started this over the summer when I was moving to a new house and wanted to document the family history behind some thing I own. It's turned out to be more useful than I thought and I've expanded the features as friends found it useful. A developer friend, who I used to work with, joined me and we're both working on it now. It does have a little revenue now but we are far from quitting our day jobs.

I'd really like any feedback from the HN community!
by indoordin0saur | 2025-12-15 19:49:54+00:00
You don't even need to go overseas. Just look at the NY Times and why they got the Iraq war so wrong or for even more egregious examples go and look at our wars before that. The fact that many of the high level positions on the news desk at the Times are filled by former employees of the US State department or intelligence agencies might give you a hint.
by liuliu | 2025-12-15 19:49:56+00:00
I read it (and regret it is a waste of my time). Their arguments are:

* integer keys are faster;

* uuidv7 keys are faster;

* if you want obfuscated keys, using integer and do some your own obfuscation (!!!).

I can get on-board of uuidv7 (with the trade-off, of course, on stronger guessability). The integer keys argument is strange. At that point, you need to come up with a custom-built system to avoid id collision in a distribution system and tries to achieve only 2x saving (the absolute minimal you should do is 64-bit keys). Very puzzling suggestion and to me very wrong.

Note that in this entire article, the recommendation is not about using natural keys (email address, some composite of user identification etc.), so I am skipping that whole discussion.
by 0x3f | 2025-12-15 19:50:06+00:00
> You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred.

I don't think that's a fair characterisation. Recently we've convicted:

- an ex-footballer (i.e. someone with the means to mount a proper defence) for calling someone a 'diversity hire'; and - someone burning a religious text in the street, as a protest.

Are these really meeting your bar for inciting violence and/or hatred? At a level might warrant imprisonment? For me, these things are not even borderline; they are well into legitimate free speech territory and the government shouldn't be trying its best to stifle them.

And those are just successful convictions, not initiated prosecutions, or the wider chilling effects of it all.

Even if what you said were true, those two things are largely legal in the US, so I wouldn't really say it's their tabloids over-hyping it as much as they legitimately find the actual standards here questionable.
by kccqzy | 2025-12-15 19:50:49+00:00
It’s not a buried sentence. It’s a section heading in large font saying “ The 777-200 Problem Is Not Safety. It Is Economics.”

Then there’s a whole paragraph stating “The Boeing 777-200 is not an unsafe airplane. As far as I can tell, that is not the issue even after the incident over Dulles over the weekend.”

Then just in case the reader jumped to conclusions, the first sentence of the conclusion again says it’s safe.
by SirMaster | 2025-12-15 19:51:33+00:00
OK but how realistic is that? Not everyone lives in a city nearby local stores.

There is such a wide variety of products that people go to Amazon for. I know I do. So many things are niche I can't see how any local stores could exist to stock things like that in even a 1 hour range from a majority of the population.

How many people are going to drive hours to go to a special boutique that has this random thing they want or need?

Maybe people use Amazon to buy routine things that could easily be stocked locally. But I guess I use Amazon to get things that I can't really get or even usually find anywhere else for that matter. Most come from small operations using Amazon as their sales platform. Amazon is providing a lot of discoverability and logistics to them and I am not sure I would even stumble across the seller if I had to find some tiny website that they operated themselves.

I am not sure most people would prefer to shop locally, most people don't seem to even go to the store anymore and instead use delivery services for everything. This saves so much time to allow us to do other things that we enjoy in our lives. I don't think small shops would be able to offer this level of convenience.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-15 19:51:36+00:00
Wherever they might be working now.. isn't really relevant to the project

> Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd,[2] started a project to replace Linux's conventional System V init in 2010.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History
by volf_ | 2025-12-15 19:52:09+00:00
The world is filled with "good enough" solutions. If it has 80% of the functionally needed, it will be good enough for most use cases.

> the most meritorious solution never rises to the top

You know why? Because it was the best solution at the time that covered everything they needed. You can only complain about it because the initial problem was solved and people were able to move on to something else.

Does it work for what we need it to do? Yes? Ok. Now that we have settled this problem, we can continue on developing.

Meritocracy is only relevant to someone who has ideas but no desire or ability to actually structure the idea in such a way that would work in the world we find ourselves in today.

> Maybe D-Bus has something similar?

So you just commented here to say nothing but "dbus sucks because it isn't the best. I wonder if there are better options?".
by shevy-java | 2025-12-15 19:52:26+00:00
We may need both actually: solid protocol and great reference implementation.

Wayland was advertised as protocol mostly. After almost 20 years, it still has not promised to be a full replacement to xorg and probably never will, where wayland developers say "this is not our goal". Took people quite some time to realise that; it's been more recently become obvious, but say, 12 years ago few understood this.

I still have not been able to find working replacements to all that works on xorg, for instance; specifically imagemagick is different on wayland. I may try again at a later point in time, but my old workings there did not work, and replacements seem dead or ineffective or incomplete - that is quite frustrating for something that was aggressively advertised as "this is now the future".
by danaris | 2025-12-15 19:52:27+00:00
Well, the right wing also wants to destroy education, which is pretty bad for teachers in or out of a union.

The teaching profession also has a tendency (far from a universal rule) to select for people with higher compassion and empathy, which has been outright called a "sin" by the right wing.

So yeah, if you're mad at teachers' unions for supporting left-wing political causes & politicians, you're, uh, kinda barking up the wrong tree. Or upset at water for being wet. Or something.
by senko | 2025-12-15 19:52:48+00:00
A gold standard behaviour for when you want to replace a disfunctional tool/system and will require buy-in from a wide community, is to behave like Charlie Marsh did with ruff and uv.

He didn't barge in guns blazing proclaiming "pip is a disgrace" and "it's a fuckin joke". He wrote a tool that was much better and encourage others to try it. Within a year or so, it snowballed into an unstoppable change.

This project currently has a bunch of C++ files, no docs, no tests, no roadmap on how it might replace d-bus, nothing. And as another commenter pointed out, starting a new system service in 2025, yelling about security, and doing this in an unsafe language doesn't inspire confidence.

Lennart Poettering, Theo de Raadt and Linus Torvalds may get away with talking like this, but if you seriosly want to bring a wide community on board (without which the entire thing is a non-starter), look to Charlie instead.

Oh, and also, if you think D-Bus is bad, consider yourself lucky you didn't need to use the thing it replaced - CORBA.
by antiloper | 2025-12-15 19:52:51+00:00
> Make clients store a cookie or something and only reply if they prove ownership of it

Unix domain socket authentication is stronger and doesn't require storing cookies on the client side.

> what the hell is your threat model here? The attacker is just going to ptrace firefox and read all the secrets anyway.

Which is why you can (and people do, e.g. flatpak) run applications where ptrace or global filesystem access is blocked. Which is why portals exist and why there shouldn't be a "get all secrets via dbus" escape hatch.

> I _want_ other programs to be able to read secrets (e.g. keyring administrators, .netrc-style shared secrets, etc.)

Then don't use it? Secure defaults matter for most users.

> Do you hate a{sv}? If you propose JSON as alternative, you are going to make me laugh.

Find the *kwargs here: https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-shell

Etc. etc. This isn't the 90s anymore.
by MarkusQ | 2025-12-15 19:52:55+00:00
"Went" is a powerful word. With suitable helpers it can replace "proceeded", as you demonstrated, "attended" ("I went to a good school") as well as "became" ("On hearing this, Joe went all silent") or "said" ("So then she went 'Dude!' and we all laughed") and hundreds of other words.

Only a handful of words ("got", "y'know" and "fuck") rival its versatility.
by miki123211 | 2025-12-15 19:52:59+00:00
To a European like me, United was such a weird airline to fly.

There were actual commercials played before the safety video, the cabin crew warned passengers to make sure children cannot see the adult content they're watching (can you get more American than that?), and their credit card was offered multiple times during the flight. At least the WiFi was reasonably cheap.

Over here, that stuff would never fly (no pun intended), except maybe on Ryanair or other extremely low-cost carriers. On e.g. a Lufthansa longhaul flight, which are priced similarly and cover the same route I flew (fra-ord), it would be unthinkable.
by josh2600 | 2025-12-15 19:52:59+00:00
This is why signal’s encrypted phone number lookup system is so cool. The server uses a bitwise xor when querying for numbers using hardware encrypted ram. The result is that even if you’re examining the machine at the most basic levels you can’t tell the difference between a negative or positive hit for the phone number unless you’re the phone requesting the api.

Obviously ratelimiting is a separate and important issue in api management.

The thing about building secure systems is that there are a lot of edges to cover.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-15 19:53:04+00:00
> Not for people with just a BS, at least outside certain areas (DC) and roles (cybersecurity)

Based on the FAQ, US Tech Force roles are located in DC (so they'll get the DC adjustment) and from the sounds of it, this proposal is the AI Washing the "Cyber Service" or "Cyber Exempted Service".

Also, based on Scott Kupor's (former Managing Parter at A16Z turned head of OPM) memo [0] it appears they seem to be using the same approach used to start the USDS back in the Obama admin. And based on their mention of "fellows", I think they'll merging parts of what used to be the Presidential Management Fellows program.

If AI-washing and Trump-washing helps maintain the core of these programs, there's nothing wrong with that.

Edit:

Dug deeper thru the FAQ - it's basically an AI washed version of the PMF and PIF.

[0] - https://www.opm.gov/chcoc/latest-memos/building-the-ai-workf...
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 19:53:27+00:00
> Phone. Or a wristwatch if you're that type.

Sure, but why would I look down, when there is a clock in every direction I look at. I wristwatch would also be analog again.

> My last 7+ exams were all done on a computer. That clock was a lot closer than any that happen to be on a wall.

I have no clue how your university does prevent cheating, but ok. Here any kind of network-connected(/connectable) device is forbidden. And then there is math, where the only thing you are allowed to have is a pen and the formulary (and maybe a ruler).
by conrs | 2025-12-15 19:53:37+00:00
> What made it worth it for you?

- Like you mentioned, it helps me learn more about a topic/explore it more deeply, I usually begin with an intuition and then explore outwards.

- Folks positively mention my articles - both current connections and new connections.

- They sometimes spark interesting discussion which helps refine my knowledge further.

> What kinds of posts actually worked (for learning, career, network, opportunities)?

- Hard to say, I don't have a high signal here. Usually just having some content for people to skim was enough, but folks would tend to mention nearly random articles depending on their interests.

> Any practical format that lowers the bar (length, cadence, themes)?

- I'm not a great blogger in that I have no established cadence. I didn't want pressure to deliver crap (biweekly), nor did I want necessarily to put posts on too high of a pedestal (monthly+).

> If you were starting today, what would you do differently?

- Highly recommend going with simple tech. A static site based on Markdown does wonders. Offload discussion threads to sites like HN or reddit - the comment section of your links.
by codegeek | 2025-12-15 19:53:45+00:00
I have worked in edtech industry for 10+ years now. Every time the word "gamification" comes up in a conversation (with users, customers, internet posts), it reminds me of the quote from the great Charlie Munger "Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome". Basically, gamification is supposed to incentivize the learner but a majority of training/learnings are unfortunately mostly about "checking a box" especially when it comes to required/regulated trainings (I mostly work with customers in these areas).

So if you are building a learning app where learning is forced on the learner by someone else (their boss, employer, parent etc), then gamification won't be of any real use. No one will care if they just unlocked some imaginary points.

On the other hand, my kids love learning in apps like Duolingo where they are proud of the "streak" they have for continuous number of days. But here is the thing. No one asked them to learn this stuff. They got interested (by watching a friend etc) and now they are playing the same game.
by judah | 2025-12-15 19:53:49+00:00
Sure. Just tell me how Israel should prevent the hundreds of terrorist attacks per month coming from the West Bank. There were 214 terrorist attacks per month in 2023, now down to 57/month today; thanks primarily to new security checkpoints.

Perhaps if Fatah would redirect its funding away from terrorism, there would be fewer security checkpoints and more self-determination for its people.
by Findecanor | 2025-12-15 19:54:43+00:00
The counter in a pointer is still a kind of key, even if not cryptographic. What I mean is the risk of hitting the limit of number of available counter bits.

Some approaches on this take the probabilistic route and reuse counter values. Others invalidate the object ID when the counter wraps. I've myself designed a system that did the latter, but I think that was viable in that case only because the churn was expected to be extremely low. But for arbitrary pointers in arbitrary programs you can not make such an assumption.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-15 19:54:57+00:00
> there are plenty of ways that the government can interfere in an otherwise fair market

There's no such thing as "otherwise fair market" outside of government regulation. Ergo, any "interference" is for someone's benefit, and as a rule that's not the government. In other words, seeking economics explanations to political phenomena isn't going to lead to anything useful.

> Baumol is empirically good at predicting price movements.

Until something else explains the facts better - AnthonyMouse wrote about a better theory that can actually be expanded to a fairly precise descriptive model, despite the fact that the quantitative part of it would be politics dependent.
by oersted | 2025-12-15 19:54:57+00:00
I feel like you are overthinking it. There's a segment of the population that share a set of values, they are collectively more active than average in imposing their worldview on the rest, and they've had a strong momentum towards their goals for a while.

They are labeled MAGA, and they are as real as any widespread social movement could be. If your point is that social movements don't really exist as a "material" entity, then we are just arguing semantics.