MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by monerozcash | 2025-12-08 00:35:14+00:00
Curiously, the US Government has never made that allegation. There's significant circumstantial evidence to suggest that the US Government may not believe TSB to be Russian intelligence.

USG had no problem blaming Russian intelligence for many other things that were going on at the same time, but they never tied TSB to that bigger picture.

Given what we know about the likes of Hal Martin, there's little reason to believe that only Russian intelligence could have been behind the shadow brokers leaks. In fact, there were rather suspiciously timed twitter DMs written by Hal Martin within minutes of TSB releasing NSA files.

However Marcy Wheeler does argue rather convincingly that Hal Martin's twitter account may have been hacked by TSB in an effort to frame him.

A curious OSINT detail about Hal Martin is that he was using the email address teamtao999@gmail.com on fling.com while looking for women interested in fetishes and group sex. The email address is a reference to the tailored access operations team within the NSA.

His twitter account (@HAL_999999999) created in 2010, also referenced TAO2 in it's avatar at the time of the TSB leaks. It's unclear for how long that was the case, as it was changed later on and there are no archives. Interestingly, he also used to be fairly active on the infosec twitter between 2011 and early 2016 and is featured in tweet chains with many fairly prominent individuals.

His OPSEC wasn't very good, it's perfectly possible he was compromised by some random person.

Edit #89: Okay, I'll throw in one more detail. Very interestingly, it was allegedly Kaspersky who turned in Hal Martin to the NSA after he tried to approach them over twitter. This might seem like a big deal right now, but at the time it wasn't. Russian cybersecurity companies used to be quite happy to work with their western counterparts and law enforcement shortly after this incident when among others Ruslan Stoyanov from Kaspersky was charged with (and later convicted of) treason for allegedly giving information to an American researcher.
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 00:35:34+00:00
> It is impossible for a simulink model to accidentally type `i > 0` when they meant `i >= 0`

That's a classic bias: Comparing A and B, show that B doesn't have some A flaws. If they are different systems, of course that's true. But it's also true that A doesn't have some B flaws. That is, what flaws does Autocode have that humans don't?

The fantasy that machines are infallible - another (implicit) argument in this thread - is just ignorance for any professional in technology.
by rr808 | 2025-12-08 00:36:22+00:00
I'm on Spark Scala 2 project and I hate it. Basically any good Scala dev would never want to work on our ETL projects, so we get second rate Python or Java devs like me who bastardize the language to get anything to work. Most of our new stuff is all pyspark, hopefully we can replace Scala asap.
by tehjoker | 2025-12-08 00:36:59+00:00
I think you are not being creative enough with how one might attempt this. For example, splice the cables leading to the datacenter, put an inconspicuous chip in the servers that intercepts the keys and feeds them via wireless signals to a collection point. Perhaps you could even do something clever like put very short range EMF into a metal co-location rack and collect the signals almost totally invisibly using a mesh network of devices built into the metal.

There's lots of fun tricks you can think of when you have national resources at your disposal.

However, you are forgetting that NSA works for Google. It works to support the promotion of American companies worldwide. They're on the same team, and Google knows that. They even have the same mission: To usefully organize the world's information!

Now that Google is openly a military contractor, it's even easier to make this click. Back in the day, you had to read things like this Julian Assuage piece to understand this: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
by btisler | 2025-12-08 00:37:00+00:00
I’ve been working on tools that specifically address this problem, but from the level upstream of citation. They don’t check whether a citation exists — instead they measure whether the reasoning pathway leading to a citation is stable, coherent, and free of the entropy patterns that typically produce hallucinations.

The idea is simple: • Bad citations aren’t the root cause. • They are a late-stage symptom of a broken reasoning trajectory. • If you detect the break early, the hallucinated citation never appears.

The tools I’ve built (and documented so anyone can use) do three things: 1. Measure interrogative structure — they check whether the questions driving the paper’s logic are well-formed and deterministic. 2. Track entropy drift in the argument itself — not the text output, but the structure of the reasoning. 3. Surface the exact step where the argument becomes inconsistent — which is usually before the fake citation shows up.

These instruments don’t replace peer review, and they don’t make judgments about culture or intent. They just expose structural instability in real time — the same instability that produces fabricated references.

If anyone here wants to experiment or adapt the approach, everything is published openly with instructions. It’s not a commercial project — just an attempt to stabilize reasoning in environments where speed and tool-use are outrunning verification.

Code and instrument details are in my CubeGeometryTest repo (the implementation behind ‘A Geometric Instrument for Measuring Interrogative Entropy in Language Systems’). https://github.com/btisler-DS/CubeGeometryTest This is still a developing process.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-08 00:37:28+00:00
It’s not a false dichotomy at all. There is a finite set of resources that can be deployed at any given time. $1 spent on a laptop is $1 that isn’t going to medicine. This usually a curve rather than a straight line (so usually you’re better off with some combination of both), but this doesn’t really apply to a situation where your limiting factor is dollars rather than the factors of production.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-08 00:37:44+00:00
I don't understand, all they have to do is tap submarine cables, why is that infeasible now? What specific thing do you think they were collecting before that they can't now?

Metadata is extremely valuable!! lots of things can be inferred from it. In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example. They can take any packet and trace it back to a specific individual, even if you're on Tor, chaining VPNs,etc.. without decrypting it. They can see what destinations you're visiting. they can build a pattern of life profile you and mine that. The ad industry does much of this without access to global internet traffic captures already lol.
by mootoday | 2025-12-08 00:38:14+00:00
I recently started to get an interest in writing a GUI with Rust. In particular, a database GUI.

Initially, I thought Tauri with Svelte. Then I learned about gpui (https://www.gpui.rs/) and I'm intrigued.

TIL about iced, which seems to have been around for a while.

Before I embark on building a prototype UI for my app with all three libraries, does anyone have hands-on experience they can share?
by 1659447091 | 2025-12-08 00:39:24+00:00
I vaguely remember a site where you could watch random people live streaming their programming environment, but I think twitch ate it, or maybe it was twitch -- not sure, but was interesting

[added] It was livecoding.tv - circa 2015 https://hackupstate.medium.com/road-to-code-livecoding-tv-e7...
by martin-t | 2025-12-08 00:39:26+00:00
Programmers are willingly blind to this, at least until it's their code being stolen or they lose their job.

_LLMs are lossily compressed archives of stolen code_.

Trying to achieve AI through compression is nothing new.[0] The key innovation[1] is that the model[2] does not output only the first order input data but also the higher order patterns from the input data.

That is certainly one component of intelligence but we need to recognize that the tech companies didn't build AI, they build a compression algorithm which, combined with the stolen input text, can reproduce the input data and its patterns in an intelligent-looking way.

[0]: http://prize.hutter1.net/

[1]: Oh, god, this phrase is already triggering my generated-by-LLM senses.

[2]: Model of what? Of the stolen text. If 99.9999% of the work to achieve AI wasn't done by people whose work was stolen, they wouldn't be called models.
by bxparks | 2025-12-08 00:39:43+00:00
[Passed my edit window, so replying to self]

Looks like the original repo of syncthing-android, (https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android), which was maintained by @Catfriend1, now redirects to the one maintained by @researchxxl (https://github.com/researchxxl/syncthing-android).

The problem seems to be that no one in the syncthing community knows who @researchxxl is. The account was created only 3 weeks ago. There was no communication about how the transfer took place. Was the transfer actually authorized? Did @Catfriend1 get hacked? People are worried about a backdoor hijack attack similar to the XZ libary.

There's a long discussion at https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing.... It is too long and complex for me to follow. (I tried to get an LLM to summarize that thread for me, but the output was not helpful.)

It is unclear what sycnthing-android users are supposed to do right now. I am staying at version 1.30.0.4 until things become more clear.
by conradev | 2025-12-08 00:40:26+00:00
The signing is definitely about control, as is all things with Apple, but there are security benefits. It's a pretty standard flow for dev tools to ad-hoc (self) sign binaries on macOS (either shelling out to codesign, or using a cross-platform tool like https://github.com/indygreg/apple-platform-rs). Nix handles that for me, for example.

It makes it easy for tools like Santa or Little Snitch to identify binaries, and gives the kernel/userspace a common language to chat process identity. You can configure similar for Linux: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/how-use-linux-kernels-integri...

But Apple's system is centralized. It would be nice if you could add your own root keys! They stay pretty close to standard X.509.
by LanceH | 2025-12-08 00:40:31+00:00
Lots and lots of articles written about 23% of 300 items -- at one store? Every store?

What's the actual extent of the problem?

There have been way too many articles and videos at this point to keep pointing at the same small data set.

I've personally never experienced an overcharge, and at 1 in 5, it should have happened by now.

Is this a one store thing, or a regional thing, or should I just put those thoughts on hold and rage blindly?
by samsolomon | 2025-12-08 00:40:44+00:00
I’m the design leader for an enterprise software company and would love to get rid of toasts. Places where feedback is immediate don’t need them and simple forms can probably be fine with a banner or alert.

Reasons that toasts are difficult to get rid of:

- Easy for developers to implement consistently.

- Providing feedback where actions are taken on elements not on the screen (like bulk actions on a data grid, or within our workflow).

- Dense UIs where actions are taken frequently and injecting an alert or banner to be dismissed adds a ton of work for users. Also, causing the UI to jump isn’t great.

Would love to hear solutions to the above.
by text0404 | 2025-12-08 00:40:57+00:00
What are you talking about? This is weaponization of the FBI to treat US citizens like criminals by designating them as terrorists or supporters of terrorism. This is not a "both sides" issue. This is the full weight of the state being used against its own citizens for constitutionally-protected activity.

You specifically mentioned Obama. How did the Obama admin do the same? Does it make this a dismissable non-issue?
by elmomle | 2025-12-08 00:41:03+00:00
Your comment seems to imply "these views aren't valid" without any evidence for that claim. Of course the theft claim was a strong one to make without evidence too. So, to that point--it's pretty widely accepted as fact that DeepSeek was at its core a distillation of ChatGPT. The question is whether that counts as theft. As to evidence, to my knowledge it's a combination of circumstantial factors which add up to paint a pretty damning picture:

(1) Large-scale exfiltration of data from ChatGPT when DeepSeek was being developed, and which Microsoft linked to DeepSeek

(2) DeepSeek's claim of training a cutting-edge LLM using a fraction of the compute that is typically needed, without providing a plausible, reproducible method

(3) Early DeepSeek coming up with near-identical answers to ChatGPT--e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1idqi7p/deepseek_a...
by martin-t | 2025-12-08 00:43:00+00:00
The whole "reproduces training data vebatim" is a red herring.

It reproduces _patterns from the training data_, sometimes including verbatim phrases.

The work (to discover those patterns, to figure out what works and what does not, to debug some obscure heisenbug and write a blog post about it, ...) was done by humans. Those humans should be compensated for their work, not owners of mega-corporations who found a loophole in copyright.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-08 00:43:34+00:00
If we were to accept that the NSA works for Google, there's even less reason to believe that Google would grant NSA full take access to plaintext content.

Google has a lot to lose by doing so, and not all that much to gain. Google has also been a leading force in pushing for broader use of encryption on the internet, making the NSAs work significantly more difficult even in a hypothetical scenario where Google is happy to give them anything they want.
by DaveZale | 2025-12-08 00:43:39+00:00
Also, what about stock options and getting vested? Some companies can offer tasty carrots. It's not always about the stick.

Anyone who has ever started their own business knows how hard (and rewarding) it can be- but you're just creating your own job. Nothing wrong with that. It is one of the best experiences in full accountability, but it's a job.
by phil21 | 2025-12-08 00:43:45+00:00
Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value?

A long time ago I used to help manage a couple retail stores. A $5k random expense would have put that location into the red for the month. Perhaps not the volume of a dollar store chain, but certainly not small either.

I have a feeling that if the $5k fines were basically guaranteed to happen with some regularity you’d see this cleaned up pretty quickly with local management replaced ASAP if not.

Enforcement doesn’t have to be over the top abusive with the goal to put a location out of business overnight. Especially in already underserved communities. Like everything to do with humans there simply needs to be consistent, reliable, and timely consequences to form a reliable and immediate feedback loop for behavior.

If a store makes it an actual policy to eat these fines then the fine amount needs adjusting. From everything in this article though the problem is simply it’s worth the gamble they don’t happen at all.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-12-08 00:45:04+00:00
It is important to understand that Dollar General and Family Dollar serve thousands of flyover communities where there are no Walmart stores or other viable market access. Dollar General has stated that it can generate profits in communities with fewer than 1,000 homes. Walmart generally requires a much larger population base for its stores.

Dollar General is the largest retailer in the US by number of locations, with over 20,000 stores across 48 states. Family Dollar operates over 8,200 stores. Walmart's U.S. store count is significantly smaller (around 4,700 U.S. Walmart stores and 600 Sam's Clubs as of 2024).

Dollar stores are frequently found at the heart of "food deserts," which are often rural communities located more than 10 miles from a grocery store selling fresh produce—a gap often created when a community is too small to maintain a supermarket or attract a retailer like Walmart.
by CPLX | 2025-12-08 00:45:33+00:00
What you’re saying just isn’t true.

Looting the companies is accomplished by stacking up debt and then giving themselves the money. Occasionally there are a few variations like looting a pension fund or taking a high quality product and making it horrible and selling that until people notice.

It’s literally their business model, it’s happened thousands of times and is a very clear fixture of the modern American business climate.

If you don’t know this it’s because you aren’t looking or it’s in your interest to say you don’t know this.
by aatd86 | 2025-12-08 00:45:51+00:00
True. The counterpoint being that back in the days, they could have decided to write a parser if the data was structured and they would have then learnt things that they will never learn by relying on AI.

For a junior in the learning phase that can be useful time spent. Then again, I agree that at times certain menial code tasks are not worth doing and llms are helpful.

It's a bit like a kid not spending time memorizing their time tables since they can use a calculator. They are less likely to become a great mathematician.
by chemotaxis | 2025-12-08 00:45:51+00:00
I think that's common in most places. What's different in the US is that the IRS forces you to proactively provide a lot more information about it, though. I have a rental property and need to enter the same information about the same income and expenses on three different forms, breaking it down in different ways. It's tedious and error-prone, and I guess the philosophy is that it's easier to spot fraud if the numbers on all the different forms don't add up to a coherent story.

Other countries presumably rely on other fraud signals. They might have more visibility into your day-to-day financial transactions, or there might be more of a culture of leaving an anonymous tip if you suspect your neighbor isn't paying a fair share.
by jrs235 | 2025-12-08 00:46:03+00:00
As mentioned in a sibling comment reply:

Time estimations, or conversations to days or other units, typically fail because if a developer says 1 day they might mean 8 focused uninterrupted development hours while someone else hears 1 calendar day so it can be done by tomorrow, regardless of if a developer spends 8 or 16 hours on it.
by iainctduncan | 2025-12-08 00:46:43+00:00
Shameless plug: People into this sort of thing might be into my partner's book coming out in April. It's a beautifully written blend of science writing (penguin biology), memoir, and terrifying asides from the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Her accounts of the wackiness of living and working out of McMurdo are really fun to read, and include all the orientation and training for which this manual was written (though she was there in 2003). And the history stuff is just hair raising.

One of my favourite lines: "There are many ways to die in Antarctica."

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/796661/where-the-ear...

(That's the Canadian publisher link, but it's coming out at the same time in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, and Russia as well, and is on all the major book things as preorder).
by ineedasername | 2025-12-08 00:48:03+00:00
>we probably would have a word for them

Student? Good learner? Pretty much what everyone does can be boiled down to reading lots of other code that’s been written and adapting it to a use case. Sure, to some extent models are regurgitating memorized information, but for many tasks they’re regurgitating a learned method of doing something and backfilling the specifics as needed— the memorization has been generalized.
by jcims | 2025-12-08 00:48:55+00:00
DIY radiative cooling paint from YouTuber NightHawkInLight - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3bJnKmeNJY&list=PL1a2HkcVbm...

It has pretty impressive performance.

Tech Ingredients did one or two vids as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNs_kNilSjk

Was thinking of whipping up a batch for my rv.
by nitwit005 | 2025-12-08 00:49:08+00:00
Ask for something like "a first person shooter using software rendering", and search github for the function names for the rendering functions. Using Copilot I found code simply lifted from implementations of Doom, except that "int" was replaced with "int32_t" and similar.

It's also fun to tell Copilot that the code will violate a license. It will seemingly always tell you it's fine. Safe legal advice.
by Lerc | 2025-12-08 00:49:13+00:00
The user interface was an experiment in itself. It was a lot of python which was way too heavy for the machines delivered, it presented a new platform, and thus a barrier to entry to anyone in the field with general computer skills.

If it had have been delivered using the same Linux base with any number of off-the-shelf minimal window managers it would performed much faster, and the body of people who knew how to make software for it would have existed many of whom would have been happy to make what they needed.

Instead they got a "We've chosen this for you" of something that had not proven its worth.

I still think there's scope for educational systems in all parts of the world if they facilitated development of software that does things that the teachers ask for.

I'd love to see a grant program that gave schools money ear tagged for development on open source projects. The schools get to pay for things that they decide they would like, but it has the requirement that it has to be open source because if one school wanted it there's a chance another school will too. They can choose to pool resources and produce even better things.
by bawolff | 2025-12-08 00:49:17+00:00
While that's undoubtedly true, is that really feasible?

Training programs are expensive, and i imagine difficult to conduct across potentially remote areas with underdeveloped infrastructure.

Internet access is maybe more doable now with starlink, but how practical was it at the time? I imagine this varries significantly with region, maybe in some cases all that was needed was LTE modem -> wifi, but if actually new infrastructure needed to be set up, that could be very pricey very fast.

Like everything its all about trade offs, if olpc did those things would they have budget for other things?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 00:49:38+00:00
It looks like North Carolina’s previous Weights & Measures law was entirely criminal. So in 1991 they added civil powers, but curtailed the fines.

The solution here appears to be less in raising the civil fine and more in criminally investigating, to start with, the store manager [1].

[1] https://www.ncleg.gov/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bycha... § 81A-30.1
by strogonoff | 2025-12-08 00:51:06+00:00
Toasts are popular, but not the only option if you want to notify the user about completion of a longer-running action when the user may have already switched away from where they started it. Consider a status bar[0] instead. You can make it cute and animated, too!

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A....
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-08 00:51:43+00:00
True. Cook was a great money maker but he's so boring on the product side.

But they'll never get anyone even close to Jobs obviously. Just won't happen. Even if they find someone with the same attention to detail and "risk it all on a grand vision" mentality, he or she won't get the trust of the board who are generally risk-averse. The only reason Jobs got away with doing all that was that he was Mr. Apple. He was the company.

Hopefully they'll get someone closer to that but the magic will never come back IMO.