MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CameronBanga | 2025-12-31 22:40:45+00:00
It does feel high pressure in the moment, but I wouldn't have two published technical books if not for the consistency and push of my editors and the publisher.

Another constraint of a technical book that I didn't see mentioned here was that time almost has to be very limited during the writing process. I worked on a couple mobile development/design books, and an iOS 18 programming and design guide is worthless after Apple announced Liquid Glass last summer. At 2+ years into the project and seemingly only 1/3rd complete, the publisher really needs to be sure the content will still be relevant after released.
by tantivy | 2025-12-31 22:41:29+00:00
I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web.

Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-31 22:41:45+00:00
> > I wonder how Elon / SpaceX folks would respond to these laws esp. #39 (avoid designing launch vehicles)

SpaceX has designed 3 (four if you include Falcon 1) launch vehicles: Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Starship. The first three run the same engine family and are arguably in the same vehicle family.

SpaceX has absolutely embraced avoiding designing new launch vehicles (and even major components) until the fundamental limitations of the existing approach are exceeded.
by nine_k | 2025-12-31 22:44:02+00:00
I think if you understand something really well (anything: the law of gravity, the Curry-Howard isomorphism, electrolytic dissociation, general relativity,...), you can find a bunch of comparisons, or metaphors, or other ways to explain it so that an interested five-years-old will get a rough idea. A very rough idea indeed, but one that could allow them to ask qualitatively reasonable questions, and that forms an intuition which helps during a real study.
by bitwize | 2025-12-31 22:44:32+00:00
ExplainingComputers with Christopher Barnatt is a regular online series that tickles that right spot for me. He's got the professorial yet whimsical energy of an 80s BBC presenter, making the show feel a bit like The Computer Programme or Beyond 2000.

https://explainingcomputers.com

https://m.youtube.com/@explainingcomputers
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-31 22:44:50+00:00
Well, that's clearly incorrect: software displaying unsolicited advertisements is called adware, and requires no spying at all.

> Spyware is a form of malware that hides on your device, monitors your activity, and steals sensitive information like bank details and passwords [0]

> Spyware is loosely defined as malicious software designed to enter your computer device, gather data about you, and forward it to a third-party without your consent. [1]

> Spyware is malicious software that secretly monitors your activity and collects sensitive information, like passwords, location data, or browsing habits, without your consent. [2][3]

0: https://www.malwarebytes.com/spyware

1: https://usa.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/spyware

2: https://us.norton.com/blog/malware/spyware

3: https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/spyware
by gizmo686 | 2025-12-31 22:45:07+00:00
The notion of transcendental is not related to how we right numbers. However, in abstract algebra, we generalize the notion of algebraic/transental to arbitrary fields. In such a framework, a number is only transental relative to a particular field.

For instance, the standard statement that pi us transcendental would become the pi is transcendental in Q (the rational numbers). However, pi is trivially not transcendental over Q(pi), which is the smallest field possible after adding pi to the rational numbers. A more interesting question is if e is transcendental over Q(pi); as far as I am aware that is still an open problem.
by sandreas | 2025-12-31 22:45:09+00:00
I did some research in dumping damaged dvds lately because I had some little treasures laying around that were just unusable.

I had good success using DVD Decrypter (hardly available, I got my copy years ago) ignoring bad sectors in the settings, Redumper[1] and, if DVD is only scratched very badly using car-anti-scratch / polish chemicals with a lot of patience [2] (some hints: Toothpaste does not work unless it is whitening toothpaste, don't use tools like a drill, will make the problems even worse, prefer the slow process of polishing by hand).

1: https://github.com/superg/redumper

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN8ET7axaNk
by cwillu | 2025-12-31 22:45:16+00:00
Interesting, although it's worth noting that the study specifically calls out that “Third, we cannot exclude other risks in air travel beyond in-flight risks, e.g., queuing for security or customs or boarding the plane, as well as the waiting time on the runway or transfers to terminals in public buses”.

(To the people who downvoted that comment: shame on you)
by dwohnitmok | 2025-12-31 22:45:32+00:00
This is not necessarily true. It is possible for all real numbers (and indeed all mathematical objects) to be definable under ZFC. It is also possible for that not to be the case. ZFC is mum on the issue.

I've commented on this several times. Here's the most recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44366342

Basically you can't do a standard countability argument because you can't enumerate definable objects because you can't uniformly define "definability." The naive definition falls prey to Liar's Paradox type problems.
by MentatOnMelange | 2025-12-31 22:45:37+00:00
I think drinking is declining for the same reason as dancing... any situation involving relaxing in a social way has gone from "what do the people around me think of me?" to "how could someone make what I'm doing look stupid to get upvotes/likes on social media?"

edit: It deserves mentioning the level of drinking involved in socializing was never a good thing and I think everyone is more aware of the dangers now.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-31 22:46:29+00:00
> Contrast this with a no-rebate world with cheaper/more transparent pricing. Fewer patients would hit their out of pocket maximum.

And premiums would go up. Every insurer has to get their premium approved by every state’s insurance regulator, and every state’s insurance regulator is not going to allow them to have more than a few percent of profit.

> They can use the rebates they get from the providers to subsidize the insured, allowing them to offer lower premiums and gain market share. This is what people mean when they say "In America, the sick people pay to subsidize the health care of the healthy people".

I’ve never heard of this, and it’s legally not allowed. The ACA mandates insurers price plans so that old people only pay at most 3x what young people pay. And the ACA does not allow insurers to charge more to people likelier to need healthcare. Mathematically, that means younger and healthier people pay higher premiums so that older and sicker people can have lower premiums.

NY state goes even further and says all ages pay the same premium, so young subsidizes old even more. MA has a 2x cap, I believe. And then of course, FICA taxes mean the young and working are paying for the healthcare for the old and non working, the vast majority of all healthcare spend in the US (Medicare).
by hexaga | 2025-12-31 22:47:09+00:00
It's an efficient point in solution space for the human reward model. Language does things to people. It has side effects.

What are the side effects of "it's not x, it's y"? Imagine it as an opcode on some abstract fuzzy Human Machine. If the value in 'it' register is x, set to y.

LLMs basically just figured out that it works (via reward signal in training), so they spam it all the time any time they want to update the reader. Presumably there's also some in-context estimator of whether it will work for _this_ particular context as well.

I've written about this before, but it's just meta-signaling. If you squint hard at most LLM output you'll see that it's always filled with this crap, and always the update branch is aligned such that it's the kind of thing that would get reward.

That is, the deeper structure LLMs actually use is closer to: It's not <low reward thing>, it's <high reward thing>.

Now apply in-context learning so things that are high reward are things that the particular human considers good, and voila: you have a recipe for producing all the garbage you showed above. All it needs to do is figure out where your preferences are, and it has a highly effective way to garner reward from you, in the hypothetical scenario where you are the one providing training reward signal (which the LLM must assume, because inference is stateless in this sense).
by keeda | 2025-12-31 22:47:48+00:00
Hmm I don't know that it was that obvious in advance... I think the earliest recorded case of AI psychosis was that employee Google fired for being convinced LaMDA was sentient:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/23/google-fi...

At that point, most of us only had experience with older chatbots and didn't know what GenAI chatbots were capable of, so I thought this was clearly a one-off with a gullible and unwell individual.

And then ChatGPT was released. I could see this was something else entirely, and I could see how people could get tricked into thinking it was sentient. However, I still didn't make the connection with how this would interact with other types of psychological issues.

This could be because I was an outside observer; it's likely being at the epicenter of things, these companies had way more early signals that they neglected, which is the sort of evidence I think these lawsuits will surface. To OpenAI's credit, when they realized ChatGPT 4o was overly sycophantic they did roll it back pretty quickly, but I'm pretty sure the speed with which they've been moving they've glossed over a lot of issues.
by bwest87 | 2025-12-31 22:48:23+00:00
Sure there is some minimal marginal cost, but it's so close to zero that it's usually negligible, and the incentive is to basically give it away and "monetize" something else. Your point about games actually just makes my original point. Software is already usually free or dirt cheap, which is why reducing the cost to make the software can't create some "low cost / low value" quadrant. Unless your talking about bespoke software that has such a small market size it isn't worth making today. I could maybe see that area opening up, but even that software would not fit the OP's description of software that "has no owner and is not meant to be maintained"
by docjay | 2025-12-31 22:48:37+00:00
You seem like someone reasonable to ask: please program me with the rules for how the world should handle itself in the presence of mentally unstable and/or clinically delusional people. What are the hard coded expectations? I need something solid, we obviously can’t call for your opinion every time a company or product comes into existence. I also don’t imagine you’re saying anything that can be misinterpreted by someone that literally thinks they’re in the matrix (as this person did) should be preemptively banned…right? I have a low functioning autistic cousin that got a “I’m awesome!” pendant that he took as carte blanche to stay up past bedtime and eat ice cream any time he wanted. No, surely it’s not that broad of a ban.

I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with anything, I’m just asking for a rule set that you think the world should follow that isn’t purely tied to your judgment call.
by nineteen999 | 2025-12-31 22:49:21+00:00
Only for people who want to use it as a desktop replacement for Windows or MacOS I guess? There are no end of people complaining they can't get their wifi or sound card or trackpad working on (insert-obscure-Linux-distribution-here).

Like many others, I have Linux servers running over 2000-3000 days uptime. So I'm going to say no, it doesn't, not really.
by wincy | 2025-12-31 22:49:30+00:00
If I’m using the AdGuard safari extension on my iPhone, I noticed the Etsy website didn’t work at all (there’s some fantastic costume sellers there, and I was looking at what it’d take to dress like a Viking). Anyway, on load the screen becomes grayed out with no way for me to fix it or interact with any underlying elements.

If I disable the content blockers temporarily, it’s because it’s trying to direct me toward the Etsy iOS app, which I would never in a million years install.

It does this at least daily, I tried it just now and it’ll go away for maybe 24h before the invisible pop up comes back.
by theptip | 2025-12-31 22:49:33+00:00
I dunno man. A useful psychological trick in this scenario is to imagine you were on the other side of the transaction.

Say you have nine figures in your account. Would you push it all into this company to be able to have a fun job? Seems completely insane to me.

F You Money means you can spin up whatever projects you want for the rest of your life. Even if your dream job is worth $100m to you, is the delta between this job and your realistic best alternative really worth that much?

Speaking as a co-founder CTO, I believe there is a very insidious kind of attachment that forms when you’re dancing with burnout, and working on a successful company that you’ve built from the ground up.

“I want to leave a dent in the universe” I told myself. After 3 months in a hammock decompressing, I very quickly realized that there is more to life than work, and it’s really easy to find fulfillment building things if you get bored. But this viewpoint is really hard to hold onto when you’re buried in the day to day excitement of the job.
by quesera | 2025-12-31 22:49:49+00:00
I wouldn't call it devastating just by dint of the issue count:

- Most issues do not become exploitable vulnerabilities.
- The prereq for these code paths is root in the jail, so an ordinary user would first require a privilege escalation bug to get root, which is where most security review is traditionally focused (these paths should be closed already).

I haven't seen whether the POCs can actually get to an escape, but this is great work and FreeBSD is better for it.
by RealityVoid | 2025-12-31 22:52:04+00:00
This is merely your failure to imagine it. Maybe they enjoy it, maybe they have a specific goal they want to achieve, have some sort of obsession, maybe they feel duty to all the people they lead and relief on them, think they are making the world better so they feel compelled to continue working, are mad with power and enjoy lording over other people. There are many many reasons why one would work after being financially secure, and they're all equally valid as a personal motivator.

And, anyways, I think you say this now, but if you were to get those 10 millions you would probably change your tune. A lot of people would find some other project to dedicate their energy. Especially the kind of people that make stuff happen.
by jart | 2025-12-31 22:52:08+00:00
They have solved the popup problem. It's called AI. If I ask Claude to browse the web for me and report back what it finds, then there's no popups, no ads, no newsletters. I'm insulated from all the awful things people do. That's what I love about technology. It always comes along at just the right time to solve the greatest problem people have ever had, which is other people.
by nine_k | 2025-12-31 22:53:07+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal

Did you ever do a barbecue? You first burn the light, hydrogen-rich substances of the firewood, with a large beautiful flame; that flame would burn down the meat, but it burns off quickly. What remains is charcoal, the source of most heat in the firewood; it does no produce a visible flame, but emits a lot of heat. It is mostly carbon.
by elwatto | 2025-12-31 22:53:26+00:00
That was the whole point of writing this series: to show how my role evolves and what I’ve had to give up. Trust me, if it were up to me, I’d still be having fun coding (even more so these days). There’s an entire section on delegation in this year’s post.

I’m not the single DRI for culture at all. We have many strong culture carriers, which has made scaling to 100 people much easier than scaling to 20. That said, culture is still one of the core responsibilities of founders, in my opinion.

Also, OCTO isn’t about me wanting to innovate. It’s about giving certain engineers permission to not be tied to a roadmap and to stay fluid.
by crote | 2025-12-31 22:53:50+00:00
> "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge.

> "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes."

Okay, but, we have 5G towers, car chargers, and planes right now?

I understand that purer material is better, but to what extent are the impurities of current wafer production methods limiting us? Why is shooting the furnace into space the best option? Why is making wafers 4+ orders of magnitude more expensive the solution we should go for?
by bayarearefugee | 2025-12-31 22:54:47+00:00
Buffet's strategy assumes a rational market, so I wouldn't expect it to work as well in an environment where stock market valuations are increasingly vibes-based and often wildly inflated by circumstances that should be illegal (like selling X to xAI to generate a voodoo valuation).

Arguably the entire market is heavily overvalued now, though, so while his strategies are probably no longer optimal, they'll probably continue to work out well enough at least until the next big correction.
by cynix | 2025-12-31 22:54:55+00:00
I think how one interprets the usage of “square pixels” here is highly dependent on what that person is most familiar with. When I saw the title, even without reading the article, I immediately knew it’s talking about PAR, since I’m already familiar with video encoding standards. It didn’t even occur to me that it could be talking about the shape of physical elements on various display technologies.
by knollimar | 2025-12-31 22:54:58+00:00
The "let" function may be of interest to those wanting to excel more programmatically. There's also lambda that is interesting for the more modern excel use cases.

=Let(table,$C$17:$S$24,

rowName,A6,

colName,C6,

headerRow,$C$15:$S$15,

headerCol,$A$17:$A$24,

rowIndex,MATCH(rowName,headerCol,0),

colIndex,MATCH(colName,headerRow,0),

index(table,rowIndex,colIndex)

)

or even

=LAMBDA(table,rowNames,colNames,rowToFind,colToFind,

LET(

rowIndex,MATCH(rowToFind,rowNames,0),

colIndex,MATCH(colToFind,colNames,0),

INDEX(table,rowIndex,colIndex)

)

)($C$17:$S$24,$A$17:$A$24,$C$15:$S$15,A6,C6)

(Also alt+enter to input the newlines)
by BurningFrog | 2025-12-31 22:55:48+00:00
It's hard to put my finger on why, but that's a really weird way to frame the situation.

For one thing, most of us don't control any CO₂ production we can turn off.

Also, even if/when we finally produced our last CO₂ molecule, the excess CO₂ will last for many centuries, and we really should get it back to lower levels.

With good capture tech, you can keep keep doing some important CO₂ producing activities.

Sure, it seems very unfeasible with current technology, but that is bound to improve as you work on it.
by themafia | 2025-12-31 22:55:51+00:00
LLMs show the problems of energy economy in this form of computing. It costs way too much in resources and power for minimal and generally worthless results. 2048 is a game with a several known algorithm for winning. Tetris is an obscenely simple game that unassisted humans could reliably take to the kill screen 20 years ago.

Does any of this used energy benefit any other problem?

Also using "Superhuman" in the title is absurd given this paltry outcome.
by waffletower | 2025-12-31 22:56:06+00:00
I'm a progressive -- just as I am not dumping my climate friendlier Tesla at a loss because Musk is a Nazi buffoon, there is no way I am walking away from my GraalVM compiled babashka binary because another billionaire turd kicked Stephen Colbert off the tonight show. I can mourn and label both as petulant and stupid, without having to bleed my back like Saint Thomas More.
by josephg | 2025-12-31 22:58:30+00:00
I hear you, but sometimes this is what I want.

For example, I’m pretty sure some complex invariant holds. Checking it is expensive, and I don’t want to actually check the invariant every time this function runs in the final build. However, if that invariant were false, I’d certainly like to know that when I run my unit tests.

Using debug_assert is a way to do this. It also communicates to anyone reading the code what the invariants are.

If all I had was assert(), there’s a bunch of assertions I’d leave out of my code because they’re too expensive. debug_assert lets me put them in without paying the cost.

And yes, you should run unit tests in release mode too.
by imgopaal | 2025-12-31 22:58:44+00:00
Thank you to everyone who took the time to review QuickClip and give honest feedback.
I spent the day going through everything and fixing the issues that were pointed out, especially around security.

You were right. The concerns were valid, and they’re now addressed.

1. Shared encryption key (Retr0id's main issue):
Problem: All users shared one encryption key, so any user could decrypt any other user's data.
Fix: Each user now has a unique encryption key derived via PBKDF2 from master key + user ID (10,000 iterations). Old items encrypted with the shared key are detected during decryption and automatically re-encrypted in the background with the new per-user key. Backward compatibility is maintained during the migration.

2. Public image access (Retr0id's second issue):
Problem: Images were publicly accessible without authentication.
Fix: Images now use signed URLs that expire after 1 year. The app automatically converts any public URLs to signed URLs. Storage bucket policies restrict access to user-specific folders.

3. Storage enumeration (foltik's issue):
Problem: Could enumerate all user uploads with a sign-up token.
Fix: Storage policies now restrict folder access by user ID. Still reviewing listing permissions to prevent enumeration.

4. E2EE misrepresentation:
Problem: Marketing claimed "end-to-end encrypted" but it wasn't true E2EE.
Fix: Added a /data-security page that explains:
It's server-side encryption with per-user keys, not true E2EE
Why server-side encryption was chosen (seamless cross-device sync)

5. Transparency issues:
Problem: No information about how data is handled before signup.
Fix: Added /data-security page with details. Link added to footer. Removed the footer joke that hurt trust.

6. Other fixes:
Rate limits adjusted for encryption/decryption operations
Background re-encryption for old items
Proactive signed URL conversion for images
What's still being worked on:
Storage bucket listing permissions (enumeration prevention)
Adding screenshots to landing page
FAQ section
Considering open source (evaluating)
I appreciate the security review. The app is more secure now, and I'm committed to transparency about what it does and doesn't do. Check /data-security for the full explanation.
by ozim | 2025-12-31 22:59:23+00:00
I agree.

There was a long thread here where people were arguing about this topic.

My take is that people saying sharp knives are safer don’t understand how average people are using knives.

Totally different than in restaurant setting or ‘self proclaimed chef’ setting where you are going to chop loads of stuff fast or you get angry customers or you take pride in your chopping and slicing skills.

Worst offenders were sharpening knives for other people and then they were surprised that those people would cut themselves with sharp knives… none of the story included a person who was perfectly happy with their dull knife cutting themselves with that dull knife.