MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-28 23:18:59+00:00
> Like they truly talk about them like they’re kindergarteners

Well, a bunch of them are. From what one can hear about Elon Musk for example, at each of his companies there is an "Elon handler" team making sure that his bullshit doesn't endanger the mission and stuff keeps running [1], Steve Jobs was particularly infamous among employees [2] and family [3], Bill Gates has a host of allegations [4] even before getting into the Epstein allegations [5], and Trump... well, I don't think the infamous toddler blimp is too far off of reality.

> and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.

That makes sense even for those who aren't emotional toddlers. At large companies it is simply impossible for any human to dive deep into technical details, so decisions have to be thoroughly researched and dumbed down - and it's the same in the military. The fact that people are allowed to hold positions across multiple companies makes this even worse - how is a board of directors supposed to protect the interests of the shareholders when each board member has ten, twenty or more other companies to "control"?

IMHO, companies should simply be broken up when they get too large. Corporate inertia, "too big to fail", impossibility to compete against virtually infinite cash coffers and lawyers - too large companies are a fundamental threat against our societies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012719

[2] https://qz.com/984174/silicon-valley-has-idolized-steve-jobs...

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daught...

[4] https://www.amglaw.com/blog/2021/07/both-microsoft-and-its-f...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
by neilv | 2025-12-28 23:19:06+00:00
> > We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, [...]

This morning's aspiring robber baron fun (I think it's OK mention this, under the circumstances, so long as I don't say anything identifying)...

Responding to a cold outreach from a new startup, for which I happened to also have unusual experience in their product domain (no, you won't guess which). They wanted me to relocate to SF, as a founding engineer, and do a startup incubator with them.

Me: if you haven't even done the incubator, just to clarify, you want a founding engineer, not a co-founder?

Them: it will be good experience for you, to work alongside me to develop the product, and to see how the incubator works from the inside.

(This isn't really their fault. The incubator has started telling kids that they should work for one of the incubator's portfolio startups for the experience (certainly not for the salary and stock options), and then maybe one day they can be the Glorious Founder. And then new Glorious Founders, who might not yet know any better, simply regurgitate that.)

(I previously tried to talk with that same incubator about this message that they were using, after they included it in a broadcast that also invited connecting with a particular person there. When I found a way to contact that named person, they ignored my question, and instead offered to delete my account on their thing, if I didn't like what they were saying. So I deleted my account myself. I'm not sure we really developed a collegial rapport and constructive shared understanding about the concern...)
by tptacek | 2025-12-28 23:19:35+00:00
I have no idea who you are and can only work from what you write here, and with this comment, what you've written no longer makes sense. The binary (or the lifted IR form of the binary or the control flow graph of the binary or whatever form you're evaluating) is the source of truth about what a program actually does, not the source code.

The source code is just a set of hints about what the binary does. You don't need the hints to discern what a binary is doing.
by PhilosophyForAI | 2025-12-28 23:19:48+00:00
Howdy!
Whenever you make a big decision, check through this list!
For this . . . is a list of common reasons you might make a bad decision.
Whenever ya make a decision, if your decision doesn’t fall under any of these reasons, than you’re doing about as good as any normal, flawed human possibly can!
by tbrownaw | 2025-12-28 23:20:12+00:00
They measure/model aboveground biomass, and present the change in that measurement as being a source/sink in the carbon cycle, ie as coming from / going to the atmosphere.

But I also see multiple places they mention the changes as being at least partly due to logging or wood harvesting. Which seems like biomass being removed and yet not going into the atmosphere.
by userbinator | 2025-12-28 23:20:26+00:00
I think everyone agrees that dynamic range compression and de-Bayering (for sensors which are colour-filtered) are necessary for digital photography, but at the other end of the spectrum is "use AI to recognise objects and hallucinate what they 'should' look like" --- and despite how everyone would probably say that isn't a real photo anymore, it seems manufacturers are pushing strongly in that direction, raising issues with things like admissibility of evidence.
by Yodel0914 | 2025-12-28 23:21:08+00:00
I’m not deeply into Jung, but he has a concept around phases of life that rings true to me. It’s a good and proper (and somewhat inevitable) to move though these phases as you age; there’s not a lot of point as a 20yo trying to implement the advice/preferences of what you imagine your 80yo self would want; in a very real sense you’re completely different people.
by daymanstep | 2025-12-28 23:22:07+00:00
100% this.

People need to read "The Strength Of Weak Ties" before advocating extremely damaging courses of action such as deleting LinkedIn.

Humans are social animals and we cannot survive without a social network. Yet many in the West seem to ignore this obvious fact. It is baffling.

After so many years, I can't help but wonder if it's deliberate malice.
by LaurensBER | 2025-12-28 23:22:35+00:00
The improved Broadband Adapter support, latency improvements and performance improving game patches (by capping parts of the game loop) are really cool and exciting improvements!

I grew up with the GameCube and spent many hours gaming on it but as the original hardware ages it's increasingly becoming more and more expensive to source (it's not unaffordable but you're paying for old stuff that's, unfortunately, likely to break soon-ish). Without projects like Dolphin it would become a very expensive hobby, somewhere in the next 5-10y.

I know that there's "official" solutions but the quality of the emulators that Nintendo produces unfortunately, tends to be subpar.

Dolphin is becoming so good that it's usually my goto benchmark for budget hardware (SBCs, lately the N100s, etc). Really cool to see that the team keeps pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
by asadotzler | 2025-12-28 23:22:38+00:00
I hear ya. Thanks for the reply. I'm glad you chose OSS and I fully share your views as expressed here.

I think helping make OSS a thing at all, especially in the very early days when my employer was seen as the poster child for its failure, will be the closest thing I have to a legacy. And I got to travel the world teaching about and evangelizing the open source process, tooling, and ethos which was great fun. I even got to play in the big leagues for a while, at the height of our consumer successes, and those years helped solidify some important industry standards that will certainly live on for a while.

I'm happy with my contributions, and happy with the comfortable life I achieved all while having a good time doing it. I'm also very happy that I got out a couple years ago before this latest wave of destruction.
by amluto | 2025-12-28 23:22:46+00:00
> attacker advantage of less than 2^-64

Why so high? Computers are fast and massively parallel these days. If a cryptosystem fully relies on fingerprints, a second preimage of someone’s fingerprint where the attacker knows the private key for the second preimage (or it’s a cleverly corrupt key pair) catastrophically breaks security for the victim. Let’s make this astronomically unlikely even in the multiple potential victim case.

And it’s not like 256 bit hashes are expensive.

(I’m not holding my breath on fully quantum attacks using Grover’s algorithm, at high throughput, against billions of users, so we can probably wait a while before 256 bits feels uncomfortably short.)
Show HN: SecureNow – Security Fixes You Can Apply Today
by pelmenibenni | 2025-12-28 23:23:43+00:00
Hi HN, I'm an Indie Dev.

Building web apps, I struggled to check for vulnerabilities on a surface and a deeper level at the same time. Most free scanners gave vague results or missed dependency issues and tools for deeper searches are mainly for enterprise. Also with vibe coding the issue of security is rising more and more.

I built SecureNow - a simple web scanner built with Next.js and Supabase that checks SSL, ports, dependencies, headers, and basic vulns.

It caught real issues in my projects. Free basic scans at securenow.app.

Feedback on accuracy and missing features?

Thanks!
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-28 23:23:52+00:00
> How long do you have before you need to have a solution? An hour, a year, a century? Too bad, almost sure convergence only provides a guarantee if you wait an infinite amount of time.

Thanks for this. I was actually just thinking "this can't actually work, it would mean P vs NP is solved." Of course, this explains why it doesn't mean that.
by RickJWagner | 2025-12-28 23:23:54+00:00
Legally, that’s how.

The pendulum goes back and forth. The right is in power now, so the left will point out deficiencies and promise improvements. If enough people believe things could be better, than the left will win power in the next election.

Then the cycle starts over again. It works wonderfully, and the USA has prospered because of it.

Sometimes immature people do crazy things because they’re narcissistic and want to try to circumvent the rules. They could do the right thing and try to bring change legally, but through either stupidity or lack of morals they instead go outside the law. People all across the political spectrum should view such people as a liability to us all.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-28 23:23:58+00:00
I'm not sure money and time are cleanly separable metrics for this in that changing one changes the other, which is why it's not as simple as looking at the toll roads' dynamics in isolation. If a region spends more on transport infrastructure then the average transit time is going to be less (and conversely the opposite) for pretty much any method of buildout except fraud. The notion of "everyone now bears the cost of the road" causes the roads to be optimized towards the average public good. This is not to say it's without tradeoff to anybody at all - just that it's geared towards the best tradeoff for everyone as a whole. The notion of "those able to bear the cost and extra overhead of the toll road bear its cost" certainly still causes a reduction in time for those willing and able to pay, but only for the able who now have no interest in their public infrastructure funding duplicating a path they already have for the common good.

That's where the shift in burden to the poor so the rest can have shorter commute comes from. If everyone had the same opportunity cost to use the toll road then it wouldn't have the shift in burden as much as a pure shift in utility. Of course it doesn't have the same opportunity cost, so who benefits from the toll road is more slanted than who benefits from the public road. Whether or not the shift of burden is acceptable/ideal is a matter of opinion on public policy, but it's there.
by xanthor | 2025-12-28 23:24:02+00:00
Even the official CPC line is critical of Mao. The assertion is not that all Chinese people believe the same thing or all necessarily belief different things from dominant western narratives on every issue. The assertion is simply that: some narratives are dominant in the West and treated as closed issues without any room for critical discussion or nuance. Deviating from those narratives is punished in a variety of ways through social and institutional enforcement.
by AttentionBlock | 2025-12-28 23:24:24+00:00
> It’s a cynical way to view the C-staff of a company. I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.

I strongly disagree with this statement. What C-staff cares about is share-holder value. What middle management care about is empire building and promotions.

> for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.

You presented your point in a misleading way. I would classify this as collaboration/communication rather than politics.

Politics is when you need to tick off a useless boxes for your promo, when you try to to take credits for work you haven't helped with, when you throw your colleague under the bus, when you get undeserved performance rating because the manager thinks you are his good boy. There's a lot more, I didn't read any of your previous blogs, but all of these things are what engineers dread when we refer to politics.
by igregoryca | 2025-12-28 23:24:28+00:00
The lack of a "refresh" option has been a problem with iCloud for years. Back in the iOS 8/9 days, I'd write in Pages on an iPad and then try to open the document on a Mac or the Pages web app. Pages itself was (and is) pretty nice, but iCloud sync was constantly broken. Things didn't appear when I needed them to.

Some designers say that refresh buttons shouldn't exist because the interface should always reflect the current state of reality. They're right, but until the day we get 100% bug-free bidirectional sync with perfect conflict resolution that instantly polls the network whenever it reconnects, refresh buttons are a necessary evil.
by stavros | 2025-12-28 23:24:41+00:00
One thing I've learned while dabbling in photography is that there are no "fake" images, because there are no "real" images. Everything is an interpretation of the data that the camera has to do, making a thousand choices along the way, as this post beautifully demonstrates.

A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits, with local edits being things like retouching specific parts of the image to make desired changes, and one could argue that local edits are "more fake" than global edits, but it still depends on a thousand factors, most importantly intent.

"Fake" images are images with intent to deceive. By that definition, even an image that came straight out of the camera can be "fake" if it's showing something other than what it's purported to (e.g. a real photo of police violence but with a label saying it's in a different country is a fake photo).

What most people think when they say "fake", though, is a photo that has had filters applied, which makes zero sense. As the post shows, all photos have filters applied. We should get over that specific editing process, it's no more fake than anything else.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-28 23:24:43+00:00
All this 21st century activity you're pointing out was mainly carried out by those about 20 years younger than the youngest baby boomers.

All we had were multi-million-dollar bailouts to go with that.

You know, the value of the dollar and all.

There was major presidential malfeasance and this thing called "inflation" back then too. It was devastating with no actual recovery since. Or young people wouldn't be complaining now.
by teraflop | 2025-12-28 23:25:54+00:00
Maybe they are making progress. But given that they first started talking about this in 2018, and then in 2022 they announced that they were planning to release a version with CoreCLR in 2023, and then in 2024 they said it would be in beta in 2025, and now in 2025 they're planning to release it as a technical preview in 2026, but they're still talking about an "internal proof-of-concept" as though it's something coming in the future...

As an outsider, it certainly seems like there's reason for skepticism.
by niyikiza | 2025-12-28 23:26:28+00:00
I've been going down this exact rabbit hole for the last few months. The 'opt-in guardrails' problem you mentioned is the dealbreaker. If the agent can just ignore the read_file tool wrapper and call os.system('cat ...'), the policy is useless.

I ended up building a 'capability token' primitive (think Macaroons or Google Zanzibar, but for ephemeral agent tasks) to solve this.

My approach (Tenuo) works like this:

1. Runtime Enforcement: The agent gets a cryptographically signed 'Warrant' that mechanically limits what the runtime allows. It’s not a 'rule' the LLM follows; it’s a constraint the runtime enforces (e.g., fs:read is only valid for /tmp/*).

2. Attenuation: As the agent creates sub-tasks, it can only delegate less authority than it holds.

3. Offline Verify: I wrote the core in Rust so I can verify these tokens in ~27µs on every single tool call without a network round-trip.

If you are building a POC, feel free to rip out the core logic or use the crate directly. I’d love to see more tools move away from 'prompt engineering security' toward actual runtime guarantees.

Repo: https://github.com/tenuo-ai/tenuo
by johnea | 2025-12-28 23:27:25+00:00
I didn't see any of that.

I highly recommend disabling javascript in your browser.

Yes, it makes many sites "look funny", or maybe you have to scroll past a bunch of screen sized "faceplant" "twitverse" and "instamonetize" icons, but, there are far fewer ads (like none).

And of course some sites won't work at all. That's OK too, I just don't read them. If it's a news article, its almost always available on another site that doesn't require javascript.
by barishnamazov | 2025-12-28 23:27:51+00:00
I love posts that peel back the abstraction layer of "images." It really highlights that modern photography is just signal processing with better marketing.

A fun tangent on the "green cast" mentioned in the post: the reason the Bayer pattern is RGGB (50% green) isn't just about color balance, but spatial resolution. The human eye is most sensitive to green light, so that channel effectively carries the majority of the luminance (brightness/detail) data.
In many advanced demosaicing algorithms, the pipeline actually reconstructs the green channel first to get a high-resolution luminance map, and then interpolates the red/blue signals—which act more like "color difference" layers—on top of it. We can get away with this because the human visual system is much more forgiving of low-resolution color data than it is of low-resolution brightness data. It’s the same psycho-visual principle that justifies 4:2:0 chroma subsampling in video compression.

Also, for anyone interested in how deep the rabbit hole goes, looking at the source code for dcraw (or libraw) is a rite of passage. It’s impressive how many edge cases exist just to interpret the "raw" voltages from different sensor manufacturers.
by cons0le | 2025-12-28 23:28:17+00:00
If serious conversation isn't possible on social media, then what do you call this?

Is the conversation we're having now not both serious and on social media?

I think if the great minds of old had access to our modern internet, they would have no trouble communicating their ideas. It's not like all social media is short form. You can type a whole book into the comment box here if you want.
by ikidd | 2025-12-28 23:28:21+00:00
10X. 100X. I have very, very little time for programming anymore, but I have a lot of ideas for things I never had time to make.

In the last 6 months I've built (with the $20/mo plan from Cursor):

- shared tasks app that tracks fleet maintenance on my farm, with a personal tasks view. We can now search part numbers by equipment or refer back to previous work to look up invoices, as well as actually get jobs lined up for when we have help so they aren't sitting there staring at the walls because nobody has a list of what to do next.

- LoRa telemetry mesh for soil moisture sensors, gate motion sensors, waterbowl temperature and level sensors. This would have taken me months to build and debug, Cursor had it done in minutes, I prototyped and then punched up some boards on kicad and ordered them from JLCPCB. Took a couple days to debug them into a workable state and was in place for winter.

- Fertilizer planning application for figuring out our fertilizer buy while prices are low, based on:

- Soil sampler truck application for Android tablet, that interfaces a sub-3m Garmin GPS connected via bluetooth and tracks all the sample site for the sample truck as samples are punched, so we can go back to the same spot every year and determine soil regeneration results.

- Android application to track and calculate loads for silage feeding of cattle, since as you feed you'll want to rebalance the grain ration as you refill, and you'll often have silage at X %age left on, this app lets you enter the mix you want and calculates how much of each to add in order to rebalance the leftovers on the truck to the new ration. I actually did this one on my laptop while I was feeding cattle over a week.

- An alert app to watch MQTT and set phone alarms off if an alert pops up for telemetry problems or intrusion alerts on above LoRa mesh.

Currently working on a system that lets me run multiple Cursor sessions on a workstation and interact with the chats remotely over my phone so I can work on projects while I'm running equipment or doing chores.

A lot of people hate AI, and for a lot of things I totally get it. Frankly, the ethics of AI and the horrible uses people are finding for it scares the hell out of me. But I would never have found time to do any one of these items before AI. I used to run software projects when I was an IT nerd, so I know how program well enough to be dangerous. I'm enjoying having a team back.
by nospice | 2025-12-28 23:30:25+00:00
> A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits,

Even that isn't all that clear-cut. Is noise removal a local edit? It only touches some pixels, but obviously, that's a silly take.

Is automated dust removal still global? The same idea, just a bit more selective. It we let it slide, what about automated skin blemish removal? Depth map + relighting, de-hazing, or fake bokeh? I think that modern image processing techniques really blur the distinction here because many edits that would previously need to be done selectively by hand are now a "global" filter that's a single keypress away.

Intent is the defining factor, as you note, but intent is... often hazy. If you dial down the exposure to make the photo more dramatic / more sinister, you're manipulating emotions too. Yet, that kind of editing is perfectly OK in photojournalism. Adding or removing elements for dramatic effect? Not so much.
by Bender | 2025-12-28 23:30:32+00:00
I'm curious if any of you has made the switch back to listening to mp3s?

I never stopped. If there is something I like listening to then I must have local copies of it or it does not exist as far as I am concerned. The internet is too fragile to depend on. Companies come and go. Songs get censored, altered or cancelled based on societal identity politics. The internet and power distribution could vanish in one gamma ray burst. Nobody will believe it can happen until it does.

App: I put the songs on MP3 players connected to a tiny mixer and my 1990's sound system. I keep several MP3 players in metal containers and boxes to shield them when not in use.