MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sjducb | 2025-12-13 09:49:55+00:00
I think we need a law that government agencies must support out of band identity proofing.

The root of the problem is that government agencies can request personal details and if the tech company fails to comply then the tech company is sanctioned. However the government agency forces the tech company to provide details in an insecure way often over email. If the tech company tries to demand reasonable security then the law enforcement agency views this as non-compliance and starts the sanctions.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-13 09:50:47+00:00
Here is a thought: Maybe we are all just living in some gigantic experiment, that some incomprehensibly advanced civilization has created, to make us indirectly play DOOM, without us even realizing. Any progress we make is just one step further in their experiment, a reward, every issue like war, climate change, corruption, put in place by them as a challenge, while behind it all, in higher dimension, it is translated all into input for their version of DOOM, while they are watching us perform for them. One of them found it funny or interesting, to give us our own DOOM to play with, and now their scientists are speculating, whether it is always the case, that when you give a test population a DOOM, that they will pass a DOOM onto other beings, recursively.
by elondaits | 2025-12-13 09:50:47+00:00
Back in 2015, I traveled to the US and wanted to buy a Macbook Pro at the Apple Store. The configuration I wanted wasn’t available in Apple Stores, and I couldn’t buy it online because at that point there was some limitation in the online store like they only took US credit cards, or something.

At the Apple Store, the employees suggestion (a more senior one, who was consulted) was to buy a gift card for the computer’s cost (~$1500) and pay at the online store with that. I didn’t do it because buying “virtual stuff” for that amount seemed crazy (this was a huge amount of money for me, at the time).
by dimaulupov | 2025-12-13 09:50:50+00:00
It is saturday! Guy had a trouble during non-business times and advice to make a complaint to ACCC? People who unlock accounts do not work on weekends, it is not front line of support who works all the time. What happened with giving a chance to people (which is Apple consists of) to actually do something before complaining to 4 letter agency? Also ACCC will not deal with such complaints. It says right on their home page.
by drysart | 2025-12-13 09:53:42+00:00
What? No they didn't. They extended the deprecation timeline for Windows 2019 agents from the original EOL date of 30 June 2025 to 31 December 2025; with a well-published brownout period from 2 December to 9 December in addition to the original brownout period from 3 June to 24 June.

The initial banners and warning emails about it went out well ahead of the original EOL timeline; and again as the extended EOL drew close.

If you were caught off guard by the brownout period, it's your devops team that's to blame, not Microsoft; and Microsoft was absolutely right to blame you for not migrating sooner. They gave you an extra 6 months to do it because you should have had all this done back in the first half of the year.

(If you want to blame Microsoft for anything here, blame them for not having a comprehensive tool to identify all your windows-2019 pipelines and instead just relying on "just go look at the latest pipeline runs page and hope everything's run recently enough to be on that".)
by p-e-w | 2025-12-13 09:56:17+00:00
That idea is incomprehensible to me.

I see value (or lack of it) in what I have in front of me, not in how much a person had to struggle and suffer for it to come into existence.

Either something is good or it’s not. Creating something good can sometimes take a lot of effort, but it’s not the effort that makes it good. Otherwise digging a hole and filling it back up would be a valuable undertaking.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-13 09:57:21+00:00
Obviously all these smart appliance are about remote management, but I have to question how much usage it's getting in real life. My parents got a few smart devices for their holiday home, as my dad didn't want to drive 45 minutes both ways to check up on things during the winter. I think he probably ended up spending more time managing the IoT stuff that he ever did driving.

It create to have the option to manage something remote, but when remote become the only option, the usability takes a dive. When I have to go find my phone, unlock it, find the app, possible update the app, find the right setting or menu, stare at "Failure to connect to device", and whatever else might go wrong, it's quicker and easier to just manage the device directly. We got rid of our robot vacuum clear, because it's literally quicker and better to go get our 20 year old regular vacuum, and the floor is done in 3 minutes, not the 20+ the Roomba needs (and I needed to clear the room for it). When we used the Roomba, 99% of the time I pushed the "Start" button on the device, because it's way quicker than using the app.

There's a place for smart devices, but they need to be much better and have local controls.
by svara | 2025-12-13 09:57:57+00:00
Having people work on things that are at the limit of human understanding is an essential part of a modern educational system.

For every professional string theorist, you get hundreds of people who were brought up in an academic system that values rigor and depth of scientific thinking.

That's literally what a modern technological economy is built on.

Getting useful novel results out of this is almost a lucky side effect.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-13 09:59:04+00:00
> Or maybe the next great story teller to create something meaningful that touches people in ways that change their mental model of the world.

How many pieces of AI art can you actually remember? I mean, call to mind in the same detail as you can remember a photograph?

I think AI generated imagery is fundamentally compromised somehow in this regard: something subliminally uncanny, no matter how realistic, makes them harder to recall.

For this reason I personally doubt AI generated art will ever have a profound effect on people. Because it really seems to lack the mechanism.
by vintagedave | 2025-12-13 09:59:06+00:00
Why would it be? There’s no argument or info. Looks like a provocative question.

Surely an archive site is fairly neutral. The worst you can argue is bypassing copyright, but also avoiding server overload (‘hugs of death’) which we’ve all seen it frequently used to avoid. Is that naïve? Is there some key info or background that this post completely omits?
by Liquix | 2025-12-13 09:59:07+00:00
the issue is that eventually SIM cards will be baked in to deliver ads and spyware; there will be no alternatives because everyone was fine with buying smart TVs and not connecting them to wifi.

see: Android's recent transformation into a closed platform which no longer allows users to control devices they purchase. it's important to fight against trends like this loudly and vehemently while we still can.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-12-13 10:00:39+00:00
Would you be fine if that version is affected by botnet in the future, or if the documentation is not updated for newer windows version unless you pay.

And would you be willing to pay $200 one time or $10/month(say assume the average subscription time for users is 2 years), so to recoup the amount they need to increase the cost a lot.
by pastage | 2025-12-13 10:01:40+00:00
Making China imports expensive and cumbersome makes these builds difficult in my opinion. It is most certainly not really $300 if you have good connections, second the admin and tolls can make you spend enormous amount of time and money.

Electronics (MCU, sensors, displays, cables, LiPo, switches): ~$125 / ~£100 PCB share (DIY assembly; amortized per build): ~$10 / ~£6 [full 5× PCB batch ~ $35 / £28] Hardware/fasteners/mech bits: ~$25 / ~£20 Optics (lenses + beam splitter): ~$115 / ~£90 Printed parts material: ~$25 / ~£20 Rough per-build total: ~$300 / ~£235 (add shipping/taxes and any PCB batch overhead you keep)
by frigg | 2025-12-13 10:02:06+00:00
What I've learned from all these disaster stories: have backups for everythig. I have an iCloud+ subscription but also a OneDrive subscription, photos are sync'ed to both storages. On gmail, I set up fwd for all emails to another email address (non-Google related) just in case. Of course you can't do this for every service but do it for the ones you can.

On a meta note, Fuck Apple, I'm so glad I didn't pursue an iOS developer career 10 years ago.
by spencerflem | 2025-12-13 10:02:10+00:00
No, it doesn’t have to take effort, but that does mean that someone genuinely cares.

Like, I love blog posts. Really do, I’ll read anyone’s about anything. Someone thought of something and cared about it and put it into the world and that’s wonderful.

But someone making an AI post doesn’t care. And worse, it makes anyone who does care feel silly, like, why am I wasting my time on this thing that’s so worthless that whatever the first thing the computer spits out is good enough for them
by unit149 | 2025-12-13 10:02:34+00:00
Garageband DAW + MacOS 14.4 Roland Juno-D7 synthsizer, for 8-bit audio complementary compact disk format as AIFF, WAV, or MIDI appliance, in which under SLA-royalties licenses, binary 44.1 Khz sample rate sets the reproducer for reference level.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/GarageBand.pdf
by johnisgood | 2025-12-13 10:06:00+00:00
This issue affects the privacy of all individuals, not just a narrow subset of users.

Mandatory identification and age-verification requirements are against privacy, justified under the familiar refrain of "think of the children". The critical question is how far society is willing to go in accepting pervasive surveillance and data collection under this rationale. Not long ago, we expressed concern and even disdain toward such practices when observing them in countries like China. Today, however, the gap between those systems and our own is narrowing to an uncomfortable degree.

FWIW there are technically sound, privacy-preserving solutions to achieve this goal. Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, can verify eligibility or age without disclosing identity or personal data. These solutions are well understood and feasible. Yet they are consistently excluded from policy discussions and implementations. This omission suggests that the underlying objective is not genuine child protection, nor meaningful respect for individual privacy, but rather increased control and data accumulation.

> They all also stop being effective as soon as a child is outside of your wifi network, which was my entire point.

True, these solutions do not work outside your Wi-Fi, but the point is that government-mandated age verification compromises privacy for limited benefit. I believe parental guidance (and the guidance of their teachers, ideally) and household controls are more effective. In any case, the broader point is that there is no technical silver bullet. Parents will always need to combine education, guidance, and trust-building with any tools, rather than relying on government mandates that compromise privacy.
by baq | 2025-12-13 10:06:06+00:00
And yet the tools wielding these are quite adept at writing and modifying them themselves. It’s LLMs building skills for LLMs. The public ones will naturally be vacuumed up by scrapers and put in the training set, making all future LLMs know more.

Take off is here, human in the loop assisted for now… hopefully for much longer.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-13 10:06:27+00:00
> I also wonder why mini-split heating systems drip and pool water outdoors instead of pumping that distilled water back indoors for humidification.

Do you want Legionnaire's Disease? Because that's how you get Legionnaire's Disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires...
by lenkite | 2025-12-13 10:06:55+00:00
> the best people can come up with is point to a decades old no-poaching agreement

Why shouldn't Id employees be smart and protect themselves in a job market currently going bad for IT ?

Regarding the US in general, wage-fixing is still pretty common

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-nuclear-plant-op...

"In July 2025, a class action lawsuit was filed against Constellation Energy, Duke Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric and other U.S. nuclear plant operators, alleging that they conspired to suppress and coordinate worker pay for thousands of employees dating back to 2003. This lawsuit claims the companies acted together to keep wages low, which plaintiffs allege violates antitrust law"

"In a landmark verdict on April 14, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division notched its first-ever jury trial conviction for criminal wage-fixing under the Sherman Act in United States v. Eduardo Lopez in the District of Nevada. A home health care staffing executive, Eduardo (“Eddie”) Lopez, was found guilty of (1) conspiring with several competing home healthcare staffing agencies to fix the wages of home health nurses in the Las Vegas area, and..." https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/doj-secure...

"Hagens Berman: $200.2 Million in Settlements Reached in Lawsuit Accusing Red Meat Processing Industry of Wage-Fixing" https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240909921707/en/Hag...
by jeffreygoesto | 2025-12-13 10:07:05+00:00
There is no shortcut through the hills if complexity. From [0]: "I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity"...

If you move on to the next complex thing, you miss out on the most valuable learning, namely what the essence of the thing you semi-accidentally built really is and what really is worth carrying on into the future...

[0] https://pmhut.com/project-management-on-the-far-side-of-comp...
by subscribed | 2025-12-13 10:07:47+00:00
You're lucky and this is not a representative of the politicians at all.

In my Parliament MPs seem to represent primarily the interests of their donors, not those of their country, not even constituents. It still better than it used to be, the corr...., er lobbying is not as blatant, but its still obvious.

Seeing the MP? Yeah. Maybe if someone lives in the "unsafe seat" area and the MP is trying to get reelected:)
by Sammi | 2025-12-13 10:07:47+00:00
I'm kinda confused about why this even is something that we need an extra feature for when it's basically already built in to the agentic development feature. I just keep a folder of md files and I add whatever one is relevant when it's relevant. It's kinda straight forward to do...

Just like you I don't edit much in these files on my own. Mostly just ask the model to update an md file whenever I think we've figured out something new, so the learning sticks. I have files for test writing, backend route writing, db migration writing, frontend component writing etc. Whenever a section gets too big to live in agents.md it gets it's own file.
by 7bit | 2025-12-13 10:07:51+00:00
There's a German documentary called "Yellow Cake". It is about the cost of mining uranium. It really was eye opening and I have seen it like ten years ago when I was about thirty. It took thirty years for someone to show me how incredibly devastating the mining of Uranium is to the environment. That's how good of kept secret it is. Because once you see it, you would never ever want nuclear energy ever again. And you finally understand how bad people are lying when they say, it is clean energy. It destroys entire landscapes for generations to come! It is extremely expensive and it is very finite.
by dmurray | 2025-12-13 10:08:19+00:00
I would expect the opposite.

Commercial products are run by product managers: they do whatever the business needs that day, and if it doesn't work for most inputs, "that's fine, our users will only ever need addition". Fun open source projects, run by the same programmer who does the implementation, obsess over finding the generic solution to inverting a function and end up with a version that isn't useful for anyone's specific case.
by jasode | 2025-12-13 10:08:27+00:00
>It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this.

It's also the buying of gift cards that can get Apple accounts locked: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/r8b1lu/apple_will_pe...

If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.

- Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're potentially ruining the recipient's digital life if they redeem it.

- Don't buy Apple gift cards: You risk ruining your own digital life.

If you've been given an Apple gc for Christmas -- and you have paranoia of the risks -- don't buy anything online that's tied to your Apple ID. Instead, go to the physical Apple store to redeem it. And don't buy an iPhone with it because that will eventually get assigned to an Apple ID. Instead, get a non-AppleID item such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock.

I have thousands of credit-card reward points that could be traded in for Apple gift cards but I don't do it because Apple's over-aggressive fraud tracking means Apple's store currency is too dangerous to use.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-13 10:09:25+00:00
The Verizon software is CoFEE, AT&T had Clarify and SystemX, Cox had Polaris, Charter had Sigma, Comcast had Grandslam, TWC/RR had Real and Unify

Netflix had Obiwan, Amazon had CRC.

Sometime well over a decade ago I used to have teamviewer on all of these :)
by af78 | 2025-12-13 10:09:40+00:00
I am now convinced that Russian complaints about supposed US influence campaigns, “NATO expansion” etc. were never sincere. Russia has conducted info-ops in the West forever, during the Cold War and after. If there's an expansionist power here in Europe, it's Russia. Liberal democracy stands in its way so it's no wonder Russia fights against it in every way, both at home and abroad. Authoritarian regimes are notorious for using grievances, real or made-up, to justify their authoritarian rule and hostile actions toward other countries. Nazi Germany: Versailles treaty, supposed oppression of Germans in Sudetenland; Hungary: Trianon treaty; Serbia: Ottoman rule; China: opium wars. I could go on but the last example is interesting: Russia took land from China in the 19th century, yet China only talks about the actions of Western nations. Which shows IMO that these grievances are a mere tool to advance geopolitical interests and should not be taken too seriously. Many moves were made to bring Russia and West closer: Russian leaders showed repeatedly by their actions that they were not interested.

There is not shortage of narratives Russian propagandists disseminate via influencers or useful idiots, tuned for the appropriate audience. You identify as a pacifist? Russia is a peaceful nation, it's its adversaries that are the warmongers! (Don't ask how Russia became so large.) You oppose colonialism? Russia stands against US hegemony, demands a multi-polar world! (In reality Russia behaves as a colonial empire and has a long history of oppression of the nations it has conquered.) You identify as a conservative? Russia is the main defender of order and traditional Christian values! (Well, the Russian Orthodox Church is just an arm of the state security services; church attendance is low; crime and divorce rates are high; Russia has no problem with Islamic regimes like the Taliban, Iran, Hamas or Kadyrov's Chechnya.)

I do not deny the threat China poses and that the way the West approached globalization was naive. Indeed, China has close ties with regimes of Russia, Iran and North Korea. Given this reality, what I don't understand is the policies of the current US administration. China is churning out missiles, warships etc. at an alarming rate, yet the US reduces military spending. China's reach via TikTok is growing yet the US administration does next to nothing about it. The US sided with Russia and North Korea on UN votes about Ukraine (https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/1160456). Trump antagonizes traditional EU allies, except those with authoritarian tendencies like Orban's Hungary. On the other hand, he has only kind words for Putin, Xi, Kim; his only complaint seems to be that he's not a member of their club.
by neop1x | 2025-12-13 10:10:28+00:00
This happened to me as well with a secondary iCloud account, and I still have no idea what triggered the ban. Apple support said they couldn't reverse it. The account was on an old iPhone, and after the ban, it became impossible to log out, rendering the device e-waste overnight. I at least didn't have any valuable data in icloud. But that experience prompted me to stop using Apple products or any other device that requires an online account to function. Fortunately, since recent AMD APUs are quite capable, I sold my MacBook M2 Max and have happily returned to using x86_64 Linux. No more Apple in my life, ever.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-13 10:10:40+00:00
> The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives.

Yes, in many countries they are, but I don't think the laws are dictating Apple to completely turn off the accounts, but instead dictate that Apple should take measures against it.

They could disable those gift card features + Apple wallet/pay if they suspect fraud, and if no one complains within a month, then disable the entire account, rather than start with disabling the account. Would give them space/time to investigate, and wouldn't be a huge pain in the ass when the inevitable false-positives happen, like in this case.
by willaaam | 2025-12-13 10:11:06+00:00
We must have regulation, and I support that fully. It also seems healthy to me to have an independent view on the specifics of said regulations. I mostly agree with the vision and direction of the DMA, but in my opinion it lacks specificity and clear unacceptable boundaries.

That lack of specificity, to me, is why Apple has been able to implement malicious compliance. At the same time the lack of specifics risks companies leaving the EU market in its entirety due to regulatory unclarity with high fines.
by ben_w | 2025-12-13 10:11:21+00:00
Ironically, I had Amazon flag and undo some gift card purchases (of cards, not with cards) that I made for Christmas, while myself thinking about this category of problem, about why cards are a mechanism for scams rather than specifically money laundering.

The cards were to family members that I normally send gift cards to at Christmas, and the activity was counted as "sus" even though I was asked to validate my card number and expiration date before being allowed to make the purchase.
by JoshuaDavid | 2025-12-13 10:12:09+00:00
Anthropic was founded by a group of 7 former OpenAI employees who left over differences in opinions about AI Safety. I do not see any public documentation that the specific difference in opinion was that that group thought that OpenAI was too focused on scaling and that there needed to be a purely safety-focused org that still scaled, though that is my impression based on conversations I've had.

But regardless anthropic reasoning was extremely in the intellectual water supply of the Anthropic founders, and they explicitly were not aiming at producing a human-like model.
by drtgh | 2025-12-13 10:12:28+00:00
The system is perverse per se,

you create money based on debt, and eternal growth, and devalue savings, and force people to bet in order to try to preserve savings value, then each ten or fifteen years you allow someones to harvest the rewards of the casino.

And when population start to decrease (on developed countries), you rise the alarm, "more population is needed due to the decline in the birth rate", promoting an eternal growth that would need the resources several planets if everyone had a decent standard of living.