MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandrake | 2025-12-15 21:36:16+00:00
The problem is when the automation fails, you're back to manual. And decreasing the period between updates means more chances for failure. I've been flamed by HN for admitting this, but I've never gotten automated L.E. certificate renewal to work reliably. Something always fails. Fortunately I just host a handful of hobby and club domains and personal E-mail, and don't rely on my domains for income. Now, I know it's been 90 days because one of my web sites fails or E-mail starts to complain about the certificate being bad, and I have to ssh into my VPS to muck around. This news seems to indicate that I get to babysit certbot even more frequently in the future.
by michaelt | 2025-12-15 21:36:27+00:00
I'm quite surprised the CA/Browser Forum went for this.

Nobody's paying for EV certificates now browsers don't display the EV details. The only reason to pay for a certificate is if you're rotating certificates manually, and the 90 day expiry of Lets Encrypt certificates is a hassle.

If the CA/Browser Forum is forcing everyone to run ACME clients (or outsource to a managed provider like AWS or Cloudflare) doesn't that eliminate the last substantial reason to give money to a CA?
by araes | 2025-12-15 21:36:27+00:00
Implement them like the iPod used to implement playlists. There's no playlist bars, tabs, UI, or other clutter. You just had a default list you were working on, and anything you added got added to it.

Except for the constant glitching and crashing, the iPod had a really great user interface. (and to be fair, that was probably partially my fault for downloading all kinds of sketchy MP3s)
by dinfinity | 2025-12-15 21:36:28+00:00
> But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.

1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels? Because if the sites are 5 times the scale of the current ones I would imagine there are considerable scale based cost efficiencies, both within projects and across projects (through standardization and commoditization).

2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV already greatly smoothes the power production curve throughout the day, improving profitability. Lower cost panels make the downside of requiring more panels in such a setup almost non-existent. Additionally, they reduce maintenance/cleaning costs by being mounted vertically.

3. Battery/energy storage (which further improve profitability) costs are dropping and can drop further.

Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer. Possible projects are underground thermal storage ("Pit Thermal Energy Storage", only works in places where heating is required in winter), desalination, producing ammonia for fertilizer, and producing jet fuel.
by isk517 | 2025-12-15 21:36:48+00:00
Every one of them will also be tripping over each other to try and push their software as the solution to any and every problem. I'd wager a hefty sum that at the end of the day every US government department is going to have it's own unique software stack that will be ill-suited for their needs, incompatible with what adjacent departments use, and offer no robustness in the event of an emergency.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-15 21:37:10+00:00
Nothing like putting in a multi decade civil service career and coming in one day to find a 20-something installed over you whose primary qualification was being hired at a "friendly" tech company and making the right kind of joke around the CEO.

... although that seems depressingly like it would also be the experience with new administrators being installed in executive agencies every 4 years, except they're slightly older.

Man, if only there were some way to retain talent in the face of political leadership transitions... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...
by metalman | 2025-12-15 21:37:32+00:00
the real truth is that there is a high probability that as was stated long ago, "it's not that the universe is stranger than we understand, it's that it is stranger than we can understand" and at this point it is very clear that the whole can not be understood from the parts, which the article underlines by pointing out that some of the parts are black holes, and others are orangutangs.
by neuralRiot | 2025-12-15 21:37:36+00:00
>People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.

The focus, thanks to years of advertising, is shifted towards features, new features sell, quality doesn’t, so to keep the price point and “innovate” manufacturers need to lower the quality knowing that a new version will replace the device soon, most consumers see this as normal so when a poorly designed and cheaply made thing for what there’s no replacement parts , no repair info, no software/ firmware fails is just an excuse to purchase the new shiny iteration with all the the bells and whistles (and AI!, copilot toaster!) wich is gonna last les than the previous one but now needs an “app” an activation and a subscription for the premium features .
by redbluered | 2025-12-15 21:38:04+00:00
> The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.

Sounds like a place I wouldn't want to work (and filtering for the reverse stance would be equally problematic).

Do you think things will work better if we have pro-Israel and pro-Palestine companies with the two groups never talking?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-15 21:38:09+00:00
I've had two such chats with Trump supporters, and one said in great detail that this statement is true. He acknowledged that Trump has done a number of ethically and legally problematic things, and that supporting Trump means enabling this, but feels that he has to accept that necessary evil in order to achieve his policy goals on various issues. (The other flatly denied that Trump has ever done anything wrong and refused to keep talking when I produced examples of the most pointlessly cruel stuff.)

Have you heard differently in your own casual chats on the topic?
by madeofpalk | 2025-12-15 21:38:21+00:00
ACME https://guide.actalis.com/ssl/activation/acme

Google https://pki.goog/

SSL.com https://www.ssl.com/blogs/sslcom-supports-acme-protocol-ssl-...

ZeroSSL https://zerossl.com/documentation/acme/

I don't actually think Cloudflare runs an ACME Certificate Authority. They just partner with LetsEncrypt? Edit: Looks like they don't run any CA, they just delegate out to a bunch of others https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/reference/certificate-...
by tamimio | 2025-12-15 21:38:23+00:00
Well, these measures are a bit outdated. To be tracked now you don't need to access someone's personal devices. You can be tracked with flock cams, ring cams, or any other thousands of cams out there that are already recording you and logging your car and your details. That grocery store you went to yesterday? Yep, you are logged from the moment you are in the parking lot till you leave. Oh, you used paid parking a day later? Your car is logged too, same goes with bus/trains tickets. Neighbors cams or building CCTV? That too. Your home address is also logged through many ways but primarily your tax filing and driver's license. Your home internet can be logged one way or another too, at router level (think of the many exploits against that). What about your laptop hardware? Definitely it isn't open source. Plus, have you checked your hardware if it's bugged? I personally know someone who ordered a laptop and an XYZ agency bugged his laptop (man in the middle) before it was delivered. A new laptop you order online and your bank info will trigger someone to intercept it and alter it in the middle. And many more details, like, are you sure someone won't stick an AirTag somewhere in/beneath your car to track you? FBI and DEA already used modified AirTags that won't notify anyone with an iPhone around to track drug dealers precisely. What about personal connections like friends and family or work that could be a weak link? and many ways without going into further details. So while your measures might work against some random internet attack or random stalker, against a surveillance state it won't. If they want to track you, they have all the resources (technical, legal, etc.) needed to do so.
by XorNot | 2025-12-15 21:38:28+00:00
All of that is about protecting secrets at rest on the device. It is of no protection at all if an application simply asks the secure-whatever for them and then proceeds to email them all to someone else.

The secrets in the keyring of my secure boot protected, full disk encrypted laptop are exactly as secure until I boot it up and unlock the keyring for Dbus.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-15 21:38:40+00:00
Neat theory, but AFAIK just the opposite. At least, as a young optical engineer, I was bombarded with technical experts proclaiming with great assurance that "digital would never fully replace film photography", because "its resolution would never compare".

And yet, if you took a crayon and continued the line of maximum resolution achieved on a single chip... that line wasn't plateauing.

Somehow, everyone believed Moore's Law, but not as it applied to detectors (which are basically transistors, which is what Moore's Law discusses).
by wcfrobert | 2025-12-15 21:38:46+00:00
Well there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose.

(1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head.

(2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred.

Here's a good David Foster Wallace quote in his interview with Bryan Garner:

> "there’s a real difference between writing where you’re communicating to somebody, the same way I’m trying to communicate with you, versus writing that’s almost a well-structured diary entry where the point is [singing] “This is me, this is me!” and it’s going out into the world.
by cess11 | 2025-12-15 21:38:47+00:00
You're repeating yourself.

Under what definition would the targeting of villages where the IDF is operating qualify? Why are you back to lying about the pager attacks being "targeted", even though they clearly were not, and even if they were, that would make the israeli crime a lot worse?

I used it as a rhetorical device, and as is obvious above and elsewhere, it's not something I'm monotonically trying to rub in as part of an astroturfing campaign.
by shawndrost | 2025-12-15 21:38:54+00:00
Think of your product as part "content" and part "container". When I say "content" I mean "stuff that could fit on a content platform". When I say "container" I mean, the bundle of forces that your product exerts to bring the user in contact with the content.

Some learning products are just content with zero container. Books are the limit example. Karpathy's "Let's build GPT" is another.

Most learning products -- and all apps -- live or die by the container they create. (There is no reason to build a learning app other than to build a container. If you feel you have the best content, ship it on a content platform and save yourself a very painful distribution slog.

Duolingo is in the container game. Their container is made of every cheap trick in the book -- notifications, streaks, etc -- because they work. My startup was Hack Reactor, the coding bootcamp, and we did it with pair programming and fixed classroom hours. (We had great content, but our competitors with good containers and bad content did leagues better than vice versa.)

If you're building an app, you're in the container game. You can build a great container with no cheap tricks. I have done so! But you can't build a great learning app with no container, and you can't build a great container if you if you don't want to change your users' patterns of engagement and attention.

So, what is your container? How will you weave a powerful spell that meaningfully transforms the attention and engagement of the app's user? What will cause them to pull up your app again and again, when they would have churned from a simple anki deck or whatnot? Given that you find it distasteful to use the easy levers you mentioned (notifications, "streak" psychology), what alternatives can shift your users' patterns of attention and engagement towards the learning task?

If you have great answers to those questions, great! If you don't want to build a container, build content on a platform with easy distribution. If you want to build a container but you don't want to shape your users' attention or engagement, you are confused.
by Uehreka | 2025-12-15 21:38:54+00:00
(GP here) There’s a big difference between techniques that could be feasible for an app (presumably used by people who want to study one hour or less per day) and techniques you can use with people who are dedicating their entire professional workday to language learning for weeks/months on end.

I guess my original comment could’ve been more specific, but I figured the context was implied.
by milesvp | 2025-12-15 21:39:19+00:00
If you could afford an amiga around this time, you most likely weren't impressed with any of the consoles. Even if you had a commodore 64, you may not have been interested with the NES, my experience was that the games on the commodore was that many of the games were closer to the arcade than what you got with the early NES cartridges could do. Later cartridges outstripped the commodore since they added extra processing in the cartridges themselves. By the end of the NES life, the games had gotten really good, some games could almost compete with the early SNES titles.

I had a similar feeling towards the N64 some years later. I had a 486 that could do much better 3D and with more interesting games, and there was nothing in the nintendo catalogue that could compete with what I basically had free access to due to the internet.
by cjbenedikt | 2025-12-15 21:40:07+00:00
Always amazes me how people like him - apparently well read - can come up with such an odd world view. " Greta on a bike"? Never saw her on one but mixing her in as Antichrist? Seriously? Plus his view on MAGA and Trump. Does he actually follow day-to-day events or is he so aloof that he cannot be bothered. And this very simplistic view that there is either right or left or Greta. Is there a teutonic undercurrent? Sorry, but it is nigh impossible to take him seriously.
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-15 21:40:20+00:00
This made sense when Signal/TextSecure allowed users to send regular SMS, making it easy to convince others to set it as their default messenger.

Now that this crucial adoption feature has been removed, it makes zero sense for Signal to continue to rely on phone numbers. Since that feature has been removed, the utility of Signal has been lost anyway and many in my groups returned to regular SMS. So the system is already compromised from that perspective. At least forks such as Session tried to solve this (too bad Session removed forward secrecy and became useless)
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-12-15 21:40:40+00:00
I think the point is people are well aware that living in a country that speaks the language is a great way to learn a language.

The point was what's the best way to learn a language other than by having an entire country surrounding you dedicated to that language? Many / most people can't pick up their life for a year to learn a language. People have work, people have families, people have local commitments.
by K0balt | 2025-12-15 21:40:44+00:00
I agree, but since a messaging apps utility is some fraction of the square of the # of users on the platform, a facile way to propagate virally is a de facto requirement for an app targeting wide spread adoption / discovery rather than targeted cells of individuals focused around a pre shared idea.

It’s a compromise meant to propagate the network, and it has a high degree of utility to most users. There are also plenty of apps that are de-facto anonymous and private. Signal is de facto non-anonymous but private, though using a personally identifiable token is not a hard requirement and is trivial to avoid. (A phone number of some kind is needed once for registration only)
by feelamee | 2025-12-15 21:40:53+00:00
I mean that bug is *not in* uninitialized variable - bug in program logic. E.g. one of code pathes don't initialize variable.

So, I see uninitialized variables as a good way to find such logic errors. And, therefore, advice to always initialize variable - bad practice.

Of course if you already have a good value to initialize variable - do it. But if you have no - better leave it uninitialized.

Moreover - this will not cause safety issues in production builds because you can use `-ftrivial-auto-var-init` to initialize automatic variables to e.g. zeroes (`-fhardened` will do this too)
by bflesch | 2025-12-15 21:41:07+00:00
All of the things you mention are interdependent, as resource and service management is the core of it all. I'm convinced that they set out to design somethign that has a scope which is as small as possible, but then noticed that interfacing with legacy-but-established open source software was extremely difficult.

I'm very thankful for systemd covering more and more bases because the "common" alternatives for many problems might be stable but they are often really bad to configure, maintain and debug - the ergonomics in non-default use cases have a lot of potential for improvement. And what can you do if the maintainer is not responsive to the kind of improvements you would need to make the software ready for the next decades? Many times I have forked things and tried to refactor their technical debt so a new feature can be implemented without making it an even bigger hack, and after that you just want to delete it all and start from scratch with a "proper" setup.

So I can understand the perspective of the systemd developers and the pain they had to go through simply on a technical level, not even thinking about the huge flamewars on mailing lists with some people.

Open source has big social dynamics, and a certain type of person is attracted to being "leader" or maintainer even though they are not as technical as I would wish them to be. I've had the painful experience with having to explain security vulnerabilities to some of them and my idealistic illusion of open source project governance received a good grounding in reality.

On top of this imo the documentation of systemd is really good.
by dolmen | 2025-12-15 21:41:08+00:00
> An important part of adoption will probably be bindings to other languages. The libraries are all in C++, but since they aren't very big (by design), making Rust / Go / Python bindings shouldn't be hard for someone experienced with those languages.

If the the protocol is that clean, make a formal specification for it that can be used to generate client code.

A binding to C++ is definitely not what I want in my Go program.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-12-15 21:41:24+00:00
The airlines deserve no money above the price of a ticket. The way i see it the hold comes free with the rest of the plane. I see no reason why i need to pay another 40 pounds to bring a case, so i will shamelessly abuse my allowance. (if it was a reasonable amount like a tenner, that would be a different story, as it stands it's a cash grab)
by jcims | 2025-12-15 21:41:25+00:00
I used to be knee deep in PKI stuff, now I hardly pay attention.

Two quick questions:

1 - Are there any TLS libraries that enable warnings when certs are nearing expiration?

2 - Are there any extensions in the works (or previous failed attempts) for TLS to have the client validate the next planned certificate and signal both ends when that fails?
by saulpw | 2025-12-15 21:41:59+00:00
After you've spent a lot of time exerting yourself, then you can let go and let your non-doing take over. I've experienced this myself with coding and music and language. Once you've got it "in your fingers", learning to relax is a big part of the Inner Game of Whatever.

But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances. That's a lie, guaranteed to mislead many people to not trying anything because it feels like effort.
by Asooka | 2025-12-15 21:41:59+00:00
One more thing: D-Bus has the concept of generic services which can be automatically started, e.g. org.freedesktop.FileManager1. When you send a command to that service, the file manager will be started if it is not already running. However, there is no mechanism for the user to select which file manager to start, so if you happen to have both KDE and GNOME installed you have a 50:50 chance of launching dolphin or nautilus. See for example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/778028/set-a-specif... . It truly boggles the mind.
by SerCe | 2025-12-15 21:42:16+00:00
Great article! Just yesterday I watched a Devoxx talk by Andrei Pangin [1], the creator of async-profiler where I learned about the new heatmap support. To many folks it might not sound that exciting, until you realise that these heatmaps make it much easier to see patterns over time. If you’re interested there’s a solid blog post [2] from Netflix that walks through the format and why it can be incredibly useful.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7-S-Hn-7Do

[2]: https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-flamescope-a57ca19d47bb
by drnick1 | 2025-12-15 21:43:08+00:00
> I graduated from my PhD and realized that most, if not all, of the Matlab scripts I had used for my research would now be useless

And this is why you should write free software and, as a scientist, develop algorithms that do not rely on the facilities of a specific language or platform. Nothing is more annoying than reading a scientific paper and finding out that 90% of the "implementation" is calling a third party library treated as a blackbox.
by kragen | 2025-12-15 21:43:15+00:00
I don't think they needed improving in order to continue accessing the existing sites that still used them.

Also, you may not have noticed this, but you're commenting on a thread that's largely about PETSCII and Videotex.

Fortunately, AFAIK, there isn't any significant body of existing Sixel art we need to preserve access to.
by xg15 | 2025-12-15 21:43:27+00:00
> A further 2021 meta-analysis distinguished between three different kinds of peer involvement. It found "informal" peer strategies (such as general discussions in class) were associated with greater program effectiveness. However, actively encouraging peer bystanders to intervene (for example, as "upstanders") was associated with less effectiveness in reducing victimization.

Sone armchair psychology here, but this doesn't seem surprising to me:

One thing a bully needs is to feel strong and secure in their peer group: They feel they can get away with bullying the victim - or even gaining validation - because they believe the majority of the other students are "on their side" and the victim is socially isolated.

If a number of students stand up and call out the bully on their own, they signal to the bully that this is not the case - and that the bully might risk social isolation if they continue.

But if everyone just got an official lesson before to stand up to bullies, this signal falls flat - because it's obvious the students are just "acting on orders" of the school authorities and this is not their real opinion. So the bully might believe they're still "really" siding with them, no matter what they say openly.