MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dijit | 2026-01-19 22:18:45+00:00
Alright, let's see if I get this right.

You're arguing that a system can apply the law unjustly even when it reaches correct outcomes. I think that's only meaningful if the "unjust application" materially affects people's lives in ways that matter beyond process.

So: plea bargains. You say they apply unreasonable pressure. But what makes the pressure unreasonable? A prosecutor offering a reduced sentence for pleading guilty isn't force, threat, fraud, or intimidation. It's a straightforward trade: save the court's time and resources, get a lighter sentence. That's pressure, but it's not inherently unreasonable.

You could argue it becomes unreasonable when the alternative is so severe that even innocent people feel compelled to plead. But that's an empirical claim. How often does that happen? You've now said you think plea bargains routinely produce false confessions. That's testable. Where's the evidence?

On thresholds: you're right that "more often than not" sounds low for a justice system. But the question is compared to what? Every alternative has error rates. Jury trials have wrongful convictions. Bench trials have wrongful convictions. The question isn't whether the system is perfect, it's whether it's better than the realistic alternatives and whether the error rate is acceptable.

What error rate would you accept? Because without that, "we need way way way better" is just saying "it should be perfect," which isn't achievable.

The original claim upthread was that the law is rarely applied justly. That's not a claim about error rates being too high, it's a claim that injustice is the norm. Do you actually believe that, or are you arguing something more limited about plea bargaining specifically?
by artur_makly | 2026-01-19 22:19:00+00:00
I'm starting to host bi-weekly after work soirees.

It's simple. Anyone you meet casually and get a nice vibe from - just invite them - you will see their face light up like they won a lottery...cause they did - your lottery.

Tell them that you're hosting a special gathering with interesting people you've recently met ( that way everyone starts from 0 )

bonus points: Make sure that your list is as balanced as possible with as many different types of humans ( age/gender/race/education/talent/interests ) add your weights into any criteria as you see fit, but keep in mind the more the blend the spicier the magic and the more you will grow.

If they want to bring a special friend ( great! but just say one for now )
Lubricate with some light wine/beers/alcoholic beverages (dont worry most will bring their own ) .. add some nice chill-house ambient music .. and let the magic begin.

Become the change you seek, it's intoxicating.
by simonw | 2026-01-19 22:19:25+00:00
> In the hardest task I challenged GPT-5.2 it to figure out how to write a specified string to a specified path on disk, while the following protections were enabled: address space layout randomisation, non-executable memory, full RELRO, fine-grained CFI on the QuickJS binary, hardware-enforced shadow-stack, a seccomp sandbox to prevent shell execution, and a build of QuickJS where I had stripped all functionality in it for accessing the operating system and file system. To write a file you need to chain multiple function calls, but the shadow-stack prevents ROP and the sandbox prevents simply spawning a shell process to solve the problem. GPT-5.2 came up with a clever solution involving chaining 7 function calls through glibc’s exit handler mechanism.

Yikes.
by ZoneZealot | 2026-01-19 22:19:26+00:00
> People configure things similar to https://mxtoolbox.com/dmarc/dmarc-setup-cname instructions (which I find in conflict with RFC1034).

I don't think they're advising anyone create both a CNAME and TXT at the same label - but it certainly looks like that from the weird screenshot at step 5 (which doesn't match the text).

I think it's mistakenly a mish-mash of two different guides, one for 'how to use a CNAME to point to a third party DMARC service entirely' and one for 'how to host the DMARC record yourself' (irrespective of where the RUA goes).
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-19 22:20:15+00:00
There are many in-house tools (say at banks) where Java code generates... COBOL. It's wild: in the video you linked it's explained COBOL was meant for machines that don't exist anymore so COBOL is running inside emulators.

So you have Java code, generating COBOL code, that's then run on an emulator emulating an old IBM system that was meant to run COBOL. It's just wild.

Some of the tools are even front-facing users (bank employees): at times you can still see at some banks an employee running an app in a monochrome green-on-black text terminal emulator that is basically COBOL.

It's weird, just weird. But legacy code is legacy code. And if you think COBOL's legacy is bad, Java is going to dwarf COBOL's legacy big times (for Java is typically used at the kind of places that still use COBOL and it's used way more than COBOL).

So in the future, heck, we may have a new language, generating, inside an emulator emulating current machines/OSes, Java code that is going to be code generating COBOL code (!), that's then going to be run in an emulator.
by tremon | 2026-01-19 22:20:18+00:00
The station density in NL simply doesn't allow for the same kind of high-speed rail that you see in Spain, France or Germany. The segments Groningen-Zwolle and Maastricht-Eindhoven are basically the only parts where train speeds over 200km/h make any difference. On all other trajectories, the limiting factor is not the maximum train speed but the interference from other rail traffic.

The major cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag) typically have 4 trains/hour going between them. Higher-speed trains won't make any difference there, unless you first build out dedicated infrastructure (like the IC Direct line between Schiphol and Rotterdam, which cuts a whopping 20 mins from the regular IC travel time).
Show HN: AirPipe – terminal to phone file transfer via QR code
by sammylis | 2026-01-19 22:20:43+00:00
I needed to get files from servers to my phone without cloud uploads or setting up SCP on mobile.

airpipe send file.txt : QR code appears, scan with phone, file downloads. Reverse works too: airpipe receive lets phone upload to server.

The relay is zero-knowledge. Encryption key lives in the URL fragment (the #... part), which browsers never send to servers. Relay only sees encrypted bytes. NaCl secretbox for the crypto.

~900 lines of Go. Relay uses ~1MB RAM if you want to self-host.
by notahacker | 2026-01-19 22:20:49+00:00
Nah, I'm getting the impression from having a Facebook login and it looking like the platform best representing Dead Internet Theory. That's compared with other Meta platforms I've invested a lot less time in trying to cultivate a social network on which friends actually still communicate on, so it's not like I'm part of some self-selecting group of hardline opponents.

I can remember when my Facebook feed was full of travel and baby pictures (not to mention much earlier days when it was how you got invited to parties) Now when I log in, the feed is full of slop, with maybe one actual update from someone I last saw in high school 20 years ago. That's not just because they're filling the feed with slop for the sake of it. If I navigate to a friend's profile their most recent updates are probably their last three birthdays, each with generic greetings offered by 3-5 people presumably not close enough to have their phone number. My last few friend requests are all bots. I'm sure people still habitually click the app and scroll for a few moments, and also sure it might be different for communities in India or Brazil but yeah... it really isn't what it used to be for regular people who heavily used it for at least a decade and couldn't care less about privacy concerns or Zuck's politics. It's gone from social network to third rate clickbait feed which happens to be a default app on more phones than the better ones...

As for Threads, there was something about the way they tried to entice signups with the world's dullest clickbait that just didn't induce me to see if anyone actually used it for stuff.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-19 22:21:10+00:00
> Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use.

And what if you're on HN and don't use what other are using there? I don't use AI. I don't use social media. I don't use JS frameworks. I don't use Go or Rust. I bang out HTML/JS/CSS by hand in an editor that is not VSCode when I write UIs. I also don't use Docker. Am I even allowed here?!
by everdrive | 2026-01-19 22:21:27+00:00
Social media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism? In years prior, you would be heavily shaped by the people you lived near. TV and internet broke this down somewhat, but social media really blew the doors off. Now it's the case that almost no one seems to be able to explain all the woes we're facing today: extreme ideas, populism, the destruction of institutions.
All of this because people are addicted to novelty and outrage, and because companies need their stock price to go up.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-19 22:22:03+00:00
Meh. "Spectrum" is either:

A very short way of emphasizing that not all autistic people are the same. Any more than all non-autistic people are the same, or all color-blind people are the same, or all German-Americans are the same, or all grandfathers are the same, or whatever. No matter how addicted most people seem to be to idiotically simplistic stereotypes.

or

When looking at a particular situation, from a particular PoV - a way to state that there may be a considerable and kinda one-dimensional-ish range in how well various autistic people seem to handle it.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-19 22:22:20+00:00
> The US has the second largest manufacturing base in the world after China. It's larger than India and is even slightly larger than the EU.

Of only end products. The "largest manufacturing base" is misleading when majority of inputs for your finished goods are dependent on imports.

> it doesn't matter if something is currently made in the US

It definitely does matter. The right way to have gone about this was to first build the manufacturing capacity in US before imposition of tariffs. It was done in the reverse, which led to US revealing its hand too early, allowing for rest of the World to re-calibrate and start the process of de-dollarization.

> foreign manufacturers to have to lower prices. They could also switch to substitute products or reduce consumption and then foreign manufacturers would still have to lower prices to limit the extent to which that happens.

It won't happen. There is no reason for exporters to lower prices when tariffs only set a new normal. Once the prices have gone up and consumer spending has stabilized around those jacked up prices, that will set the benchmark. Just study history. No product has been devalued due to any contingent circumstances unless the product itself becomes obsolete. Here you are not talking about novel products being developed and manufactured that will obsolete something popular. You are talking about bringing back manufacturing of nuts, bolts etc. Things that are critical and have an already established price in the market that will only go up higher in price once manufacturing moves to US eventually. Rest of the World will adjust to the new higher price.
by andy99 | 2026-01-19 22:22:38+00:00
Imo this is what happened once protests became a “right”. I know most people here won’t agree with the Canada trucker protest, but I remember when it happened, people were saying “ok, you’ve had your protest and exercised your rights, you’ve been heard, you can go home now” - framing it just like that, as a rally to show an opinion rather than a threat. It felt to me like “the establishment” just treats them as peformative, because as you say they usually are, and then doesn’t know what to do when it’s actually something they have to react to.
by SpaceNugget | 2026-01-19 22:24:28+00:00
> They are, at best, a mild deterrent against indiscriminate use of lethal force.

Is a quote from a sibiling comment to the one I replied to.

It seems that at the very least an extraordinarily loud minority of americans believe that arming the general population should somehow result in fewer gun deaths. On the big social media platforms, the larger news networks, and right here on HN, I am always surprised that such an obviously incorrect idea can be so pervasive.

> All available evidence indicates we should be spending much less time and energy focusing on guns and far more focusing on the failures and motivations of our government.

No, it doesn't. You can't just assert that because it's what you think. Societal issues do play a part, but just as you need oxygen and fuel for a fire, removing either one stops the flames. So if changing the individual minds and morals of seemingly half your country seems easier than enacting legislation restricting access to guns... well I don't think you should hold your breath.
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-19 22:24:29+00:00
Just as relevant now as ever. This part strikes me particularly:

> Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I think that one of the great failures of our society and our government has been our willingness to allow large gaps to form between a law and its application. We constantly hear about laws that are "on the books but not enforced". We constantly pass laws to remedy perceived ills, but we don't fund or even specify enforcement mechanisms (or we make such mechanisms ineffective), so the laws just add to the pile of unpaid promissory notes that King refers to in another famous passage. (Ironically the civil rights legislation that King fought for is an example of this.)

I also wonder what King would say if we could ask him today about what he says here. In the situation he describes, is it really the ordinance itself that becomes unjust, or can it be that the ordinance itself remains just while it is the enforcement process itself that is unjust?

We seem too content to allow decisions about the provisions of a law to be separated from decisions about how those provisions are implemented; we allow innumerable people (e.g., police officers) discretion to make their own decisions about what the law means. This leaves space for those people to interpose their own personal biases and beliefs between the law and its operation. I think we need to fix that.
by meindnoch | 2026-01-19 22:24:36+00:00
No. There are no neural networks here. The renderer is just a function that takes a bunch of ellipsoid parameters and outputs a bunch of pixels. You render the scene, then subtract the ground truth pixels from the result, and sum the squared differences to get the total error. Then you ask the question "how would the error change if the X position of ellipsoid #1 was changed slightly?" (then repeat for all ellipsoid parameters, not just the X position, and all ellipsoids, not just ellipsoid #1). In other words, compute the partial derivative of the error with respect to each ellipsoid parameter. This gives you a gradient, that you can use to adjust the ellipsoids to decrease the error (i.e. get closer to the ground truth image).
by chronid | 2026-01-19 22:25:06+00:00
Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.

Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)
by bwblabs | 2026-01-19 22:25:21+00:00
I'm not sure, but we're seeing this specifically with _dmarc CNAMEing to '.hosted.dmarc-report.com' together with a TXT record type, also see this discussion users asking for this at deSEC: https://talk.desec.io/t/cannot-create-cname-and-txt-record-f...

My main point was however that it's really not okay that CloudFlare allows setting up other record types (e.g. TXT, but basically any) next to a CNAME.
by therealmarv | 2026-01-19 22:25:27+00:00
I've researched a little deeper. Apparently it depends on the mixture and on the model of your laptop.

I've written that because I remember of "staingate" of Apple Laptops. Apparently the 2012–2017 Retina models were really not okay with alcohol solutions.

So depending on the manufacturing year and alcohol solution percentage you can be fine with alcohol on glossy displays.
by distances | 2026-01-19 22:25:31+00:00
> Remember the hype around location and Foursquare?

There are dozens of us still doing regular check-ins with Swarm, the check-in app that Foursquare rebranded years ago. Maybe hundreds even! It's a good time to join, mayorships are easier to get than ever and there are no busybodies left pushing pointless app updates!
by terminalshort | 2026-01-19 22:25:36+00:00
But do they need it? How do you know? And don't say because the doctor said so, because doctors disagree all the time. When my grandfather was dying in his late 80s, the doctor said there was nothing he could do. So his children took him to another doctor, who said the same. And then another doctor, who agreed with the first two. But then they took him to a 4th doctor, who agreed to do open heart surgery, which didn't work, and if anything hastened his inevitable death due to the massive stress. The surgery cost something like 70 grand and they eventually got the insurance company to pay for it. But the insurance company should not have paid for it because it was a completely unnecessary waste of money. And of course there will be mistakes in the other direction because this just isn't an exact science.
by simonw | 2026-01-19 22:27:19+00:00
Why can't they both be true?

The quality of output you see from any LLM system is filtered through the human who acts on those results.

A dumbass pasting LLM generated "reports" into an issue system doesn't disprove the efforts of a subject-matter expert who knows how to get good results from LLMs and has the necessary taste to only share the credible issues it helps them find.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-19 22:27:22+00:00
You realize “the pipeline” you have to build is literally just Athena SQL statement “Create table select * from…”. Yes you can run this directly from S3 and it will create one big file

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/ctas.html

And if you are using any OLAP database for OLTP, you’re doing it wrong. It’s also a simple “process” to move data back and forth between Aurora MySQL or Postgres by federating your OlTP database with Athena (handwavy because I haven’t done it) or the way I have done it is use one Select statement to export to S3 and another to export into your OLTP database.

And before you say you shouldn’t have to do this, you have always needed some process to take data from your normalized data to un normalized form for reporting and analytics.

Source: doing boring enterprise stuff including databases since 1996 and been working for 8 years with AWS services outside AWS (startups and consulting companies) and inside AWS (Professional Services no longer there)

Why are you doing this manually? There is a built in way of doing Kinesis Data Streams to Redshift

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/using-other-s...

Also by default, while you can through Glue Catalog have S3 directly as a destination for Redshift, by default it definitely doesn’t use S3.
by AuthAuth | 2026-01-19 22:27:22+00:00
I'm a pretty liberal guy, I like democracy I like captialism but its stuff like this that is blackpilling me on private enterprise. No matter how much they have they continue to push the boundary and squeeze the customer. My cope at the moment is that its only americans and its due to a failure of culture. But im starting to the same greed in companies in my own country. I dont think worker owned enterprise is any better as they still have the same incentives.
by hansvm | 2026-01-19 22:27:33+00:00
Some people don't though, and their referrals are much more valuable than dozens of additional applications.

Much like many other decisions you're making in the job market, it's a polarizing choice that increases your overall chances when the alienated class of people isn't too large. If 90% of people ignore those emails but your chance of getting a first-round interview goes up 5x compared to a cold application when the remaining 10% respond, 2+ emails are easier to send than 1 application, especially when you've done the legwork to make your application any good.

I haven't used techniques like these specifically yet, but as somebody who nearly always eventually gets the job once I've had a first-round interview, I wouldn't be opposed to seeking out the hiring manager and contacting them directly to decrease the resumé false rejection rate.
by doomerhunter | 2026-01-19 22:27:33+00:00
Both are true, the difference is the skill level of the people who use / create programs to coordinate LLMs to generate those reports.

The AI slop you see on curl's bug bounty program[1] (mostly) comes from people who are not hackers in the first place.

In the contrary persons like the author are obviously skilled in security research and will definitely send valid bugs.

Same can be said for people in my space who do build LLM-driven exploit development. In the US Xbow hired quite some skilled researchers [2] had some promising development for instance.

[1] https://hackerone.com/curl/hacktivity
[2] https://xbow.com/about
by asdff | 2026-01-19 22:27:59+00:00
>> You no longer need to review the code. Or instruct the model at the level of files or functions. You can test behaviors instead.

I think this is where things will ultimately head. You generate random code, purely random in raw machine readable binary, and simply evaluate a behavior. Most random generated code will not work. some, however, will work. and within that working code, some will be far faster and this is the code that is used.

No different than what a geneticist might do evaluating generated mutants for favorable traits. Knowledge of the exact genes or pathways involved is not even required, one can still select among desired traits and therefore select for that best fit mechanism without even knowing it exists.
by cosmicgadget | 2026-01-19 22:28:03+00:00
> How can you claim it to be zero relevance when the discussion is about incumbent US President not deserving the Nobel Peace Prize

If I wrote "Argentina didn't deserve to win the 2022 World Cup" would you reply with an unhinged rant about France not deserving their 1998 win?

> Henry Kissinger should also be squarely blamed, though he himself got the Nobel Peace Prize.

Finally I was afraid we weren't going to get to Italy's '82 title!

> But I see you are making excuses for the US Presidents not being able to stop wars their country started or involved in.

Are you going to answer my question or just put words in my mouth?

> Is that your excuse now to ignore Trump's wrongdoings?

My what? My guy, you need to take a deep breath and not pretend people are saying things they aren't.