MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bsgeraci | 2026-02-06 18:59:27+00:00
Great question and I think about this a lot. I chose MIT deliberately and I'll explain why.

My graduate research focused on common computer security misconceptions — one of the biggest being that open source is inherently insecure. The algorithms and systems we trust most are the ones open to public scrutiny. AES was selected through an open competition where every candidate was published for the world to attack. TLS, SHA-256, RSA — their security comes from transparency, not obscurity. I believe the same applies to software infrastructure.

Could a bigger player take this and run a competing service? Sure, MIT allows that. But I'd rather have the code out there being used, audited, and improved than restrict it to protect a business model I don't even have yet. If someone like AWS wraps this in a managed service, that honestly means I built something worth wrapping — and the open version still exists for anyone who wants to self-host.

I've thought about the Canonical model — paid support around a free product — and I might go there someday. But I don't have years of production use behind this yet. We all start somewhere. Right now I'd rather focus on making the software good and building a community around it than optimizing a license for a monetization strategy that doesn't exist.

AGPL is a valid choice and I respect projects that use it. But for me, MIT is a statement about what I actually care about — the code being out there for everyone.
by tptacek | 2026-02-06 18:59:32+00:00
To put it mildly I don't think there's a consensus among Minnesota DFL-types who paid attention to this that the state at any point took the matter seriously in proportion to its severity. There's a lot of evidence that they did the opposite thing. I try to avoid openly identifying my partisan commitments (see this whole thread for why) but: this shit is what we Democrats constantly dunk on the GOP for doing, and we're not acquitting ourselves well here.

It's annoying that we're talking about this in these terms, because the article is about public services fraud, and it's mostly technical, and it's an interesting subject. We shouldn't have to debate Tim Walz to engage with it.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-06 19:01:08+00:00
Yes, because when I enroll a child in a daycare I start by wandering around the facilities with a camera man and then I demand to see the children. But sure is suspicious that this place has no kids in it when I visit it outside it's posted operation hours.

Nick did a day worth of shooting, didn't follow up, and didn't check basic things like hours of operation.
by jghn | 2026-02-06 19:01:18+00:00
I think you're the one who missed the point, as in you missed *my* point.

When I first saw Starship Troopers, I disliked it because it wasn't faithful to the book. Over time I came to appreciate it for what it actually was, and now think it is fantastic.

Likewise, with Hackers I initially disliked it due to how inaccurate and unrealistic it was. I came to appreciate it for what it actually was over time, and now think it is fantastic.
by ra7 | 2026-02-06 19:01:30+00:00
We know Waymo reduced their LiDAR price from $75,000 to ~$7500 back in 2017 when they started designing them in-house: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-i...

That was 2 generations of hardware ago (4th gen Chrysler Pacificas). They are about to introduce 6th gen hardware. It's a safe bet that it's much cheaper now, given how mass produced LiDARs cost ~$200.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-06 19:01:33+00:00
> Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw.

If you can find good leaders by random draw, that means the average citizen is a good leader, which would seem to suggest that the average citizen should be a reasonable an hard-to-dupe judge of good leaders, and therefore that elections also work well.

If elections don't work well to select leaders, that's a pretty good piece of evidence that sortition won't, either.

OTOH, the particular failures of sortition and elections may be different, and using a system where both are used for different veto points might be net less problematic than either alone. Consider a bicameral legislature with one house chosen by elections and the other by sortition, for instance.

(OTOH, there is plenty of solid evidence in comparative government of how to do electoral democracy better and people in the US don't seem too interested in that, which is probably a better focus for immediate reform than relatively untested, on a large scale, ideas about avoiding electoral democracy.)
by causal | 2026-02-06 19:01:41+00:00
> Always Have an Agent Running

I'm a huge believer in AI agent use and even I think this is wrong. It's like saying "always have something compiling" or "make sure your Internet is always downloading something".

The most important work happens when an agent is not running, and if you spend most of your time looking for ways to run more agents you're going to streetlight-effect your way into solving the wrong problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
by writeinaclick | 2026-02-06 19:01:54+00:00
WriteinaClick is an AI-powered editor built for "pantsers"—writers who prefer discovery over planning. The platform organizes manuscripts into acts, chapters, and scenes, allowing authors to navigate their entire book seamlessly while maintaining a spontaneous creative flow.

The built-in AI assistant enhances every page by analyzing pacing, dialogue, and character consistency. With integrated web research and detailed export tools, it serves as a comprehensive hub for drafting, refining, and analyzing your professional manuscript.
by geauxvirtual | 2026-02-06 19:02:06+00:00
How much of this code was actually reviewed? Doing a quick glance through some of the features being touted around SSO, there are a few vulnerabilities, and wonder if these actually work and have been tested with different providers.

* I say this as an engineer who has supported an authentication platform for years for a SAAS company and know not one IdP has implemented SAML the same as others.
by vharuck | 2026-02-06 19:02:16+00:00
I was thinking about this yesterday. For the US system, what if the top roles of an independent Prosecutorial Branch were appointed by the Judicial Branch, but Congress would control them by using the budget and impeachments? The President could still work with the appointees on setting the overall agenda and priorities. Executive control could be enforced with allowing or denying cooperation with executive agencies.

But Prosecutorial would have to be its own branch to avoid the current SCOTUS crushing on the "unitary executive" theory.
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-06 19:02:24+00:00
With consulting you make some $X * N consultants on staff

With products you hope to make $X * N units sold. Staffing to build product + make those N sales takes something like log(N) sold units.

At least that's the dream. Consulting requires little upfront capital investment. Products often require a constant, but large, upfront capital investment
by cvoss | 2026-02-06 19:02:41+00:00
I'm old enough to consider TV ads as scams too. "For only 6 payments of 19.99!" The "mute" button on my parents' remote control was worn off. I still mute ads that I get through low-tier streaming subscriptions. It's really jarring to go to a friend's house where they don't mute their ads.

Heck, I've even seen scam ads in printed local newspapers. They typically target seniors with a thing for collecting rare coins and use misleading language about the U.S. Mint.
by kube-system | 2026-02-06 19:02:45+00:00
They add a tiny bit to the efficiency and/or range, they look cool (e.g. serve a gee-whiz marketing purpose), and safety evaluations in the markets where they still exist don't penalize them -- up until now they've had very little against them.

Maybe as legal and reputational backlash spreads the pros will not outweigh the cons. But someone designing a car a decade ago, marketed towards early adopter types, would have had no reason not to.

And I say this as someone who hates these handles designs personally.
by buzer | 2026-02-06 19:03:01+00:00
So just to clarify there are two different things here:

The information that fraud detection is being performed is something that needs to be disclosed. That's what would be part of the article 13/14 (13 is when controller collects data directly from subject, 14 is when they receive it from anywhere else (including generating it themselves)) notices. It's very rare that any law would forbid giving any kind of article 13 notice, that's why banks do disclose that they process personal data for AML purposes in their privacy policies.

Article 14 itself however does allow omitting the notice in certain circumstances, but those are quite limited. Fraud detection can fit here, but usually only in the context where controllers transmit the information to other controllers regarding risky clients and such. The actual fraud detection itself is a different purpose and it's objectives are not, generally speaking, in risk just because someone knows that certain company ran the fraud detection on this transaction (since fraud detection is run on every single transaction).

The "how" is part of the second thing. That's generally more on article 15 (and 22) territory where controller could omit the information why exactly the transaction was denied (and possibly things like transaction's fraud score). I don't really like the current interpretations either (as it makes it pretty impossible to fix incorrect information) but unless CJEU gives some ruling in the issue it's unlikely that DPAs & EDPB are going to enforce some changes there.
by comboy | 2026-02-06 19:03:26+00:00
People do get addicted to bikes. Not even questionable. But of course that's not a charitable interpretation, and on that - yes I don't think personalized content is comparable to heroin. What is so evil about personalized content?

I'm sincerely trying to understand. Your whole argument here is based on the premise that TV is OK because it's not personalized.
by daemonk | 2026-02-06 19:03:55+00:00
Pretty cool technique using complementary overhangs and toehold sequences to generate a 3-way heteroduplex, ligate knick, and then remove barcode duplex.

They don't give much details on how the barcode duplex is removed though. I guess ultimately the barcode duplex strands can just be melted off and the ligated strand can be used to template off of.

If this can be made into an easy to use kit, can really make vector generation much easier and hopefully not locked into proprietary systems.

I can imagine a company that bioinformatically generates libraries of common long oligos with corresponding barcode and allow end-users to select oligos to modularly ligate together in a one pot reaction. Cool stuff.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-06 19:04:35+00:00
Call me cynical, but from the comments online, I think this research is being used for propaganda marketing to push for MV3 adoption - to assuage the lay users that all the hue and cry is for nothing and they shouldn't abandon Chrome, and to provide an excuse for other browsers holding out to embrace MV3 completely. (Don't be surprised if Firefox suddenly changes its mind and decides to fully embrace MV3 and drop MV2).

Here is the actual research - Privacy vs. Profit: The Impact of Google's Manifest Version 3 (MV3) Update on Ad Blocker Effectiveness - https://arxiv.org/html/2503.01000v2

> This study comes with several limitations ... this study faces limitations related to the dynamic behavior of websites and extensions ... Second, consistent with previous research, the automated browser-based experiment does not replicate all aspects of user interactions, such as visiting sub-pages of a website’s homepage, which introduce different trackers than the website’s homepage ... Third, the study explores ad blocker effectiveness using a European IP address and default ad blocker settings on a select sample of websites, focusing on display ads. As a result, the web’s long tail is under-represented. Consequently, we cannot rule out that MV3’s 30,000-rule limit could disproportionately affect less popular websites that rely on rarely used rule ... Because EU traffic often involves GDPR-driven website changes that reduce third-party activity irrespective of consent, baseline ad and tracker counts are lower ... Fourth, our study cannot exclude that any future changes to the Chrome extension ecosystem might hinder ad blocker effectiveness, as feared by some ad blocker providers ...

Note that the intent of this study was to determine if MV3 ad-blockers are as effective as MV2 based ad-blockers. Nobody has said that MV3 cannot be used to block ads or trackers. What they have always criticised is that it makes it harder to do so than MV2, and the difficulty of implementing dynamic filtering with it gives the advertisers an upper hand over adblockers.

When the ad-block extension developers tell you that MV3 cripples their extension and makes it harder to block ads and trackers in your browser, who are you going to believe - the experts at blocking ads and trackers or a corporate who makes its money from data harvesting and online advertising and has a real incentive to cripple ad-blocking on browsers?
by tptacek | 2026-02-06 19:04:46+00:00
I remember being at Summercon before this movie opened and Ericb addressing hotel conference room we were seated in talking about how Iain Softley had directed Backbeat and how happy he was that he was doing this movie and that you had to get in the right headspace to understand what it was going for.

(I think the movie is wildly overrated just as a piece of storytelling; the hacker fan-service in it is just fine, they clearly got some tfile kids to consult with the script.)
by Arch-TK | 2026-02-06 19:05:12+00:00
But that's the point. DRM works at all (in terms of causing inconvenience, not preventing copying, for that it will never work of course) because the people producing the data have an interest in applying the DRM.

But the people producing 3D printable gun parts are _not_ interested in applying the DRM.

If you want to draw an analogy to media, this is more like if the government mandated porn detection software on your computer which would prevent porn from being able to be displayed on your screen. Or mandating HDCP between your monitor and your computer so that your computer could implement restrictions on what you could view on the monitor.

Except that computers are extremely difficult to DIY from basic components (I mean raw chips and metal). Meanwhile I can literally buy aluminium extrusions, or even bits of wood, some stepper motors, some gears, some belts, some pulleys and some stepper drivers, an STM32 devboard and get PCBWay to make me a simple PCB, or just use a prototyping board. And at the end of it, I would have a high quality (maybe a bit slow) 3D printer. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it could print gun parts because I have personally taken a trash-tier prusa i3 mk2 clone and turned it into a machine which could probably rival the mk3 at least.

How exactly are they planning on stopping me from designing a part, slicing it, and then putting it on a DIY 3D printer?

They could maybe achieve this by restricting the sale of certain components such as hot-ends, extruder gears (although you can get away with generic gears), or stepper motors and stepper motor drivers. I just don't see it happening. Maybe they could ban open source slicers and CAD programs?

But I guess I better start stocking up on high quality stepper motors and stepper motor drivers and buy a milling machine and a lathe so I can manufacture the other parts myself. You never know when the UK government will steal another wonderful authoritarian idea from another country.
by setgree | 2026-02-06 19:05:47+00:00
I once worked at a crypto company that outsourced some of its marketing work to a content marketing firm. A piece that firm submitted to us contained a link to an "academic" article about global poverty with a totally garbled abstract and absolutely no content whatsoever. I don't know how they found it, because when I search google scholar for a subject, usually the things that come back aren't so blatantly FUBAR. I was hoping Claude could help me find something like that for a point I was making in a blogpost about BS in scientific literature (https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/p/how-i-read-studie...).

The articles it provided where the AI prompts were left in the text were definitely in the right ballpark, although I do wonder if chatbots mean, going forward, we'll see fewer errors in the "WTF are you even talking about" category which, I must say, were typically funnier and more interesting than just the generic blather of "what a great point. It's not X -- it's Y."
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-06 19:06:34+00:00
This is not false, but gives the wrong idea that foreigners are driving them in real time.

> After being pressed for a breakdown on where these overseas operators operate, Peña said he didn’t have those stats, explaining that some operators live in the US, but others live much further away, including in the Philippines.

> “They provide guidance,” he argued. “They do not remotely drive the vehicles. Waymo asks for guidance in certain situations and gets an input, but the Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input.”
by mothballed | 2026-02-06 19:06:57+00:00
Though distasteful, the video has Biden for instance as a primate as well[]. It's not just black people made to be into monkey or ape-like animals, and by no means were all black people portrayed as primates (one was a hippo, for instance). I didn't even know it could be considered racist until the media told me it was supposed to be.

[] https://x.com/xerias_x/status/1981716010483753013
by zamadatix | 2026-02-06 19:07:10+00:00
Agreed. This is where I find (certain parts) of the counterargument for this particular case interesting and am curious to see what the actual ruling eventually is once all of the final arguments are made.

It had always seemed to me the (normal) YouTube video itself has no protection mechanisms applied, counter to the claim that's what the rolling cipher is about. Certain types of "protected" videos (movies, TV, etc) with Widevine and the like sure, but on normal videos there's nothing implemented for protecting the actual content from being captured or replayed. The rolling ciphers mentioned are implemented at the layer of and seemingly only for protecting the delivery because, of course, YouTube wants to be able to say 3rd party clients (which bypass any form of revenue and user behavior data they get for the cost of providing the delivery) are breaking their protections.

The video stream played in the browser does not have any such rolling cipher protections and it seems a stretch to try to argue recording the screen recording is bypassing what those are meant to protect, but it'll be interesting how the court perceives this here.
by kristjansson | 2026-02-06 19:07:10+00:00
On Shirely, and the reaction: there's a markedly different valence to a fraud 'investigation' seeking to arrest, try, convict, and imprison _fraudsters_ vs one seeking (through a thin veil) to mar an entire community and bring about their violent dispossession at the hands of unaccountable little green men. It would not be an unreasonable person that strongly supports the former and opposes the latter.
by martythemaniak | 2026-02-06 19:07:16+00:00
Choosing what to pay attention to says a lot about who you are and what you think. The largest fraud in the history of the country is unfolding in Washington, there is endless potential BAM content that would be of incredible consequence, but you won't find any mention of anything like that on his blog. Anybody that knows who patio is knows where his bread gets buttered understands very well why he would never say anything on those topics. As it stands this article is the only 'politica' post he has over the last year.

This is essentially gish-gallop or Banon's flood but for an audience that thinks itself sophisticated. As long as you are only focused on discussing the minutia of carefully selected technical materials, you won't have to focus on anything else going on.
by bsgeraci | 2026-02-06 19:07:49+00:00
I think we are in a time where we can make amazing things happen. I always go back to my Star Trek shows. We can now ask a computer to make a program for us. That is what I have been dreaming of. Now we are not at that level and lots of thought and experience goes into helping guide claude code but it is sometimes sci-fi like. The code is more clean, more maintainable for even myself. Everytihng is always commented, complexity is reduced.

I think if you follow a few rules whenever making changes and using all the latest tools like linters, security checkers, end to end frameworks, and any other helpful tool you can really make stuff happen.
by K0balt | 2026-02-06 19:08:19+00:00
Equal to the 2x3090? Yeah it’s about equal in every way, context windows included.

As for useful at that scale?

I use mine for coding a fair bit, and I don’t find it a detractor overall. It enforces proper API discipline, modularity, and hierarchal abstraction. Perhaps the field of application makes that more important though. (Writing firmware and hardware drivers).

It also brings the advantage of focusing exclusively on the problems that are presented in the limited context, and not wandering off on side quests that it makes up.

I find it works well up to about 1KLOC at a time.

I wouldn’t imply they were equal to commercial models, but I would definitely say that local models are very useful tools.

They are also stable, which is not something I can say for SOTA models. You cal learn how to get the best results from a model and the ground doesn’t move underneath you just when you’re on a roll.
by simoncion | 2026-02-06 19:08:23+00:00
> Github lets you use a noreply email address

Oh, I was unaware of that. I've not seen anyone use it, [0] but I've only paid any attention to the Big Corporate and Traditional Hacker populations.

Thanks much for the information.

[0] I'm certain that folks do use it, so folks shouldn't bother pointing out people that do.
by drewmate | 2026-02-06 19:08:42+00:00
Unfortunately, many of our urban areas have already been planned (for better or worse) for cars and not the density that makes public transit viable. Autonomous cars will solve a host of problems for the old, young, mobility limited, and just about everyone else.

It will prove disruptive to the driving industry, but I think we’ve been through worse disruptions and fared the better for it.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-06 19:08:47+00:00
People can amass power in a system with sortition, but those people don't amass it in the role of office holders (in those offices subject to sortition.) Of course, the office holders aren't the people amassing the most durable political power in the current system, either.

If you don't think officeholders that are randomly chosen amateurs in the field that are guaranteed to be out of it in short time aren't very often going to be extremely vulnerable to manipulation by people whose interests are stronger, more permanent, and durable, then you haven't thought things through very well, IMO.
by tptacek | 2026-02-06 19:09:04+00:00
No, to all of this. Talking about the largest fraud scheme in the history of the midwest without taking on all of Washington corruption doesn't make you a "gish gallop" or "Banon's flood" (whatever that is). In fact, it's kind of the opposite of a gish gallop. It's a single coherent argument. If you can rebut it, do so.