MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjg59 | 2026-03-10 01:04:09+00:00
To respond in more detail: secure boot (as in the UEFI specification) does nothing to prevent a user from modifying their system firmware. Intel's Boot Guard and AMD's Platform Secure Boot do, to varying degrees of effectiveness, but they're not part of the UEFI spec and are not UEFI specific. I have replaced UEFI firmware on several systems with Coreboot (including having ported Coreboot to that hardware myself), I am extremely familiar with what's possible here.

> Trustzone usually runs code from eMMC.

This might be true in so far as the largest number of systems using Trustzone may be using eMMC, but there's nothing magical about eMMC here (my phone, which absolutely uses Trustzone, has no eMMC). But when you then go on to say:

> Without that key you can't update the code Trustzone executes. Only the manufacturer can update it.

you're describing the same sort of limitation that you decried with SMM. As commonly deployed, Trustzone is strictly worse for user freedom than SMM is. This isn't an advantage for Arm.

> Also, any ring -2 code can be used for secure boot locking the device to manufacturer approved OS

No, the secure boot code that implements cryptographic validation of the OS is typically running in an entirely normal CPU mode.

> enforce DRM

This is more typical, but only on Arm - on x86 it's typically running on the GPU in a more convoluted way.

> lock hardware upgrades and repairs

Typically no, because there's no need at all to do any sort of hardware binding at that level - you can implement it more easily in normal code, why make it harder?

> spy

When you're saying "can be used", what do you mean here? Code running in any execution environment is able to spy.

> call home

Code in SMM or Trustzone? That isn't literally impossible but it would be far from trivial, and I don't think we've seen examples of it that don't also involve OS-level components.

> install trojans by remote commands

Again, without OS support, I'm calling absolute bullshit on this. You're going to have an SMM trap on every network packet to check whether it's a remote command? You're going to understand a journaling filesystem and modify it in a way that remains consistent with whatever's in cache? This would be an absolute nightmare to implement in a reliable way.

> And you can't audit what it does.

Trustzone blobs do have a nasty habit of being encrypted, but SMM is just… sitting there. You can pull it out of your firmware. It's plain x86, an extremely well understood architecture with amazing reverse engineering tools. You can absolutely audit it, and in many ways it's easier to notice backdoors in binary than it is in source.

Trustzone is mostly deployed on Devicetree-based platform. What saves you here isn't the choice of firmware interface, it's whether the platform depends on hostile code. If you don't care about secure boot (or if you do but don't care about updating the validation keys at runtime), you can implement a functional UEFI/ACPI platform on x86 with zero SMM.
by kobieps | 2026-03-10 01:04:35+00:00
No it's a full story, more akin to zero (at the highest level that is, many many differences and trade-offs).

Unfortunately I'm not qualified to answer that last question... I'm on the PowerSync team. What I can say is that we get a lot of praise from users (the ones that survive onboarding that is, lots of DX improvements we still need to make)
by gruez | 2026-03-10 01:04:50+00:00
>The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work.

Empirical work... like conveniently ignoring the fact that there's far less old money billionaires than we'd expect?

>For these lucky people, the experience of the Vanderbilts and their contemporaries offers a cautionary tale. At the turn of the 20th century, America’s census recorded about 4,000 millionaires, note Victor Haghani and James White, two wealth managers, in their book, “The Missing Billionaires”. Suppose a quarter of them had at least $5m (the richest had hundreds) and had invested it in America’s stockmarket. Had they then procreated at the average rate, paid their taxes and spent 2% of their capital each year, their descendants today would include nearly 16,000 old-money billionaires. In reality, it is a struggle to find a single one who traces their fortune back to the first Gilded Age.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/12/h...
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-10 01:04:54+00:00
> "why does this exist?"

"Though hidden from the sea, the castle controls access to Loch Shiel" says Wikipedia. Which is a sensible thing for a castle to do back in the olden times.

Plus it's a tidal island - you can just walk across. Don't even need a drawbridge (although I guess that makes defending attacks from inland a bit tricky.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Tioram
by diacritical | 2026-03-10 01:05:18+00:00
> you can't have pleasure without suffering

That's not true, though. There's no physical law that states that an X amount of suffering is required for an Y amount of pleasure. Nothing prevents you from taking a brain that's feeling pleasure and keeping it in that state. We don't have the technology, but it's not impossible theoretically. It's a configuration of neurons that somehow gives rise to qualia. Maybe in the evolutionary or day-to-day psychological sense we "need" suffering to overcome adversity and get stronger or not to become too content with what we have and lose it, but that's very far from a law of nature or a necessity in the real sense. And obviously some animals live their whole lives in bliss, others in agony. So it's not like there aren't any real life counterexamples.
by jrm4 | 2026-03-10 01:06:30+00:00
Sure -- but it also makes it harder to verify. That's my issue with Bluesky, perhaps I'm thinking like a lawyer. ATProto's most touted feature is also its biggest danger. A post on 2 servers thats hashed/verified (and perhaps admissible in court) might be more dangerous than many more rando Mastodon servers.
by karakoram | 2026-03-10 01:06:40+00:00
I find it utterly amazing that a country like the USA does not have nationwide high-speed rail and mass transit in every major city (that works for everyone).

Comparing with Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia) and certain EU countries (Vienna, Netherlands, etc.), it just shocks me how much people need a car for everything. Even a visitor needs to rent a car to properly go about their business.
by mossTechnician | 2026-03-10 01:07:09+00:00
I think this entire thread has run its course; if it's not this detail, it'll be another, as a few others have already moved goalposts further down the discussion than the ones you're setting here.

But if you wish to sate personal curiosity, it is in his Substack, linked from the first link I posted, which was itself from the link posted by its GP.
by h4ch1 | 2026-03-10 01:07:29+00:00
Catastrophe 1914 - Max Hastings : Great book about what triggered WW1, the state of the world at that time. Just a great read in general.

The Seven Military Classics Of Ancient China : Sun Tzu isn't the only military strategist on the block.

Kaplan and Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry: I make sure to study at least one university/high school textbook on any subject that I find interesting.

Also, not reading but watching Professor Jiang Xueqin's lectures [0] has been pivotal towards helping me find new avenues to research and understand geopolitics .

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@PredictiveHistory
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-10 01:07:31+00:00
> I am sooo tired of statements like "No x. No y. No z." and then optionally "Just Foo.". Who aside from Fred fucking Durst writes like that?

I disagree. This is a classic humor template in popular magazines from the 1990s and 2000s. The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" probably has/had this style frequently. Also, (Timothy) McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is basically an extended trope of exactly this type of writing from 1990s and 2000s.
by linkregister | 2026-03-10 01:07:47+00:00
It is understandable that someone who only lived in the United States or a low-enforcement place would have this world view. I'm more sanguine about the trajectory of our society.

Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, etc, have well-enforced traffic laws. Speeding is the exception rather than the rule, unlike the United States, where one can expect the flow of traffic to be 10-20 miles per hour over the posted limit. Yet these societies don't suffer from an excess of enforcement or consequences in other areas. For example, it is legal to walk around in public with a bottle of beer in virtually all of Europe.

What we have seen in the United States is a reduction of many hardly-enforced laws. Jaywalking and minor drug possession have been decriminalized in several US states. This is due to voter interest. It will continue to be up to the public to decide what do to when enforcement can catch up to excessive laws.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-03-10 01:07:53+00:00
Brittleness is not a concern. "Disk rot" is. The dyes used to make writable DVD's were organic (AZO usually), and break down starting at around the 17 year mark (some earlier, if they were poorly made). They have some measure of redundancy built-in, so you may not notice right away. The discs begin to look a bit "cloudy" at first. Eventually they become unreadable.

Go with inorganic blu ray media if you want longevity. Most HTL blu rays made currently will last around 100 years if properly stored. If you need longer there are M-Disc's, but they are expensive and rumor has it that ALL verbatim 100Gb blu rays are essentially M-Discs with different labels these days.

For all practical purposes any Blu ray larger than 25Gb is probably inorganic HTL, but if you worry a lot you can buy more expensive "archival grade" discs from Japan as well that have been vettted and tested.
by scubbo | 2026-03-10 01:07:55+00:00
You're shifting the goalposts. I agree that status signalling happens in hobbies. I disagree that everyone who indulges in a hobby does so purely - or even mostly, or at all! - in order to be able to tell stories about ways they managed to "cut the line".

Some of just like to do things, and to attain status by doing things well, rather than by bragging about our ability to cheat.

EDIT: to put it a different way - all tales of "skipping the line" are an integral part of that hobby; but not all hobbies involve, and not all hobbyists enjoy, tales of "skipping the line". And; every tale of "skipping the line" is status signalling, but not every status signal is such a tale.
by heavyset_go | 2026-03-10 01:08:56+00:00
Yeah, I somehow glossed over the whole container thing.

The container thing might be horizontal scaling thing where 1 container runs on 1 instance with 1 vCPU, running multiple processes on instances means you need beefier slices of compute to take advantage of the parallelism, and you can't cleanly scale up and then down using only the resources you need.

If you have a queue distributing work, that model makes sense with single-threaded interpreters where consumers instances are spun up and down as needed, versus pushing work to a thread pool, or multiple instances with their own thread pools, that aren't inhibited by the GIL. The latter could be more efficient depending on the work.
by derriz | 2026-03-10 01:09:09+00:00
> As with any religion, environmentalism

Calling something a religion is a lazy and disingenuous way to dismiss it. The effects of airborne and waterborne pollution on human health has been the focus of scientific investigation for centuries at least. Ecosystem destruction is not "a religious belief" - it's something which has been measured, carefully recorded and studied using scientific methods.

> at 1/1000th the cost of re-wiring our entire energy system around renewables

This is alarmist hyperbole. Renewables now account for about 35% of the global electricity generation mix. There are countless examples of countries that run grids where renewables account for more than 80% of the electricity mix. Even if you just consider wind and solar, many countries are approaching 50% penetration in the space of 20 or 25 years without "re-wiring their entire their entire energy systems".

Yes NG generation is the only fossil tech still standing in terms of being able to compete at any level with modern generation tech but it is being squeezed.
Batteries surpassed NG in terms of economics for peaking sometime around 2020/2021 - which is reflected by the share of new capacity investment since then.

> industrializing 3B+ people using windmills

A windmill is a device used to mill materials that happens to be powered by wind, like a watermill, or a pepper mill or a paper/wood/etc mill. I'm not sure what that has to do with electricity generation.
by trhway | 2026-03-10 01:09:59+00:00
Buying an antidrone and even antimissile system like say Pantsir-S1, Skyranger 30 or similar is just few million dollars - peanuts compare to the cost of the datacenter to be protected. Once AMAZN starts doing it for themselves, they will possibly also start air-defense-as-a-service using spare capacity.

With all the money and assets and the whole value of business, the Big Tech has already started to move into energy, and i think the defense, starting with self-defense, will be among the nearest-future next domains they will move into.
by nebula8804 | 2026-03-10 01:10:37+00:00
The ship may have sailed for a lot of consumers. This along with EVs are one of those things that people try once and if they don't like it they won't try again. Probably helps to explain why all the stocks of these companies were riding high for quite a while but then collapsed.

How do you rebrand after people have already associated your product with past failed incumbents?
by acdha | 2026-03-10 01:11:18+00:00
Not many pay “a lot more”—your plumber is not taking home what she charges you—and that often comes with unpleasant working conditions, overtime, or extended time away from home. That’s like talking about tech salaries as if most people are L7 staff engineers at big tech companies.

Most people are not making that much in blue collar work, but even if they were, it’s also not like freshly-laid off people can just switch overnight. Lots of that work isn’t great for middle aged people, etc. and anyone retraining is going to need support for training, certifications, etc. but that’s happening when they have the financial obligations of a successful mid-career person.

For example, say Google actually developed AGI and canned everyone. What happens to the market in Mountain View when everyone is trying to enter construction work or become auto mechanics at the same time that those industries are hammered by a lack of customers, and the real-estate market suddenly has entire blocks for sale?

That last part might seem extreme but I saw it in San Diego in the 90s: the defense contractors laid tons of people off after the Cold War collapse, and that meant that entire neighborhoods went from having streets of engineers who worked at the same places all scrambling at the same time. Fortunately, that wasn’t permanent or every sector of the economy (and some of them were able to repurpose things like carbon fiber aerospace techniques into golf clubs and bicycle frames) but there were literally people with engineering Ph.Ds competing for $15/hour QA jobs just to have health insurance.
by diacritical | 2026-03-10 01:12:53+00:00
Look up on negative utilitarianism and the Benevolent World Exploder if you want to find more info on the button idea.

Basically the idea is that if minimizing suffering is more important than maximizing pleasure, a world with no life would have no suffering whatsoever.

Regardless of whether you believe that, removing humans only would still leave the unfathomably huge amount of suffering of wild animals and after a while someone else will evolve and take the role of humans. However, if we leave humans exist, they could either destroy everything anyway (like with nukes or AI) or eliminate suffering like David Pearce and others imagine.
by olcay_ | 2026-03-10 01:13:50+00:00
I think Jetpack Compose is not actually as bad as you think. I think it's really great and I wish more people caught on actually.

I can't comment on the learning materials as I was following it since the project started and I was already accustomed to the Android Developers website.

Kotlin has a few reactiveness concepts that make reactivity easier but might scare off developers from other languages. The most important ones are Flows and Coroutines.

Say you want to have a UI that shows the current list of connected devices that should always show up to date info. The function to get the list would be something like this:

val devices = manager.getDevices()

But you need it to be declarative instead of imperative, so you use a Flow:

val devices = flow {
while(true) {
emit(manager.getDevices())
delay(1000)
}
}

Devices is now a cold flow. It does nothing unless it's being collected. When you start collecting it, e.g. by using collect:

devices.collect { list -> ... }

Now it starts running the while loop and you get the up to date devices list in your lambda every second. You can also make the lambda run only when the list has changed, or debounce it, or run only for the latest value, and more with trivial function chaining.
But this function is suspending, which is Kotlin's way of async functions, and suspend functions take turns running on the threads that are managed by the coroutine scope they are in, so you need to provide it a coroutine scope by wrapping your collection in scope.launch { ... } .

And your viewmodel can now collect the flow in a way that's going to be accessible without suspending (async) functions by turning it into a StateFlow:

val devicesStateFlow: StateFlow<List<Device>> = devicesFlow.stateIn(scope, some more arguments...)
// Now synchronous code can call like this:
print(devicesStateFlow.value)

// And Compose (reactive ui) code can do this in Composable functions:
val devicesState by vm.devicesStateFlow.collectAsState()

I think that was the source of confusion you had when you were trying to use datastore. It's designed for reactive applications so you were supposed to use it in a viewmodel, turn it into a stateflow and collect it as state in your ui.
by charcircuit | 2026-03-10 01:14:28+00:00
>everything is going fine

Stealer malware is running rampant on the PC platform. It is not going fine.

>One, I've never seen a computer that will auto-boot into removable media

Look into late 20th century PCs. They are designed to boot from a floppy disk first.

>But also, if you have direct physical access to the PC

It does not take physical access to write to a floppy disk.
by underlipton | 2026-03-10 01:14:35+00:00
There are multiple well-researched and practical interventions that can be done to make driving safer for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. Implementation in the US is regularly scuttled by insane self-styled experts who "audacity" their way to public trust and influence, inexplicably.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forester_(cyclist)
by jesse_dot_id | 2026-03-10 01:14:58+00:00
I think a lot of them are aware of it, but also grifters, and hoping to profit off of it before the bomb goes off so that they can claim ignorance and escape blame. New and powerful thing that people don't fully understand becomes fertile ground for grifters to sew their sins. Like when Marie Curie discovered radium and everyone and their mother started forcing it into products, including toothpaste and "medicine", within like 5-10 years.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-10 01:16:45+00:00
> At his level of personal wealth there is no realistic scenario that leads to personal bankruptcy. In our current capitalist society once you're into the billions you're "too big to fail" and you have unlocked the infinite money glitch.

This is plainly false. There are plenty of example, even recently, of billionaires losing their fortunes or going bankrupt. Often they come with criminal prosecution because they get desperate and try illegal ways to hang on to their wealth. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and several other examples come to mind.

There are a lot of stories of billionaires getting too risky with their investments or too concentrated in businesses and losing the majority of their wealth. The Barclay story, Jim Justice, the old Peloton CEO.

It’s not a common outcome because you have to try hard to screw up that badly when you have over a billion dollars in wealth. Parking it anywhere in common investments would leave you and your ancestors set forever.
by linkdd | 2026-03-10 01:17:41+00:00
This is not Wave Function Collapse. This is a constraint solver.

The goal of the original algorithm ( https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse ) is to infer the constraints from a sample, and then run a constraint solver.

Hard-coding the constraints skips the whole point of the algorithm (which is also badly named by the way).
by protimewaster | 2026-03-10 01:18:05+00:00
My thinking is that it's very unlikely the people actually responsible for implementing it were the same as the ones in court arguing it would be easily reversible. From a strictly technical standpoint, if your boss says "Make this happen ASAP, even if you have to cut corners", and then a year later says, "Undo all of that", it's gonna be a shitshow.

I completely agree that it's malicious, but I'm thinking the people actually responsible for implementing it (the software, procedures, etc.) probably weren't themselves malicious. I think the technical people responsible for implementing it were intentionally put into a position, by their bosses, where they'd basically be the fall guys and provide a reasonable technical excuse for their boss's maliciousness.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-10 01:19:12+00:00
Sorry, I need to ask the dumb question: Is that Show HN (AsteroidOS) post written by an LLM or not? Honestly, I cannot tell.

A few people in these comments seem wildly confident that it is written by an LLM. If anything, I hope it was written by a human as an elaborate troll to trigger these so-called immaculate LLM detectors.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-10 01:19:24+00:00
The compute power is also ridiculous.

Some of the reason for the high density is that you need devices physically close to each other to share such bandwidth. It’s not because we’re limited by the physical building space, because we can construct buildings all day long. Sending bits around at ultra high speed is hard and you need to keep all of the devices physically close to avoid having your interconnect costs explode.
by eblanshey | 2026-03-10 01:19:46+00:00
I know what it's like growing up in a religious atmosphere. Since you've been trained to think inside the box, you realize the box is nonsense. The problem is thinking that the only valid alternative is that there is no creator and everything is just random (the opposite extreme.) Look into other philosophies like advaita vedanta, buddhism, or progressive science like another commenter mentioned about nassim haramein.