skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The CIA has definitely committed some pretty heinous acts, but the only reason they appear worse than your average national intelligence service is that the US has a habit of declassifying operations and documents after they're no longer active and/or relevant, forcing them to confess to a subset of their crimes. Most national intelligence services are allowed to freely and happily cover up the vast majority of their crimes indefinitely, and there's much less opportunity to hold them accountable unless they actually get caught.
During my first job out of college, I was assigned to maintain an ancient Windows codebase. A few different groups of people had been assigned to maintain this specific website and the people responsible before me had hardcoded secrets in the compiled executables but had excluded them from the source code. My experience using hex editors from tinkering with old video games (Diablo 2) gave me the skills to extract the secrets for work.
Look at FAA's air traffic control academy [video]
This is the interesting part. For me.

> Note that if provided with the plaintext of a username known to be in use, Signal can connect that username to the Signal account that the username is currently associated with. However, once a username has been changed or deleted, it can no longer be associated with a Signal account.

The "no longer associated", I will need to get Signal word for that, right. (You cannot cryptographically prove something was deleted, right.)

But it's good enough I guess
Ask HN: Why isn't there a standard file format for sharing signed content?
Photos and videos would be the major use case but why don't we have a standardized file type that includes something like a PGP signature? At a minimum photos could be signed by the photographer and signatures could be shared to services running a transparency log allowing authors to publicly declare creation of the hash to avoid people stripping signatures and resharing. At the limit we could imagine the camera signing the raw image, the photo editor signing their edit along with the original, etc. A chain of trust seems pretty easy to establish in a single file.

Especially with the recent commentary related to OpenAI:Sora, I'm seeing a lot of doom and gloom around not being able to trust anything online anymore... But didn't GPG solve this 20 years ago? Just about everything you need to solve this problem has already be done for signing files. Of course GnuGPG doesn't make it easy for everyone to use.

I prototyped something simple that just uses gpg and tar to create a chain of trust for files. The next step would be to create some kind of PKI or Web of trust for people to easily create keys tied to their identities and record hashes/signatures. The hard part is adoption. There is nothing technically preventing us from having every piece of media shared on social media to include a full verification log of every edit all the way back to its creation. Any photo with the log could be dismissed as fake.

What am I missing? Why isn't this solved already? All the major social media companies claim trust is a really hard problem to solve but it doesn't seem like anyone has even attempted to do this. Has anyone worked on this and failed for some reason?
I wonder if people in politics or civil service feel the same about this show as the people in tech feel about Silicon Valley series.

These series are also scary because they somehow managed to remain relevant. Maybe the way the world works hasn't changed that much after all.
> The first step to addressing a problem is to give it a name and cause. Solutionism without understanding is a waste of effort.

Sure, but once things are given a name and a cause, you typically find very few people willing to actually do the work. You'll find most people aren't much interested in the issues they claim to be passionate about once the cameras are off and social media has moved on to another topic.
I've seen this on Telegram but never on Signal. I use Signal on both iOS and Windows.
Great explanation. I was amazed when I started using Claude because I could find a recently-transcribed novella, upload it, and ask specific questions. I'm downright giddy to try a 1M+ model.
Signal (and Signal's phone number model) predates Telegram. It was designed as an SMS and WhatsApp replacement; that is, it was originally designed to replace insecure phone-number-addressed systems.

Obviously, the cryptographic guarantees of the two systems aren't even close to comparable.
Aside from the obvious FOSS arguments, what are the big positives to JMAP for me as a user over using a client that supports Exchange?
Exactly the same as my experience working at one circa 2007 or so. It was something the managers would explicitly instruct the line workers to do.
It's funny.

There have been narrow time and place windows where investors have been willing to bet on social media, roughly the 2005-2010 era in Silicon Valley and the 2017-current period in China.

It's conjectured that one factor is the size of the cultural zone, it is easy for a site to get established in a big country like India and then move to a small country like Belgium, but to go to the other way is thought to be impossible.

There was a time when it seemed the route for a social media startup was to go public, after Facebook went public that window seemed to close and the next business plan became "get bought by Facebook". On one hand, events like this

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whats...

seem like an orderly way for Facebook to keep ahead of the next big thing, bit I think if they had to do it every year for some new startup they'd start to feel that it is like extortion so I imagine Facebook has used whatever pull they have with VCs to suppress investment in this sort of company in SV. (I wish I had some evidence and/or specifics!) And of course Facebook can't keep buying competitors forever because eventually the antitrust cops will wise up.

I found this article

https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-twitter-faceboo...

but it strikes me as pretty silly. Since Twitter has shown some weakness the competitors we've seen move in are not scrappy commercial startups but instead Facebook with Threads, Bluesky by the founder of Twitter and Mastodon which is whatever it is but it sure isn't commercial.
Yeah, this is still my top requested feature. I have two phones, one is data only sim. I just want to be able to signal from both of them just like how I can on my mac and PC.
I like using scaleway for personal projects, but they are available only in Europe
Most companies out there want you to have certain technologies / keywords in your resume and will automatically reject you if you don't have them.

Yes, building a solid project with boring technology that delivers real business value sounds good in theory but not so good when applying for a new job. Maybe it can help after you somehow manage to pass some initial screening.
MLX array framework gains Swift support
Because the same movie doesn't flood the market with hundreds of different names. Similarly, the content of a movie doesn't change from year-to-year while the name stays the same.
Requiring a phone number is like asking for an id. What does signal offer that whatsapp doesn‘t? Serious question.

Edit: Ok, ok, I was wrong, signal does have advantages over whatsapp.
No they're not. They demonstrating how unethical surveys can, if portrayed improperly can appear to show different results. There is a difference between fiction and reality.
There are much better options above copying someone else. Copy is better than letting anything happen, but you should do better. You should learn from Netflix, stackoverflow and the like - no need to remake the same mistakes they did - but your situation is different so copy isn't right either.
Nonetheless, it's far less of an issue than in any other language. You don't need 20 lines of crazy code to slip a serious security vulnerability into C, you can add one with a single character changed half of the time.
I order from Domino's now and then. I've noticed that someone named Scott seems to be working preparing pizzas at all hours on all days. It didn't take me very long to figure out that the tracker was just putting in a placeholder event. The actual delivery tracker seems to work OK, though.
Aha, blind fingerprinting (literally) via audio? Yep that's a vector
that wasn't on my mind. If you have a database could ID a remote user
from swipes. That's a LE win. Fair do. I also discovered (about 2016
while working on audio phone apps) that we could already ID users from
their tap patterns, finger length, style etc - but there's no common
database of that, so less useful.
Rust does the same thing, though? If you are having trouble pleasing the compiler, you can use unsafe to get around it. Of course, the Rust people are a lot more active at telling you that what you wanted was actually wrong and bad, but it's essentially the same position.
"Every empire carries the seeds of its own destruction"

FB let you connect with friends -- but that's also its fatal flaw -- friendships are trending towards zero. TikTok enters the scene and now friendless people can have parasocial relationships with their tiktok subs.
> The concept simply boils down to as soon as you find an account’s phone number, it’s a game over for that said privacy

You completely misunderstand what kind of privacy Signal aims to achieve. Signal protects you from eavesdropping and data hoarding, two major privacy issues with solutions like Facebook Messenger for example.

They do not and have never claimed to offer a service where “privacy” means nobody knows who anyone is, it isn’t Tor and I wouldn’t want it to be.

If you don’t like the goals and design choices of Signal, just use another service.

There are benefits of the choices they’ve made, namely ensuring that most users of the service are “real people”, which I think is great. It’s not a social network, it’s a messaging app between friends that solves issues presented by alternatives like SMS or Instagram; that’s it.
That seems unlikely. The dimensions of the problem space are huge and getting larger. Although the next Linux kernel scheduler I write will be my first, it's not hard to infer the increase in complexity due to the evolution of CPUs that Linux runs on: "efficiency" cores (now on AMD devices as well), multi-chip modules creating cache locality problems, critical power and thermal management requirements on high power/current devices — all changing concurrently.
Boeing again, this time a 757-200.
Crowd Compass
Somewhat related, it's hard to find things like Gatorade powder. "Rehydrating" on a serious mountain hike, the kind with 10,000ft peaks means stopping by at the nearest alpine hut, and drinking a liter or so of beer. I grew up (to age 13) in Germany but on adult visits, felt like a fish out of water, with my sandwiches and water bottles.
Telegram's privacy is questionable but its UI is absolutely outstanding.
You shouldn't need to cryptographically prove that an old username is unavailable. You should be able to simply send a request to Signal servers asking if it's available and receive "no" as a response.

You'd have to take their word that this wouldn't change, though.
Software Engineering Interview Advice
"When I graduated from MIT in 2008, I failed many job interviews. I claimed "The people hired over me are not better. They are just good at interviewing." My poor attitude kept the number of job offers at zero. Eventually I learned that all of my successful classmates had spent time to prepare. So I solved a few practice problems and landed a job with Microsoft in Redmond."
> Is it proper for a creationist to be able to earn an "A" in an evolutionary biology course? Yes. The professor should say to such a student, "You do not have to change your beliefs about creation or evolution. I will not judge you or grade you on your beliefs or lack thereof. All you need to do is learn and accurately show that you know how biologists calculate and reason about evolution."

My bio teacher took this tack. He said I don't care what you believe; on my test, I ask you what someone who believes in the big bang would say about the creation of the universe.

> Activism is about convincing others of something, or, failing that, to punish them.

I have unfortunately had professors who took this tack. I was too naive at the time to understand that they would demand unadulterated ideological fealty, though perhaps it saved me the ethical dilemma of pretending to believe something I thought was wrong, for the sake of a grade.
I've gotten similar pushback. I asked for a solution involving curl and was told that that was not something Gemini could do. Then I clicked the button to see the other drafts of Gemini's responses and got two versions that worked.
Some amount of hierarchy is unfortunately necessary if we want to tackle larger issues that necessarily require coordination (like, say, global warming - you can't mitigate it if any commune can just "opt out" because e.g. they personally aren't affected in a negative way).

I think the important thing is to always treat hierarchy as a cost. So whenever things need to be organized, you look at that cost versus the benefits to see whether it is justifiable at all; but even if it is, you still try to minimize the cost to achieve the requisite outcome. Broadly speaking, in the context of governance in general, it means loose confederations with power mostly flowing "bottom up", but with mechanisms in place that still do allow to tackle those aforementioned emergencies like AGW that require top-down enforced coordination.
I agree with most of the article and from the technology angle what is missed is that the addictive dopamine hits are individually tailored with machine learning. The "engagement" optimization process that started with online advertising and social media is now getting applied directly to content creation and curation and delivery.

Alcohol and other drugs were at least fairly nonspecific and generic; very few people could afford tailoring their drug experiences, but the engagement platforms will helpfully find the individually most addictive stimulus and then helpfully switch to a new category as tolerance builds.

The good news is that the robots can't manufacture things yet and so the economy can't literally produce the Wall-E universe yet. Give it 5 or 10 years maybe.
Yeah -- I was confused too. Is the subscription just for the client, or does it come with an email account?
I'm really sorry that your emotional wellbeing is predicated on the exploitative practice of a multinational company. You should have seen this coming. Bell Telephone didn't get away from litigation for "securing" telecommunications infrastructure under one body. Microsoft didn't foil antitrust litigation for "protecting" users from third-party browsers.

Expecting Apple to escape broader antitrust scrutiny is a pipe dream. You should probably plan accordingly.
Hypera only generates the introductory paragraph in a cold email (as you must have seen on the website). How useful or spammy the rest of the email is - i.e., what the sender is trying to pitch - is up to them. If CTR and response rates increase, both of which lead to increased conversion, it stands to reason that these emails are more welcome with personalisation than what you might call spam.
It looks like a good value for money, but immediately after registering, I get this reply

"After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us."

Someone has a similar experience? I've tried it twice, filled everything truthfuly, valid credit cards etc. and no still the same.
Here is the fallacy that so-called "tech" company-dependent commenters will propagate: If no one is making it, then no one would use it if someone made it.

It's fine for "developers" to hypothesise about other "developers", but making conclusions about computer users who are not "developers" is nonsense. Yet some HN commenters will do this ad nauseum.

Unless and until someone makes "a new version of old Facebook" and forces it upon computer users to the same extent as "new Facebook", then no one knows which option computer users would choose.

Removal of meaningful choice is a deliberate, anti-competitive tactic.
Fraud Alert: Fake GitHub Job Opportunity Emails (via Github Notifications)
Beware of fake Github Job Emails exploiting notifications@github.com and trying to steal private repositories data.
I write rust professionally and really like it, but I do think that its noisy syntax is a flaw. I'm not sure how I would clean this up, but it really can be inscrutable sometimes.
LoFi is a thing already. It's an abbreviation of Low Fidelity.
The CIA is the covert agency of American foreign policy. They don't act independently.
> PDFs are specifically a problem: I have complex docs with lots of messy formatting. How do I represent this in the right way so the LLM can understand it?

40 years after PostScript and this is still a problem that one needs to throw AI at. I feel the software development and human-computer interaction took a wrong turn along the way. What happened to the semantic web?
That attack is more about timing than about sound. There is some information available from the sound of a keystroke, with a very good microphone under ideal conditions each key could be identified uniquely, but that's not the main vector. Some sequences are easier to type than others by their very nature, and individual typists have idiosyncratic variance in how easily/fast/accurate they are at a given sequence. That's the main trick used to derive what's typed from a recording of it happening, and compression doesn't reduce that information, so long as the keypresses are audible.
A Global Documentation Platform
A journalist acquaintance of mine in NYC was in touch with the orthodox community there, who were somehow associated with the Temple Institute, the organization working together with American evangelicals to breed a red heifer. According to scripture, sacrificing a red heifer at the Temple in Jerusalem would herald the coming of the messiah. So the plan (as I understand it) is to breed the heifer, demolish Al-Aqsa Mosque, rebuild the temple there, sacrifice said heifer, and Bob's your uncle, here comes the messiah.

If this is all the actual case (I'm going on his word, since I wasn't the one in touch with these individuals), it represents a real attempt to bring about the apocalypse -- at least according to scripture. It would certainly cause an enormous amount of turmoil around the world, especially the Middle East.
> Words speak louder than actions

The second, third and fourth largest bank failures in the nations history weren’t actions?
This is a common, but terrible argument. Anyone can (mis)use, make, or weaponise technology given enough time and funding. Following this reasoning to its logical extreme, nobody should ever do anything.

The problem something like this solves is to raise the bar somewhat and discourage a fraction of those who would.

Done right, that fraction will be significant.
Further considering how money is getting devalued, investing the surplus money into stock reserves is the correct investment.
I keep thinking this is a sign of a larger failure coming. The consolidation masks a financial problem at one or both of the companies.
Is Signal considered to be (or attempting to be) an open ecosystem?

My understanding is that Signal (the app) is private, not anonymous, centralized, and closed.

The underlying protocol is open and could be used for an open ecosystem, but I didn't think Signal aspired to do that.
WhatsApp does not provide real encryption - all the metadata is unencrypted!
You are implying that civil libertarians are in a position to "implement a solution". They generally aren't.

But if you want to see an actual implementation of the concepts that I've mentioned, you can look at e.g. Rojava or the Chiapas.
with such speed and CXL gaining traction (think ram and GPUs over network) why network SSD is still issue?
you could have like one storage server per rack that would serve storage only for that particular rack

you could easily have like 40GB/s with some over provisioning / bucketing
> It is a way to increase usability for casual users, decrease spam by requiring some other source of identity tied to real existence (emails are easier to generate than throwaway phone numbers).

You either end up discriminating against users who have to use VOIP for whatever reasons (and there are legitimate reasons) by blocking VOIP numbers, or your barrier to entry for spammers is almost negligible. It's not a good system.

If you want to prove that users are humans, use a webcam and an id, or delegate the task to some bigcorp who already has a similar system. If that's too much for you in terms of privacy, you shouldn't be attempting to prove that users are humans in the first place. Maybe you should prevent spam via product driven solutions, e.g. whitelisted contacts.
Open source webOS port LuneOS Eiskaffee is the first stable release in 5 years
As if you can't get a whole lot of information on most people with just their phone number. The number of people whose Signal ID is built off a burner phone ad no longer traceable back to them is miniscule.
> kill them so they be dead and can't board no ship no moh.

I would discourage the use of African American English spelled out like that generally, but especially when discussing African people or people of African descent.

The primary historical usage of that style of writing was to belittle African American people by making them look dumb and illiterate, and to other-ize them by making their language seem strange and different.

I wouldn't pretend to know your intent, but that writing style makes it appear racially biased even if you didn't intend it to be.

> just shoot them and kill them so they be dead

The goal of avoiding that is likely to avoid an escalation in hostilities. My understanding is that modern piracy is like plane hijackings before 9/11. People are mostly unharmed, the ship is mostly unharmed, the company pays a ransom to get both back and everybody goes on with their day.

If this escalates to live fire, the pirates might decide it's easier and safer to fire an RPG into the ship, loot what they can before it sinks, and then let it sink.

Even if successful piracy attempts become less common, the costs of a successful piracy attempt skyrocket. Those ships cost millions; the shipping company can pay a lot of ransoms for the price of a single sunk ship.

Insurers are probably also happier this way. Their losses are small but consistent, which is easy to plan around. It's much harder and riskier to plan around the event that eg 3 ships are all sunk in the same week.

It's like shoplifting in stores. It's cheaper to watch the thief leave and accept the loss than to have security try to physically stop them and occasionally have to pay out injury claims.
Alexander Litvinenko would disagree with you.

https://news.sky.com/story/the-polonium-trail-how-did-the-po...
This is basically the Rust equivalent of the obfuscated C code contest and indicates little to nothing about the actual Rust people write.
Sure distributed clusters get back to network/workload limitations.
Considering how gamed RT has become, what would be the point even if there was one?
I see the same thing on HN posts. 1999 vibes everywhere.
Specifically you can’t back out for office 365. That part was windows 11. The rest of their products offer no option to bypass the spyware and adware.
It's not 1:1, but from observing some math professors, tablets with a stylus are a partial solution to this.