skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if my copy of Electrum was backdoored

While it’s not foolproof, it’s a good reason to compile things yourself from source instead of using the binaries. Unless someone trusted is validating build reproducibility, but that isn’t as common as we’d all like.

Some 4y old discussion of how some OSs for electrum are built reproducibly: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/dcz0my/what_is_not...
Show HN: A MVP website to try Stable Cascade
I built a MVP to introduce and try stable cascade online.
s/at the speed of light/no faster than the speed of light/

Information's radiation speed is variable. Lightspeed is its upper limit.

Though yes, some leakage occurs at lightspeed. Fingerprint sound should be somewhat slower in most instances.
Can we make the size of tokens arbitrary and make them the size of words?
Time flies, because we're spending almost a quarter of each day scrolling
A mysterious wave-like structure in our galaxy found to be slowly slithering
I said that it is necessary, but not sufficient. That does not mean it's a distraction: that means it is foundational.
In user space perhaps, but the OS is very heavily ObjC (and C)

Someone posted a great analysis breaking down how many binaries used which language in iOS through the years
Maybe they're not necessarily going for "all humans that exist everywhere under any circumstances" but instead "humans likely to have access to a phone number which can sometimes receive SMS."

Not every app needs to cater to every single human and potential use case on the planet.
It's a great encapsulation of why Signal is not federated, and, unless you find the current CEO stating otherwise, is unlikely to change. Changes like the one detailed in the link simply wouldn't be possible to roll out efficiently in a federated ecosystem.

Signal has consistently focused on helping /most/ users do what they want with the app without sacrificing security. This change - away from requiring phone numbers - helps plug one of the biggest criticisms, both on the security and product side. Nothing about their mission requires federation, so I respect that they haven't sacrificed their mission in order to do it.
Cops turn LockBit ransomware gang's countdown timers against them
Over the past couple of weeks I wrote a macos/ios app with objc and c. It's like a 2d game with most code in C which is also used on Linux. Draws the whole view with MTKView and uses udp with bsd sockets.

I mainly chose it for the c interoperability and I don't have any interest in swift.
This does a fairly detailed analysis of the various vectors and wraps up patching in an enormous script plus related tools.

https://simeononsecurity.com/github/optimizing-and-hardening...

There’s also a lot of extensive details of the dark patterns in the installers where no means yes with the privacy preserving option hidden behind rolled up options etc. Even then you need to do other patches to avoid telemetry and data collection. Even then you end up with ads surfaced in the start menu, etc.
They just released a major improvement to these, actually :). So keep trying it! At the risk of sounding like a shill: kagi is by far the best money I spent last year. The “programming” “academia” “small web” and (especially!) “PDF” buttons are worth their weight in GOLD.

These are the main two improvements from last week:

We added Wolfram|Alpha to enhance our capabilities in calculations, unit conversions, and time queries for better results. This solves a huge number of issues reported for these kind of queries as the results now come from a computational knowledge authorithy.

In the same spirit of getting answers faster, now simply starting your query with an interrogative word (what, where, who, which, when, how) or just ending it with a question mark (?) will automatically trigger Quick Answer.
This is my take as well (adding erlang to my list of things along with python/kotlin/go/lua).

Some things are just a little *too* different. There's no for-loop, it's just recursion. Pattern matching on the function signatures are nice, but then I have to dig around a lot more to find what I need.

That being said, I do want to try it and learn about it more; the promises it makes about concurrency and event driven programming looks nice, i do really want to try it.
Experiencing Time in Daily Life
> It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it.

This is victim blaming.
You mean that Miri catches it at runtime, right? If so, that hardly demonstrates anything about the difficulty or lack thereof of fixing rustc’s type checker, since Miri is not a type checker and doesn’t know anything about “lifetimes” in the usual sense.

I agree that this isn’t a “fundamental design flaw in the language”, but Miri is irrelevant to proving that.
Navigating development in a hyper-growth startup
I thought the choice of the Tudor Crown was an odd choice for him as the last Charles to wear it met an unpleasant end

(St Edward's Crown just looks better too!)
Doesn't seem "disposable per-conversation" in my reading of the announcement. Seems like a permanent username that just doesn't get featured in the conversation.

>Your profile name remains whatever you set it to.
Can you post what a $14,000 SQL query looks like?

If nothing else, it can be an example in my SQL 101 course.
A lot of games on Steam work natively on mac. With the game porting toolkit, it's likely that the vast majority of them work - though maybe not all too well.
The lack of any kind of backup/export for iOS is the main thing keeping me from recommending Signal.

Sadly, from what I’ve seen in similar threads online, it seems the devs are opposed to backups in principle (they believe that chats should be ephemeral and backing up is antithetical to this).
All waste has issues. Time reduce, reuse, recycle. Products should be sold in containers that can be used again as much as possible.
Regarding embeddings - I am assuming you are using ada-002 or have you moved on to 3-small already? Do you have a particular strategy for migrating embedding models other than re-embed the whole dataset? And lastly, what is/are your vector store(s) of choice? I am not quite sure of your scale but I have found that north of 50 million vectors a lot of the current options get a bit weak in the knees, especially if you index and query concurrently at high rates.
That's not sufficient, you also must not make mistakes.

I have very limited cloud experience, but I did make a mistake that lead to a rather slow but constant cost. The amount was small enough to not be relevant in a professional context, but the memorable part was that I could not pinpoint the source easily with the AWS tools and my limited understanding of them. The categories and labels were too broad, and it took a bit until I figured out what went wrong. There are certainly better tools to investigate this, but I didn't know them. In the end it was simply luck that the mistake still fell into an area of insignificant amounts of money, but it could have easily been significantly more if a few parameters had been different for the same mistake
While the invite-only period may have been necessary for scaling reasons, I have my doubts that it was necessary for buzz-building reasons.
Its worse than the article mentions. Because bandwidth isn't the problem its IOPS that are the problem.

Last time (about a year ago) I ran a couple random IO benchmarks against a storage optimized instances and the random IOPs behavior is closer to a large spinning RAID array than SSDs if the disk size is over some threshold.

IIRC, What it looks like is that there is a fast local SSD cache with a couple hundred GB of storage and then the rest is backed by remote spinning media.

Its one of the many reasons I have a hard time taking cloud optimization seriously, the lack of direct tiering controls means that database/etc style workloads are not going to optimize well and that will end up costing a lot of $$$$$.

So, maybe it was the instance types/configuration I was using, but <shrug> it was just something I was testing in passing.
Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight
Did they not know that Crow has already claimed him?
As someone that often has limited time to research viable options to present to leadership, I expect to be able to negotiate pricing at the enterprise level if we want to move forward. What's deeply frustrating that keeps me from sometimes mentioning an option is having no idea what the rough order of magnitude pricing is. Some kind of pricing is deeply appreciated.

If I don't know whether something will fit within the approximate budget for the project and can't quickly get an idea from other research I'm not going to mention it as an option. I'm used to spending about a million per rack but that's for a complete ESX cluster with storage and networking, if I have no idea how alternatives stack up against that it's hard to put it on the table.
The fossil record could be incomplete, and both could be true. I've seen other studies hinting at bird evolution happened older than we thought
"a huge unmet demand currently exists for a social network which is based on the social graph, instead of the content graph, and which is pre-enshittification*"

I would argue this hasn't disappeared, but merely moved. There's a number of other platforms people are using for seeking a certain social graph:

Social networking style:

- Mighty Networks ( https://mightynetworks.com ), Hylo ( https://hylo.com ), Circle ( https://circle.so ), etc.

Chat Style:

- Discord, Slack, etc.
The developers last game had an all time peak of 7,000 users. They planned worst case scenario of 250,000 users for the sequel expecting more realistically 50,000 users.

They're currently at 394,686 players on steam alone - not including Playstation players. The servers are doing their best right now.
Ultimate/normal customer, and i agree. Personally i think AI _is_ Search, and while we don't need to force them together in some massive behemoth now - laying foundation for being familiar, comfortable and well integrated in the future seems foundational to today. In my eyes at least.
Uno R4 Stars: Meet Anouk Wipprecht
This. And a way to pay signal anonymously? A workaround for some apps, is to have friends gift you support tokens.
Amazon Scam Costs User $1000
Good point!

The former C++ programmer in me wants to call them "user pointers" but that would just confuse people who haven't learned pointers.
Apple reproduction gets complicated; too.

Humans seem to like things that can't decide what they are from one generation to the next. The plasticity of dogs and other domesticated life forms shows how we favor diversity even in potential form.
The stems from:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/18/clarence-tho...

>> Clarence Thomas told a Republican congressman that US supreme court justices should get a pay raise or “one or more” would quit, prompting “a flurry of activity” among rightwingers because his “importance as a conservative was paramount”, ProPublica said in its latest hard-hitting report on questionable ethics at the high court.

And the actual offer was in addition to live in a tour bus:

>> The host suggested that Thomas could upgrade his “favorite mode of travel” by signing a contract requiring him to step down from the supreme court in exchange for $1m annually from Oliver along with the tour bus, which is outfitted with a king-sized bed, a fireplace and four televisions.
Uninhabitable as in we couldn’t introduce basic life forms there even if we tried?
Ask HN: Does anyone know how arrowhead studios is scaling?
Arrowhead Game studios is having a great problem of having released a game that more than half a million people want to play at once.

There last game had 45k at once.

If anyone knows how they're dealing with this? I want to know almost as bad as i want to play the damn game lol.
Agreed. It’s ridiculous that they’re even calling this feature usernames, since you still need a phone number, thus completely defeating the purpose of a “username”.
Aluminum cans are plastic lined on inside. Paint is toxic technically. Aluminum is beat when recycled.
Not everyone I connect to on signal is a friend. same for e.g. journalists or government people who use Signal.
Can anyone recommend a good methodology for writing tests against a Playwright scraping project?

I have a relatively sophisticated scraping operation going, but I haven’t found a great way to test methods that are dependent on JavaScript interaction behind a login.

I’ve used Playwright’s har recording to great effect for writing tests that don’t require login, but I’ve found that har recording doesn’t get me there for post-login because the har playback keeps serving the content from pre-login (even though it includes the relevant assets from both pre and post login.)
Nope, go for it.
Archy had everything in one file too, for similar reasons to the ones expressed in FTA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)
I expect it's more a combination of several factors:

- if we don't have usernames we don't have to deal with obscene usernames, trademarked usernames, impersonation claims, and similar

- if we don't have usernames and our generated friend codes aren't guessable, we don't have to worry about people getting random unexpected friend requests from people they don't know
I understand this, but Signal doesn't attempt to tolerate third-party apps on their servers as far as I know. They don't support interoperability.
If I were in a similar position, the easiest way to relocate would be create a local company, then setup a foreign branch in the country you want to relocate to and then just do business as normal. If you can do that, you just need to find clients to support you remotely so you can move.
This is great, thank you, these seem like the solutions with least technical overhead for me.

I imagine the credit card charge may introduce UX friction, so perhaps we can also allow users to provide a picture of mail with their name and address.
As an engineer, my view on days/hackathons is pretty simple: you don't pay me enough for my good ideas. If I had an idea that could make the business $5M, I'm better off going into business for myself. Instead, I'm going to do whatever I can to try something new and different to learn

So with that in mind, as a leader, I view them as opportunities for sanctioned on-the-job learning. I would hope that you spend the time automating existing processes or learning a new technology that might be useful. At our most recent company hackathon, we focused on a new way to do the old thing. Everyone could build basically whatever they wanted, but they had to use the new tool to do it. Not because we want the output, but because we want everyone to feel comfortable with the new tool. There was zero expectation about turning anything into a production project, although we did have two projects come out of it that are likely to go to prod soon without disrupting the roadmap.

I get where you're coming from, and I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. If your work is doing hack days, and then getting mad because features aren't shipped, that's pretty shitty of them. Might want to try and find another place with better culture -- easier said than done!
It seems like a feature which is mutually beneficial. Ie user activity on embedded sites helps indicate interest in Kagi index updates.

Isn't this entirely in-line with your desires? Better quality search results by way of having up to date indexes?
Is ,comma-backtick` some personal quirk of yours, or is it some standard I'm not aware of?
Thinking again about it, you could have sheets of paper stacked into a cube. 1 m^2 sheets, with 0.1mm checkerboard pattern, stacked a metre high. That's some fine detail...
I suppose it's just what I grew up with, but the old crown seems really iconic to me, while the new one seems really dull and non descript. (I know they're both old but you know what I mean.) It's a pity the king didn't stick with the old one.
Which is just a different way of saying "uninhabitable".

The middle of the Sahara is uninhabitable. Unless you introduce sufficient water and plants that is.
Because path dependence is real so we're mostly building on top of a tower of shit. And as computers got faster, it became more reasonable to have huge amounts of overhead. Same reason that docker exists at all.
It's not like they charge the same price for a current gen vCPU as a five-year-old vCPU. The benefit of self-service is that you can benchmark it yourself.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-cr...

>> The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.
I've had the same thoughts on those. Maybe it also allows them to gather data on whether/how people interact with a webpage itself, which may be an indicator for its quality.
Wait this doesn’t make sense. They own the code I wrote for them. The ‘subscription’ is for future updates of that code. They can keep the version and never update. If I quit they still have what I wrote.
I know they offer time-based tasks, but I've never used them. I limit myself to a resolution of one day and then setup alarms in the morning if I need.
The high cost of return-to-office mandates
Paper on SSRN - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401
I've had to do this with absolutely no one else behind me and no one in front of me.

It's a funny feeling, watching the machine at work
> How does signal know that account X is sending Bitcoin bullshit if the messages are encrypted?

They don't. That's not what I intended to say, sorry for the miscommunication. It's just a common spam bot I see on things like Facebook, Insta, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, email, etc. But Signal can stop you from sending 100 messages a second. There are other ways to fight spam without needing to know any of the users or contents of the messages. A lot can be done from the minimal metadata that's required to perform communications.

> Keybase doesn't use phone numbers, how do they solve "spam accounts" ?

I don't know but I'm not a security expert. So you probably shouldn't be asking me. But if you got any questions about ML I'm qualified to answer some of those.

I'm pretty sure a big reason Signal uses phone numbers is just because they built from Text Secure. It is also aimed at an audience less technical than Keybase's target audience. I mean Keybase is free and private but everyone still uses Slack or Discord. FWIW, Signal does write blogs about these things. So if you'd like to learn more I suggest reading those while you wait for someone much more qualified to answer your question. I think you'll get it answered much faster if you're less assertive. Or you could go the otherway and try the old tactic of confidently saying something outlandish and wait for people to correct you. But I think this is a more difficult method to get answers to a specific question. Your call though.
I see that it is a ton of wishful thinking and FUD on the side of Signal to claim that: XMPP is alive and kicking, has all the features one needs, runs everywhere, at scale, offers the same or better crypto, better privacy, better resilience and is more sustainable. When Signal will inevitably fail/turn against its users/enshittify itself or get acquired, all federated and P2P protocols will keep on going. For decades. That's the kind of communications systems we should be demanding in the present era, nothing less.
Had this happen (but more like $100) analyzing the GitHub dataset on GCP.

Honestly I was already concerned when it was taking more than 5 minutes to return a result.

Once I saw how slow it was I found my error, not querying the sample dataset that was a fraction of the size, to make sure my filtering worked.
Plastic bag use went up in California because of covid. Some moron said reusable bags spread covid germs. So stores banned reusable bags for many years. It's just back to normal where reusable bags are acceptable to bring in by the customer.
Brightest black hole ever discovered devours a sun's-worth of matter every day
My recommendation is to either work or camp. If you can't stop working long enough to enjoy a national forest for a short time, something is horribly wrong.
Far more regular people use other cryptography tools and protocols like full disk encryption, TLS, end-to-end encrypted messaging, etc. All of those are secure and easy to use.
I have been bitten by this in the past. At least now they give warnings in-app that the app will expire soon. But if you don't use the app regularly, you wouldn't even know. Also, I'm not aware of any other apps that die in this way, so it's not like people are in the habit of periodically checking the app to make sure they're still on a version that can receive incoming messages.
Just TAX the rent-seekers and the speculators. Tax the $&%# out of them. Lower sales taxes to zero accept on luxury goods and a few other things like cigarettes, that sort of thing.
Thank you thats a new term for me, "Know your customer"

Will be looking these services up!
Probably better to be maximally pedantic here:

- Assume our language has a specification, even if it's entirely in your head

- a "correct" program is a program that is 100% conformant to the specification

- an "incorrect" program is a program which violates the specification in some way

Let's say we have a compiler that compiles correct programs with 100% accuracy, but occasionally compiles incorrect programs instead of erroring out. If the language specification is fine but the compiler implementation has a bug, then fixing the compiler does not affect the compilation behavior of correct programs. (Unless of course you introduce a new implementation-level bug.) But if the language specification has a bug, then this does not hold: the specification has to change to fix the bug, and it is likely that at least some formerly correct programs would no longer obey this new specification.

So this is true:

> It's still something you fix by changing what programs the compiler accepts or rejects

But in one case you are only changing what incorrect programs the compiler accepts, and in the other you are also changing the correct programs the compiler accepts. It's much more serious.
HDCP and walled-garden shenanigans are already an issue. Amazon Prime won't do 4k on PCs. I've run an HTPC for years, and still got forced into their ecosystem because the only way I could get UHD was through their damn smart TV app.
jfc, is this from geforce experience? if so i knew it was bad but this is something else entirely
>Extensive experimental results in real-world scenarios demonstrate that
Printlistener can attack up to 26.5% of partial fingerprints
and 9.3% of complete fingerprints within five attempts at the
highest security FAR setting of 0.01%
What strings can't I send over WhatsApp?
Also check out - https://appmaildev.com/en/dkim
I have a pet pigeon. My partner wants to do some sort of a lifestyle video of him with little miniature kitchen, living room, etc. Sorta like Martha Stewart, only with a black carrier pigeon.

He comes running when called, and he really likes bossing the dogs around, so I think we could actually do something like this.
Relevant Xkcd: https://xkcd.com/303/