skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The TikTok ban is security theater through and through.

Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.

They — just like the FBI, NSA, American police departments and almost every TLA — can just buy the data from a broker, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admi...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...

The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.

So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.

EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!

https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...

> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.
>> Part of this is that homes are too fancy and large. All of that translates into elevated costs and risks.

I was originally responding to the above parent comment. Agree, if you can't afford it, don't buy it.
Do you have links to the Human Rights Watch reporting that you reference?
Completely agreed on the feeling that we lost a lot by moving away from some of the simpler interface options. Particularly for introductory and play purposes. Specifically, even.
> Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone.

Like every other right, your freedom ends where other peoples freedom begins. You can install whatever you'd like on your phone... unless it prevents others from exercising their rights. That's how we all get to stay free from the "might makes right" crowd.

Joining your phone to a botnet belonging to a hostile foreign power might very well prevent others from enjoying the very rights you're trying to preserve.

You have a point about avoiding the slippery slope though. I do hope that the deciders are taking that risk seriously.
I'm pretty upset about it and I am not a creator.

I'm not just upset because I have a general dislike of being told I'm an idiotic, addicted, communist stooge who is easily brainwashed. I am used to folks telling me that- it started when I was writing anti-war editorials in the early oughts, so there is nothing new in that.

What I regret is that I have been following a number of quite-good political discussions on the platform, with a nicely diverse group of interlocutors.

While the discussion generally leans far left, there are many flavors of that left:

not a lot of tankies, mostly just people between "dirt bag left" and "black panther party", lots of women, BIPOC, trans folks, academics, working people, indigenous folks, queer folks of all stripes, activists, and folks who just don't like authority.

Those conversations had been very hard to come by on Yt, Ig, or Fb.

I think it's the response format for videos. I don't think it's worth bothering to speculate about other reasons, though I did note that several legitimate left news sources were shuttered in 2020 when Meta and Tw started their political purge.

Anyhow, I know that folks in the US have very little regard for political autonomy, so I am not surprised that this happens, and compared to the carceral state and the happy ecocide of the planet this is a very little thing. But I will still miss it.
> Most people are sufficiently informed and intelligent.

Sorry but I don't believe this in the slightest.
The article admits this explicitly:

>Malicious hardware has plenty of precedent: it’s been used by intelligence agencies and private pentesters alike. Heck, a bit over a decade ago, I built an evil plasma globe for work. Still, we weren’t here to debate whether a malicious RJ45-to-USB adapter could be made. The important question was whether in this particular instance — as the poster put it — “the Chinese were at it again”.
This is a really awesome development.

Several news stories tie this feature to Phillips Hue lights, or Zigbee lighting generally. I think this is only because that's what has a lot of market penetration. As far as I can tell, ambient sensing would leverage all your Zigbee devices since it's looking at signal interference.

So, when they talk about firmware updates, is this really FW updates to the Zigbee endpoints, or are they just talking about the controller that processes all those LQI numbers?

If it works, this could allow really refined zone occupancy detection depending on how many devices are covering an area. I could see a lot of false positives and limitations to only very course grained detection - large bodies moving through an area. I don't know if a pet moving low to the ground and all would be disrupting zigbee signals enough to be detected.

Anyway, super cool. Anonymous (for subject) and low profile (for instruments) presence/occupancy/motion detection needs all the help it can get.
Are you... not monitoring those things otherwise?
For most people the Venn diagram of things that are possible to install on your phone and things on the app store is a single circle.
It is a lot more complicated, and I agree with the vibe of your comment based on some readings, but couldn't find much regarding sources about the sabotage. I found [this article](https://www.digitalaoban.com/why-uber-failed-in-china/), and I also found another by searching "IMEI FRAUD UBER DIDI SIM CARD", (but that other article was literally copy pasted from the first) (couldn't find sources from the first) (I have some hurtful things to say about tech journalism but this website is too polite for that)
Again, don't really doubt, but more sort of wondering where you sorts get primary information from.
The Supreme Court Rules Against TikTok–Now What?
My experience with PWAs is… not great. What are the best and/or most popular PWAs?
Yeah i shared with relatives by taking a screenshot of a tiktok to show them the news
Why Kids' Shows Like 'Cocomelon' Hamper Critical Brain Development
So, it's software for driving super-fast resin printers that work similar to beam radiation therapy (but with lasers and resin). Very cool.
It's a country that doesn't believe in freedom of artistic expression, either.
How can you call Americans naive when over and over again for the past 2 decades there have been non-stop news stories about how the US Gov spends insane amounts of effort ensuring the technology Americans use is not fully secure? Maybe you should understand that the public can actually recognize Machiavellianism.

edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:

- Bullrun

- PRISM

- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries

- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings

- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans

- Vault7

- XKeyscore

- STELLARWIND

- MUSCULAR

etc.?
USB doesn’t provide any DMA (until USB 4) and requires more host cpu resources to meet the same bandwidth. It also has less consistent performance by virtue of the USB protocol itself.
I want to believe you, but arguments like this are so simplistic that it's profoundly disappointing. It is simultaneously the case that they are extensive trade partners and that there's ongoing harassment in the South China Sea, the horrifying takeover of Hong Kong and the increasingly chilling situation in Taiwan, or the harassment of expat dissidents who have fled to the West.

To say nothing of extremely adversarial cases of increasingly aggressive hacking, corporate espionage, "wolf warrior" diplomacy, development of military capabilities that seem specifically designed with countering the U.S. in mind, as well as the more ordinary diplomatic and economic pushback on everything from diplomatic influence, pushing an alternative reserve currency, and an internal political doctrine that emphasizes doubling down on all these fronts.

I don't even feel like I've ventured an opinion yet, I've simply surveyed facts and I am yet to meet a variation of the Officer Barbrady "nothing to see here" argument that has proved to be fully up to speed on the adversarial picture in front of us.

I think what I want, to feel reassured, is to be pleasantly surprised by someone who is command of these facts, capable of showing that I'm wrong about any of the above, and/or that I'm overlooking important swaths of the factual landscape in such a way that points to a safe equilibrium rather than an adversarial position.

But instead it's light-on-facts tirades that attempt to paint these concerns as neocon warmongering, attempting to indulge in a combination of colorful imagery and ridicule, which for me is kind of a non-starter.

Edit in response to reply below: I'm just going to underscore that none of the facts here are in dispute. The whataboutism, insinuations of racism, and "were you there!?" style challenges (reminiscent of creation science apologetics) are just not things I'm interested in engaging with.
>2) the USB storage provided by network card can still contain malware,

That seems unlikely given that "malware" is signed by Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42680282
For anyone reading this who is knowledgeable about this topic, where, specifically, can a regular citizen buy personal data about people from data brokers?
The 10" rack is the de facto standard half-width rack. It uses the same spacing as 19" inch racks. My understanding is that two 8.75" devices fit in 19" rack with mounting bracket in the center.
Oh we care. I care way, way less about an American company with my data over the CCP.
Yeah, also mpv has a framebuffer driver. AFAIK Qt has one as well, so any Qt program could run without X/wayland.
I think they meant syllables specifically, not syllabic symbols. Meanings syllabic symbols might get confused for an alphabet if the language has a sufficiently small set of syllables. See https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/36909
Insuring the contents of a home is routinely done as an entirely separate matter from insuring the structure. All renters have to do it that way. You can do it that way in a rent-to-own scheme too.
I'm surprised there are no UTF-8 specific decode instructions yet, the way ARM has "FJCVTZS - Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero"
2025 Los Angeles Wildfires: Pre-Event and Event Imagery Viewer
This application offers a visual comparison of pre-event and event imagery for the 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires. Users can utilize the slider tool to seamlessly toggle between the pre-event images on the left and event images on the right, effectively highlighting the extent of structural damage caused by the wildfires.
It’s this - anyone saying otherwise simply does not know, or is pushing some kind of an agenda. I fully believe some people in the US government buy the whole “security” angle, but it’s very obviously bogus. So is the idea of selling it - china is very protective of chinese user data, there’s no way they are going to trust an american investor to play by their rules, even if a serious price was offered, which it hasn’t been. this entire thing feels like theater, honestly.
You're expected to! I think we could even calculate exactly how much.
from the opinion: "[Tiktok] further argue that the Act is underinclusive as to the Government’s data protection concern, raising doubts as to whether the Government is actually pursuing that interest"

ie what you're saying...the Court replies:

"the Government need not address all aspects of a problem in one fell swoop...Furthermore, as we have already concluded, the Government had good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment"

Congress can solve one problem without needing to solve all problems.
The small GTPase MRAS is a broken switch
I'd be stunned if Trump saved TikTok, that would be really inconsistent with his anti-China rhetoric, which is one of the consistent policies he has.
Mitsubishi Corp. Quits China Metal Trading After Copper Fraud
That's a convenient fig leaf.

There are 2 separate problems:

- Lack of US privacy legislation
- Security-sensitive systems and infrastructure owned by competitor nations

The existance of a different problem is not a justification to avoid progress on the original one.

PS: Curious how many total comments there are on this article. Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.
There's no such thing as POSIX. Every platform needs support a little different. macOS isn't nearly as similar to a random distribution of Linux as a lot seem to think and vice versa, you can't just build on Linux and expect macOS support.

There's no such thing as POSIX. There have been a million different standards named POSIX. The only one that really mattered long-term commercially was "capable of being used for US Government projects" and that one both has and has not claimed Windows was "POSIX" in different decades. "Has a file system and a command line and is capable of running programs." Exciting standards stuff like that. Everyone who uses the term "POSIX" has a different definition in mind, in my experience.

> Most full stack web developers are not doing things in a Windows environment.

I think that depends as much on which part of the country you live in. There's a lot of "dark matter" developers doing boring full stack things on Windows. You might not see them, you might not care about them, doesn't mean they don't exist. Also the last straw poll I saw was something like a 50/50 split. I don't any side can claim "most". I do think that yes, the most visible web developer is the stereotype of the Bay Area macOS programmer with a hipster 'stache a near permanent chair in some coffee shop. I don't think that is most web developers in the general world.
A lot of creative people were doing very well on TikTok. It made the careers of a huge number of indie writers.

When I say "made" I mean "Earning six or even seven figures."

Crafts and art services were also doing well. And certain influencers, obviously.

It pretty much took over from Insta, which Meta somehow managed to shoot in the head with some of their algo changes.

So - politics aside - that community is pretty unhappy about this.

Dealing with this is going to be interesting insight into Trump's leanings.
Use an IMAP client. There's multiple available for both mobile and desktop operating systems. You'll need to turn IMAP on in the settings menu of the Gmail web page, and for clients that don't support OAuth2, you'll need to create application-specific passwords, in the Google Accounts web page.

As an added bonus, pretty much every IMAP client is faster, has more reliable notifications, and better usability/accessibility than Google's web interface and mobile applications.
It’s about this talk

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4507-infu...
You could do two passes over the string, first get the total length in bytes, then fill it in codepoint by codepoint.

You could also pessimistically over-allocate assuming four bytes per character and then resize afterwards.

With the API in the linked blog post it's up to the user to decide how they want to use the output [u8;4] array.
I can think that China is up to no good with my data and still be mad at my own Govt for doing the exact same thing. The outrage is not that TikTok is banned, it's that Zuckerburg is doing the exact same harms to America that China is alleged to be doing, but only 1 app is banned. Hence people flocking to Rednote rather than using Reels.
What exactly is ArkType? What problem does it solve? Is it for typescript? Vanilla JavaScript?
Old custom software, old hardware, vendor wants all the $ for an upgrade, we refuse to pay. I took 10 desktop pc's($500 each) replaced servers ($20k each), one usb to ethernet dongle in every pc b/c we needed 2 network ports and we had this laying around, USB3 to GB, slap virtualization with USB passthrough. They work for 5+ years, gigabit speed, 24/7 with no problems.

People should have more faith in dongles. Not all are bad.
In what way? He's basically just a friend of Trump
No, their business model is getting placement fees for whoever they graduate from the program.

Considering this was a sponsored link on HN, endorsed by Y Combinator, I'd say you have a ridiculous threshold for labeling something a "scam", except to the degree that the companies committing to hire these people are pretty unlikely to get whatever they were hoping to get.
https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0602/2024-12/SIMD...
> They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department.

Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.
I'm not sure what the current state of the art is, but for the longest time it was pretty common for USB peripheral ICs to have small flash devices attached to them in order to be able to store VID/PID and other USB config information, so that the device is enumerated correctly when it's plugged in and can be associated with the correct driver etc. And depending on when the device was designed, 512kB might have been the smallest size that was readily available via supply chain. It would not have been strange to use a device like that to store 10s of bytes!

The ISO thing is a little bit weird, but to be honest it's a creative way to try to evade corporate IT security policies restricting mass storage USB devices. I think optical drives use a different device class that probably evades most restrictions, so if you enumerate as a complex device that's a combo optical drive/network adapter, you might be able to install your own driver even on computers where "USB drives" have been locked out!
> lone wolf-ism is what drags us down

with respect to what metric? economic growth? that's probably not true, lone wolfism is what drives people to develop expertise in the first place

if the metric is community or "sustainability" or something else, is pursuing that metric in the place of economic growth sustainable long term?
I've only got superficial knowledge in this regard, so please take it with a grain of salt, but: the way I understand it is that PCIE has full direct memory access, so devices connected through it can use zero copy and similar techniques to access and process data much faster, especially with lower latencies than over regular USB. Using USB might/will require copying the data to transfer/read from and to different buffers, between user/kernel space, etc.
I've heard it put that, if you're not a government official, having your own government spy on you could be more consequential than a foreign one.
Those teens in Omaha will eventually become voting adults in Omaha and then will eventually come into positions of leadership in both the public and private sector. I can guarantee that 0% would appreciate being blackmailed or unknowingly used as pawns in spycraft. Teens in Omaha may not understand the full scope of what it means.
I would also add, it's not _unreasonable_ to be wary of something when a tool like a virus scan pops up a warning. The jargon used to explain what the executable is doing is gibberish to any 'normal' user, there's no way for them to know it's listing stuff you'd more or less expect it to be doing.

Of course, there's a bit of a jump from that to making bold claims about what it's doing, but the initial concern was understandable.
Thankfully this shouldn't become a large problem, because websites simply don't load that quick
The forced 5 second wait time is killing me. Why not just let me click between the puzzles? Also feels like a left-to-right orientation would be easier to browse, as opposed to the mobile style stacked cards.
Or-ing 1 onto codepoint before calling leading_zeroes() should get a decent compiler to remove the branch.
https://www.acxiom.com/customer-data/

https://www.epsilon.com/us/products-and-services/data
People are now using Rednote, so what’s new?
RTL8156B does line-rate 2.5 Gbit/s no problem, most USB-C docks with network have a RTL8153B in them and that does line rate as well. Even mildly dodgy first-generation stuff like AX88179 generally works.

I.M.H.O. these USB dongles are actually preferable to the much more expensive Thunderbolt dongles praised below, because a) they work on regular USB ports as well b) they do not require Thunderbolt c) they use less power and d) they don't force a highly ventilated cooling mode on certain host systems. And, fwiw, at least some Thunderbolt docks actually used USB NICs connected to the internal USB controller, which was hooked up over PCIe.
I'm guessing if I accidentally got a pci-e one, it wouldn't work in any of the USB ports I would connect it to (as, to my knowledge, I only have USB ports), or do they generally fall back to working as a USB device?
I think they meant that because content is siloed already by language barriers, the only ecosystem that would be affected by the removal of US users is the English-speaking subsystem.

That said, the English-speaking world clearly extends well beyond the US and English commonwealth countries nowadays. Also, a lot of videos don't have any dialogue and can also cross the language barrier.
Someone should send Joe a "I bailed Silicon Valley (Bank) out and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"
> The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it

A lot of the responsibility falls upon governments who are lobbied by developers to zone areas for development that should never have been zoned for development in the first place.
Boring locale specific discussion.
It's unlikely you can. They're generally only willing to set up corporate deals to sell data in massive bulk. You could buy a domain name, set up a decently real looking website with a corpo looking email, then go to any broker like https://www.acxiom.com/customer-data/ (not affiliated, first one i found on google) and do the whole corporate dance of signing a contract to get what you want.
imo, this is a liability for them, as well for those of us who are interested in zig, but don't want to break our heads and time reading zig (language impl, not zig src examples) source code just to understand the language features. I don't know if they (andy and co.) get it, or if they subscribe to "use the source, luke" mentality :)

happy to be told I am an idiot, and don't get it, but only with good reasons :)

( as a guy who did quite a lot of C earlier, including in prod, I was interested in the goals of zig, but it should work for my needs, in the sense that I describe above. )

and I will decide what is good for me :)

now, zig away!
My understanding of fuel cells is they are rather sensitive to the purity of the fuel and oxygen. I wonder if this system is less sensitive such that, say, piped hydrogen can be used.
Can you definitively point to something TikTok collects that can be used for blackmail that isn't collected by any other social media app?
Teens don't understand the full scope of what anything means: that's practically the definition of teenager.
But neither of those problems are addressed by a TikTok ban. If privacy legislation was enacted and it banned TikTok as a result the conversation would be very different.