skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Fed up with compliance tools? Help us make SOC-2 OSS
Hi HN! We're open-sourcing our collection of SOC 2 controls as the first step in building an open source compliance automation platform. Github: https://github.com/getprobo/probo

The current SOC 2 experience:

1. Pay a random $10k+ for compliance software

2. Get hundreds of tasks with no context on what's optional and how much time it will take

3. Realize you need to pay an external auditor

4. End up with checkboxes, not better security

Why we think open source matters:

- Never speak with a sales guy who doesn’t understand your needs.

- You should never pay for templates.

- Ship an integration instead of uploading a screenshot.

- Don’t get locked. Churn if you don’t like the product

Check out the repo, star it, and let us know your thoughts! We’d love feedback from fellow teams tired of compliance-as-a-box-ticking-exercise.
It sounds like you’re saying that personalized feeds are the key problem?
You wouldn't be a great HR because of such a shallow reason
Tiktok(or other algorithm-suggesting platforms) provides echo chambers for each user

HN/subreddit provides a single echo chamber for everyone

that's why I like HN more, I don't want to be in my echo chamber, I perfer visiting your chamber
Teens don't get addicted to Hacker News
Nvidia's RTX 50-Series Cards Are Powerful; Real Promise Hinges on 'Fake' Frames
- Attempt to factor your integer n into primes...

- Once you have the complete prime factorization, check whether 2 is among its prime factors...

- If 2 is a factor, it’s even; if not, odd.
Let me lay out how this works:

The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a reach for them as it is.

Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.

6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".

This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.
Ah it's new tech, they just need to get used to it until they can't do without!
Evidence as to CCP control? Or evidence to another thing?

Because something that is very important to understand about China, or any other totalitarian regime, is that the people in charge don't let something like TikTok happen without having a fairly good grip on the people running it. That's just authoritarianism 101.
Oh damn, xe really want to look into WGU after this.
US will ban cancer-linked Red Dye No. 3 in cereal and other foods
https://archive.today/O00Tr

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00830.pdf

Related:

FDA weighing ban on red dye No. 3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42542951 - Dec 2024

FDA may ban artificial red dye from beverages, candy and other foods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42382676 - Dec 2024

US Food and Drug Administration moves to ban red food dye - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352983 - Dec 2024

The data and puzzling history behind California's new red food dye ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857175 - Oct 2023

California becomes first US state to ban 4 potentially harmful chemicals in food - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37838521 - Oct 2023
What is causing the record level of mental health disorders in children?
> Beyond the fact that we have access to all kinds of technology that did not exist 70 years ago even for the richest people on the planet

This is a standard element of conservative/libertarian gaslighting: "Do not complain about your precarity or inequality, because you HAVE COLOR TV!!! OMG, NOT EVEN KINGS OF OLD, COLOR TV!@!! FOCUS ON THE TV, IT'S COLOR!!112!!"

> It’s not really our fault: Humans have memories that are both short and bad, which leads us to forget just how bad many things used to be in even the recent past, and take for granted the improvements that have been made.

That works both ways. Bad things can become the new normal, the degradation only clearly visible at the transition, then fogotten.
They could do that -- then equity would correct investors would be like wait what. Exec and employee comp would decrease. Pressure to deliver consistent returns is real assuming its a material cost difference.
Someone seems to say something demeaning like that about him whenever he comes up, and I don't really know why. Which is fine, maybe it's a subjective thing. For what it's worth, the few times I read something of his, I loved it.
Pretty much. A small set of customers weren't willing to pay for AI? Now everyone has to pay for AI.
do you need that clutter on your calendar though, when a voice query to perplexity (or siri et al when they catch up) will answer your question about opening hours when you need the information?
https://archive.is/AR1Y6
Forcing you to pay for features you never asked for and won't use. I'm sure this will work out great for google in the long term.
FDA Proposes Reducing Nicotine to Nonaddictive Level in Tobacco Products
most people in the field believe his research isn't even capable of being wrong
I agree with you, but also want to point out:

New authors, self-publishers, can't afford tens of thousands of dollars to get an audiobook recorded professionally... This can limit their distribution.

Authors might even choose not to make such version (or lack confidence to record themselves), so AI capable of making a decently passable version would be nice -- something more than reading text blandly. AI in theory could attempt to track the scene and adjust.
Yes, a type theory is a logic, but not a particularly good one. It is limiting to have to under-approximate the mathematical universe via statically typed chunks before being able to talk about the objects in the universe, and the article just describes another instance of why that is problematic in practice.

The alternative I propose is simpler than you would think, and definitely simpler than type theory, but it is also very new: http://abstractionlogic.com . And of course, it doesn't come with a fixed algorithm for type checking, but going forward and in the age of AI, I think that will turn out to be an advantage.
>when their kids are ready for a real bike, they put them on one with side-wheels (support wheels?)

In the US they are called "training wheels."
Lucky you, to live in such jurisdiction.
But also not functionally a union. Teachers are actually represented by their state affiliate, and whether or not they can collectively bargain (the sine qua non of being a union) varies from state to state. Personally, I've lived in several states, but none in which the state Education Association was able to collectively bargain for its members.
This but unironically.

Seriously, given all the crazy shit that's been uncovered in the last 20 years — PRISM, Five Eyes, Cambridge Analytica — why would an influence campaign run over one of the world's biggest social networks controlled by the actual, real life authoritarian Big Brother state be the one scenario that crosses the line from plausible to fantasy for you?
I’m sorry to hear that happened to you.

Unfortunately, the data about mental health outcomes of teens who consume social media is not positive, so I’m not sure things would have been better.
> 小红书 (pronounced Xiaohongshu) is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance. It’s currently #1 on the USA App Store.

抖音 Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance...
Excellent summary, thank you.
IIRC Gaia had a performance degradation because of stray light, probably ice on the border of it's aperture[1].

How has that affected this result?

[1] https://blogs.esa.int/gaia/2014/06/16/preliminary-analysis-o...
I would never go to support wheels after a walking bike (laufrad in german). They learn to use instantly, and pretty fast are stable and balancing. Next step is to add pedals, but NOT pedals+support wheels!
They probably sell SaaS, don't they? What about industrial machinery, make up, whatever else?
Building Twitter Lite: A Case Study on the Twitter 1.0 Web Experience
The problem is not the social network in itself, but the fact that companies are manipulating what you see to maximize the bad aspects of the network. Companies should have strict limits on the kind of algorithms they use to generate a feed.
We have Woom bikes. This is exactly what they recommend. Each of my three kids learned at different speeds, though. It basically turns your pedal bike into a strider bike.
I think that's part of why it's always been a little bit of a head scratcher for me — I didn't really go into it curmudgeonly, I was genuinely interested in it, people seemed to like it, and I was interested in something new. It just never worked out at all for me.

I even had people telling me in all seriousness "I must secretly like the content", as in the algorithm knows better than I do what I like. Which is kind of a weird and maybe even disturbing idea to buy into if you think about it.

I was told to keep at it, which I did. I'd put aside for a long time, go back to it, repeat the process over and over again. Eventually I just gave up. I always felt like it was targeting some specific demographic by default and never got out of that algorithmic optimization spot for me.
> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok

This was the case for the first attempt, but then TikTok gave the US government access to everything. So the effort completely stalled, and the only people still banging the drum about it were R's who had run on anti-China rhetoric.

Then Oct. 7th happened, and the followup genocide that the US decided to go out of its way to participate in. The most, and most influential, anti-genocide activity was on TikTok, simply because TikTok has a hold on the young audience and young content producers, and being young they aren't cynical and hollowed out inside, and can't justify being silent in order to protect their own incomes and families (which they don't have yet.) The Lobby quickly picked up the dropped ball and carried it over the line, and Biden continued his unbroken record of being completely humiliated by Bibi, a regular criminal before he was a war criminal.

Now the ban is a zombie, because opposition to (and support for) the genocide is now set in stone, and it already looks like Trump has ended it even though he isn't in office yet through the technique of placing the slightest amount of pressure on Bibi.

All we'll have left is a horrible soon-to-come Supreme Court decision that enshrines the idea that bills of attainder explicitly intended to limit free speech are ok now because China. Which is also because Russia and also because Hamas, and because Maduro, and because hate, and because sowing discord, and because, because, because...

-----

edit: and if the Trump peace fails, and all the kids migrate to some other platform, that platform will be attacked. They lucked out that TikTok was owned by China, and Americans are such racists that they could use that racism to get them to agree to silence Americans speaking to Americans. But before, they were attacking every social network for allowing speech from Trump supporters, people criticizing covid policy, always Palestinians, women who don't accept transwomen (to get the libs onboard), etc...
Makes sense that this is the only way to compete with Microsoft.

(See also how MS attacked Slack by including Teams for “free”.)
Other children.
And it would be better if "the algorithm" were under control of some unelected managers in a billion dollar company owned by finance capital?
The US gov's intention was not at all to shut down TikTok. It was to force ByteDance to sell it.

The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's not about your social security number.
It already does. It’s the cli flags. What you’re missing is the semantic which you can get with learning about containers, codecs, and other stuff. You don’t use grep and sed with no understanding of what a text file is.
Or change the frequency of the wave you are standing on (or those around you, I’m not sure which) and move forward like an inchworm

I believe this is not dissimilar to the mechanics suggested by the ZPE/antigravity people like Ashton Forbes
> you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide

This is a terrible idea that was obviously flown as a butt-covering excuse by administrators who, like the school administrators, have discovered that it is much easier to fight reporting of crime than it is to fight crime.

I am deeply disappointed to see it treated as some sort of deep truth, when in fact it is a shallow lie that anyone with the slightest understanding of bureaucracy ought to have seen through in no time at all.
I sympathize with your opinion of him being a crackpot but he is also a genius and the idea is that the graphs in his theory are more fundamental than quantum mechanics and it would emerge from them.
If crypto bros took over the DNS system, it would no longer be them doing their own thing and we would all be getting screwed harder by the more deeply and insidiously misaligned incentives that come with crypto coin projects

Anything that gets put on the blockchain gets a secondary derivatives market that then impacts your own project. There is nothing you can do about this, they are created independently and can live on a different blockchain. They are so obsessed with financializing everything and turning it into a market where they can skim off everything out there
No that is a completely different app. The Chinese TikTok (Douyin) isn't on US app stores.
In support of (2): https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...

I personally see this as the beginning of a slippery slope - a move that follows in the footsteps of China.
Machine Learning for Absolute Beginners: Busting Popular ML Myths
Text file – powerful way to plan your work and life
For all complains of the toxicity of the platforms. For now, the contents over there are written by your fellow human (maybe AI in a few years). Just focussing on platform closure for me indicates that we resigned from fixing our fellow folks.
GNU Parallel is really neat, software that's so good it's boring. Closing in on being a quarter century old by now, no? I remember first reading about it in 2003 maybe?

I've also used 'fork in Picolisp a lot for this kind of thing, and also Elixir, which arguably has much nicer pipes.

But hey, it's good that Python after like thirty years or so is trying to get decent concurrency. Eventually people that use it as a first language might learn about such things too.
This is the level 0 of reasoning about these topics...

We live in organised societies, nobody is forcing you to do crack but people doing crack will definitely lower the experience of everyone they interact with (and more given the burden on shared goods like healthcare, infrastructures, &c.), that's why we collectively decided that crack shouldn't be sold to 13 years old kids.

Now of course this is very flawed and we'll always have things slipping through the cracks (alcohol, tobacco, junk food, &c.), but unless you want to live in a mad max type of world you have to accept some level of regulation, and that level of regulation, in a working society, should be determined through politics

If tiktok is crack, HN is honey. One becomes problematic much quicker than the other, when you see a kid spending 5 hours a day on HN hit me up
Speak for yourself. I've been using hacker news since high school, 10+ years ago and haven't been able to stop.
Wrong - it's practically impossible to buy video and audio data at the PII level like Tiktok is getting.
Is that absurd? It's not inconsistent.
If you never want to get captains to be willing to sail to your ports again… also, manifests can be wrong, or insufficiently descriptive. Manifest may accurately say a container is full of machine parts. But neglect to mention the machine they are parts of is a machine gun.
I'm currently sat in an office surrounded by people forced to be here due to an RTO mandate. 1% of people like it. 99% don't.

So why not vote with feet? Because the market is grid-locked, everybody who wants to move is looking, and so we're in a position where the jobs that are fully remote are starting to shift down in comp offers a little too fast for people able to afford to make the move.

Here's the thing, those who are going to align to 100% WFH are going to get some _superb_ talent if they offer ~80%-90% of RTO equivalents, and they're going to win a lot of brain share. The brain drain is no longer about the Atlantic or even Mediterranean: it's evolving into London vs Bedfordshire, New York vs Arkansas...

The RTO-mandate companies are going to look at this in about 12-18 months and realise they can't attract talent in much the same way those who can't get people in to the country on the right visas weren't able to get people a few years ago. It's going to be a wild ride.

Personally, I can't wait.

And if you're building a team right now, make a clear choice: RTO might work if you want young people to grow with you, but if you want experience, you're going to go a lot faster, a lot sooner, for quite a lot less money, if you follow the data and go remote-first.
Oops. TIL
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist
http://crn.hopto.org/media/#government
No, you definitely have to pick your battles. Something that you want to continuously optimize over time makes a lot more sense than something where it's reasonable to test and the commit to a path forever.
> related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell

Just trying to parse this - does that mean "a collapse in carbon absorption" actually means "more carbon was produced for the same amount of absorption"?
Pressure, with a remote work as a threat to supply the wages in this sector must be competitive, though there are known bad companies that keep the wages down preying on the loyal employee trope and brand name
Show HN: Edit Photos with Just a Prompt
This is my side project, editing image with just a prompt, will be happy for any feedback
You (sorta) can! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD

The trick is (as the sibling comments explain) that it involves an exponential number of calculations, so it's extremely slow unless you are interested only in very small systems.

Going more technical, the problem with systems with the strong force is that they are too difficult to calculate, so the only method to get results is to add a fake lattice and try solving the system there. It works better than expected and it includes all the forces we know, well except gravity , and it includes the fake grid. So it's only an approximation.

> Could a competent software engineer, even without knowing the fundamental origins of things like particle masses or the fine-structure constant, capture all known fundamental interactions in code?

Nobody know where that numbers come from, so they are just like 20 or 30 numbers in the header of the file. There is some research to try to reduce the number, but I nobody knows if it's possible.
Come on. It might just be comments from the next LLM at this point.
Yeah, big "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people" vibes, as expected.
For more down to earth contents I heard that Kuaishou (They made KLING AI video maker) is more suitable.
So Hossenfelder is now a psychiatrist and a sociologist?

bah, I really dislike "scientist influencers". She isn't versed in the subject, she's no better than Haidt.
Nice.

Does it work with sites that have cloudflare antibot (or similar) functions?
Fascinating stuff. The way horses shaped the whole history of Eurasia is just mind-boggling.
Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.

The chart with the number of suicides for children going up is not a moral panic, but a grim reality.
How did you learn to write this paragraph?
“He climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called “An Evening With John Taylor Gatto,” which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries." http://crn.hopto.org/archives/john-t-gatto/
every generation thinks they’re the first to argue that there are negative effects of free expression.
> how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers

A law passed at the same time as the tiktok ban attempts to address this:

> a) Prohibition It shall be unlawful for a data broker to sell, license, rent, trade, transfer, release, disclose, provide access to, or otherwise make available personally identifiable sensitive data of a United States individual to—
(1) any foreign adversary country; or
(2) any entity that is controlled by a foreign adversary.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/9901
Which makes all the positive comments about rednote hilarious. It's like two proles in 1984 talking one another about how they're gonna defect from Oceania to Eastasia because citizens are treated just so much better there!
People don't want to be taken care of if they're sick or injured? They'd rather be backfired or dead because of an accident? Unless if they participate in the American employment cabal?

Please. People want to be taken care of. America was built by people escaping famine and people escaping poor living/working conditions.

In other words, it was built by people trying to make a better living for themselves. Living or dying by your success or failure wasn't a desirable feature, it was an incidental side effect of colonizing a new land.
I grew up in the US and I hated every single day of school. I don't have a favorite teacher I remember fondly, I don't have friends from school, etc. I absolutely hated it.

But I still am against home schooling. I still got social skills from going to public school that homeschooled kids lack. I still don't think your average parent is equipped to give their children a good education.

I have people I know who have homeschooled their kids. Without exception these people are narcissists with insane views who are using it as a way to indoctrinate their children into having the same worldview that they hold.

Homeschooling should be illegal. It is child abuse.
It's important to say that the US had TikTok with Vine, but is so corrupt that it let Facebook buy it to shut it down.
Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website? I imagine this ban will go down exactly the same. Never underestimate a bored teenager's ability to bypass tech restrictions. Heck maybe this is what is needed to finally get a new generation out of the comforts of their tech walled garden and get their hands dirty.
So it’s like a stiff spring /strut vs a loose one? Doesn’t a loose suspension dampen and stiff propagate quicker though?