skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Parts I found relevant:

- It was a clean state of a somewhat old phone (iPhone 11, factory defaults + new apple id)
- A single (old) app was installed (Stack by KetchApp, 10-12 years old)
- Was sending out an update a second pretty much instantly (5 kB - ~300 KB every second)
- Within a minute: IP, Lat / Lon, country, phone model, carrier / network operator, vendor, OS version, connection type (wifi), headphone status (?), volume setting (?), screen brightness setting (?), battery status (?), CPU count, system RAM, free RAM allocation, free hard drive capacity, system boot time (?)

Might as well just screen grab the Task Manager equivalent and hand it to them. Have better, quicker data about my own current RAM allocation and free hard space than I do. It hands them when the system booted for an ad? The headphone, volume, brightness, and battery was just "what" kind of headshake about invasiveness. Somebody'd hand wave they need it (we want it, we want it). They obviously don't.

Edit: It's almost Remote Desktop, on an iPhone. Realtime (~1 Hz) RAM / ROM allocation. Not sure how many Apple user even know how to check their realtime RAM / ROM allocation. The free hard drive space especially is just asking for botnet downloads.

Edit: Right, and ... disabling tracking doesn't mean anything because numerous updates blatantly ignore the setting ("uc": "1", // User consent for tracking = True;) and it's just a flag while they still send your vendor specific customer identifier anyways.

Really interesting article, and great investigation, just disturbing how much on an effectively clean phone.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. I'm not talking about the parent comment, but egregious cases like these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42858607

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42854194

You can't post like that here, so I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Thanks for the correction! Can it be retrofitted into existing models through distillation or do you have to train the model from scratch?
Blaming China is easy and has bipartisan appeal while actual data privacy regulations are hard and do not.
'Open the Door, Open the Door ': How Dozens Fled an Inferno on a Plane
Episode 1: Digital Jesus a.k.a. Matt Harrigan – Wwsul
One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do.

As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.

And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketplace, find an exec and buy their details for pennies and call them up on their cellphone. (this is usually successful, but can backfire badly -- CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigans)
Stress does cause ulcers...
I missed that comment (because the parent submission was flagged lol) but dang's argument IMO more drives to the point that current HN policy/culture is insufficient. Flagging for repetition is fair, but the problem here is that there's very little repetition because Elon/DOGE keeps finding new ways to interfere with institutions.
Can’t read Anki source unless your work is GPL. Could you share the insights yourself?
> I read you had a politician that proposed a global coalition where all countries that are being threatened by Trump aligns on retaliatory measures.

The party that currently leads the (minority) federal government is having a leadership race currently, and one of the candidates put forward the idea:

* https://financialpost.com/news/economy/freeland-summit-natio...

Even if she does not win the leadership, it's worth looking into.
Some key quotes:

> "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it."

> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
Show HN: Random Art Generator in Haskell
F-35 OP, pls nerf.

It's not OP! Here are secret docs to prove it!
https://archive.ph/cC8fl
Show HN: Notifly Style – Design notifications in seconds
Notifly style is a tool that allows you to design notifications in seconds. Thanks to the app's UI and UX design, this process is further accelerated. After finishing the design, you have the option to download the notification code in HTML/CSS or JSX format, which you can use in your project.
It's a lesson that everyone learns eventually.

You cannot eliminate complexity (although you can minimize it, to be clear). But for most things, you can shuffle the semantics around, you can paper over them in a new way, but at the end of the day, someone has to pay the piper.

In my experience, complexity eliminated from one spot will invariably bubble up somewhere else in an unexpected way.
What is this supposed to prove? The question isn’t particular novel. There are decades of speculative terraforming discussions on the internet that you can search via Google, especially after the Martian book and movie.
It goes back a lot further; see e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07/the-to...

And Republicans fought against it because the wrong party/person proposed it.
Counterpoint; JMS had the five seasons of Babylon 5 planned out but, fearing cancellation, tried squeezing wrap-up storytelling from the fifth into the tail of the fourth, and the narrative compression is palpable, it feels super rushed. Then they did get renewed and the resulting final season feels disconnected and flabby.
What's the point of monitoring your Internet traffic at the domain and IP level? If you want to stop sensitive data exfiltration, it doesn't matter the domain (malicioussomething.com vs google.com) but the data in the packets, which apps like this rarely track.

How do people deal with this dichotomy?
Need epub version of this
Not just Elon. The CEOs of the most prominent tech companies had front row seats at the inauguration

Clearly tech is now a lot more than just code, chips and networks
I've been on both sides recently, and it hasn't really changed significantly. If you're heming and hawing you're not getting the job.
12 years ago, when we already had Arduino but no ESP32 yet, I built this thing:

https://newton-net-pl.translate.goog/2012/01/robot/?_x_tr_sl...

It was made of an old HTC Magic phone, acting as camera+wifi transmitter, connected to Arduino via its serial port and level shifter, to control the servo and a RGB LED. I had a lot of fan with that, even if the connection wasn't really to stable.

Thanks for sharing, maybe it's time to revive the project with the next generation of the microcontroller.
What happens if you feed the n-gate archive to an LLM and ask it to generate commentary on current HN posts in the same style?
It feels to me that insightful details about what's going on have been coming out of tech/startup publications like TechCrunch and Wired instead of some more traditional news media. These stories feel relevant to the communities and interests here in a way that other political ones don't.

[Edit: That said, there's a risk some lower quality, less substantial, and more sensationalist articles or publications will be submitted as a result, so it's extra important to not just vote based on headlines.]
Sorry to hear you are out.

I've found "T/F" vals are not always portable between languages ("True" in Python vs "true" in JS) whereas integer comparisons are always interpreted correctly.
That was back before Google purchased YouTube and they had their own video service called Google Video. Google Video was great because they didn't have that limit.
Some abuse of wealth for political power may be inevitable but some countries are a lot better at limiting it than others.

For example here in France the amount of money politicians can spend on campaigning is strictly limited (and reimbursed by the state for those that pass a certain threshold of the vote). I'm not saying that it's perfect or that abuse doesn't sometimes still occur (as the current court case involving ex president Sarkozy shows) but I think it does improve things a lot.

Contrast that with the American system where to have any chance of becoming president (no matter which party you support) you basically have to be rich. And where multiple lobbyists and special interest groups basically buy the policies they want...
> How is it this is evidence the memo will affect things when the exact opposite order of operations has occurred around it?

The FAA workers received this memo the morning after the DC crash: I'm sure it wasn't great for morale.

The FAA administrator that got pushed out my Mush was one year into a five year term: I'm not sure why he had to go. (Though he was in charge when the FAA fined SpaceX $600k for safety violations: related?)
More importantly - Doge has given Elon Musk, an unelected oligarch, the keys to the kingdom: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/us/politics/elon-musk-dog...

The richest guy in the world now controls the US Treasury's payment system, no checks, no balances. It's insane.
For me distro is NixOS, since Guix System is unfortunately not much focused on desktop.

For laptops... Well... If you REALLY need one, because 90% of the time you just need a desktop, Lenovo Thinkpads, Dell Precisions are the least crappy I knows.
Shh. I need my VMs and they also help me run software the corp malware doesn’t play nice with.
I've been very curious about this and about how we should modify our hiring. Its obvious that an individual should be able to use AI companions to build better, faster, higher quality things... But the skillsets are sooo uneven now that its unfair to those who are with and without.

I think it ultimately comes back to impact (like always) which has remained largely unchanged.
China's artificial sun fuels Western fears it has lost race to energy holy grail
Cool. So too large to fit in the margin.
My understanding is that anyone can sue anyone in theory. Ideally, yes.

In practice, the State AG's are one of the most respectable powers to sue for a federal law being broken, which would then go to federal court. Ideally the SCOTUS would step in itself and injunction all this stuff so it doesn't get to this point, but Trump sure is working them overtime.
In this case, it won’t matter, I’m afraid, which way the trolley goes as it will at least mangle both groups of people, and the only winning move is to try to move as many people as possible away from the track.

An Eastern European solution is to get a few buddies to cut the electrical wire that powers the trolleys and sell it for scrap metal, which works on all electrical trolleys. (After the trolley stops, it can be scavenged for parts you can sell as scrap metal, too.)
Good tip! Do you mean for hackernews or for the homepage of for both?
Courts are still fighting. Something are being overturned already (which is lightning quick). The moment we throw our hands up and give up is when the administration wins.
One client of mine has a couple repositories for non-mission critical things like their fork of an open source project, decommissioned microservices, a SVG generator for their web front-end, etc.

They also take this approach of "whatever tool works," but their coding test is "here's some symptoms of the SVG generator misbehaving, figure out what happened and fix it," which requires digging into the commit history, issues, actually looking at the SVG output, etc.

Once you've figured out how the system architecture works, and the most likely component to be causing the problem, you have to convert part of the code to use a newer, undocumented API exposed by a RPC server that speaks a serialization format that no LLM has ever seen before. Doing this is actually way faster and accurate using an AI, if you know how to centaur with it and make sure the output is tested to be correct.

This is a much more representative test of how someone's going to handle doing actual work knocking issues out.
Years ago I encountered a caching system that I misremembered as being a plugin for nginx and thus was never able to track down again.

It had a clever caching algorithm that favored latency over bandwidth. It weighted hit count versus size, so that given limited space, it would rather keep two small records that had more hits than a large record, so that it could serve more records from cache overall.

For some workloads the payload size is relatively proportional to the cost of the request - for the system of record. But latency and request setup costs do tend to shift that a bit.

But the bigger problem with LRU is that some workloads eventually resemble table scans, and the moment the data set no longer fits into cache, performance falls off a very tall cliff. And not just for that query but now for all subsequent ones as it causes cache misses for everyone else by evicting large quantities of recently used records. So you need to count frequency not just recency.
Is there a way to force SNI by blocking ECH requests?
One of the few movies that I don't mind watching again every few years
tell me more about your use name :-)
They were moved to being contractors to keep them off the books.
> We might just integrate with it to keep up.

the skeptic in me thinks this path will be reserved only for a select few, as capabilities of integrated humans expand exponentially, so will the need for more energy and resources

I dont think there's enough to go around unless we unlock space travel...
no reference to the Reddit CEO's X accounts being suspended after the boycott
https://x.com/redditspez
https://x.com/stevephuffman
https://archive.ph/QYBhK
Facebook hard-code IP addresses when their domains are blocked. I found this out while using NextDNS alongside that logging functionality that iPhones have. It’s insane the lengths that they go to.
As mentioned by the other comment, the difference lies in how much human effort was put - something by its nature is not possible to ask in a black and white manner that applies everywhere. But in cases which are close to the extremes, it is easy to answer: even though the Toy Story renders are machine output, these renders are the result of a lot of human effort by the human artists that made the 3D scenes, materials, models, animation sequences, etc for the purpose of being used in those renders. So Disney can claim copyright on that sort of "machine output".

Similarly, claiming copyright on AI output is like claiming copyright on something like `init_state(42, &s); for (int i=0; i < count; i++) output[i] = next_random(&s);`. While there is a bit of (theoretical) effort involved into choosing 42 as a starting input, ultimately you can't really claim copyright on a bunch of random numbers because you chose the initial seed value.

Of course you can claim copyright in the code, but doing the same on the output makes no sense: even the if the idea of owning random numbers isn't absurd enough, consider what would happen if -say- 10000 people did the same thing (and to make things even more clear, what if `init_state` used only 8bits of the given number, therefore making sure that there would be a lot of people ending up with the same numbers).

AI is essentially `init_state` and `next_random`, just with more involved algorithms than a random number generator.
Changed from https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-... above. Thanks!
> The headphone, volume, brightness, and battery was just "what" kind of headshake about invasiveness. Somebody'd hand wave they need it (we want it, we want it). They obviously don't.

Well the why the ad industry wants it is clear: fingerprinting and segmentation. Someone consistently low on battery? Push them ads for powerbanks.
Popular in 2021 (684 points, 207 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616985
Sure, but the GP you were replying to was focused on the risk of states losing federal funding and how that leverage is making many act differently in response.
Scavengers Reign is an amazing, 10/10 show and it's so depressing we'll never get a second season. I miss my telepathic dead wife salamander addiction metaphor.
There was a nice talk on the recent Chaos Communication Congress (from Chaos Computer Club):

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-databroker-files-wie-uns-apps-un...

(English audio available)
Yes, but I need to connect to existing RDP servers. No way I'm going to be able to install anything else.
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

"The Door Problem" (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655994 - June 2024 (29 comments)

The Door Problem (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24313607 - Aug 2020 (11 comments)

The Door Problem of Combat Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20645914 - Aug 2019 (120 comments)

The Door Problem (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16021509 - Dec 2017 (27 comments)
hiring market tightened up... that doesn't mean there isn't one
Its going to bite leg, arm or throat and then hang on to the prey shaking , while the rest of the pack catches up. If you have anything beyond your fist, use it to punch the nerve rich noose.
Alternative get a grip and strangle it.
This scientific-academic synopsis gives me only the faintest idea of what kind of animal this might be:

> A new supergiant species of Bathynomus A. Milne-Edwards, 1879 from Vietnam is described. Bathynomus vaderi sp. nov. is characterised by its wide, rectangular clypeal region with parallel lateral margins, concave distal margin, and narrowly acute apex; the distally narrowing and posteriorly curved coxa of pereopod 7; and the presence of 11 upwardly curved pleotelson spines.

"Curved coxa of pereopod?" "Curved pleotelson spines?" "Wide, rectangular clypeal region"?
dang's argument IMO more drives to the point that current HN policy/culture is insufficient.

That's the "This time it's different" bit from his comment so I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying this time it's different except even more different?

but the problem here is that there's very little repetition because Elon/DOGE keeps finding new ways to interfere with institutions.

Right but that's not how 'repetition' works in the narrow context of HN. It's a fuzzy repetition, a repetition by reference not by value. If Elon Musk goosesteps 3 times today and 6 times tomorrow, that doesn't mean it makes sense to put 9 Musk goosestepping stories on the front page of HN. There'd be no HN left.

Edit: I saw a mention of https://news.ycombinator.com/active in another thread. As I type, I count 7 ongoing, live threads about new US admin stuff and that's just of the 30 most active. It simply is not the case that this isn't being discussed on HN. It's being discussed on HN more than any other topic and, in fact, with way more than a typical, to use dang's term, Major Ongoing Topic gets discussed, at least concurrently.
Could you offer us a translation of the first two or three sentences? Apparently this comment was interpreted as a threat of murder.
Even just to look at the picture near the top (which is also repeated near the bottom), if you do not allow the app to track you that only disables one of the items of the information and not all of them. This is explained later in the document, that it is not explained very well to end users. I agree that it could be explained better. Perhaps, "Allow app to track your activity..." can have a option to display a more elaborate description, explaining that it only affects the Advertising Tracking ID (and what that means) and has no effect on other methods of tracking.

And, looking further in the document, we can see there is more.

Some of them, such as IP address and timestamp it is reasonable to use for programs that access the internet (although it should be possible for the user to set up a proxy and/or adjust the clock in order to change these things, the server would still use its own timestamp anyways).

Available memory also makes sense to be readable (although ideally, the user should be allowed to limit the amount of memory available to specific programs, in order that there is enough memory remaining for other programs; the reported total memory should then include only the memory available to this program and not to all programs), and the same should be true of the number of CPU cores and the amount of available disk space.

Others probably should not normally be known by most programs (but some are usefulf or some kind of programs), and even when they are, the operating system ought to allow users to reprogram what information is available and what filters, logging, etc will be used.

The presence of wired headphones probably should not be accessible by software, and the redirection should be handled by hardware. Perhaps an exception makes sense if the settings need to be different, e.g. mono vs stereo, although even then, programs should only see those settings (and only if they have audio output), and the user should be allowed to override them due to preferences (e.g. some users might want mono even if connected to external speakers or headphones; on my computer sometimes only one speaker works and sometimes both, so it is useful to me to be able to switch to mono).

Furthermore, there is the consideration, if the advertisers/spies are stealing your power and network bandwidth and quota in order to do these things; then, that is theft.
My parents and their generation suffers a lot from this, I feel. They grew up in a time (and in a country, I guess) where any information that they'd digest on TVs, newspapers, etc. came vetted officially or professionally. So, they kind of presume that everything they see online must be true because it's out there.

It's not like there was no garbage output before, but it's the scale at which it can be done nowadays that is the key, I think.
Sounds like this could inspire a simple test as to whether someone should have access to classified information, which would also positively indicate their more mature than a twelve year old.
>Eh. Zip code level location + timestamp is still pretty invasive, even if, pedantically, that’s not very precise.

That's basically sent to multiple parties (ISPs, transit providers, CDNs, analytics/advertising/diagnostics/security vendors) everytime you visit a website. If this counts as "invasive" to you, you shouldn't be connected to the internet at all, much less buying a tracking device (a smartphone) and installing random ad-supported apps on it.
I dislike that as a developer, knowing something like the headphone status could be useful for the functionality of the app. But some other unscrupulous person is just exfiltrating it! This is part of the reason I agree with Apple’s stand against apps with sub-apps/“desktop like” due to not fine-grained enough permission settings. There is a significant privacy downside to “superapps” and now Elon is pushing for the X everything app.