skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked it - particularly the volume and brightness controls, and for convenient hotkey access in apps that I didn't use too often to memorize. But it was extremely badly implemented and then basically abandoned. At the very least, it should've never replaced function keys.
Nobody is confused about how it's currently working. The whole complaint is that there isn't a way to donate towards Firefox and have any confidence that's where the money will go. There are a million social justice charities out there and zero dedicated to non-chromium browsers. A lot of people are disappointed by that. Anyone who wants to fund Afrofeminist conferences can do so directly.

Sure Mozilla can spend donations how it wants, but donors are free to not donate as well. For years many people have been saying that they want to support Firefox without all of unrelated social projects, but Mozilla has refused to offer that. I expect that a lot of potential donations have therefore not happened.
Yeah, I don't think the 12" MacBook was anywhere near the most controversial, because it was always clear that it was a niche product. I had one and loved it. Those who it wasn't right for didn't buy it.

The 2016-2019 Pros on the other hand replaced a machine that was universally loved. there were entire podcasts dedicated to complaining about them for four years.
I exclusively call landlines from my phone, at least using "actual" phone calls; businesses, to be precise.

For all person-to-person calls, my family and friends have long switched to FaceTime and WhatsApp, which are both encrypted. Why would I pay per minute for a less secure and lower fidelity (HD voice usually does not work internationally) channel?

That said, I really would prefer if the POTS were better secured, given that SSNs and payment card numbers are transmitted over it all the time.
There's nothing wrong with working in sales! No kink shaming here.

Startups usually require people to wear several hats at once. That's normal. But suppose that your company grows to be 20 times larger. Would you still be working with customers or directing the projects to implement their requirements?

You probably won't have bandwidth for both roles.
Does no one remember the last Google Gemini super-impressive demo that blew everyone away was faked?

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/07/googles-best-gemini-demo-w...
As somewhat of an AI-generated image hater, I had a lot more fun with this than I was expecting to. Nice work :-)
Meta is trying to block ex-employee's book alleging misconduct and harassment
No, I haven't. Good point. Despite the emphasis I've put on it here, it's really just a relatively minor irritation not worth bringing up in a formal way, at least at this time. He's getting enough pushback from me on things that are more important to the team as a whole already.

I'm very far from shy, though, and if/when the general subject comes up in more casual conversation, I will certainly say something.
I’ve entered into no contract with the German government just because Hans decides to punch in his credit card number into my website.

What I'm saying might be a silly defense to you or an EU attorney, but again, I don’t need to care unless you have some way of enforcing your inane ideas that declaring jurisdiction over me makes it so.
DELETE, DELETE, DELETE [pdf]
The headline alone reminds me of the Mark Twain quote:

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
Facebook discloses FreeType 2 flaw exploited in attacks
Misleading clickbait title on this post.

Doesn’t match the clickbait title on the article itself.
These people sure rule like they don't expect to ever lose power.
You just perfectly laid out why it's simultaneously difficult to find a new job in UX while getting paid well once you do find a job (if you're good).

Those who understand what good UX is and how it manifests itself, value it highly, while many (even in tech) still consider it pixel-pushing and "pretty colors".
I agree with this sentiment. My first gig was telecom, and I wrote in a pascal like language called CHILL, but found out my forte was debugging and patching and ended up doing a fair amount of assembly code that would get applied to live systems. The decade plus I spent in medical devices, I used C and assembly.
The thing is, if you own all the code and actually understand what it is supposed to do, you can write safe code.
https://timeguessr.com/

I really enjoy time guessr! Playing it on the TV with family is fun too.
I have been building a kind-of geography guessing game in a similar vein. Mine has a solo mode and a party-game mode and doesn't use any AI. I'd love to hear some feedback.

https://guesshole.com/
FBI Redactions on Seth Rich Index Leave No Answers
Ah, the East German State Police mentality...

Sadly, governments end up becoming corrupt. In one formerly free nation (or at least it was one that obnoxiously bragged about being one), data about women's periods became weaponized in a witchhunt against abortions.
is there any ability for us to log centrally the SQL queries executed from multiple laptops against our s3 iceberg store?
The M1 MBAir I think is better than the M1 MBP in terms of sheer utility and price/performance. Until the new $999 Air that launched this week, the M1 Air was the best laptop ever launched, IMO.
This was wild to contemplate and I was about to raise my finger and say "Really?! 'G&A' at that scale?!" but at the same time even if those kinds of roles are over-hired - they have to be responding to need and within a realm they found risk-averse.

Having said that I just have had the same kinds of questions/trouble as OP about Mozilla's wild spending and budget compared to seeing their devs at grungy linux confs in the midwest when I was an undergrad in the 00s.

You did help point out what I really wondered about also and didn't understand, so thanks.
Yeah, the keyboard never went back to be as good as it was before.
I'd not heard that Feynman quote before, so thanks for sharing; I love it.

I'd include writing, art-, and music-making in that category.
Agree that something like this does seem likely. And this line of thought also highlights the work of Chaitin, and the fact that the current discussion around AI is just the latest version of early-2000s quasi-empiricism[1] stuff that never really got resolved. Things like the 4-color theorem would seem to be just the puny top of really big iceberg, and it's probably not going away.

The new spin on these older unresolved issues IHMO is really the black-box aspect of our statistical approaches. Lots of mathematicians that are fine with proof systems like Lean and some million-step process that can in principle be followed are also happy with more open-ended automated search and exploration of model spaces, proof spaces, etc. But can they ever be really be happy with a million gigabyte network of weighted nodes masquerading as some kind of "explanation" though? Not a mathematician but I sympathize. Given the difficulty of building/writing/running it, that looks more like a product than like "knowledge" to me (compare this to how Lean can prove Godel on your laptop).

Maybe it's easier to swallow the bitter pill of poor quality explanations though after the technology itself is a little easier to actually handle. People hate ugly things less if they are practical, and actually something you can build pretty stuff on top on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-empiricism_in_mathematic...
Zig has defer, which is arguably way simpler. Is there something RAII can do that defer can't?

Not everyone likes RAII by itself. Allocating and deallocating things one at a time is not always efficient. That is not the only way to use RAII but it's the most prevalent way.
Yes because flipping those bits would make the iPad a Mac.

And the whole point of an iPad is that you have a simple and consistent experience.
Thats awesome.

See my post below -- I have been tracking Eschelon since the early 90s...

Guess what NSA router backdoors have become (mobile phones with socialifelog media apps on them)

---

And like @tptacek said

>>If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.

---

Love that but, I do think that both is true...

Look incompetent so they don't think you're competent (Stuxnet/DUQU)
Why is there a lack of domestic opportunity? Why do they keep exporting their labour instead of focusing on internal capital investment and inviting foreign capital?
Meta alleged that Wynn-Williams violated the non-disparagement terms of her September 2017 severance agreement, resulting in the company filing an emergency motion on Friday.

Ah the good old make them sign some broad agreement when they are desperate playbook that every company is employing now days.
That's hardly an isolated example though, plus who knows how many staff hours went into evaluating various proposals and facilitating the conference. The big question is why. It's not like there are a dearth of social justices non-profits out there. It couldn't be easier to donate directly to such projects. Why can't we have a single non-profit focused entirely on preventing a total browser monopoly?
I’m not sure it’s worth answering the question because to me it almost feels like a straw man in the sense that it’s disconnected from the current reality. I think running a movie trailer before another movies plays and putting up movie posters around the theater is fair play. It’s within the same context and is actually advertising an entertainment product. Further, people go out of their way to watch movie trailers on YouTube.

However, the majority of ads I’m discussing don’t adhere to that. Overall, people are pretty good about finding out about things! If it’s really desired, some will seek it out. Others will learn via word of mouth. Steam is a good example I think where people find games without having to see ads on TV, online, or other areas.
My teen years: The transputer operating system
My finger slipped across most of the keyboard, or I fucked up.

You decide!
I think you're missing the core component. We care __WHY__ the theorem is true. To be honest, the __IF__ part matters a lot less.

The thing is that the underlying reasoning (the logic) is what provides real insights. This is how we recognize other problems that are similar or even identical. The steps in between are just as important, and often more important.

I'll give an example from physics. (If you're unsatisfied with this one, pick another physics fact and I'll do my best. _Any_ will do.) Here's a "fact"[0]: The atoms with even number of electrons are more stable than those with an odd number. We knew this in the 1910's, and this is a fact that directly led to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which led us to better understand chemical bonds. Asking why Pauli Exclusion happens furthers our understanding and leading us to a better understanding of the atomic model. It goes on and on like this.

It has always been about the why. The why is what leads us to new information. The why is what leads to generalization. The why is what leads to causality and predictive models. THe why is what makes the fact useful in the first place.

[0] Quotes are because truth is very very hard to derive. https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!
https://archive.ph/wuUEv
New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan will pick up where Pat Gelsinger left off
Yeah, I have a 2018 12.9 model and I haven’t really felt the need to upgrade. The tablet still feels snappy and all I do is draw, and markup papers.

I tried programming on it but without a shell and proper file system API, what can you even do?
Discussion (171 points, 4 hours ago, 40 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347369
By stakeholders I don't mean the telecom industry, but the governments regulating it. Lawful interception is non-negotiable, and (working) end-to-end encryption would break that, so I predict that we'll never see it on the POTS, VoIP or circuit switched. (And even OTT VoIP is under constant political attack.)

> You seem to be ignoring (or disregarding without explanation) similar engineering feedback

You mean the other "Bellhead" comments explaining why it's technically impossible to do something on the POTS that's been solved in OTT VoIP for years, like real-time end-to-end encryption using block ciphers etc.?

Yeah, I do discount confident statements declaring something technically impossible when I've been happily using such a system for the better part of a decade.
Sharding, write scalability, and similar are the technical advantages that can matter at scale (and mattered a lot more before SSDs became so common), but I think for most users the only tangible ?benefit? was the schema less nature.
At least in C it's only plain old function pointers.

You don't have to think about exceptions, overloaded operators, copy constructors, move semantics etc.
The Ollama stuff is the old llama.cpp stuff that constrains output tokens.

It's great, I've used it to get outputs from as small a model as 1B.

But it's a stark difference in quality from, say, Phi-4's native tool-calling.

If Gemma 3 is natively trained on tool-calling, i.e. y'all are benching on say, Berekley Function Calling leaderboard, that'd be great to know out here.

Tangentially, github.com/ochafik is a Googler who landed an excellent overhaul of llama.cpp's tool-calling, might be worth reaching out to (if you're not working with him already!)
Gelsinger. Should've kept Pat and gotten rid of (at least some of) the board.
Truly the best angle Firefox could take would be to be stronger pro user: block ads, resist fingerprinting, hide annoyances, etc.
It doesn't use Chromium. I think that their point is that Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko, can only have an impact on the rendering engine space proportional to its user base, which they have argued is insignificant.
> [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth.

what percentage of the US population do you reckon could "make an educated guess" about the technological capabilities of the US government in 2002?

please remember this is a technology discussion forum, not a general public forum.

> Zimmermann's PGP encryption software

"PG what? Encryption? like the cryptkeeper? I like hans zimmer music"
Shout out for stilling calling it PSX
I've used a wlcsp mcu before and sunlight would make it reset. That was a fun one to debug.
> I prefer using python interpreters installed by linux package manager.

uv will defer to any python it finds in PATH as long as it satisfies your version requirements (if any):

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/python-versions/

It also respects any virtual environment you've already created, so you can also do something like this:

/usr/bin/python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install uv
.venv/bin/uv install -r requirements.txt # or
.venv/bin/uv run script ...

It's a very flexible and well thought out tool and somehow it manages to do what I think it ought to do. I rarely need to go to its documentation.

> Using uv would probably save some time on dependency updates but it would require changing my workflow and CI/CD.

I found it very straightforward to switch to uv. It accommodates most existing workflows.
> I'd argue that the biggest reason machines are black boxes are because no one is bothering to look inside of them.

People do look, but it's extremely hard. Take a look at how hard the mechanistic interpretability people have to work for even small insights. Neel Nanda[1] has some very nice writeups if you haven't already seen them.

[1]: https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability
I think it’s something a lot more interesting than aggression. Aggression happens to be one trait that runs counter to surface level social norms while simultaneously enabling conformity with the deeper ones. Consider a popular bully that picks on a racial minority. On the surface, many kids may have been told to be nice to those of other races, to never exercise violence, etc. At a deeper level, though, they may have internalized their culture’s disdain for that minority. The bully comes along to benefit from the group’s deeper desire to hurt and exclude the minority because he/she, for whatever reason, possesses characteristics that allow him/her to violate the surface level norms with less concern. Aggression is just the trait that allows one to violate the norm against violence.
Why would you trust everything on somebody else’s computer?!
Imagine Google still owning Boston Dynamics in Gemini era. It would have been an absolute killer.
My 13” 2015 rmbp is my favorite notebook of all time. My dad uses it now.

I didn’t find it to run that hot and generally found it to be the best windows laptop (via vm) money could buy at the time.
I bought one of the refreshed ones in 2016 as a sort of "I want something like an iPad but I just can't tolerate not having a real keyboard and OS" thing and was super pleased with it.

The size was really so good—great on a plane, so light I never thought about it in my bag. I took it all over for years. Wrote a little iTunes library export tool in the back seat of a minivan on the drive from NYC to Maine right after I got it^. It's nice to have an actual laptop when traveling rather than just a phone or tablet, but even a little bit bigger and heavier can be annoying. My wife still uses it for web browsing and has only just recently started to mention it being unusably slow (it was never fast, but it was passable). I have an M1 Air now but would absolutely prefer something a bit smaller.

^ https://github.com/drien/itunes-to-sql
How to communicate with your Asian parents
I'll have to use this, thanks for sharing. Isn't it problematic since Gemini isn't representative of a real user, though?
Can you have each tab use a different browser profile?
Deleted messages, disappearing chats, and a firestorm of L.A. controversy
For scripting... HIGHLY recommend putting your dependencies inline.

E.g.:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.11"
# dependencies = [
# "psycopg2-binary",
# "pyyaml",
# ]
# ///

Then -

uv run -s file.py
> Whoever had the reigns when Apple finally reversed these decisions and made the M1 MBP

They shoulda kept the touchbar and restored the functions keys (including restoring volume controls etc to function keys). That would have been amazing. There was so much opportunity for cool custom functionality with touchbar, but it needs to be dedicated to that, not doing double-duty as physical keys.
It looks to me like C is still very relevant, and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

I realize a lot of people don't want to use it; and that's fine, don't use it.
He's not making a comment about everyone, it's a specific comment about how often long time C programmers make basic mistakes after a million SLOC or so.

In this instance Walter is correct - the mistakes he listed are very rarely made by experienced C programmers, just as ballet dancers rarely trip over their own feet walking down a pavement.

The problem of those errors being commonplace in those that are barely five years in to C coding and still have another five to go before hitting the ten year mark still exists, of course.

But it's a fair point that given enough practice and pain those mistakes go away.
> I worked in the industry for several years, though not in litigation. I've been nothing but courteous to you despite your posts being shallow and dismissive. Review the site guidelines; you are breaking several of them.

Frankly, I don't find your correspondence courteous at all.

> They weren't asking for $30,000.

I'm well aware. Did you see the "if". I guess that you find this rude and/or dismissive, but you fundamentally misunderstand my point, and in a way that seems as if you are jumping to. After all, I started the sentence with "if" and then described a scenario explaining how pleading works. Which I guess you understand because you worked in the industry?

> Your contention is that this came about from an industry standard practice of multiplying the statutory maximum by the number of infringements.

No my contention is that the maximum amount of statutory damages allowed under law is $150k per work infringed, when willfulness is present. In every copyright case involving statutory damages, the pleading will seek the maximum amount of statutory damages available because if you do not, it will be waived. Do you understand the concept of waiver? I ask, not to be rude, but because it does not seem like you do. I'm happy to explain, but I'm sure google or chatgpt could provide perfectly adequate answers.

>Maybe the big shots do things differently but I've seen a lot of money get left on the table to avoid bad press, which is why I find it hard to believe there was no one in the loop here who would have had the capacity to suggest that this was a bad idea. My contention is that this didn't happen, because the whole point of these lawsuits was not to recoup damages but to curtail piracy via a chilling effect.

Yeah? You see a lot of attorneys in copyright cases not seeking the amount of statutory damages? Where did you see that? As I mentioned, I'm a litigator, and I do a lot of copyright. That's not my experience at all.

> The RIAA's settlement amounts are typically in the neighborhood of $3,000-$4,000 for those who settle once they receive a letter from the music industry.

I'm not sure what your point is. You do not seem to understand what I am talking about at all, which is that it would be malpractice to not claim the maximum amount of statutory damages available when you plead. You do not have to ultimately seek them at trial, but you cannot go the other direction. I hope that clears things up for you. And this is why I often complain about the reporting of legal cases on sites like ars, sometimes they do a good job, sometimes they only serve to confuse most readers.
Hmmm, I've never seen that and I feel like I work with some pretty locked down companies.
Promising and not delivering on Apple Intelligence.

But I seriously do not want any agent knowing too much.

For example: “Onscreen awareness” — Giving Siri awareness of whatever is displayed on your screen.

Siri had better not be shy.

Or perhaps Siri ought to take a long walk on a short pier.

Same for Copilot,I suppose.

Life is a creative work. It's art, not algorithm. I take my camera with me to be surprised. I play piano to be part of the process that a composer felt.

If I hand off my email writing, photography, music and so on, I'm not learning. Great results but not mine. Just LIKE mine.

AI, please paint my house. It bores and taxes me. Life doesn't.
Meanwhile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Saad%C3%A9-class_conta... <- CMA-CGM LNG-powered

https://www.cma-cgm.com/news/5012/maiden-call-of-cma-cgm-iro...

Ammonia too complicated?
That is a van built by Ares (I might have the spelling slightly wrong).

Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.

The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.
Firefox private donations amount to 8 million usd from the last published data. Their CEO makes 9 million a year. 0 of Mozilla donations directly make it to Firefox developers or activities.
When i let go of the steering wheel in any other car, the car nose straightens out to be in line with the tail.

The fix won't come until after a massive lawsuit. I just wish it counted under lemon laws.