skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There has probably never been a human society in history or prehistory without bribery, and no possible set of bribery laws could conceivably create one. This is a property of human nature, not the current set of laws in one country.

I think the same is probably almost true of advertising, though maybe societies without money such as Tawantinsuyu are an exception. But I don't think you can have merchants without advertising, because, like fraud, advertising is so profitable for merchants that they will do some of it despite whatever laws you have.
I purchased the book a year ago but never had the pleasure to examine it closely.

I feel RE (or binary analysis as we are discussing) is a fascinating topic but it demands a lot of focus and an uncertainty amount of time to reach a milestone. It gives me the feel, that it is not something that I can comfortably study for a couple of hours every night for a few days, pause, and then pick it up again in a week or so. It requires a dedicated amount of time pretty much every day.

I wonder what is your experience?
A Blue Wave in 2026 won't undo the damage done. The world no longer trusts America, and it's going to be a minimum of decades, if not centuries, for that trust to be restored. That trust permitted America a lot of power and now that is gone.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-american-age-is-over
Is there a tech scene in Exeter? I have long lived in San Francisco having moved from UK in 2006 but I spent a lot of time down in Devon where my parents now live.
Show HN: Professional Profile Page
Folks who care about
1. Owning their professional data
2. Algorithms that decide our interactions from the applications
3. Don’t want to get stuck in infinite scroll mode
4. Deeply care about sharing with people you know

I have developed a simple professional profile page which stores your followers and can public ally recommend your profile.

I don’t like LinkedIn it’s a great thing but they sell your data and use heavy attention based advertising it’s becoming a place for marketing company .

Work in progress the code in GitHub at GitHub/cynsar-capital/second-ex
The head of Octopus has said that the UK government is spending £350m a year on support for renewable power when production is too high and they have to be switched off.

I believe the contracts for power supply aren’t so generous, but an essential key thing is to make battery power key to the whole process.

In time with enough battery power I’m guessing carbon free steel generation, and aluminium production might become viable, but there’s a long long way to go before that happens.
You ride to the sun.
And what percentage of the world's >1B Muslims agree with you? Fundamentalist Christianity may have waned over the last century... But broaden your borders a little bit and I think you'll find Western secular liberalism is hardly the only major world ideology, or even the dominant one.
Steve Kent from BBN told me how they bootstrapped the original trust anchor which signed over the card conpanies PKI using an HSM module. After they initialised the subsidiary CAs they destroyed the private key hardware, and some of them wanted to take bits home to put in lucite as a memento but others were worried it was a skymesh moment and enough information could be gleaned from chip remains they'd reveal the private key.

(The public key proof was all they wanted, no reuse intended of this keypair)
Thank you. They act as if the “best minds” need not read or reason beyond logic and math. Having a “best mind” requires a lifelong dedication to understanding other people, ideas, and history above all else.
Very old advice (2016). Definitely very good in that period of time though. I suppose it’s relevant today for some job posts.

But thanks to transparency in pay regulations from states such as Colorado. Pay is advertised up front.

You know what you are worth. Find jobs/companies that fit that ideal number. Then pop off in interview(s).
That isn’t useless, the $100k bottom number provides a lot of information to labor sellers.
Nobody looks past the first two or three pages in the search results. That's why SEO is a large industry.
The vast majority of Patreon contributions come from the YouTuber advertising it.
I don't think anyone is against receiving marketing information they request, like a catalog. It is far different than advertising that people are essentially forced to view even if they don't want to see it. You request a catalog, just like you might request to view an online store's website. But advertising you don't request is a completely different ballgame. Imagine if every time you turned on or sat down at your computer it forced an open specific newspaper's site, or reddit, or twitter, and there was no way to stop it from happening. If every time you drove down a specific road all your electronic devices opened up some random website you didn't request or want. That is what people have a problem with.
Investing in Pivots
I used to feel dismayed that I missed that era of the internet and technology (I'm 19). IRC, forums, work-in-progress gifs on personal websites, etc.

I still wish I were there for that, but I'm glad I get to be here for LLMs and the intelligence explosion. I have absolutely no idea what the world will look like in a few years. It certainly isn't the certain high-paying tech job in a largely static world that it looked like a few years ago.

But whatever happens, it's going to be interesting!

I wonder whether I'm spending my time optimally, working on a little SAAS that happens to use LLMs as a downstream commodity, contributing through a niche benchmark.
> dubious assumption that Trump gives any fucks about the US economy

I do believe that. If the economy crashes he will lose support from his billionaire friends. Also, the economy (along with immigration) was one of the top reasons people voted for him. I do believe he doesn't want to lose popular support. Currently GOP senators won't speak up against him because they know MAGA supporters will turn on them. But if he loses support GOP senators will be emboldened.
100% - there were no bald men before the invention of the internet
Here are a few samples https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/
They used to have one. It was the E in EMV. It's now part of MasterCard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europay_International
Yeah, automated tests are great when they are good. But when they are bad, they can be worse than no tests at all.

Multiple times in my career I've taken ownership of a codebase written by someone else. Some of the most pleasant ones had very little test coverage, but the code quality was high enough to make the lack of tests not really matter. On the other hand, some code is so bad covering it with tests adds nothing of value; it's just one more thing I have to analyze and decide what to do with.

I agree with most of the author's points in general, but I think that most programmers who are capable of writing good tests are also capable of recognizing situations when it's not worth the trouble.
au contraire.

internet have very few entry points, and they are all corrupted by advertising.
I think all groups engage in in group preference. If you look at businesses run by Indians in the US, they clearly favor hiring Indians, you see the same with other groups. Same with various East Asians, Jewish people etc.

It isn't just the dominate group, it is everyone.

So simplifying, if you have only 2 groups, one being 30% and the other 70% of the population, it would at first appear the 70% group has an advantage for finding jobs, but in reality they do not, as while they are favored at 70% of jobs, they are also competing against an equivalently larger group of people.

Anyway the implementation of racial preferences in college applications, and DEI has led to a system that systematical favors certain groups, and gaslighting that somehow this isn't the case.

I don't support Trump but liberals denying this reality, along with various other incredibly stupid woke positions, has led to the current situation, where we have a complete and utter imbecile running the country, because hey, at least he doesn't deny reality in regards DIE/social issues.
If labeling claims as "tired" makes it false, not a single fact in the world can be considered as backed by evidence. I'm not flipping anything around either, because again, it's squarely on you to provide proof for your claims and not those who question it. You're essentially making the claim that transformers can reverse a non-reversible function. That's like saying you can reverse a hash although multiple inputs can result in the same hash. That's not even "unbacked claims" territory, it defies logic.

I'm still not convinced LLMs are mere abstractions in the same way programming language implementations are. Even though programmers might give up some control of the implementation details when writing code, language implementors still decides all those details. With LLMs, no one does. That's not an abstraction, that's chaos.
> silica

For anyone else curious, it's from the hydrazine tank's rubber diaphragm. Tubes inside the thrusters, which direct fuel to the catalyst beds, had openings taken from 250 um diameter down to 35 um.[1]

The 28" spherical tank[2] has a rubber hemisphere to separate hydrazine from pressurant (He? N?). The diaphragm is EDPM that's teflon and silica filled.[3] The silica particles are for (tensile?) strengthening. It has a leaching issue (discussed in [2] page17).

PSI was a small SoCal company. Derivative tank used for Shuttle APU. Same material used since 1975.

[1] a story https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/voyager-1-team-accomplishes-tr...
[2] nice paper https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=review+and+history+of+p...
[3] meh, color pic Low cost derivative tanks... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=AIAA+99-2831
It's nice but it takes a million clicks to get to another day's puzzle. Tap to close the results page, Tap the toast to show the close button, tap the close button, tap the calendar, tap the day. Maybe some big left and right arrows at the top of the page?
This is very Unix-centric. Day 01, Processes, ignores interesting alternatives, like OpenVMS, which have radically different memory layouts, and things like "images" getting loaded into a common address space.

Mach would be another alternative to consider.
I'd love to hear how people write tests for ML. When I'm doing a greenfield project with a new model, a lot of issues are very statistical, e.g. incorrect downsampling - the model will run and train, just less optimally than normal.

I can't put optimality bounds because I don't know how well the model _should_ train, and when it doesn't train, that's not necessarily because of an incorrect implementation. And, actually training a model for a test is quite resource and time heavy.
> Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda

In Portuguese, I never found it difficult - mostly because, as the OP suggests, there is no material difference. If you want to talk about political propaganda, either say "propaganda" and let the other person deduct from context that you mean political propaganda, or explicitly say "political propaganda" (propaganda política).

In some ways, it might even be better as it will require you to actually characterise whether you mean political in the party-electoral sense, or in the ideological sense, etc.

The first time I heard the word "propaganda" in the English language, I assumed it was a less used synonymous for "advertisement". Despite having lived in an English-speaking country for over a decade, I still see them both as one and the same.

I sometimes feel like the separation is mostly used as a means to purport corporate and commercial advertising as legitimate, good and desirable (or at least acceptable) whilst keeping the idea of political and ideological advertisement as evil.

Both are bad. Both are means to manipulate an individual's opinion in favour of the advertiser. Commercially it is so I feel compelled to trade a portion of my life and health (in the form of money that I earned through work) to them in for a good or a service that I may otherwise not have thought worth the exchange.

Politically it's the same, only this time instead of my money they want my vote or my support for a certain policy that might even be against my personal or collective interests.
There's several games I've enjoyed from seeing ads for them. I would have never seemed them out on my own.
I've been to a lot of places and this is actually how the majority of the world looks. China looks like this. The Philippines looks like this. Turkey looks like this (though the streets are far cleaner than average for 3rd world or even 2nd world). South Africa looks like this. Congo, if you adjust your opinion of what richess is, and what poverty is, down, looks like this.

You can find far, far more luxurious hotels in South Africa or the Philippines than in Switzerland or England.

Some days I think the difference between 1st world and 3rd world is not so much wealth, but the division of wealth.
Bike-shedding is your counter argument?

Here's an interview with Thiel and Vance's guru on "democracy": https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in... -- the word democracy is used there as it is by most who use it in the context of the US (including myself).

And the person they picked for this is a charismatic narcissist who clearly only cares about himself? The examples of previous "dictators" all clearly believed that what they were doing was for the benefit of the country as a whole.

Those opposed to Trump holding office don't do so because he's in the "wrong party", they oppose him because he is eminently unsuitable for the job. Note that even hard core conservative members of his party advocated for voting for his opponent. That's a first, and there's a reason why.

Note as well that he's making noise about ignoring a constitutional amendment that would prohibit him from the office after this term.
> if you “win” a negotiation through power then you will likely find later you lost when you get paid back for winning through strength.

Could you please provide an example of said scenario?

> if either party feels that someone won and someone lost, then that will be a bad start to the relationship. Negotiating salary is about finding a salary that both employer and employee feel happy at.

Yes, I second this. It once happened to me that I "won" by getting an over-budgeted salary, but had to quit 3 days later because one of the bosses leaked in a meeting that they intended to overwork me since they felt hustled by me during the salary negotiation.

Said and done, they assigned me more work than initially scoped, as to adjust the "bang for the buck" balance (and had to quit shortly after that).
If the way you write automated tests is slowing you down rather than speeding you up, you need to rethink the way you are writing tests.

In my opinion tests are the ultimate productivity hack for building software. In exchange for a relatively small up-front cost (if you know what you are doing) they let you move so much faster! You can make changes with confidence that each change won't break your existing functionality, without having to spend hours on manual testing for every change you want to ship.

This goes for smaller personal projects too. I gave a talk about this a few years ago, originally titled "Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests" but then renamed (after I'd pitched the talk but before I presented it) to "Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder". Video, slides and notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/
I love this. We are a rust shop and we use clickhouse a fair bit. We’ve been quite impressed with its speed and flexibility. I’m glad to see this kind of direct, real-world feedback around both the benefits and difficulties of mixing rust and C++, which we have also had to do a bit of (albeit in the opposite direction: a smattering of C++ in a sea of rust).

I’m not sure if the poster here is the post author, but it would be great if the author would consider filling out this survey that was recently released asking for feedback on the future of rust’s vision: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/04/04/vision-doc-survey.html

I’d love to see rust become the de facto standard for cross-language portable code by virtue of its ease of use, but as this and our experience highlights, there’s some way to go yet!
cool. I would so happily pay you guys for long context API that aider could point at -- the speed is just game changing. I know your arch is different, so I understand it's an engineering lift. But, I bet you'd find some pareto optimal point in the curve where you could charge a lott more for the speed you guys can do if it's long enough for coding.
Sorry, that was a confusing choice of term by me, when the article already used the term "rule". I mean the courtship dynamics.

When it's a buyer's market -- or the buyers think it is -- some of the candidate tactics are going to play differently.

Even the old advice that, once the company decides they want you, that changes the dynamics, and now opens up negotiation. The dynamics maybe don't change as much as they used to. If candidate A doesn't take the offer, B, C, D, etc., are lined up and waiting, and probably not going anywhere.

I suspect that a lot of techbros who only know/remember the sellers market of a few years ago are going to be hit by the pendulum swing, when a lot of employers will be similarly cocky and fickle.
I may be the only one who doesn't think of it as a problem and doesn't call it bad.
I remember asking folks for tests for their stuff, and they didn't want to do it because it would take too much time and effort. And I said "It doesn't have to be perfect, just do a simple sanity check".

It's possible people on the opposite ends of the perfectionism scale might view tests differently.

The perfectionists want 100% test coverage which takes a serious commitment of time and effort, while the fast-and-loose folks don't want to bother with tests at all.

I wonder if the best way to test is to have the fast-and-loose people make fast-and-loose tests, and then let the perfectionists iterate on the tests as time goes on.
I have unironically begun referring to today's US Republican party as a cult, because it's one of the very few ways that can explain the profusion of contradictory statements and double-standards.

The true rule is "Dear Leader is ultimately right and we deserve to get what we want." Everything else is just a... a strategic insincerity.
Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive
or an april fool's joke!
I tried summarizing the thread so far (339 comments) with a custom system prompt [0] and a user-prompt that captures the structure (hierarchy and upvotes) of the thread [1].

This is the output that we got (based on the HN-Companion project) [2]:

LLama 4 Scout - https://gist.github.com/annjose/9303af60a38acd5454732e915e33...

Llama 4 Maverick - https://gist.github.com/annjose/4d8425ea3410adab2de4fe9a5785...

Claude 3.7 - https://gist.github.com/annjose/5f838f5c8d105fbbd815c5359f20...

The summary from Scout and Maverick both look good (comparable to Claude), and with this structure, Scout seems to follow the prompt slightly better.

In this case, we used the models 'meta-llama/llama-4-maverick' and 'meta-llama/llama-4-scout' from OpenRouter.

--

[0] - https://gist.github.com/annjose/5145ad3b7e2e400162f4fe784a14...

[1] - https://gist.github.com/annjose/d30386aa5ce81c628a88bd86111a...

[2] - https://github.com/levelup-apps/hn-enhancer

edited: To add OpenRouter model details.
Archaeolinguistics and language deciphering in action-adventure video games
Recession Watch
It's already used a lot — the paper I believe is from 1991, and GPT4 among many others is MoE
Context matters.

If you are a startup without customers/users then writing tests is a bad idea - you need to focus everything on getting working code and users. You may be throwing your code away because you still don't even know what your users really want.

On the other hand if you are writing a banking system then sure, testing is not negotiable.

"Should we be writing tests?" cannot be answered without also knowing what the software is, what the company does and the context in which the software is being written.
Totally agree. One of my favourite style of tests is this:

for path in ("/", "/news/", "/about/"):
response = client.get(path)
assert response.status_code == 200

Run that on every commit and if you accidentally ship something that throws an exception on one of those pages you'll know about it instantly.
Interface, by Neal Stephenson
Erica Synths DIY Eurorack Modules
Would you happen to know if by "private investment" they suggest battery developers paying to fix this part of grid operator infra? Because I'd think that they might also be able to go to the carbon markets to recoup this cost as well potentially (considering the CO2 emissions projected offset by more aggressively managing low carbon generation and resulting energy that would've otherwise been curtailed over a window of time, versus carbon emissions business as usual).
Related to the "blissful" feeling, an under emphasized criteria when choosing current tasks for engineers from a backlog of tasks is which feature are they more excited to work on right now.

The motiviation and tinkering can be similar to a side project, and results in higher quality work IMO. Obviously there are urgent tasks, but it's an ignored vector in the "weighting system" for choosing work for engineers.

If you wait to assign the task in the next sprint, the excitement for that particular task might be gone.
> When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?

Magazines almost always have their text in thin columns, because long lines are difficult to follow. Books are also typically 1/3th the width of a typical computer screen for the same reason.
> Companies generally respect candidates who negotiate

Is this really the case? If a company is giving you an offer, presumably they want to hire you. At that point, does the recruiter, your hiring manager, your skip level, the CTO, the CEO even care at that point? Does this respect ever come into play in future performance reviews? I personally don’t think so, but I’ve only ever worked for larger companies.

I’ve always thought you should negotiate because you’re potentially leaving money on the table, since companies will often try to lowball your offer.
I like the idea of the shared list, right now it’s paper and SMS and maybe Apple Notes at my house. One question- It’s not clear to me whether the idea is that you were supposed to go to 3 different stores to find the lowest prices?

Also “me had a recurring problem” sounds wrong presumably. That’s how you know it’s not “me and my wife”.
Right, I've received one job offer in the last decade. One. Took me a year and a half of searching to get it. Don't skip the degree or get older. ;-)
Oh one more note, regarding hermetic builds: I have tried to package clickhouse in nix for our dev environment and CI, but its build is pretty complicated, so I resorted to just pulling the precompiled binaries.

Nix, via the standard rust integration or via something like crane, is actually quite nice for building rust/C++ combo projects, so it’d be awesome if the team might consider this as a means of achieving reproducibility. I’d imagine they’d have an easier time of it than I did, given they are more familiar with their own build process.