MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-04-10 22:49:03+00:00
Assuming your data stays at home, without opening any firewall ports, then maybe your data is safer. You're still only one malware/burglary/house fire/flooding/accident away from losing it.

The moment you start opening ports you're no longer remotely safe. Cloud providers have dedicated staff monitoring services (or monitoring systems monitoring services) for anomalies, as well as people monitoring their networks. These same people will also know in advance when a new patch is coming for some 0-day exploit that might leave them vulnerable.

Compared to your setup at home, where you will patch it "eventually" (at the earliest when you get home from work), and you won't know if you're the target of an attack until your server gives up.

Not to mention the risk of losing other data. The LastPass leak a couple of years ago was made possible by attackers gaining access to an unpatched Plex server on a developers home network, from which they could gain access to his work laptop. LastPass had questionable security practices sure, but the validity of the attack still stands.
by echelon | 2025-04-10 22:50:06+00:00
Likely nothing. Mobile devices can't do much AI stuff except for the tiniest of models, and it'll likely be a long time before they will be able to anything super useful.

Edge compute is a long ways off, even on desktop without a dedicated GPU. But especially on mobile.

You might have bumped into a media website trying to run a WASM-powered onnx runtime background removal tool, or perhaps a super slim LLM. You'll notice how slow these are and how they can lock up your browser. That's about the experience you can expect from edge compute.

Nvidia's proclamation that they're going to be working on robotics as their next growth sector could mean more innovation on the edge / low power compute front. But most of the yield will come from better model architectures and models designed specifically to work with compute constraints.

For now, datacenter inference reigns supreme.
by antifa | 2025-04-10 22:50:34+00:00
I have general one-shot success asking chatgpt to make bash/python scripts and one-liners where otherwise it would take 1hr to a day to figure out on my own (and I'd use one of my main languages maybe) or I might not even bother trying, which is great for productivity but also over 90% of my job doesn't need throw-away scripts and one-liners.
by r00fus | 2025-04-10 22:51:02+00:00
I think the mouse is critical with non-touchscreen interfaces. Smaller hit-targets, lots of on-screen buttons/menus, file manipulation, etc.

The more and more modern desktop OSs evolve, the less of that is required. I want to open a file? I search for it using Win key / Spotlight - I just need to know the name or content.

The day will come when LLMs come integrated with your desktop OS and abstract away even more of the screen elements and interactions...
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-04-10 22:51:29+00:00
Coupled with the American paradox, does this suggest that human capital is not necessarily correlated with [formal] education, after all?

(Indeed the first chart looks like a scatterplot, so there is no need to invoke anecdata)

But considering the author's expertise maybe he's trying to point towards studying the correlation with hardwork-- a better proxy? Some say that is already factored into GDP calculations.
by octagons | 2025-04-10 22:51:41+00:00
Check out Smallstep’s step-ca server [0]. It still requires some work, but it allows you to run your own CA and ACME server. I have nothing against just hosting records off of a subdomain and using LE as mentioned, but I personally find it satisfying to host everything myself.

[0] https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/
by smegma2 | 2025-04-10 22:54:07+00:00
It is interesting that this article from a Canadian news source doesn’t have any mention of what Canada’s border policy is for comparison.

Canada’s customs may also confiscate or search a device with no justification: https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/travel-voyage/edd-ean-eng.html

I don’t necessarily endorse the policy but I feel that it undermines the article’s point. It would be useful to know how common this practice is in other countries for reference.

> Canadians (and all travelers) are left to grapple with a sobering truth: crossing into the U.S. means surrendering more than just your passport.

So does returning to Canada I guess?
Ask HN: Is Everything Data Compression?
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-10 22:54:12+00:00
After thinking about it for a while I am wondering, is everything data compression? Perhaps trivially so?

Like chaotic and nonchaotic systems alike can be described by their ability to be compressed. The less compressible the less chaotic [1]. And this is where we define explicitly chaos is in the regime of positive Lyapunov exponents. And so that creates an intrinsic link between dynamics and information. And information is what the universe is fundamentally made out of to say metaphorically.

But then that is why neural networks are so good at their jobs compared to anything else when predicting chaotic things [2] because they literally are attempting to compress the space of data. Which is a descriptor of chaos.

And the reason we say that neural networks are unexplainable or at least hard to explain is that they don’t show directly the solution. But if we switch our mental model to that the universe is simply only able to be described by literally compressing it into something, then neural networks are the best estimator for any function [3].

Which implies that neural networks are the best we can get. So all you can do is work towards more sophisticated architectures to understand anything. Because there isn’t anything that’s a true data model, function approximations are all we will ever get [4]. And also the reason they can predict further into the future than though possible is because previously we simply had worse compression algorithms than before.

And to me this all seems trivially true, or likely less than that because there seems to be no implications from it that are more than cursory observations and perhaps I am simply naive. So I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction to read or do more to understand these things. Because I have organized a conference to understand these ideas [5] and I think I should organize another one but also I’m not sure how to interact with these ideas because most of my time is spent doing geophysics and data science and not this.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0370157301000254

[2] https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.043252

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S089360809700097X

[4] https://projecteuclid.org/journals/statistical-science/volume-16/issue-3/Statistical-Modeling--The-Two-Cultures-with-comments-and-a/10.1214/ss/1009213726.full

[5] conference talks on YouTube (not all the talks were recorded and also the conference was broader in topic than this post). https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6zSfYNSRHalAsgIjHHsttpYfxJ_XIPbt&si=VVWAE-fsv_WfFwfK
by bobthepanda | 2025-04-10 22:55:36+00:00
I would imagine at least part of it is the fact that Russia is a resource exporting economy and thus suffers from "Dutch disease" where the consistent sale of commodities like oil pushes up the currency and makes other types of exports less compatible. If natural resources are super-profitable then they potentially become a crutch for the economy; and if other sectors are less competitive and profitable then there is not much reason to invest there.

Coupled with the fact that these types of sectors don't actually employ very many people as a percentage of the population, it makes sense that it would have bad effects on the rest of the population.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-04-10 22:55:37+00:00
Does it matter if data is encrypted ?

If it does, I assume you also roll your own network equipment. If you're worried about surveillance, know that you're far more likely to be targeted at the network port than at your data.

As for the process, the cloud (for storing data) is nothing more than a remote fileshare that someone else keeps running. If you have an up to date copy of your data you can change the process any way you like.

Servers are not free, nor are they fire and forget. Once you setup a server and decide to open it to the internet, you become a target, and you will be found. There are bots scouring the entire ip range of every residential IP network looking for juicy targets, and when they find something they record it for later use. Then when some new 0-day is found for service X that you're running, they don't need to scan, they can just lookup in their database an exploit right away.

I'm not against self hosting, and god knows I've been doing it for decades, but it is very rarely worth the hassle compared to the gains. The power cost alone of running a server is more than the equivalent cost of storing it in the cloud (assuming we're not talking media servers, but regular user created data).

The worst argument I usually see is people self hosting mail for private, completely oblivious to the fact that there are usually 2+ people in a mail thread, and something 68% of the worlds population runs on Google/Microsoft/Apple/whatever, so while you may keep your emails private, if they're targeted for being scanned they have already been so.
by db48x | 2025-04-10 22:55:47+00:00
Why would you grep for the emoji? The actual pattern you want to match is the standard format of the error message that proceeds it, which hasn’t changed in eons:

my $line = "infinite-loop-linked-list.c:30:10: warning: infinite loop [CWE-835] [-Wanalyzer-infinite-loop]"; grammar gcc { token filename { <-[:]>+ }; token linenumber { \d+ }; token colnumber { \d+ }; token severity { info|warning|error }; token message { .* $$ }; regex diagnostic { <filename> [\:] <linenumber> [\:] <colnumber> [\:]\s <severity> [\:]\s <message> }; token TOP { <diagnostic> }; } say gcc.parse($line);

which when run produces the obvious output:

｢infinite-loop-linked-list.c:30:10: warning: infinite loop [CWE-835] [-Wanalyzer-infinite-loop]｣ diagnostic => ｢infinite-loop-linked-list.c:30:10: warning: infinite loop [CWE-835] [-Wanalyzer-infinite-loop]｣ filename => ｢infinite-loop-linked-list.c｣ linenumber => ｢30｣ colnumber => ｢10｣ severity => ｢warning｣ message => ｢infinite loop [CWE-835] [-Wanalyzer-infinite-loop]｣

I’ll leave handling filenames containing colons as an exercise for the reader.

The emoji just focus the reader’s eye on the most critical line of the explanation.
by KeepFlying | 2025-04-10 22:56:26+00:00
I can't find my Amazon Prime rewards card in your search, any chance it's in there under a different name?

And for my Discover It card a tool like this is t very useful unless it can handle the rotating reward category (I think one of the Chase freedom cards also has a similar program).

I can easily remember most of my static rewards categories, but managing the rotating categories is harder and is where a tool like this would help me best.
by npteljes | 2025-04-10 22:56:35+00:00
Indeed, in both cases, it's perfectly normal for the other person to do this! So attempts to bring attention to it will be fruitless. The "ignorant" person will see nothing out of place, and will be bothered by the to-them baseless accusation, and the "malicious" person will be threatened by the realization, so they will try to sweep it back under the rug.
by nhumrich | 2025-04-10 22:56:57+00:00
yes, it does actually need syntax support. In order for it to work, you need to preserve which parts of the string are static (hard coded) and which parts are dynamic (likely user input). Which you can only do at a syntax level. You could potentially do it by hand, using placeholders, like with `%`, but as we now live in f-string world, we have something better. The syntax highlighting and ergonomics of f-strings are so good, devs prefer it in most cases. The idea is to make the most ergonomic thing, also the safest thing. By decreasing ergonomics, you reduce the adoption of safer symantics.
by mbreese | 2025-04-10 22:58:03+00:00
The book Dreaming in Code [1] goes into great detail about how CalDAV (and WebDAV) came about through the work of the group who built the Chandler calendar program (or tried to). It’s been a while since I read it (at least 15 years), but I think it partially discusses some of the ways a protocol like this can get lost in committees during the design process. The fact that this project started around 2001 should also be informative about how long calendaring has been a problem. So, if you’d like to know about why it sucks, I’d recommend it.

It’s also a good story about the conflict between startups and open source, building products, and software development in general.

[1] http://www.dreamingincode.com/ ; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-10 22:58:57+00:00
As someone who lives in Mississippi, I'm beyond tired of the generally insulting and dismissive way this entire region is treated, usually by people who have never even been here.

The graph showing that Russia is neck and neck with Alabama for total US patents granted is absurd and stupid. It doesn't illustrate anything, it's purely there to get in a "Russia is as bad as Alabama!" graphic. They even include the following text which shows how intentional this was:

> Alabama has creditable research centers, of course—the Hunstville aerospace complex and the University of Alabama network among them. But Russia’s population was almost 30 times larger than Alabama’s in 2020.

Great, so Alabama has 30x the per capita patents in a patent system that is foreign to Russia? How many Russian patents does New York have each year? What is even the point of this graphic? Every other graphic is using the correct units (per capita, median, etc) except this one, it's just there to put Russia next to Alabama, because Alabama is "so terrible". The graphic is literally "how many foreign patents does arbitrary region A have compared to how many domestic patents these other arbitrary regions have, not normalizing for anything".

I would like to see how many rocket scientists there are per capita in in Alabama and Russia compared to other regions of the world, but that might not tell the story they want to tell.

Edit: I went to find the answer, and New Mexico and Alabama crush all statistics in terms of per-capita Aerospace Engineers. However, and this is just usual, when you go to https://cambridgedb.com/which-state-employs-the-most-people-... the answer to 'Where the most Aerospace Jobs are located" shows the wrong graphic to make California look good. The graphic was lifted from https://www.bls.gov/oes/2022/may/oes172011.htm, where the correct graphics are the first two on the page, which apparently they scrolled past to steal the one that doesn't address the question they are using it to illustrate the answer to.
by pansa2 | 2025-04-10 22:59:29+00:00
Your example is interesting - `join`, a generator expression and a ternary, and Python requires us to write all of them inside-out. It's a shame we can't write that in a more natural order, something like:

def f(template): return (for item in template: isinstance(item, str) then item else format(convert(item.value, item.conversion), item.format_spec) ).join('')
by floxy | 2025-04-10 23:00:47+00:00
Did Einstein "dream" about unifying the strong and weak forces with gravity? Anyone have a good timeline on what we knew about the weak force and when? Maybe most of the developments occurred after or just prior to his death in 1955? He was already 53 when the neutron was discovered. I kind of thought most of the strong interaction stuff wasn't really figured out until the mid 1960's.
by Spunkie | 2025-04-10 23:00:56+00:00
You may be interested in this new CF announcement, D1 read replicas and D1 sessions: https://blog.cloudflare.com/d1-read-replication-beta/

It'll be interested to see where D1s performance falls after these reaches general availability.

Also I've had really good luck with the CF discord for support, certainly better than CF tickets or the forums. I tend to only go to support with really weird/novel scenarios, so on tickets I end up banging my head against the wall with a tier 1 support staff for a couple of weeks before I have any chance of a real answer. But on the discord I often get an answer from an actual expert within a day.
by npteljes | 2025-04-10 23:01:06+00:00
The conclusion doesn't follow the premise. In fact, precisely the opposite arises from it. People who make things for money tend to be controlling about their thing, as it's the thing that makes them money. Others controlling the thing is a potential threat against the money-making capability of the thing, so they usually try to quell it. To not just let a remix be, but actively endorse it, is a notable and unusual event.
by wruza | 2025-04-10 23:02:26+00:00
They don't surpass Turing Machine level, so I'm not convinced.

The idea of ?. was there since the beginning of times. You don't have to dig deep to realize that (x ? x.y : nil) and (x ? x : y) sucks. Even gnu C had (x ?: y) for quite a while. It's just that the designers of to-become-mainstream languages all start with the same "density" and ignore the damn obvious, and then rather than fixing it, chew on the same dilemmas they all inevitably introduce. I sometimes wonder if they have written regular code at all or started inventing languages right after school.
by roenxi | 2025-04-10 23:03:20+00:00
The life expectancy at birth stats have to be reflective of the fall of the Soviet Union - to work out that males expected to live 50 years they have to be observed to die, which means the stats must be heavily influenced by events that happened in the last 50 years. It'd be a laggy indicator. While extremely interesting, I don't think there is a paradox there as much as hints that an empire collapsing because of economic incompetence might be bad for people in the imperial core.

And I've never been particularly impressed by comparisons of patents between countries either. I doubt the legal systems operate the same way and having a word that translates to "patent" doesn't imply to me that it actually means the same thing. Even if they do my impression is that patents are actually progress-retardant - places that make a habit of politely ignoring that part of IP law tend to do quite well (see: China and FOSS software are both interesting case studies).

Nonetheless this is an interesting area to focus on; Russia is an unimpressive country - it really should be in a similar league to China/the US/India and they just don't have the weight that those 3 names do.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-04-10 23:05:16+00:00
I think part of the answer is that our world is just very conducive to hidey-holes. There isn't that much surface area you need to cover in a three-dimensional space to get protection from the elements and other predation, and there's an awful lot of stuff out there (trees, dirt, etc) you could comfortably use to do it.
by fliellerjulian | 2025-04-10 23:05:43+00:00
Two weeks ago I posted "LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one" here on HN — it unexpectedly hit #1, and the feedback was incredible.

Since then: - we hit #1 on Product Hunt the next day - got featured in their daily + weekly newsletter - 1,500+ sign ups - 1,000+ waitlist sign ups from non US countries - 32,000+ website visitors - 35 recruiter signed up

The response gave us so much conviction that we decided to go all-in: we left our Big Tech jobs to work on Openspot full time.

It still feels surreal.

What we are building: In a world where AI can write the perfect resume for anyone, what actually makes you stand out is you — your personality, your voice, your story. That’s what OpenSpot helps you showcase — through video, audio, projects, and more.

If you're curious what we've learned so far — from launch tactics to handling the wave of attention to quitting Big Tech jobs to build this full-time — happy to share everything.
by soccernee | 2025-04-10 23:05:56+00:00
This looks a lot like AGNTCY: https://agntcy.org/

A quick scan of the "partners" for A2A includes many of the same groups that helped launch AGNTCY. Either they jumped ship or they're teaming up with everyone. The Google announcement does read like marketing hype, though, so it remains to be seen how functional it is.

Let the inter-agent standard wars begin.
by rconti | 2025-04-10 23:06:23+00:00
Tesla sells their own branded panels and monitoring solution, and do the installation.

Other installers might sell you LG panels and Enphase inverters and LG batteries, and then your monitoring comes from whomever, and the installation warranty provided by the installer.

So, no matter who you choose as a vendor, the parts are typically made by several different companies, and someone needs to install them and provide support.

I assume people who use Tesla as their middleman vs some other middleman do so for branding, monitoring, whatever reasons. Maybe they like the complete solar+powerwall battery+app solution. I don't know.
by bobthepanda | 2025-04-10 23:07:01+00:00
The Gulf countries at the very least employ millions of migrant workers who are generally not entitled to the same level of health and education services and, I would imagine, not counted in these statistics.

Plus if you look at the chart for patents per million tertiary students, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, are also all in the bottom third so it's not like they're that far ahead.
by npteljes | 2025-04-10 23:08:38+00:00
The internet was never all goofy shit like this. The launch date of G-G is "February 13, 2008", and we already had the creepy Facebook, deplorable shit like jailbait was in full swing, gore was not just popular, it was old news. Internet advertising was already very toxic for many years, and its surveillance capabilities were also ever-increasing. Not to mention, the Eternal September lasted for 15 years now.

My point is, it changed, yes, but "The Internet" was always shit, and you can also always find good fun, as always. You can turn off the doom, and enjoy a good never-ending scroll of a myriad of fantastic hobbies and people sharing their human experience. It takes effort, just like it did back then.
by bigiain | 2025-04-10 23:08:43+00:00
Yeah. It seems t me though that there two distinct demographics at play here. The"HN commenting crowd" and the "potential customers for a SaaS".

I understand and (mostly) stay out of the arguments between HN users (both "technical" and "non-technical" business types) about AI coding. (And I'm not particularly interested in airing those grievances again in this subthread, well mannered or not.)

But I'm intrigued that the dev mentioned upthread is intentionally hiding his use of LLM coding, instead of joining in with the AI buzzword bandwagon jumping that's going on pretty much everywhere I look in tech, from tiny to behemoth corporations.