MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geerlingguy | 2025-04-13 02:16:22+00:00
Note that this blog post (and the associated video) were a quick off-the-cuff thing while I was on the NAB show floor—I have been talking to a few of those involved in the testing at NIST, Sinclair, and Avateq (among others), and will hopefully have a lot more in a follow-up.

Right now it's in the experimental stage, with only 6 towers total deployed (only 5 were operational during NAB, and only one in Nevada... so timing, not navigation yet).

The ultimate plan—which is probably dependent on how well ATSC 3.0 rolls out (which has plenty of hurdles[1])—is to encourage broadcasters to add on the necessary timing equipment to their transmitter sites, to build a mesh network for timing.

That would allow the system to be 100% independent of GPS (time transfer could be done via dark fiber and/or ground-satellite-ground directly to some 'master' sites).

The advantages for BPS are coverage (somewhat) inside buildings, the ability to have line of sight nearly everywhere in populated areas, and resilience to jamming you can't get with GPS (a 100 kW transmitter signal 10 miles away is a lot harder to defeat than a weak GPS signal hundreds of miles away in the sky).

The demo on the show floor was also using eLoran to distribute time from a site in Nevada to the transmitter facility on Black Mountain outside Vegas, showing a way to be fully GPS-independent (though the current eLoran timing was sourced from GPS).

[1] ATSC 3.0, as it is being rolled out in the US, doesn't even add on 4K (just 1080p HDR), and tacks on 'features' like 'show replay' (where you tap a button and an app can stream a show you're watching on OTA TV through the Internet... amazing! /s), DRM (at stations' discretion, ugh), and 'personalized ad injection' (no doubt requiring you to connect your TV to the Internet so advertisers can get your precise location too...). Because ATSC 3.0 requires new hardware, consumers have to be motivated to buy new TVs or converter boxes—I don't see anything that motivates me to do so. I feel like it may be a lot like the (forever ongoing) HD Radio rollout.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-13 02:16:50+00:00
There is a "Daily Urine Splash Estimation in the US" section in their paper (I can't believe I looked this up). There equation basically makes these assumptions:

1. 56 million non-residential urinals in the US.

2. average of .22 L per "void" (a void is one pee session)

3. I think how they estimated average usage per urinal was weird and frankly wrong - they estimated each person would have between 3 and 6 "voids" per day, and each urinal would be used by between 1 and 2 people per day. Anyway, in any case that leads to an estimate of each urinal being used between 3 and 12 times per day. I think this estimate is way, way too high, because at the low end 3 X 56 million = 168 million, so on the low end they are estimating that, on average, every male in the US makes at least one public urinal pee (and, on the high end, 4 public urinal pees!)

4. Based on their data they calculate a value of ~1% (0.965%) of pee gets splashed onto the floor.

So you multiply that all together: 56 million * .22 * (3 on the low end, 12 on the high end) * .965% = about 350,000L on the low end, or 1,400,000L on the high end, so they said "on the order of a million liters".

Again, I can't believe I spent time looking this up and writing this comment.
by geye1234 | 2025-04-13 02:16:59+00:00
I said

>> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.

To which you said

> "The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time

> Revelation may not change, but the actual concrete beliefs of the Catholic Church manifestly do.

The teaching of the Catholic Church just is revelation. Individual Catholics or churchmen may believe all kinds of things, some contrary to revelation and/or each other, but that's something distinct. What has manifestly changed?
by ordersofmag | 2025-04-13 02:17:39+00:00
Do they really use 90% less water cleaning the floors of women's restrooms than men's currently? Cause that's one implication of the 'new design will save cleaning' claim. Places with public restrooms that I'm familiar with seem to get their floors mopped with identical frequency (and similar apparent rigor) regardless of whether they have urinals or not.
by GenerocUsername | 2025-04-13 02:17:40+00:00
These companies could choose to invest in the US instead and not have to worry about any of this.

Tariffs are only usable as extortion if the companies have outsourced the manufacturing that gutted our middle-class.

Externalizing variables comes with risk. This risk should be factored into planning in the future. Just because a politician in the 90s promised cheap labor through globalization, a president 30 years later can flip the script
by x3haloed | 2025-04-13 02:17:59+00:00
I’ve been wondering to myself for many years now whether the web is for humans or machines. I personally can’t think of a good reason to specifically try to gate bots when it comes to serving content. Trying to post content or trigger actions could obviously be problematic under many circumstances.

But I find that when it comes to simple serving of content, human vs. bot is not usually what you’re trying to filter or block on. As long as a given client is not abusing your systems, then why do you care if the client is a human?
by teleforce | 2025-04-13 02:18:02+00:00
>an oscilloscope that costs 3x the value of your car on a trade show floor

Typical high end microwave measurement system cost as much as a Ferrari car.

Good cable and connectors can set you back by several thousand dollars.

It's a very good business space prime for disruption (hint SDR - or software-defined radio).

Fun facts, the grand daddy of Silicon Valley start-up is HP (then Agilent, and now Keysight) selling function signal generator.
by motoxpro | 2025-04-13 02:21:45+00:00
TPU's are vertically integrated.

If I was an investor and Google said they are going to now compete with Nvidia and TSMC I would take that as a sign they the leadership has completely lost the ability to see what their core competency is. Investing 100-200+ billion into fabs just to be on an equal playing field, is not it.

Would be a poor allocation of capital. Especially since, as they build up capacity for their own jobs, they get to see the excess to customers.
by mcint | 2025-04-13 02:21:47+00:00
Hi again. I have the same issue in my browser, and locally in nvim.

NerdFonts (and the right terminal emulator) were needed, and enough, there. Playing with AstroNvim, and blocked by use of yakuake.

Hoping that I can hot load something from https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads, I'm not sure what from https://fonts.google.com/ has the needed ligatures or symbols.
by j45 | 2025-04-13 02:22:37+00:00
Appreciate the intro to the book above - two additional useful SVG books. I think O'Reilly has a few more SVG titles

SVG Essentials: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/svg-essentials-2nd/9781...

SVG Text Layout: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/svg-text-layout/9781491...

The fact there’s a book on just text layout helped me learn how much depth there is in SVG.
by cookiengineer | 2025-04-13 02:22:51+00:00
Cloudflare is too stupid to realize that carrier grade NATs exist a lot in Germany. So there's that, sharing an IP with literally 20000 people around me doesn't make me suspicious when it's them that trigger that behavior.

Your assumption is that anyone at cloudflare cares. But guess what, it's a self fulfilling prophecy of a bot being blocked, because not a single process in the UX/UI allows any real user to complain about it, and therefore all blocked humans must also be bots.

Just pointing out the flaw of bot blocking in general, because you seem to be absolutely unaware of it. Success rate of bot blocking is always 100%, and never less, because that would imply actually realizing that your tech does nothing, really.

Statistically, the ones really using bots can bypass it easily.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-04-13 02:23:22+00:00
I think the "Cornucopia" model is a great example of "blind" design that works a lot better in theory/fluid dynamics simulations than it would in actual usage. I would expect a significant percentage of users to find the "hole" design... uninviting, and as a result stand way farther back than the simulation assumed. (Exhibit 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669248)

The best way to validate such findings would likely be 3D-printing single use versions of different urinals, mounting them at the student pub for one Friday evening, and monitoring usage amounts + the amount of urine on the floor mats (compared with a regular urinal next to it to account for different inebriation levels). This also avoids identifying models that men prefer/avoid if given the choice.

(Also a great way to advertise that "90% of patrons preferred the new urinals" because you'll get that effect from the novelty value alone).
I designed a post-quantum blockchain architecture alone over 3 years
by _9u0i | 2025-04-13 02:24:42+00:00
Hi everyone,

I'm an independent researcher and founder of the : project, a blockchain architecture I've been designing alone over the past 3 years. The goal was to build something that truly prepares for the next era of blockchain security and scalability — not just another token.

[name-redacted] integrates:

- Post-Quantum Cryptography (Kyber + Dilithium hybrid) - zk-Rollup for scalability and zero-knowledge privacy - DAG-based sharding for parallelism - Modular AI layer for gas tuning and anomaly detection

The entire system is documented here on GitHub: [link-redacted]

I'm not launching a token yet, and this isn't a pump project. I’m just now starting to engage with the global developer and cryptography community — would love any feedback or criticism on the architecture, assumptions, or tradeoffs.

Thanks for reading. – [name-redacted]
by xkarinsan | 2025-04-13 02:24:46+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a software engineer based in Singapore who enjoys building tools that reduce developer friction.

I kept running into the same problem across projects: code gets written fast, but documentation is either missing, incomplete, or quickly outdated. A few months later, even my own code feels unfamiliar — especially in larger or fast-changing codebases.

So I built Code2Docs for 2 reasons:

Help developers document as they go, without interrupting flow

Make it easier to revisit, maintain, and onboard others into your codebase

This is my first open-source CLI tool — hoping it helps others as much as it’s helped me already. Would really appreciate your feedback or suggestions
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-13 02:25:29+00:00
Contractually required. Clients want assurance of continuity of business in case a meteor hits our office or an errant backhoe hits the fiber on our street. We use it for real about one day every 2-2.5yr. It's only enough space for the dozen key people we need to field urgent stuff.

Previously we had clients required us cross train a handful of key employees on their specific stuff so they could acqui-hire those people to maintain their stuff in the event our company went tits up on short notice (we actually saw them exercise that with a prior vendor). They no longer do that as we're much bigger now.
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-04-13 02:26:35+00:00
A significant portion of the bot traffic TFA is designed to handle originates from consumer/residential space. Sure, there are ASN games being played alongside reputation fraud, but it's very hard to combat. A cursory investigation of our logs showed these bots (which make ~1 request from a given residential IP) are likely in ranges that our real human users occupy as well.

Simply put you risk blocking legitimate traffic. This solution does as well but for most humans the actual risk is much lower.

As much as I'd love to not need JavaScript and to support users who run with it disabled, I've never once had a customer or end user complain about needing JavaScript enabled.

It is an incredible vocal minority who disapprove of requiring JavaScript, the majority of whom, upon encountering a site for which JavaScript is required, simply enable it. I'd speculate that, even then, only a handful ever release a defeated sigh.
by klntsky | 2025-04-13 02:27:05+00:00
> Open source is for privileged fools who don't understand reality or human nature.

I get what type of people you are refering to, but it's possible to be fully aware of the reality of human nature and nonetheless to choose open source. There are other business models, like selling consultancy services, educational materials and such, that work well alongside open source codebases.
by tradethedelta | 2025-04-13 02:27:53+00:00
Funny how easy it is to forget that guerilla terrorist actions were introduced to the region by Zionists in the 1940s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing

Just to name a notable event amongst many.

Many of the masterminds of the early Zionist insurgency later became top Israeli government officials.

Sad to think that Jews and Arabs lived ok side by side. Right wing radicals realized their destiny could only be completed with Palestinian displacement.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-04-13 02:27:54+00:00
It makes sense to have a business continuity plan for various scenarios that could render the primary office location unusable (power outage, natural disaster, police closing the area for some reason, ...).

For many businesses, WFH or "everyone goes to the Winchester, we have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over" could be valid options, but if you want to have business continuity, having at least a small office where the disaster recovery team can meet and coordinate things from makes sense.

A contract for guaranteed priority access with a coworking space would likely be the easiest option unless you need some custom infrastructure though.
by ronsor | 2025-04-13 02:28:58+00:00
I'm genuinely skeptical that those are all real LLM scrapers. For one, a lot of content is in CommonCrawl and AI companies don't want to redo all that work when they can get some WARC files from AWS.

I'm largely suspecting that these are mostly other bots pretending to be LLM scrapers. Does anyone even check if the bots' IP ranges belong to the AI companies?
by AndrewPGameDev | 2025-04-13 02:29:44+00:00
I've spent a little time in this space, and I'm not sure it's a good idea to write shaders in Rust, although it's probably better than GLSL or WGSL.

Let me start with the pros:

1. Don't have to learn 2 different languages

2. Modules, crates, and the easier ability to share code

3. Easier sharing between rust structs and shader code.

Now the cons, in comparison to Slang [1]

1. No autodiff mode 2. Strictly outputs SPIR-V, while Slang can do CPU, CUDA, Pytorch, Optix, and all the major graphics APIs

3. Less support - Slang is supported by the Khronos group, and Slang gets use at Nvidia, EA, and Valve.

4. Safety isn't very valuable, most GPU code does not use pointers (it's so rare it's considered a feature by Slang!)

5. slangc probably runs a lot faster than rustc (although I would like to see a benchmark.)

6. Worse debugging experience, slang has better interop with things like NSight Graphics, and their Shader Debugger. Slang recently got support in NSight graphics for shader profiling, for example.

7. Slang has support for reflection, and has a C++ api to directly output a JSON file that contains all the reflected aspects.This makes handling the movement between rust <-> gpu much easier. Also, the example shown on the website uses `bytemuck`, but `bytemuck` won't take into consideration the struct alignment rules[2] when using WebGPU. Instead, you have to use a crate like `encase`[3] to handle that. I'm not sure given the example on the website how it would work with WebGPU.

8. If you have pre-existing shaders in GLSL or HLSL, you can use slangc directly on them. No need to rewrite.

9. In reality, you may not have to learn 2 languages but you have to learn 2 different compute models (CPU vs GPU). This is actually a much harder issue, and AFAICT it is impossible to overcome with a different language. The problem is the programmer needs to understand how the platforms are different.

[1] https://shader-slang.org/ [2] https://webgpufundamentals.org/webgpu/lessons/resources/wgsl... WGSL struct alignment widget [3] https://github.com/teoxoy/encase
by xboxnolifes | 2025-04-13 02:31:36+00:00
> As long as a given client is not abusing your systems, then why do you care if the client is a human?

Well, that's the rub. The bots are abusing the systems. The bots are accessing the contents at rates thousands of times faster and more often than humans. The bots also have access patterns unlike your expected human audience (downloading gigabytes or terabytes of data multiples times, over and over).

And these bots aren't some being with rights. They're tools unleashed by humans. It's humans abusing the systems. These are anti-abuse measures.
by pornel | 2025-04-13 02:33:42+00:00
Lifetime tracking isn't just for safety or resource management. It also helps write correct code, especially parallel one where shared vs mutable matters.

Unit testing of shaders is usually a pain. Traditionally they're a black box without any assert() equivalent, and you can at best try to propagate NaN and generate magenta pixels on failure. Sharing Rust code lets you unit-test parts of it on the CPU.

Sharing of data structures between CPU and GPU is nice too. WGSL is superficially similar to Rust, but using plain WGSL requires maintaining bindings and struct layouts by hand, which is a chore.

For CUDA, the alternative is C++. On the upside that's the official first-class API for CUDA, but the downside is that it's C++. With Rust you don't have the legacy language cruft, nor busywork like header files or makefiles. You get working dependency management, and don't get caught in the unix vs Windows schism.
by mauvehaus | 2025-04-13 02:33:53+00:00
Fine, I'll bite. I don't write code professionally anymore, but I occasionally bang out code to help me get shit done. It is of no monetary value to me or anyone else, and I'm more than happy to vomit it onto GitHub under WTFPL for anyone to use.

Anyone dumb enough to base a commercial product on it will have gotten what they deserve, and anyone with more time than money is welcome to use it for, well, whatever the fuck they want to. Anyone with the wherewithal to make big bucks off of it is only a couple hours ahead of starting from scratch.

If you're training an LLM, it's of middling quality at best. Take it. You're no better or worse off than if it wasn't out there.

Before you decide to keep your code for yourself, think hard about how much it's really worth. If the answer is very little, what do you really lose by letting anyone use it?
by echelon | 2025-04-13 02:34:03+00:00
GPT 4o is the most impressive image model in the world, and it represents a full step function change in our capabilities. Images are over now.

Flux, fine tuning, inpainting/outpainting, and ComfyUI are effectively dead. I can show 4o a scribble and it does all the editing for me. Comfy is a total hack compared to that. It's not necessary in the new world.

Every image model and image product that has raised capital is effectively worthless / back at ground zero. They're all inferior to this.

Civitai, Leonardo, OpenArt, Invoke - this is an extinction event for them. They're all worthless products now.

I expect the same to happen to video soon.

If an open weights version of 4o comes out, then I really don't think there will be a product moat for anyone in media.
by cookiengineer | 2025-04-13 02:35:14+00:00
I am currently building a prototype of what I call the "enigma webfont" where I want to implement user sessions with custom seeds / rotations for a served and cached webfont.

The goal is to make web scraping unfeasible because of computational costs for OCR. It's a cat and mouse game right now and I want to change the odds a little. The HTML source would be effectively void without the user session, meaning an OTP like behavior could also make web pages unreadable once the assets go uncached.

This would allow to effectively create a captcha that would modify the local seed window until the user can read a specified word. "Move the slider until you can read the word Foxtrott", for example.

I sure would love to hear your input, Xe. Maybe we can combine our efforts?

My tech stack is go, though, because it was the only language where I could easily change the webfont files directly without issues.
by prologic | 2025-04-13 02:35:49+00:00
I would be interested to hear of any other solutions that guarantee to either identity or block non-Human traffic. In the "small web" and self-hosting, we typically don't really want Crawlers, and other similar software hitting our services, because often the software is either buggy in the first place (Example: Runaway Claude Bot) or you don't want your sites indexed by them in the first place.
by sadeshmukh | 2025-04-13 02:36:45+00:00
I honestly don't really understand how it is not obvious, so I question if those decisions are made in bad faith. It's literally a meme template, and that's somehow not obvious?

I'm not speaking from a legal standpoint, I'm speaking from a common sense moral one. We cannot cater to the most mentally challenged in society to make sure they cannot harm themselves.

Satire is entirely ruined once you put a /s behind it. Let me quote the Onion here -

The court’s decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the bal- loon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true. But some forms of comedy don’t work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example. Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and by doing so demonstrate the target’s illogic or absurd- ity. Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-13 02:36:47+00:00
I can't run the examples right now, but looking at the last "print(template.to_json())" line, looks like the main use case is JSON ?

On cloud infra, yes, having one or two layers of languages is a natural situation. GCP and AWS both accepting (encouraging?) JSON as a subset of YAML makes it a simpler choice when choosing an auto generating target.

You mention people wanting to author the generated files, I think in other situations tweaking the auto-generated files will be seen as riskier with potential overwriting issues, so lower readability will be seen as a positive.
by pie_flavor | 2025-04-13 02:37:32+00:00
Have you ever given an iota of thought to how your website looks when the CSS doesn't load? Contemplated arranging elements into `<table>`s to preserve some semblance of formatting, crammed some truly necessary styling into `style=`? If not, then the users that disable JS are the primary driver of thinking about how your website looks when the JS doesn't load; any two given files are about equally likely to not load, JS isn't privileged here compared to CSS (and is much harder to gracefully handle its absence).
by mgkimsal | 2025-04-13 02:37:56+00:00
it seems to be the case that it downloads some of these and can play offline. i know spotify can run offline as well, but this is a bit more convenient. doesn't quite replace spotify or apple music, but is faster to jump to. spotify app just continually gets slower for me.

EDIT: nm - I misread that I was still online. It did download some, and I'm now running offline, but I can't switch to a different style (chill, sleep, etc) once I go offline.