MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kevlened | 2025-05-14 19:19:37+00:00
I wonder if evolvable hardware [0] is the next step.

In 1996, they optimized an FPGA using a genetic algorithm. It evolved gates disconnected from the circuit, but were required.

The circuit exploited the minuscule magnetic fields from the disconnected gates rather than the logical connections.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvable_hardware
by seltzered_ | 2025-05-14 19:19:53+00:00
Thanks for adding some information on this, I had almost forgot about these devices.

So would a cell booster / network extender using eNodeBS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENodeB ) actually help in the scenario in the original article?

Or would it end up as the same issue with wifi calling, where "messages from 5 digit shortcodes often aren't supported over wifi calling" ?
by dahart | 2025-05-14 19:19:59+00:00
They didn’t call that “HDR” at the time, and it wasn’t based on the idea of recording radiance or other absolute physical units.

I’m certain physicists had high range digital cameras before Cineon, and they were working in absolute physical metrics. That would be a stronger example.

You bring up an important point that is completely lost in the HDR discussion: this is about color resolution at least as much as it’s about range, if not moreso. I can use 10 bits for a [0..1] range just as easily as I can use 4 bits to represent quantized values from 0 to 10^9. Talking about the range of a scene captured is leaving out most of the story, and all of the important parts. We’ve had outdoor photography, high quality films, and the ability to control exposure for a long time, and that doesn’t explain what “HDR” is.
by mightysashiman | 2025-05-14 19:20:02+00:00
I have a question: how can I print HDR? Is there any HDR printer + paper + display lighting setup?

My hypothesis are the following:

- Increase display lighting to increase peak white point + use a black ink able to absorb more light (can Vantablack-style pigments be made into ink?) => increase dynamic range of a printable picture

- Alternatively, have the display lighting include visible light + invisible UV light, and have the printed picture include an invisible layer of UV ink that shines white : the pattern printed in invisible UV-ink would be the "gain map" to increase the peak brightness past incident visible light into HDR range.

What do you folks think?
by LinAGKar | 2025-05-14 19:21:27+00:00
>HDR can exceed that

It's not just the HDR content that gets brighter, but SDR content too. When I test it in Chrome on Android, if an HDR image shows up on screen the phone start overriding the brightness slider completely and making everything brighter, including the phone's system UI.

>The only thing HDR actually does is allow for brighter colors vs. SDR.

Not just brighter, but also darker, so it can preserve detail in dark areas rather than crushing them.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-14 19:21:33+00:00
JFC, they're 12 or whatever. Just make them finish out the year doing paper work with no chromebook (or some other long term inconvenience that teaches them that if you break things they go away and it sucks not having them) and call it good.

I'm far more worried about kids thinking it's ok to use the jackboot to solve petty problems that arise out of dumb trends or thinking that it's ok for government institutions to threaten people with unreasonable consequences for things.
by aseg | 2025-05-14 19:21:43+00:00
Finally—something directly relevant to my research (https://trishullab.github.io/lasr-web/). Below are my take‑aways from the blog post, plus a little “reading between the lines.”

- One lesson DeepMind drew from AlphaCode, AlphaTensor, and AlphaChip is that large‑scale pre‑training, combined with carefully chosen inductive biases, enables models to solve specialized problems at—or above—human performance.

- These systems still require curated datasets and experts who can hand‑design task‑specific pipelines.

- Conceptually, this work is an improved version of FunSearch (https://github.com/google-deepmind/funsearch/).

- In broad terms, FunSearch (and AlphaEvolve) follow three core design principles:

- Off‑the‑shelf LLMs can both generate code and recall domain knowledge. The “knowledge retrieval” stage may hallucinate, but—because the knowledge is expressed as code—we can execute it and validate the result against a custom evaluation function. - Gradient descent is not an option for discrete code; a zeroth‑order optimizer—specifically evolutionary search—is required. - During evolution we bias toward (1) _succinct_ programs and (2) _novel_ programs. Succinctness is approximated by program length; novelty is encouraged via a MAP‑Elites–style “novelty bias,” yielding a three‑dimensional Pareto frontier whose axes are _performance, simplicity,_ and _novelty_ (see e.g. OE‑Dreamer: (https://claireaoi.github.io/OE-Dreamer/).

Pros

- Any general‑purpose foundation model can be coupled with evolutionary search.

- A domain expert merely supplies a Python evaluation function (with a docstring explaining domain‑specific details). Most scientists I've talked with - astronomers, seismologists, neuroscientists, etc. - already maintain such evaluation functions for their own code.

- The output is an interpretable program; even if it overfits or ignores a corner case, it often provides valuable insight into the regimes where it succeeds.

Cons

- Evolutionary search is compute‑heavy and LLM calls are slow unless heavily optimized. In my projects we need ≈ 60 k LLM calls per iteration to support a reasonable number of islands and populations. In equation discovery we offset cost by making ~99 % of mutations purely random; every extra 1 % of LLM‑generated mutations yields roughly a 10 % increase in high‑performing programs across the population.

- Evaluation functions typically undergo many refinement cycles; without careful curation the search may converge to a useless program that exploits loopholes in the metric.

Additional heuristics make the search practical. If your evaluator is slow, overlap it with LLM calls. To foster diversity, try dissimilar training: run models trained on different data subsets and let them compete. Interestingly, a smaller model (e.g., Llama-3 8 B) often outperforms a larger one (Llama‑3 70 B) simply because it emits shorter programs.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-05-14 19:21:47+00:00
In France, you get a couple hundred euros each month per child and I am there thinking, so what, that will barely cover the cost of the diapers.

The government is not going to give you more money to rent a bigger place or buy a bigger house so then you need to factor in those expenses as well not to mention the partial and sometime total loss of income of 1 adult for the first 2/3 years of the life of the child.

The math just doesnt work.
by surfaceofthesun | 2025-05-14 19:22:10+00:00
It's likely correct that mass transit is directly subsidized at a greater percentage than any specific aspect of private car ownership. However, there are significant indirect subsidies due to the centrality of private cars that not only dwarf transit subsidies, but simultaneously make transit less economical.

A simple example is minimum requirements for parking. Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up. This means less people in catchment areas for different types of transit.
by Juliate | 2025-05-14 19:22:26+00:00
I am afraid you (and still to many others) don't grasp the kinetics and the scale of the phenomenon...

We're on a trajectory that is not solvable before several centuries at least, probably millennia. It spans more generations that we've had since the fall of the Roman Empire. We're only 2-to-3 generations away from 2100/+4°C.

Our kids can merely adapt to, with immensely reduced liveable and cultivable surface area on the planet.

The whole culture they'll have to invent/live in to find a "solution" barely exists today, if at all.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-05-14 19:22:49+00:00
This Chromebook "challenge" is little more than the grand finale of a decade-long tech experiment gone rogue:

They touted screens as "interactive learning," yet they’ve become glorified busywork dispensers, so bored kids weaponize them. They claimed "low-tech stunts" will replace digital pranks, but vandalism only shifts medium, not motivation. They argued it's "bad pedagogy," not devices, but bad pedagogy thrives the moment you hand out a laptop and hit "play." They promised sandboxed hardware and engagement, yet every "pilot program" fizzles once the bill arrives.

And you know what? Good. Let's admit the failure. Why rehash the same failed experiment over and over again?

Digital devices have no rightful place in the classroom. They cost a fortune, erode attention, and now literally catch fire. If the cure for social media-driven stunts is a smoking Chromebook, maybe it's time to rip the plug for good.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-14 19:22:51+00:00
Apple has stated very publicly and in multiple places/ways that Consumer Passkeys will never include attestation data on Apple hardware. That's not "the spec", but it is still currently a big enough moat to protect Consumer usage of passkeys away from Corporate needs, given most Consumer apps/websites probably want iOS/iPadOS/macOS (in decreasing interest) users today.
by lxgr | 2025-05-14 19:22:53+00:00
> but for login TOTP is better then anything else. i can put it on arduino with small oled board and have it in safe/vault offline. and there is no way for attacker to MITM

There totally is! How do you know you're entering the TOTP on a legitimate website?

WebAuthN prevents that, both by not letting you use a given key on the wrong website, and by including the origin in the signature generated using the key which the relying party can then check for plausibility.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-05-14 19:23:00+00:00
But you can't add 2 void pointers and seamlessly get integer addition if they point at integers or concatenation if they point at strings.

(You could build your own custom data types that have type metadata in a shared header and an addition function that uses it, but then you're building your own custom language on top which isn't really the same thing.)

So yes C really does restrict you in some ways that Javascript doesn't.
by bzmrgonz | 2025-05-14 19:23:05+00:00
How you gonna leave out the good parts like circa<year> so we can gauge the tech available then? Also, what about the tools you used to sync/backup to owner's house? My personal query, why did you move to freebsd? was it a different application/use? This is an awesome story, our modern approach would be to install nextcloud/owncloud with collaboration and rsync/syncthing to an offsite NAS (owner's house). As for your decision, I would have agreed to a directorship and hired a local MSP to do things the way I wanted. This would have allowed you to have your cake and eat it too. A lot of times, in these situations, all you need is trusted eyes and ears from outside the corrupted fold. This principle is used in the military and diplomatic core, there is a staffing structure, and then there is an XO, who is hired and controlled from HQ. This XO answers to HQ, not the local structure.
by thih9 | 2025-05-14 19:23:12+00:00
What does “secondary” stand for here in the error message?

> You have exceeded a secondary rate limit.

Edit and self-answer:

> In addition to primary rate limits, GitHub enforces secondary rate limits

(…)

> These secondary rate limits are subject to change without notice. You may also encounter a secondary rate limit for undisclosed reasons.

https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limi...
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-14 19:24:20+00:00
I wonder if this could put a real dent in rush hour?

(Letting my imagination wander a bit)

If everyone on the highway did this...

Could Uber be more convenient than public tranit?

Would they be able to regularly group passengers so that people are picked up and dropped off nearby?

Could Uber be cheaper than parking garages in large cities?

Could this put such a large dent in the number of cars on the road that traffic moves faster?
by dylan604 | 2025-05-14 19:24:57+00:00
I haven't thought about this for quite some time, but I remember the local mass transit, DART, offered shuttle vans if people got together and showed enough interest in people meeting in one spot and being dropped off in one spot. DART provided the driver and van, and the users just paid whatever the fare. This allowed DART to offer service and acted as a trial run on if a full bus route was needed.

Seems like something that whatever transit authority can use as well. Uber just has a better PR department with much larger budgets than metro agencies, so to younger people this probably seems like an original idea.???
by altairprime | 2025-05-14 19:25:03+00:00
The digital process of tonemapping, aka. 'what Apple calls Smart HDR processing of SDR photos to increase perceptual dynamic range', can be applied to images of any number of channels of any bit depth — though, if you want to tonemap a HyperCard dithered black-and-white image, you'll probably have to decompile the dithering as part of creating the gradient map. Neither RGB nor 8-bit are necessary to make tonemapping a valuable step in image processing.
by mattste | 2025-05-14 19:25:13+00:00
This is the beauty of Elixir's macros. For a lot of libraries, they are usually just calls to an underlying function with the same name. Because of Elixir's functional style and immutability, it makes it much easier to read through the magic compared to macros in other languages.

That being said, I don't have any hands-on experience with Ash so I can't speak for its approach to macros. I do think Zach's work in the community with Ash/Igniter is something to be applauded for. I'm currently working in a Python codebase that lacks conventions and would kill for something like Ash that provides consistent design patterns.
by kazinator | 2025-05-14 19:25:18+00:00
> Why would a stack frame want to move ownership to its callee

Happens all the time in modern programming:

callee(foo_string + "abc")

Argument expression foo_string + "abc" constructs a new string. That is not captured in any variable here; it is passed to the caller. Only the caller knows about this.

This situation can expose bugs in a run-time's GC system. If callee is something written in a low level language that is resposible for indicating "nailed" objects to the garbage collector, and it forgets to nail the argument object, GC can prematurely collect it because nothing else in the image knows about that object: only the callee. The bug won't surface in situations like callee(foo_string) where the caller still has a reference to foo_string (at least if that variable is live: has a next use).
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-05-14 19:25:42+00:00
Well, there's a reason people build homes and apartments to live in, and a reason that societies with homes and apartments are healthier than societies that sleep in tents and shacks. Dirt is... dirty.

And yes, the point being advanced in the thread is that compared to camping - which is generally healthy and not something to freak out about! - homes are going to be cleaner, occasional mold issues aside. So it's silly to freak out over the infinitesimally-slight chances of little Timmy and Sally getting dust-mold-smoke cancer-AIDS from a less-than-perfectly-sterile room.
by quintes | 2025-05-14 19:26:13+00:00
You have to break it up. Chunks milestones and evaluation.

That is Chunk up the work over some periods

Milestones tell you when you want what. This helps with expectation setting and managing anxiousness.

Evaluation is seeing how you are going and what change needs to be made.

When I do my own projects it’s feature based one at a time but knowing what the full thing is in terms of vision. It doesn’t always go to plan.

For teams, agile design, agile thinking, delivery and monitoring. It doesn’t always go to plan.

When it didn’t go to plan the question is how do I respond to it. That’s where growth lies
by exiguus | 2025-05-14 19:26:23+00:00
> In Europe this is called public transportation

Just kidding! This comment reminds me of how Uber's leadership underwent a complete overhaul due to their questionable business practices. It seems like not much has changed, and they're still trying to exploit the public for their own profit.

To learn from them, i can highly recommand: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321080908_A_REVIEW_...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 19:26:28+00:00
> very little that’s unique about NYC’s ability to build a great public transit system

Have you been to New York?

We’re uniquely dense, rich and collectivist. We have a long and proud history of public transit and a culture that doesn’t put social cachet on vehicle ownership. That’s entirely different from the rest of America.

> if somehow NYC could do it, what’s everyone else’s reasoning for not?

New York’s government is larger, and has a larger remit, than many countries. More practically: they haven’t.

> obscene amount of lobbying from your local car dealer baron, if you’re in Nashville (for example)

This isn’t being launched in Nashville.
by jimbokun | 2025-05-14 19:26:38+00:00
> Like Le Guin, he believes that we must ‘fundamentally think about how we rebuild structures’, because those we are living under ‘are literally killing us … whether that be patriarchy or racism or the climate catastrophe.’

This is why the right is surging around much of the world.

A critique of lazy story telling somehow ends up declaring lazy story telling a genocidal act that is “literally killing us.”

Or maybe it’s just a bunch of movies pandering to an audience that wants to see more of the same and if you want to see something more innovative seek it out or make it yourself.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-14 19:27:30+00:00
For one thing a lot of tools like Excel do unwanted data transformations, such as importing from a CSV they try to guess whether text is meant to be a string or a number and sometimes guess wrong. You can spend a lot of time disabling this behavior or preventing it or fixing it up afterwards, but frequently bad data just plain corrupts the analysis or target system.

You can't really trust the time handling functions on any platform which is some of the reason why languages like Python, and Java, might have two or three libraries for working with dates and times in the standard library because people realized the old one was unfixable. Plenty of Javascript date handling libraries have told people "look, this is obsolete, it's time to move on" not just because that's the Javascript way, but because the libraries really were error prone.

In a real programming language it's straightforward to fix those problems, in a fake programming language it is difficult or impossible.

If you've got a strange index structure in the source or destination data, for instance, many tools fall down. For instance if you want to convert nested set trees

https://blog.uniauth.com/nested-set-model

to something more normal like an adjacency list (or vice versa) a lot of simple tools are going to fall down.
by frereubu | 2025-05-14 19:27:34+00:00
That's pretty dismissive for what seemed to be a thoughtful article. Do you think the person who wrote it somehow imagined the decrease in pain? Just because you sorted your out in that way doesn't mean other people can't manage it in different ways - as the doctor said, they don't really know what it is, so it could have a whole cluster of different causes that respond to different kinds of treatment.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-05-14 19:27:40+00:00
Is it possible that many people simply fail to acknowledge that for one, not everyone wants to be a parent and two, if given the choice between a new car or a vacation in the Bahamas every few years and having kids, people will most likely choose the car and/or the holiday?

It is also possible that many young women have seen what the previous generation lived through with "stay at home" spouses and decided to opt out? Who could blame them really?
by dlisboa | 2025-05-14 19:27:52+00:00
> India and Thailand and most of Latin America have great privately operated local transport, from city busses to pickup trucks to regular route taxis, all self-organizing without needing a centralized database to manage them.

Great? I'm from Brazil, it's not great. They supplied a demand where the state failed to do so but the service was far from acceptable. In large cities these private transportations existed in a legal gray area and had to be pried away from organized crime at great cost. In the day-to-day they all physically fought each other for passengers, went over the speed limit to reach them before city buses and made up their own routes.

It was closer to anarchy than "great". Thankfully they're much rarer or non-existant now and the bus infrastructure in most cities is saner than in the 90s.
Show HN: EVMAuth
by sscovil | 2025-05-14 19:29:50+00:00
EVMAuth is an open protocol to enable secure authorization in a simple, standard way for Web3 apps, APIs, and AI agents.

More specifically, EVMAuth is a smart contract written in Solidity that can be deployed to any EVM (e.g. Ethereum, Radius, Base) that extends the ERC-1155 token standard, enabling developers to restrict and sell access to web resources, content, and applications based on token ownership.

EVMAuth has a ton of practical applications, such as:

• access control • memberships • subscriptions • API credits for metered usage • gamification (achievements, badges, etc.) • pay-per-view media content • event tickets • trial access • gaming assets • software licensing • in-app purchases • certifications • retail rewards • crowd-funding campaign rewards • collectible assets

...and many more.

Similar to the x402 protocol recently launched by Coinbase (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43908129), EVMAuth can and should be used in conjunction with the long dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" response status code.

In addition to the core Solidity contract code, there is also an EVMAuth TypeScript SDK available (https://github.com/evmauth/evmauth-ts), with a working code example using Express v5 and HTTP 402 (https://github.com/evmauth/evmauth-ts/tree/main/examples/exp...)

Feedback and contributions are welcome and encouraged!
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-05-14 19:30:02+00:00
One guy was caught doing that to the tune of $100 million to Facebook and Google. If he had stopped at $1 million or something he probably would have got away with it. I suspect others have.

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...
by lxgr | 2025-05-14 19:30:42+00:00
> Financial directive PSD2[1] allows to use an SMS as a 2FA only because there is an KYC already done for that number (anon SIM are no longer allowed in the EU)

I don't think that's true. Is there even any way for banks to ask your mobile operator for your identity (or confirm it), in the way that US banks seem to be able to? That seems like it would run afoul EU privacy regulations.

And regarding the EU "anonymous SIM" regulation: That one ironically only seems to apply to prepaid cards. To my surprise, I was just able to register a postpaid line using no identity verification whatsoever a few days ago...

> This code is just a proxy for probing "something you have", with the "something" being the phone number which, again, is linked to a physical person/company.

The "thing you have" is actually the SIM card. That's supposedly why email OTP does not count – an account on some server is not, or at least not cleanly, "something you have". (A pretty poor decision, IMO, but that's a different story.)

> I have commented this several times, but as of today, SMS is the only 2FA method that can be easily deployed at scale (all demographics, all locations, compatible with all mobile devices)

All demographics except for people that change phone numbers frequently. All locations except those that don't have cell signal (or for plans without roaming). All mobile devices except those without a SIM card slot. An authentication solution for absolutely everyone! /s