MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cess11 | 2025-05-06 07:24:16+00:00
Curious, then, that the golden horde was stopped by a conflict regarding succession and not heavy infantry. Sometimes it was also slowed by fortifications, but learned quite efficient siege tactics and how to build siege machinery by conquering parts of China and the nearer East.

European medieval cavalry warfare saw the development of sophisticated horse training and group tactics, which mitigates the risk that a horse would bolt at the first wound. The reason infantry with poles were the default counter against cavalry, and not bowmen, is that these weapons wound more deeply and stand a chance to overcome horse training or bleeding out the horses.

If you could flank cavalry with bows it was still a good idea to do so, largely because cavalry knights were heavily armoured and in formation, i.e. not very agile and typically locked into shock advancement. It's important to keep in mind that medieval european destrier horses were big but not tall, unlike the breeds popular among contemporary european militaries, which tend to be slim and tall.

Until mechanised warfare became dominant european warfare was highly bound by tradition and ceremony and honour, rather than efficiency. This is an important reason for the quick fascist advancements in early WWII, and the success of highly mobile mongol cavalry. Previously european militaries typically decided on whether to meet on a field and clash there, or whether one party were to retreat into a fortification and turn it into attrition warfare. Skipping past the enemy Schwerpunkt with a mobile force was more or less frowned upon, and you can see this even in modern military thinkers like Clausewitz or turn-of-the-millenium US warfare.

Deciding on where the field is, where the enemy officers are concentrated as well as their troops and entering into an honourable, decisive battle there has been the dominant mode of european and european-descendant warfare for a long, long time. It hinges on soldiers (and horses) to be trained to not bail out in the face of danger or light injury, and wouldn't be possible at all if horse mounts were frail.
by thesimon | 2025-05-06 07:24:48+00:00
> In Germany there is a discussion

The discussion concluded with it being codified into law. How it's gonna work apparently is that the image will be stored E2E-encrypted in the cloud and at the photographer you'll get a barcode that contains the URL to the image and the key to decrypt it. To upload the image into the cloud, the photographer will need to use a secure ID card to sign in.

https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/BSI/Publikat...

Was kinda interested in building software for this, but it feels like you need to pay a lot of people for fancy audits.
by poincaredisk | 2025-05-06 07:26:13+00:00
>Google received requests for user information for about 900,000 accounts

I'm responsible for a few of those btw. All for e-mails clearly related to malware operations, to help with the investigation. It's not like anyone cares what John Doe talks about with his grandma and Netflix support. Well, maybe some do, but that's probably 1% of that 900k.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-05-06 07:26:33+00:00
In the future AI will be commoditized. You'll be able to buy an inference server for your home in the form factor like a wi-fi router now. They will be cheap and there will be a huge selection of different models, both open-source and proprietary. You'll be able to download a model with a click of a button. (Or just torrent them.)
by Manfred | 2025-05-06 07:26:51+00:00
It would only be ironic if they released a tool to get rid of loading on a page.

> Critical CSS refers to the minimal set of CSS rules required to render the visible portion of a webpage (above the fold).

In reality the tool is aimed to style most of the page without loading additional assets so you don't get a jarring repaint when visiting the site.
by Lammy | 2025-05-06 07:28:01+00:00
> we started seeing a pattern we couldn’t ignore: bad actors taking our work, stripping the branding, selling it as their own, and giving nothing back. That’s not open source—that’s exploitation.

That is Open Source, and “Open Source” has always been the corpo-friendly version of “Free Software”. It's very funny to see so many people pointing out “This doesn't meet the Open Source Definition!!!!” like there's any reason to care. OSI themselves will tell you that “open source” as we know it was a product of AOLTimeWarner's desire to get people to work for them for free: https://opensource.org/history

“The [February 3rd, 1998] conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free software.’”

I want philosophically-focused software that puts the rights of human-persons above the desires of corporate-persons. Fuck “Open Source” lol
by ajuc | 2025-05-06 07:28:20+00:00
Great article. I know it's not the main subject, but I really liked this part:

> Technical Work as Emotional Regulation

Men are taught to do that in most societies. You are unhappy - don't bother talking about it (men don't cry), do sth for the society - you'll receive praise in return and your pain will go away for a while. Even if nobody'll praise you - you'll think better of yourself. Same thing that makes our fathers obsessively fix any minor inconveniences around the house instead of going to the doctor with their big health problem.

Men often laugh at women talking for hours instead of fixing the damn problem (and it is frustrating to observe). But we often do not fix THE damn problem either - we fix other unrelated problems to feel better about the one we fear thinking about.

What's more tech-specific IMO is the degree to which our egos are propped by our code. Code is the one thing many programmers had going for them when they grew up. It's what made them special. It's what was supposed to pay for all the bullying in school. It's what paid their bills and made them respected. It's very hard not to make code your main source of value.

People praise "ego-less" programming, and most programmers adhere to the rules (don't get overly defensive, take criticism, allow others to change "your" code, etc.) But that's not actually ego-less programming, it's just hidding your ego in the closet and suffering in silence.

If you procrastinate when programming - it's because you feel your code reflects on your worth as a human being. It's all ego. Changing what you do won't change that. You need to change what you think.
by ramblerman | 2025-05-06 07:28:26+00:00
> shows a lack of appreciation for context; which is what art is about

Art is not about context. I'd argue the contrary - Art that needs context is usually crap. You see it a lot in the form of "This painting is special because the painter was ...".

From a psychological perspective I agree, there is a lot of interesting stuff to unpack. But that doesn't make it good art.
by pakyr | 2025-05-06 07:29:03+00:00
Nobody in the Eastern Bloc was trading with the US very much; I was thinking more about other countries. North Korea would have been relatively unfettered within the Eastern Bloc, for example, same as most communist nations.

Also, the director was kidnapped in 1978, so before those sanctions were tightened down in the 80s and well before any Eastern Bloc states could see any writing on the wall. I'd be curious how those restrictions compared to those the US had on most other communist nations.
by srimalireddi | 2025-05-06 07:33:18+00:00
We provide MOSS as a lightweight TypeScript/WASM library that developers can drop directly into their applications. It's designed for easy frontend integration - no backend services or Docker setups required. With just a few lines of setup, you can instantly index your multi-modal data and start running real-time semantic search entirely on-device.

We love the idea of integrating MOSS with VitePress - it's exactly the kind of high-performance, client-side experience where on-device semantic search could shine. If anyone here is connected with the VitePress maintainers or community, we'd appreciate an introduction! We'd be happy to collaborate or contribute if there’s interest in exploring an integration together.
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-05-06 07:33:25+00:00
I think about this from the perpective of change management. Every defect I hope to fix entails a change, which has a certain probability of creating another irksome deficiency or incompatibility. When building complex systems I try to design them with the end state, that you describe very well, in mind.

Each time you set about to make a single change ask what is the probability (p) that this change results in another change, or track this probability empirically, then compute 1/(1-p) this will tell you how much change you should "expect" to make to realize your desired improvement. If you have n interacting modules compute 1/(1-np). This will quantify whether or not to embark on the refactor. (The values computed are the sum of the geometric series in the probability which represents the expectation value)

So this is about how we manage change in a complex system in order to align its functionality with a changing environment. I suggest that we can do so by considering the smallest, seemingly innocuous change that you could make and how that change propagates through to the end product.

In the end, a solution may be to make systems that are easy and painless to change, then you can change them often for the better without the long tail effects that drag you down.
by Baeocystin | 2025-05-06 07:35:40+00:00
I still have vivid memories of getting the 'reduced cost' meal ticket for school lunch. They made all of us with the reduced tickets stand in line and wait for the other kids to get their food first, where all the other kids had to walk past and stare at us, and once everyone else was served, they'd put the food away that was given to the other kids, then hand out shitty plastic-wrapped sandwiches that were half the size of the barely-adequate meals the 'full' sized lunches got.

It was all on purpose, too, to make us ashamed for not paying the full amount.

The adults that chose this path were fucking evil ghouls, the lot of them. Of all the things I want my tax money to go to, ensuring that no one (and especially growing children) need to feel hunger pangs while trying to learn is close to top of the list.
by boneitis | 2025-05-06 07:36:19+00:00
I feel it on those concerns, though after all, I think the point of some people's stances is that everybody should be able to take free (and dignified) student lunches for granted, as sensible as the fish-vs-how-to-fish adage is in general.

I think the concern about entitlement better applies when looking out for vultures taking advantage of these campaigners' goodwill by trying to wedge themselves into the middle of any cashflow for as-optimizably-marginal-as-possible contribution to those pipelines. Of course, I'm thinking of this more in some context of if there was a sort of centralized campaign to scale up efforts, say, statewide or nationwide (pardon my U.S-centric perspective), to solicit donations to pay off a bunch of schools' lunch debts in a region.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-05-06 07:37:43+00:00
> Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity

I disagree at least on this one. I don't see any scenario where superintelligence comes into existence, but is for some reason limited to a mediocrity that puts it in contention with humans. That equilibrium is very narrow, and there's no good reason to believe machine-intelligence would settle there. It's a vanishingly low chance event. It considerably changes the later 1-in-n part of your comment.
by voidspark | 2025-05-06 07:37:50+00:00
> There's so much to do, explore and learn.

Hobbies, hanging out with friends, reading, etc. That's basically it.

Probably no international travel.

It will be like a simple retirement on a low income, because in a socialist system the resources must be rationed.

This will drive a lot of young ambitious people to insanity. Nothing meaningful for them to achieve. No purpose. Drug use, debauchery, depression, violence, degeneracy, gangs.

It will be a true idiocracy. No Darwinian selection pressures, unless the system enforces eugenics and population control.
by 1659447091 | 2025-05-06 07:37:55+00:00
What are you talking about? Who said anything about vision for jobs?

You and I both want an employed middle class. Why are you okay with "them" coming for the middle class as long as it Government jobs? These magic employment factories are not going to spring up overnight. So in the mean time why not care about the families and lives being rocked for having the audacity to get what was a stable job that could provide security for their middle class family with the added benefit for those that value their work in civil service over joining the Ferengi?

> And who will pay for these... The "rich"?

Me for one (Im not rich), I recognize what this county provides and the opportunities available. Why be against helping that which helped you? If some people dont want to that, okay, renounce citizenship, leave the country. They can be free of a government taxing the people who benefited the most from the previous generations taxes that paid for the collective government effort providing the conditions the newly wealthy, and the much wealthier now benefited from. Musk immigrated to this country because he wasn't going to have the same opportunity to turn the money he had into the fortune it is by staying in South Africa. Yet instead of using the opportunity his American created money bought him and carefully pruning the weary looking government tree so it could grow back stronger and healthier, he took a chainsaw to it. There's more money to be made at his stage of wealth with an even weaker government; that path has greater profit and simultaneously, the chance to pull up the ladder he climbed on the backs of the middle class. So should the "rich" pay their dues? Yes, just as I do and for the same reason. Otherwise, it's the "rich" who are the freeloaders.

Is that your vision for middle class jobs? Wait til the "rich" buys whats left of the country's economy at discount, then graciously allow the masses to work in their floodlight factory for scraps 6 days a week in a new private owned unregulated job economy with no oversight for worker protections?
by chubot | 2025-05-06 07:38:21+00:00
Ha yeah, when people talk about "smartphone addiction", I don't relate

I can relate to INTERNET addiction, but not phone addiction

Because I always found that phone UI is a frustrating bottleneck. The rate of information flow is not very high, with the small screens and the limited keyboards (although I can type long chats just fine on phones now)

I was a slightly late adopter of smartphones, and I also don't use social media apps. I use them on the web on my desktop, not on my phone

---

Though a caveat is that HN does look reasonable on a phone's web browser, and it loads quickly, so it's an exception!
by rienbdj | 2025-05-06 07:38:28+00:00
In the specific case of free school meals:

- economies of scale in feeding an entire school

- recipients of the benefit (children) and delivery mechanism (kitchens) are already at the right place and time

- can guarantee money is spent on food rather than (for example) a parents gambling addiction

- reduces stigma for poor children to have universality

- can (in theory) deliver better food using school cooking facilities

- saves time even for parents who can afford to feed children

- teaching a hungry child is an uphill battle
by tstrimple | 2025-05-06 07:38:49+00:00
Oh sure. Context windows have been less useful for me on programming tasks than other things. When working iteratively against a CSV file for instance, it can be very useful. I’ve used something very similar to the following before:

“Okay, now add another column which is the price of the VM based on current Azure costs and the CPU and Memory requirements listed.”

“This seems to only use a few Azure VM SKU. Use the full list.”

“Can you remove the burstable SKU?”

Though I will say simple error fixes with context windows with programming issues are resolved fine. On more than one occasion when I copy and paste an incorrect solution. Providing the LLM with the error is enough to fix the problem. But if it goes beyond that, it’s best to abandon the context.
by LandR | 2025-05-06 07:39:05+00:00
Even if you want to look at it from a purely selfish point of view... if you want to live in a good, prosperous society, this starts with childrens education. A well fed, happy, well slept child is an ideal here to get them the best education they can.

Not wanting each child to get the best possible start in life makes absolutely no sense to me.

But yes, no child should go hungry at school.
by MartijnHols | 2025-05-06 07:39:18+00:00
One thing to consider is that if you were to succeed in placing hidden text/image on an ID card, it may fail manual forgery checks at airports and police stations. One of the many ways IDs are checked is with different types of lighting[1]. This might have made this stand out as an artifact, which could result in an officer doubting its legitimacy.

[1] https://www.airport-suppliers.com/supplier-press-release/the...
Show HN: LogWhisperer – Local AI-powered system log summarizer (no API keys)
by binary-knight | 2025-05-06 07:41:19+00:00
I've been working on an open-source tool called LogWhisperer. It's a CLI-based log summarizer that uses a local LLM (via Ollama) to interpret and summarize Linux system logs like journalctl or /var/log/syslog — with zero internet or OpenAI API dependency.

It's useful for:

Quickly triaging large volumes of logs

Identifying systemd failures or boot issues

Getting human-readable summaries from raw log lines

Under the hood, it uses mistral or phi via Ollama, and supports:

File or journalctl sources

CLI flags for easy customization (--entries, --model, etc.)

Markdown output reports

Spinner/progress UX to avoid CLI "hang" confusion

* Works entirely offline * Lightweight, installable with a one-liner * No cloud calls or token dependencies

GitHub: https://github.com/binary-knight/logwhisperer Feedback, issues, or feature ideas welcome!
by jajko | 2025-05-06 07:42:26+00:00
Why the need to attack and lie? That's a poor behavior and a typical propaganda I've often seen from webs around topics like nanochips in vaccines or pro-putin ones (or simply joint work of gru and fsb massive electronic propaganda departments).

Not going to address all that bullshit since that would be a long post, just a random one - Hitler had very detailed plans on invasion of Switzerland and treating it similarly to Austria, simply deprioritized it. Just look at the map, everything around was firmly in Axis, they were not going anywhere, he could just starve them.

The cost of invasion for him would be massive for next to 0 gains - tons of hard-to-conquer mountains, fiercely defensive population that hates to be subjugated, and as Machiavelli said 'most free and most armed nation in the world".

They were not saint, simply neutral, it doesn't seem you understand the concept quite a bit.

Also heard about how they were accepting refugees and jews to the point of clearly facing famine (since they had nowhere to go), then famous 'Das Boot ist voll' happened, and they kept bringing them in regardless? Show me any nation in modern history when facing such existential threat with no hope that would behave so morally. Good contrast ie with current US admin treatment of almost all foreigners. Also helped secretly allies ie set up and access command post in Campione d'Italia - technically an Italian territory but surrounded by Switzerland. And so on...
by imhoguy | 2025-05-06 07:42:48+00:00
Exactly open-source doesn't need scale in terms of user base. You can easily infer with hundreds B parameter models on pay as you go infa for a few dolars, or just build commodity rig for a few thousand. That is affordable for SMEs or even devoted hobbysts. The most important part about opensource is democratization of LLM access.
by cibomahto | 2025-05-06 07:45:30+00:00
Author here- That is a fun workflow! One of the things we've been prototyping is a web frontend powered by circuitpainter, where you can use a mouse or pen to draw freehand traces that can be rendered as 'real' KiCad traces so that DRC can work. However, since we also have the path information, it's possible to do things such as automatically place components along the paths, which would be extremely tedious to do by hand or with existing CAD tools.

CircuitPainter came out of an effort to automate the production of large numbers of very slightly different LED boards for sculptural work, where it was worth the effort to write code to generate the boards. I used KiCad as the backend specifically so that we could use our known footprints/solderpaste masks and get a DRC pass.
by xenodium | 2025-05-06 07:45:34+00:00
https://support.apple.com/en-us/118223 refunds are always an option on the App Store in case apps don't work out.

I'm also happy to add you to the TestFlight group if you'd like to take it for a spin before you make your decision.

Get in touch: journelly . invite at xenodium.com
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-06 07:46:18+00:00
Does it? You google a query, get results, compare a few alternative results. You ask a prompt and what? Compare outputs to each other? Or just defer back to googling for alternative sources.

Firstly, these prompts tend to be shockingly close in behavior. Secondly, Google tends to rank reputable or self curated sites which have some accountability. It can be wrong but you know thr big news sites tend to at least defer to interviews to back up facts. Wikipedia has an overly strict process to prevent blatant, source less information.

There's room for error, but there's at least more accountability compared to what an LLM is going through.

> Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.

Lastly, prompts are still treated as black boxes, which is a whole other issue. For the above reasons I still would simply defer to human curated resources. That's what LLMs are doing anyway without transparency.

People want to give up transparency for speed? It seems completely counter to hacker culture.
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-06 07:46:57+00:00
> A government can apply tariffs to any exchange it chooses

My point is that it can apply taxes equivalent to tariffs (well, like you said, only Congress can), but since it's not going to be defined by the same law or be regulated by the same international conventions and isn't going to be collected by the same administration nor from the same people (the tax will be raised on the retailer directly, unlike tariffs), I think it's fair not to call that “tariffs” since it's really going to be a very different type of tax.
by kqr | 2025-05-06 07:47:09+00:00
Hm. When I tried this on my site it retained a debugging element that is decidedly not required, but adds a lot of bytes to the CSS:

body::after{display:none;content:"";background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' width='1' height='29'><rect style='fill: rgb(196,196,196);' width='1' height='0.25px' x='0' y='28'/></svg>");position:absolute;top:23px;left:0px;z-index:9998;opacity:1;width:1425px;height:3693px;background-size:auto 1.414rem;background-position-y:0.6rem}

(It lets me uncheck the "display: none" rule in the developer tools to get a baseline grid overlaid on the site to make sure things line up. They don't anymore because I forgot I had that in there until I saw it now!)