MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by prof-dr-ir | 2025-05-05 13:44:02+00:00
> The next day the first thing I did was walk to the nearest ATM and withdraw several hundred euros, and I bought a bunch of water.

That is a very good idea for everyone. Putting together an emergency supplies kit is what various European governments, and now also the European Commission, are beginning to officially recommend:

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/26/brussels-ask-e...

> What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last?

I think some governments suggest that people buy a battery-powered or hand crank radio to address exactly this issue.
Show HN: Open-source AI web parser lib & TUI
by benzguo | 2025-05-05 13:44:03+00:00
Hey HN! I'm open-sourcing a little weekend side project. It's a terminal UI that generates parsers for webpages using AI, and a library that runs these parsers while you browse (it connects to Chrome over CDP). You can parse Twitter, LinkedIn, and HN posts and they get saved to a DuckDB database, so you can query them later. Contributions welcome!

I wrote a bit more about it here: https://0thernet.substack.com/p/memo-2-selectron
by dsr_ | 2025-05-05 13:44:07+00:00
If you throw in the effects on school attendance and participation, yes.

Massachusetts extended the free school lunch (and breakfast) program to all students in 2023. Here's the report on 2024:

https://www.mass.gov/doc/universal-free-school-mealsfinal070...

It's nominally 20 pages but the first five are boilerplate and ToC and the last ten are a listing of how much each school district received, so you could reasonably read all the actual report.
by ben_w | 2025-05-05 13:44:11+00:00
It's not so much that this specific person didn't use smart pointers, it's that they had never even heard of them, and wasn't interested either.

"C with classes" is probably a good description, given what I saw from that one person — they didn't understand sub-typing either, and only had a cargo-cult understanding of access specifiers (revealed when the rest of us asked them why they'd duplicated a class file rather than subtyping).
by cess11 | 2025-05-05 13:44:54+00:00
It's great. I'm not a fan of immaterial rights but I think Hagens having a patent on his technique is a good thing, since even he hasn't been able to steer clear of accusations of unethically sourced cadavers.

Seems like the books based on the exhibition are still available through Bezos' webshop and second hand, the one I've got is quite nice, really good colour print.

They didn't stop at human cadavers, they've also done at least one horse and at some point a giraffe, apparently a massive undertaking. His and his teams' work is in a really interesting space, somewhere between science, ethics and art.
by ebiester | 2025-05-05 13:44:55+00:00
They didn't have a monopoly on information anytime in the 20th century. If you wanted to have all the knowledge, it could be expensive to acquire a personal library, but nothing was stopping you from acquiring the same textbooks. Heck, until the information age it was pretty easy to forge a credential.

But it wasn't about credentials even. It was about inculcating a culture. You knew that someone had the knowledge and ability to reach university, and you knew that they had a shared common culture with you. Shared common culture and norms increases trust. Credentials mattered for doctors, but universities, in the end, were selling something far more intangible: culture.
by nunez | 2025-05-05 13:45:22+00:00
Shortcuts is the most useful and frustrating app on my phone.

I have tons of Shortcuts. They're excellent when they work. It's extremely frustrating when they don't.

Maybe your Shortcut uses an action that is no longer available in the version of iOS you updated to (and wasn't marked as deprecated in the changelog). Maybe the app that the action relies on send an unusual response, which Shortcuts won't tell you because it's way of error handling is "leave the user more confused than they started with". Maybe Shortcuts decided to just keep itself running in the background forever for no reason (which is even more frustrating given that apps like Music will get killed by the memory manager _WHILE THEY'RE PLAYING MUSIC_, something that should never happen on the latest iPhone).

Despite it's shortcomings, it's still better and a hell of a lot easier to use than Tasker, it's third-party equivalent on Android (because it, surprisingly, doesn't have an automation tool built-in).
by Kon-Peki | 2025-05-05 13:45:49+00:00
> they tried to get the guy to take a foreman gig so they could skimp on his payout.

That’s federal law; nothing to do with the company or New Orleans.

Glossing over a lot of nuance, but if you can offer the person what amounts to a lifetime (or at least long-term???) job at the same or better pay that they can reasonably do with their new disability, there is no standing for a workers comp claim.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-05 13:46:11+00:00
You mean the northwest like Galicia? The northeast where I live still gets plenty hot. We don't have major beach resorts like Lloret and Salou for no reason :)

Though I guess this might not qualify as "Spain" depending on who you ask - if I ask my neighbours if they are living in Spain they certainly will say NO :P Hot topic alert :)
by dataflow | 2025-05-05 13:46:20+00:00
I'm confused about the mechanics of the process here. Could someone explain how paying off the lunch debt translates to hot meals? I'm confused because the fact that a continuous debt -- however the amount -- means your expenses exceed your revenue. So even if you pay it off... doesn't that mean when doors open tomorrow, there'll be new debt, and thus the problem will still recur? Or is the idea that the debt was decreasing?

Edit: Fixed some misunderstanding in my comment.
by jerf | 2025-05-05 13:46:56+00:00
You can even go a step farther; arguably, in a Unicode era, there is no such thing as "plain text" anymore. Nominally "plain text" has always had markup in it, such as newlines, tabs, and so forth, but ok, sure, we can incorporate those things into what may be slightly misnamed but is a "simplest possible format" that had a lot of useful characteristics, like, it mostly fit into a grid (except tabs), it naturally fit with a monospace font, it could be dumped to terminal, it often had only 7-bit ASCII characters in it and if it was 8-bit the encoding was externally specified somehow, it is monochrome, etc. etc. There are some ways this strains the concept of "plain text" but when it wasn't a moving target for a couple of decades (modulo perhaps some 8-bit encoding issues) at least English speakers could pretty much agree on what "plain text" meant.

But even "plain text" unicode now breaks a huge number of those assumptions. A number of Unicode characters have defined widths, like all the spaces. Kanji is broadly defined to be twice the width of an English character in a monospaced font, and that's subject to a number of exceptions too. There are markup characters like Right-To-Left, Left-To-Right, and the Arabic Letter Mark. Emoji are not exactly intrinscally non-monochrome, but aren't exactly intrinsically monochrome either (your users may have some objections). Zero-width joiners have complicated semantics that go well beyond just "a zero-width space". You have to handle composite characters e + acute in addition to the e-acute itself, and you have to render arbitrary numbers of them to even remotely properly handle Zalgo text. You have to worry about font glyph support in a way that you didn't in a 256-character world.

Even text with no markup has mandatory markups in it now; they may not be "bold" or "italic" markup but if you want to even remotely properly render them the minimal code necessary to do so is rather more complicated than a minimal bold/italic support. Unicode doesn't really have that "we all agree on the defaults so we can just dump it to the screen and do the simplest possible render and we'll all agree that's what it should look like" anymore.
by rajnathani | 2025-05-05 13:47:08+00:00
Maybe the low-power feature of Bluetooth helped it, such as with the Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) spec that with the way "services" and "characteristics" are defined that it allows for extremely low power consumption when no read-operation is done and thus the Bluetooth radio power can be minimized. Also, the 2.4 GHz band of Bluetooth is inherently less power consuming than the higher frequency band of Wireless USB.

But I guess the other problems may have been due to as the OP article brings up about it being in a different frequency communication band. Bluetooth on the other hand shares the same frequency band as Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz (which is also the OG Wi-Fi frequency band)). Thus for PC and mobile device OEMs, it is one less antenna to integrate. Furthermore, the higher frequency of the band would have made through-walls and further-distance communication less reliable. In this context, one of the few cool applications of wireless USB would've been a wireless keyboard or mouse (but this is coming from someone who is working on an OEM computer keyboard and mouse).
by indymike | 2025-05-05 13:47:16+00:00
> Students who know least of all and don't understand the purpose of writing or problem solving or the limitations of LLMs are currently wasting years of their lives letting LLMs pull them along as they cheat themselves out of an education

My high-school age daughter told me how her small private school solved this problem:

They brought back oral exams.

There aren't a lot of other good options. Written take-home work and online tests have always been fertile ground for cheating. Another benefit of oral exams: you learn to communicate under stress.
by motohagiography | 2025-05-05 13:47:39+00:00
this appears to be the most concise answer. TM SGNL provides interop with Signal users in the field, but also includes FOIA archiving.

who manages the archiving service is a general government problem, and less of one for Signal or appointees. NSA should have been operating the archiving service and not a foreign country imo.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-05 13:47:43+00:00
I mean it's pretty easy to hide the flash. Said flash is just burning powder after it leaves the barrel. So if you have an expansion chamber after the barrel it will be contained. Silencers do this secondarily with the first order effect of reducing the noise. An empty silencer (no baffles) will still hide the majority if not all the flash.
by trollbridge | 2025-05-05 13:48:03+00:00
That's very interesting. I don't do the same thing for religious reasons. So the photos I do have are utilitarian, e.g., pictures I took of some plants for the purpose of later IDing them. Such things are quite fascinating to look back at 8 years later.

We also don't have any wedding photos, newborn photos, family photos, etc and there is a certain special feeling to knowing what someone looked like when they were younger lives only in our memories. Particularly in a world where we are flooded with pictures all the time.

The AI era makes this even more interesting. A custom in our circles is to try to find a photo for your profile pic on WhatsApp that maybe sort of looks like you, since it can't be a photo actually of you. So now AI-generated photos are quite popular for this purpose. I think it is an interesting art form.

Likewise, new baby announcements don't have a photo of the baby... you will get either an artistic impression or something, or else something AI generated, often of another type of animal. My second son was represented by a koala bear, my first daughter by abstract watercolours. I enjoy not knowing what a friend's baby looks like until I meet them for the first time.

I also find some of my friends and family, well, I don't regularly see pictures of them, and I tend to remember them however I first saw them. They age, but my memory of them lives on.
by h_bar | 2025-05-05 13:48:07+00:00
Location: Washington, DC, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Tensorflow, sklearn, C, Java, Javascript, Git, AWS, Azure

Résumé/CV: https://killertux.org/media/resume_pbutler.pdf

Email: pjbutler+hn@gmail.com

I am a seasoned AI/ML researcher and leader of cutting-edge research teams. My teams solved problems for both public- and private-sector clients by employing large language models, retrieval augmented generation, and classical, and deep learning techniques. I shepherded many of the projects from the research phase to operational deployment; successfully transitioning a predictive analytics system into production.

I have authored numerous peer-reviewed publications utilizing classical machine learning techniques in high-impact journals and conferences, and my work has garnered over 1,000 citations. I am passionate about advancing AI/ML research and its practical applications in addressing immediate, real-world challenges.

I am looking for a new chapter and to get into more production oriented work where I can see and work with things I have made.
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-05 13:48:08+00:00
This gets crazier by the day. If one believes in tariffs then they should be targeted, in fact fine tuned. And that's after careful consideration of any possible gotchas or 'unforeseen' secondary effects on local industry.

Hasn't Trump heard of auditing? If Hollywood is screwing the system by outsourcing to overseas studios then a simple arrangement would be to audit tax returns (possibly at the studio's expense/no tax write-offs, deductions) and add tariffs on the specific foreign production so the status quo is maintained—making overseas production cost essentially the same as local production.

There are likely other or similar scenarios that would have the same effect.

Sometimes I reckon the world has gone so mad I'd like to be one of the first migrants to Mars.
by bobdosherman | 2025-05-05 13:48:43+00:00
Writing sharpens your thoughts. Working math problems sharpens your ability to do math. In the context of the education system though, where grades are a signal of future ability, there's a strong incentive to engage in rent-seeking by either searching for a solutions manual or "refining" an LLM's output. The little I've done when I've taught math-based econ is to make it clear that in-class tests have very high weight on your final grade, and out-of-class problem sets have very low weight. I can only mouth words as to why it's vital for students to struggle independently on the problem sets as a tool for learning.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-05 13:48:44+00:00
It’s categorically impossible that this could bring movie production jobs to the US. If a policy along these lines is implemented, both foreign and domestic consumers will launch a massive retaliatory boycott. (I will personally begin that boycott today unless Hollywood executives denounce the proposal.) The current dominance of American media offers absolutely no leverage, because it’s trivial and cost-free to go cold turkey on it.
by peder | 2025-05-05 13:48:53+00:00
Are you intentionally missing the point? Our films made in the US are already neutered from a free-speech perspective because we're chasing opinions that are politically correct in China. We don't want to worsen that by bending to every foreign tax break. We should be making unapologetically American movies, and if foreign consumers still watch those movies, all the better. But we shouldn't be writing these to a lowest common denominator of politically correct speech. It's how we've arrived at a point where all we produce is Marvel slop.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-05 13:48:59+00:00
> rewarding them for their lack of skill

I'm not sure it has to do with skill. That would imply the average worker has agency to apply their skills. The dynamic is more: leadership doesn't understand any of technical details and is happy to defer blame on engineers. But engineers are often expressly forbidden from proactively solving problems. So any employee with half a brain can read the writing on the wall - projects will fail due to incompetence (literally no way to stop it) so we might as well prepare to clean up the inevitable mess.

The result: a brittle system that requires heroics just to keep it operating. Once the heroics are rewarded, and proactive problem solving is eliminated, the cycle is locked in place. Cleaning up messes that you yourself begrudgingly create is the new job description.
by gwern | 2025-05-05 13:49:09+00:00
An interesting ML exercise (possible class project!) would be to try to automate this. A bigram corpus combined with word embeddings and a NSFW text classifier, maybe? Your usual word embedding might not work because the point is the multiple meanings, so maybe the twist would be that you need a polysemous word embedding with multiple vectors or something like that, so it's not just an off-the-shelf word2vec...
by haiku2077 | 2025-05-05 13:49:10+00:00
A unit of archers has a very limited supply of arrows, enough to shoot for a few minutes before they have to resupply. They also cannot precise aim a lobbed shot because their weapons do not have the appropriate sight nor a rifled barrel to maintain accuracy or energy with a high lob. Arrows fired in an excessively high arc are wasted.

It seems like your intuition of weapons and warfare comes from mass media, not historical evidence or practitioners.
by ulfw | 2025-05-05 13:49:37+00:00
Seems you were a-okay with people in California losing their jobs so you got them in Atlanta. You seem not okay with it moving from Atlanta to elsewhere.

And stop repeating the Serbia line in every comment. You've done it multiple times. What productions are in Serbia? How many out of how many?

Did you lose your job to one in Serbia and now it's sour grapes all along?
by NBJack | 2025-05-05 13:50:00+00:00
Fun fact: in some places, not informing others of your intent to take a picture can be construed as illegal (i.e. 2-party states in the US) . This came up with Google Glass several years ago.

But, uh, yeah, you should take a close look at how Meta can use your data. [0]

https://opentools.ai/news/metas-controversial-data-policy-on...
by _djo_ | 2025-05-05 13:50:37+00:00
I think you're misunderstanding me, I'm referring to Obama's use of an NSA-hardened BlackBerry for unclassified communication with a select group of people, while using a purpose-built and NSA-cleared secure phone for classified communication. All of which was done correctly in terms of information security processes.

Secretary of Defence Hegseth sent Secret or Top Secret information over a channel (Signal/TM Signal and a regular mobile phone) that was never cleared for classified communications. The person I was replying to was trying to equate Obama's actions to those of Hegseth (and Waltz and others), I was providing context showing that to be a false equivalence.

What Hegseth did was indefensible.
by Kirby64 | 2025-05-05 13:51:14+00:00
> Any actual stats on people not brushing their teeth? It's not 1960 any more... And my entire point was to compare to other nations with similar development levels that don't pump it into their water supply and are doing just fine in terms of oral health.

Something like 30% of people report not brushing their teeth at least once a day. Unclear if that means most of them brush every other day or some even lower frequency, but I’d assume if you report not brushing at least once a day then you likely aren’t brushing consistently every other day or something.

> And by your metric, should we also pump in vitamins and other substances that our bodies crave? Maybe the Fed gov't could just skip that and force drip IV everyone a compliance cocktail after their breakfast of USDA approved and SNAP subsidized Captain Crunch?

We already do this, all the time! Vitamin and mineral fortified foods are everywhere. Iodine is in a lot of salt. It’s a good thing, not something to be mocked. Most vitamins and minerals have minimal cost, no issues with taking “too much” of them, and have significant health benefits if you are deficit on that particular thing.
by motorest | 2025-05-05 13:51:19+00:00
> You have to remember that the MAGA movement is a cult of personality with a bunch of weirdos ginning up stupid and naive people.

I think it's more pernicious than that. The whole MAGA movement has a rather obvious accelerationist agenda, which leads to self-destructive policies like dismantling basic social safety nets and eliminating basic state institutions. Their policies don't make sense to anyone outside of their cult because we presume the goal is to build upon the state institutions and improve upon what's already there, whereas the MAGA crowd applauds destroying everything down to fundamental rights such as the right to a fair trial. They want to see te world burn hoping they'll be able to rebuild it to their liking. The only members of the MAGA that so far voiced regrets are those who faced the fact that they themselves were being left behind.
by TrianguloY | 2025-05-05 13:51:22+00:00
I work on the University, and there I recovered wired internet rather quickly probably due to backup generators. At home most routers stopped, some even took until the next day to be functional again.

As for mobile connectivity, the main issue was the congestion. The cell network didn't fail, usually, but in most places either your phone wasn't able to connect or had no internet. Too many people trying at the same time, I guess. On the University on the other hand it worked perfectly. Maybe because it's a usual crowded place and there are more resources, but I think it was also because a lot of students (even teachers) went home, so those who stayed were mostly alone with a good internet...but less people to talk to.
by SamBam | 2025-05-05 13:51:25+00:00
The cost of living isn't a single number. A state like Massachusetts, with a high cost of living for people with high income living in or near Boston, can also have large social services, like subsidized housing, good-quality public education, free healthcare, and free school lunches.

It is true that this can end up having a donut hole effect, where the middle classes are squeezed out of areas that they cannot afford, and yet are too wealthy to qualify for social services.
by stephencanon | 2025-05-05 13:51:43+00:00
Varies enormously between states and school districts.

In our public elementary school, there are two or three options each day: a hot meal of some sort, some days a hot vegetarian meal, and a salad bar that kids can choose what they want from (which usually includes some options that you wouldn't call "salad").

It's not fine dining, but the quality and variety is generally pretty decent. The kids have accounts, and parents are expected to refill a negative balance, but every kid gets the lunch of their choice regardless.
by nunez | 2025-05-05 13:51:49+00:00
It's equivalent on the surface, but it's vastly more complicated to use and has many more failure modes due to different phone models, root vs non-root actions, and more. It's definitely a power user tool, whereas non-technical users can create shortcuts with Shortcuts much more easily.

I experimented with the idea of going back to Android. Having to recreate all of my shortcuts in Tasker was one non-starter. (It not having a HomeKit equivalent was the other. Google Home is much more limited.)

Shortcuts can also sync between Apple devices via iCloud (though Automations in Shortcuts don't; another thing that drives me mad about the app), and they more-or-less work regardless of where they're running.