MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by autoexec | 2025-05-13 16:21:22+00:00
> Tools for Humanity, which makes eye-scanning devices that capture a person’s biometric data, create a unique identifier for their identity, and store that information on the blockchain.

No thanks. I really don't want my ability to be employed dependent on some bullshit blockchain tech. I imagine that when it inevitably fails to ID someone who it should as human or it screws up the eye-scan that the only support you'll be allowed to talk to will be a useless AI chatbot. Biometrics are terrible passwords, they're certain to be a terrible "human" test too.

> Jessica Eise, an assistant professor studying climate change and social behavior at Indiana University Bloomington, says her research team has been forced to essentially become digital forensics experts due to the amount of fraudsters who respond to ads for paid virtual surveys.

Random internet surveys using unverified self-reported data were always a terrible way to do research. I wouldn't mind if scammers and AI did kill that trend off. Sure, it's very easy to produce a large amount of garbage data and write a paper on it, but ease of writing papers isn't as important as collecting real data.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-05-13 16:21:24+00:00
> These are markedly distinct career paths from the ones taken by homegrown Jews,

Actually "Oppenheimer" the movie also supplies examples of two very different New York Jewish backgrounds:

J Robert Oppenheimer, from an affluent, non-religious family - with an Upper West side apartment and a summer vacation home on Long Island. His father came to the USA as a teenager, and prospered in business.

Isidor Isaac Rabi, from an orthodox, Yiddish-speaking family living in a two-room apartment on the Lower East Side. He was born shortly before the family came to the USA.
by kacesensitive | 2025-05-13 16:22:15+00:00
Oh no, not a Ph.D. from NYU and a science policy leadership role under a president—how scandalous! Imagine thinking someone who specializes in the intersection of science, society, and governance might be... qualified to advise on science and society. Her research literally focuses on how science and technology shape—and are shaped by—social forces. But sure, let’s pretend like policy isn't supposed to involve people who understand, you know, people.
by svat | 2025-05-13 16:23:06+00:00
The live back-and-forth is the main point of what I'm asking for — I tried your cpdf (thanks for the mention; will add it to my list) and it too doesn't help; all it does is, somewhere 9000-odd lines into the JSON file, turn the part of the content stream corresponding to what I mentioned in the earlier comment into:

[ [ { "F": 0.0 }, "g" ], [ { "F": 0.0 }, "G" ], [ { "F": 0.0 }, "g" ], [ { "F": 0.0 }, "G" ], [ "BT" ], [ "/F19", { "F": 10.9091 }, "Tf" ], [ { "F": 88.93600000000001 }, { "F": 709.0410000000001 }, "Td" ], [ [ "Subsequen", { "F": 28.0 }, "t", { "F": -374.0 }, "to", { "F": -373.0 }, "the", { "F": -373.0 }, "p", { "F": -28.0 }, "erio", { "F": -28.0 }, "d", { "F": -373.0 }, "analyzed", { "F": -373.0 }, "in", { "F": -374.0 }, "our", { "F": -373.0 }, "study", { "F": 83.0 }, ",", { "F": -383.0 }, "Bridge's", { "F": -373.0 }, "paren", { "F": 27.0 }, "t", { "F": -373.0 }, "compan", { "F": 28.0 }, "y", { "F": -373.0 }, "Ne", { "F": -1.0 }, "wGlob", { "F": -27.0 }, "e", { "F": -374.0 }, "reduced" ], "TJ" ], [ { "F": -16.936 }, { "F": -21.922 }, "Td" ],

This is just a more verbose restatement of what's in the PDF file; the real questions I'm asking are:

- How can a user get to this part, from viewing the PDF file? (Note that the PDF page objects are not necessarily a flat list; they are often nested at different levels of “kids”.)

- How can a user understand these instructions, and “see” how they correspond to what is visually displayed on the PDF file?
by charpie | 2025-05-13 16:23:12+00:00
Hi HN – we just made Searchcraft Core available on Docker Hub!

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• Rust-powered engine • Typo-tolerant + fuzzy search out of the box • Front-end SDKs for JS, React, and Vue • Now available as a single tiny Docker image (94% smaller than Elastic)

Searchcraft Core is totally free to run locally or self-host. Need extra features, support, or a hosted option? We’ve got those too.

▶ Here’s a demo our co-founder, Don, filmed where he loads English Wikipedia onto a Raspberry Pi and still gets <10ms fuzzy search: https://youtu.be/SjuPn6_yl2s

If you’re building something that needs search, give it a try and let us know what’s missing — we’re actively listening and feature requests are welcome on Discord.

Docker: https://hub.docker.com/r/searchcraftinc/searchcraft-core Discord: https://discord.gg/y3zUHkBk6e Website: https://searchcraft.io/
by vessenes | 2025-05-13 16:23:13+00:00
I'd say the swing in Federal powers comes from the real income dropping for most Americans over the last 30 years. Nobody wants to be told "this is great!" when it is not. Especially when it's "Macroeconomists say this is great!".

Bread and circuses -- the prior administrations, regardless of political camp, have delivered neither the circus nor the bread. People want to try something else.

That's in my opinion totally orthogonal to the aims of those digging in Federally right now; those aims are fairly diverse in my opinion, if themed.
by mediaman | 2025-05-13 16:23:51+00:00
Corpus size doesn't mean much in the context of a PDF, given how variable that can be per page.

I've found Google's Flash to cut my OCR costs by about 95+% compared to traditional commercial offerings that support structured data extraction, and I still get tables, headers, etc from each page. Still not perfect, but per page costs were less than one tenth of a cent per page, and 100 gb collections of PDFs ran to a few hundreds of dollars.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-13 16:24:10+00:00
A lot of the "boilerplate" of WebComponents disappears if you entirely ignore the Shadow DOM, and you can just do that.

They can support objects and arrays as attributes in the same way as the old Progressive Enhancement era (jQuery/Knockout-era) web: via data- attributes and the dataset property. Similar to that era you probably still want to support JSON serialization/deserialization to those attributes for SSG/SSR support.
by mjr00 | 2025-05-13 16:24:10+00:00
> Zoom’s got 7,412 employees a small team of say 7 employees could make a noticeable difference here

What would those 7 engineers specifically be working on? How did you pick 7? What part of the infrastructure would they be working on, and what kind of performance gains, in which part of the system, would be the result of their work?
by duxup | 2025-05-13 16:24:16+00:00
I grew up going to a religious school, it wasn't really that different from a regular school. The concerns / focus that folks on the religious right in the US had almost no bearing on school life. The focus of day to day life was local, at the school, not national.

Since then a few fellow classmates have gone down the "anti porn" rabbit hole. Their social media posts are part every day family stuff, part anti porn advocacy. The posts are sometimes "normal" advocacy type posts, others are apocalyptic and angry / hateful. There's always a "we" vibe to these posts too, about them and their spouse as a couple.

The most shocking thing is that as far as I can tell, these couples have had no contact with the porn industry, no friends or family with any contact. No really first hand experience that I know of (presumably they've seen porn at some point) ... and yet a chunk of their social media time and presumably emotions and energy are dedicated to that topic.

It's inexplicable...
by lostphilosopher | 2025-05-13 16:24:30+00:00
It's worth noting that for those edge cases all the productivity monitoring in the world won't make that employee any more effective, and you won't need those tools to see that they're not cutting it (assuming you're engaged with your team as the other commenter describes). You'll likely lose more in annoying the rest of your team and burning your own cycles with surveillance than you'll gain from it.
by mtremsal | 2025-05-13 16:24:34+00:00
> We have a free version. For now, we have kept it invite-only. Question is TOFU.

Comment from `amanchanda`, i.e. the OP.

Nice hustle writing an Ask HN post to then plug your own product, but you have to make sure to respond to questions with your _other_ account `nicooo`. ;)
by nine_k | 2025-05-13 16:25:20+00:00
Question: could I offer a patch without having a GitHub account?

Definitely I can access the source code. The review tools are not on GitHub. But is it even possible to host my proposed changes elsewhere, not on GitHub? I suppose that the answer is negative, but surprises happen.

This is a relatively theoretical question, but it explores the "what bad Microsoft can do to you" avenue: it can close your GitHub account, likely seriously hampering your ability to contribute.
by blagie | 2025-05-13 16:25:20+00:00
It's a little bit different. "The projects" were only available to the very poor, and often by lottery. They often turned into a ghetto.

I'd like a baseline option open to everyone.

If you just finished Stanford, and want to bootstrap a startup, teach kids, or do a non-profit, you should be able to move into a "project" too while getting things off the ground. If you're a student and want to save a bit of money, you can move in too.

If you want to upgrade at some point, great.

If not, you've got a safe bed to sleep, and a roof overhead.

Part of the difference, too, is if open to everyone, voters can push for improvements. A lot of what went wrong with the projects wasn't due to a lack of resources, but due to mismanagement of resources. For nationalized goods to be well-managed, voters need a stake. A more extreme example of this is prisons.

But the critical thing is at that point, for-profit housing has competition. I might gladly spend $500/month to have better housing, but I might not be willing to spend $5000/month (insert your own numbers for single/family/income/etc.). That prevents some of the most exploitative practices.
by DamonHD | 2025-05-13 16:26:20+00:00
My family does not, so far as I can tell, use a different number of dishes because of the presence of a dishwasher. The kids almost never wash(ed) up, so it makes/made no difference to them for example. And I loathe washing up, but I always use as few dishes etc as I reasonably can simply from a sustainability point of view. And I ensure that the dishwasher is as full as reasonably possible before being run, and run at the best time from a carbon/cost point of view.
by throwaway-blaze | 2025-05-13 16:26:25+00:00
Right, the biggest issue would be the unlikelihood that both planets would evolve similarly-intelligent lifeforms in the same time frames.

If Venus had a superintelligent species today, we would likely be pets or food.

If it had a superintelligent species 100,000 years ago, we will never know (or not know for quite a while).

And if it has life now that is evolving into something intelligent or superintelligent in 100,000 years, who knows if humanity will still be here to find.
by Zak | 2025-05-13 16:27:17+00:00
> locking yourself out of vital apps (finance/banking)

My controversial take here is that Google's creation of a remote attestation scheme is also anticompetitive, intended to reduce the commercial viability of any non-blessed Android distributions.

Everyone could see the bad intent when Microsoft proposed the same thing about a decade earlier under the name Palladium, but Google's Safetynet didn't prompt much outcry from the tech community. I'm disappointed by that.
by naasking | 2025-05-13 16:27:26+00:00
> Astronomy.

What benefits do you expect to see from the kinds astronomy that require this sort of funding? Sure, knowing things can be nice but this ignores opportunity costs, eg. would practical knowledge like fusion research be further along if talent weren't focused on impractical knowledge?

> Physics.

Not strictly true, see quantum computing for instance, lasers, semiconductors and so on. There are some types of physics that aren't viable in this sense, but why does that automatically translate into some need to support them? For instance, consider the decades spent on supersymmetry which ultimately produced bupkis. In a world in which we weren't so focused on ideas so divorced from empirical data, what other types of knowledge or engineering would we have done?

> Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust.

What benefits do you expect to see?

> Biology aside from medicine.

Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

> Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry.

Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

> Theoretical computer science.

Untrue, Google and Facebook have advance distributed computing considerably, for instance.

> Mathematics.

Unclear, there's a lot of math involved in predictions of all sorts, like weather forecasting, stock market prediction. If your argument here is that math will be more application-focused, this strikes me much like the physics objection where it's unclear that we'd really be worse off.

There seems to be this automatic assumption among some people that pure research with no direction or constraints is an unmitigated good and that we can't do better. I used to think so too, but I just don't see it anymore.
Ask HN: How did you fund your early stage hardware startup?
by mrtb | 2025-05-13 16:27:41+00:00
I'm making drones from scratch with a buddy, each one costs ~$2000+ to build and they incur damage from test flights. I hold down a 9-6 software gig to cover our costs, while my mate is on it full time. So far I've put ~$30k into machines, components, and his living costs, and I help him on evenings and weekends. We have good route-to-market plans and momentum with prototypes, but we need more time and cash to mature our flagship model - we crashed one of our latest builds and money is tight.

Seems like we're in a liminal space where we can't advance the RnD enough working part time with my spare change, but we're also far away enough from a mature product to be an easy sell to investors.

We're exploring avenues to raise ~$250k in exchange for ~5% equity. How do you get investors on board with projects where the MVP is months away and requires that kind of capital up front?
by ijk | 2025-05-13 16:27:52+00:00
Given that the article we're discussing explicitly mentions the NSF contribution to those projects and links to articles going into great depth about the details, including NSFNET, I'm going to assume you're working off prior assumptions.

Of course, in modern monetary theory GDP growth is one of the major factors keeping sovereign debt manageable [1], and NSF funding of about $9B [2] is about 0.2% of the national budget, and that money that is invested in basic research is generally found to significantly contribute to that economic growth [3], there are few ways I can think of to make the debt situation worse than to cut basic research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-to-GDP_ratio

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation

[3] https://www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/Documents/NEW-SfN/Advocacy/2...
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-13 16:27:53+00:00
Sorry but it is absolutely the case that there are optimizations available to someone working in assembly that are not available to someone working in C++.

You are probably a lazy or inexperienced engineer if you choose to work in C++.

In fact, there are optimizations available at the silicon level that are not available in assembly.

You are probably a lazy or inexperienced engineer if you choose to work in assembly.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-13 16:28:07+00:00
Interoperable: You can build a Web Component once and it should work "out of the box" in the latest Angular, React, Vue, Svelte, etc. (React was among the last holdouts on Web Component support because of Virtual DOM silliness.) Interoperable Web Components get us away from the era of needing to build npm libraries like ng-mycomponent, react-mycomponent, vue-mycomponent, for all the various combinations of drastically different component systems and ways of writing components, even when your component's core was as Vanilla as you could make it and you shared as much code as you could between implementations there were still so many small subtle things to do differently.
by anal_reactor | 2025-05-13 16:28:08+00:00
Ah yes, the classic. If you don't want to be discovered as corrupt, simply create an institution that fights corruption, have a seat there, and use your powers to eliminate all political opponents by accusing them of corruption. By the time anyone realizes what's happening, everyone who could potentially question you is gone. Many of world's dictators rose to power using this simple trick.

Next time please do a more elaborate bait, this one was insulting.
by lupusreal | 2025-05-13 16:28:53+00:00
> The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus.

I think it's worth remembering where that came from. Before the war, in the 20s and 30s, the American industrial establishment was quite happy to work with the Soviet Union, both in selling equipment and lending technical expertise to help the Soviet Union set up their own production (for instance, Ford helped them set up GAZ). The ideological incompatibility of the Soviet Union and western capitalism wasn't seen as so much of a problem, it was mutually profitable to be civil and do business with each other.

Genuine concern with the Soviet Union grew during the war when it became difficult to ignore the belligerent nature of the Soviet Union, towards their neighbors and their own people.
by peterhadlaw | 2025-05-13 16:28:56+00:00
100% agreed. The best part is nobody ever could provide an explanation for when the beast of bureaucracy would stop being fed. It is just a given that it must grow and grow and grow. Whether you voted for it or not. And don't you dare question it because questioning it is Fascism (from people who have never seen the actual results of real Fascism).
by searine | 2025-05-13 16:29:15+00:00
The important point here is that science corrected itself. It saw a lack of progress from a direction of inquiry and using its established mechanisms rerouted that inquiry.

To expect that every effort will succeed and be perfect is just naive. What matters is that the system has a mechanism to self-evaluate its results and change the consensus. Which it did. Which means it works. We means we shouldn't burn it down.
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-13 16:29:32+00:00
100% agree and is exhausting.

The stress is just not that apparent in environments where projects tend to fail anyway, or environments that provide lots of job stability.

You basically get paid for being present instead of actually produce something useful.

I don’t understand why one would want to work in such an environment, except when you’re soft-retiring / soft-quitting
by blagie | 2025-05-13 16:30:02+00:00
A major goal of policy is to set incentives to which people optimize.

The "capitalist soul sucking robber barons" are doing exactly what the incentives we set up push for. If they didn't, boards of directors / shareholders would vote them out. And if those didn't, competing businesses would crush them. No one has any real choice; it's the free hand of the market.

There are nice books about this (Dictator's Handbook comes to mind).

Many would prefer to be less exploitative personally, but need legal frameworks to be able to do so. And indeed, in history, you often saw the "capitalist soul sucking robber barons" see the harms they were causing and push for that regulation. Most people would prefer to provide safe food, safe medicine, etc. than sell poison and snakeoil. But you can't really resist market forces.

So you need to work to set up socially-constructive market forces.

And it's all better than serfdom and 1500-era systems regardless.
by Hello71 | 2025-05-13 16:30:34+00:00
Modern commercial aviation is extremely safe because of investigators and regulators banning this "well the pilot just fucked up" explanation and instead looking at systemic factors.

As pointed out in the article, if the pilot was so incompetent, why didn't they receive further training, or if truly untrainable, fired? The airline and regulator have the responsibility for doing so, and ending the investigation at "pilot error" guarantees that another incompetent pilot will crash another plane.
by meshula | 2025-05-13 16:30:45+00:00
The team working on ScummVM has provided a great historical resource to all of us. I have no exposure at all to interactions with ScummVM you mention, so won't speculate on that.

Hopefully the patent served more in creating a safe space for musical proceduralism in games rather than being chilling. As mentioned in this thread there has been brilliant proceduralism in so many games since Monkey 2.

I figured it was high time to highlight the innovations in iMuse because I realized in discussions that the core principles weren't well known, and difficult to extract from public sources like the patent unless you are really fluent with that language.
by svat | 2025-05-13 16:31:00+00:00
Thanks, but I was not able to figure out how to get any use out of the notebook above. In what sense is it a 'live' inspector? All it seems to do is to just decompose the PDF into separate “ops” and “args” arrays (neither of which is meaningful without the other), but it does not seem “live” in any sense — how can one find the ops (and args) corresponding to a region of the PDF page, or vice-versa?
by throw4847285 | 2025-05-13 16:31:05+00:00
I've worked with many people like you, and I can say from experience that they are never as competent as they think they are. Often they are quite competent, and yet somehow they still overestimate their own skills and make life harder for everybody.

The type of person in question can be understood as somebody who equates technical skill with "not needing help." It's implicit in your post. Your mythical rock stars are extremely talented individuals, while what sets the incompetent apart is apparently their need for assurance from others.
by fsckboy | 2025-05-13 16:31:14+00:00
thanks for the pointer. I looked up AFL vs John Roberts, and the lawsuit seems straightforward and has a reasonable basis.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025/05/04/america-first-legal-fou...

"The suit was prompted by the refusal of the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office to respond to AFLF's FOIA requests for copies of communication with the offices of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Hank Johnson, two legislators who have worked overtime to stir up ethical allegations against sitting Supreme Court justices. The Judicial Conference and Administrative Office rebuffed the requests on the grounds that each are exempt from FOIA."

"The basis for AFLF's suit is that the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office are not part of the judiciary, but are instead executive branch agencies subject to FOIA. According to AFLF, neither entity is a "court," and insofar as each has other responsibilities, including the promulgation of rules governing federal courts and responding to Congressional inquiries, each is an "agency" under FOIA."