MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sedatk | 2025-05-13 19:38:00+00:00
Also, people usually underestimate the problems of TOTP. Losing TOTP is easy. Lose your phone and it's gone. It means game over for a regular person. SMS is light years ahead in terms of ease of recovery. Even after losing your phone, you can stop by a store, activate your SIM back again with your ID. Not the case with TOTP.

Yes, some of the SMS recovery scenarios can make hackers hijack your account easily too, but cell operators have workarounds in place for that. It's getting better.

I don't even know how recovery scenarios work for passkeys.
by miki123211 | 2025-05-13 19:38:13+00:00
There's also #4, reliable OCR and semantics extraction that works across many diverse classes of documents, which is relevant for accessibility.

This is hard because:

1. Unlike a business workflow which often only deals with a few specific kinds of documents, you never know what the user is going to get. You're making an abstract PDF reader, not an app that can process court documents in bankruptcy cases in Delaware.

2. You don't just need the text (like in traditional OCR), you need to recognize tables, page headers and footers, footnotes, headings, mathematics etc.

3. Because this is for human consumption, you want to minimize errors as much as possible, which means not using OCR when not needed, and relying on the underlying text embedded within the PDF while still extracting semantics. This means you essentially need two different paths, when the PDF only consists of images and when there are content streams you can get some information from.

3.1. But the content streams may contain different text from what's actually on the page, e.g. white-on-white text to hide information the user isn't supposed to see, or diacritics emulation with commands that manually draw acute accents instead of using proper unicode diacritics (LaTeX works that way).

4. You're likely running as a local app on the user's (possibly very underpowered) device, and likely don't have an associated server and subscription, so you can't use any cloud AI models.

5. You need to support forms. Since the user is using accessibility software, presumably they can't print and use a pen, so you need to handle the ones meant for printing too, not just the nice, spec-compatible ones.

This is very much an open problem and is not even remotely close to being solved. People have been taking stabs at it for years, but all current solutions suck in some way, and there's no single one that solves all 5 points correctly.
by evrimoztamur | 2025-05-13 19:38:36+00:00
It was the first time I set it up, then I went through every single instance and refactored with the appropriate choice. It wasn't as tedious as you might imagine, and again, I really don't have the option of letting my game crash.

I think the only legitimate uses are for direct indexing for tile maps etc. where I do bounds checking on two axes and know that it will map correctly. to the underlying memory (but that's `clippy::indexing_slicing`, I have 0 `clippy::unwrap_used` in my codebase now).

If you begin a new project with these lints, you'll quickly train to write idiomatic Option/Result handling code by default.
Show HN: Contextual AI Document Parser – Infer hierarchy for long, complex docs
by ishan_sinha | 2025-05-13 19:38:42+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m Ishan, Product Manager at Contextual AI.

We're excited to announce our document parser that combines the best of custom vision, OCR, and vision language models to deliver unmatched accuracy.

There are a lot of parsing solutions out there—here’s what makes ours different: 1) Document hierarchy inference: Unlike traditional parsers that process documents as isolated pages, our solution infers a document’s hierarchy and structure. This allows you to add metadata to each chunk that describes its position in the document, which then lets your agents understand how different sections relate to each other and connect information across hundreds of pages. 2) Minimized hallucinations: Our multi-stage pipeline minimizes severe hallucinations while also providing bounding boxes and confidence levels for table extraction to simplify auditing its output. 3) Superior handling of complex modalities: Technical diagrams, complex figures and nested tables are efficiently processed to support all of your data.

In an end-to-end RAG evaluation of a dataset of SEC 10Ks and 10Qs (containing 70+ documents spanning 6500+ pages), we found that including document hierarchy metadata in chunks increased the equivalence score from 69.2% to 84.0%.

Getting started The first 500+ pages in our Standard mode (for complex documents that require VLMs and OCR) are free if you want to give it a try. Just create a Contextual AI account (https://app.contextual.ai/?signup=1) and visit the Components tab to use the Parse UI playground, or get an API key and call the API directly.

Documentation 1) /parse API: https://docs.contextual.ai/api-reference/parse/parse-file 2) Python SDK: https://github.com/ContextualAI/contextual-client-python/blo... 3) Code examples: https://github.com/ContextualAI/examples/blob/main/03-standa... 4) Blog post: https://contextual.ai/blog/document-parser-for-rag/

Happy to answer any questions about how our document parser works or how you might integrate it into your RAG systems!
by xyst | 2025-05-13 19:38:45+00:00
Anybody that has the misfortune of working within a financial institution should know these folks are way behind the times.

They will hire contractors from the bottom of the barrel, claim "rEgUlAtIoNs sToP uS", load up on middle management —- thinking they will ~~whip~~ manage those bottom dollar contractors into performing like well paid folks —- then decry about asinine shit (mUsT rETurN to oFfIcE for cUlTtuRe!!11) and shift blame when the initiative(s) fall flat and projects are behind by _years_.

This rinses and repeats for a few years, maybe they get a half ass implementation out to meet minimum spec for MFA. Maybe they spend millions in consultants and contractors before it gets off the ground.
by staticman2 | 2025-05-13 19:38:49+00:00
My stated opinion is anyone who comes to an AI conversation and says "I can't tell the difference between organisms and computers" or some variation thereof does in fact have no trouble in practice distinguishing between between their child/ mom/ dad/ BFF and ChatGPT as is in fact questioning from a position of bad faith.

"There is nothing inherently wrong with training machines on existing data..." doesn't really conflate a machine with an organism and isn't what I'm talking about.

If you instead had written "I can read the Cat in the Hat to teach my kid to read why can't I use it to train an LLM?"

Then I do think you would be asking with a certain degree of bad faith, you are perfectly capable of distinguishing those two things, in practice, in your everyday life. You do not in fact see them as equivilent.

Your rhetorical choice to be unable to tell the difference would be performative.

You seem to think I'm arguing copyright policy. I really am discussing rhetoric.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-05-13 19:39:54+00:00
The complete lack of ANY kind of security, usability, and reference-ability in telephones and the continued use of them as the default communication method in business is absolutely fucking baffling to me. It's literally the worst communication method for anything: It requires verbal back and forth between two parties that's entirely dependent on your hearing the other person, with built in opportunities for mishearing. The immediate back and forth puts pressure on people to have everything they need ready lest they have to take time to respond while they figure something out. The entire conversation unless recorded is completely lost to the ether as soon as it ends, there's no way to reference back to any history, and transcriptions over crappy phone connections are less than useless. And to top it off, there is NO security AT ALL for these things, and any attempt to screen by contacts is constantly thwarted by every business that exists having between 4 and 4 billion fucking phone numbers because everything is done with phones and everyone working there needs one.

I swear, if I got one wish from a genie, I would banish the phone from existence. It's the worst for goddamned everything. Video calls, skype calls, discord, email, texts, messaging, literally everything is better than the shitty old phone.
by never_inline | 2025-05-13 19:40:05+00:00
The social-ification of tech is indeed a worrying trend.

This is exacerbated by low-quality / promotional medium articles, linkedin etc.. which promote Nth copycat HTML GPT wrapper app or kubernetes dashboard as the best thing after sliced bread, and not-so-technical programmers falling for it.

This applies to some areas more than others (eg, generative AI, cloud observability)
by The5thElephant | 2025-05-13 19:40:22+00:00
PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) would not have been possible without a completely unrelated discovery of a heat-resistant bacteria by a federally funded scientist years earlier. Is it possible that eventually a privately funded effort may have figured out that some bacteria can survive in temperatures beyond what was generally considered possible and connected that to replicating DNA? Yeah maybe, but it seems extremely less likely.

Your black and white way of looking at this is naive at face value. We need both federal and private funded research. Is there fraud in science? Yes. So your answer is throw it all out instead of rooting out the fraud? Somehow expect fraud not to exist in privately funded research? Your comments here are so myopically driven by a bias against something rather than what is the best outcome for scientific research.
by sneak | 2025-05-13 19:40:59+00:00
Absolutely not! The moment you have universal state-issued identity, you will be expected to provide it for everything, including tons of stuff that doesn’t require identity. Don’t be a privacy defeatist, the fight isn’t lost yet.

Resist every single effort to make it easier for merchants and private entities to strongly identify users. The rows go into databases and they never go away.

State-issued identity is one of the fundamental building blocks of a totalitarian police state that has universal surveillance.
by antisthenes | 2025-05-13 19:41:38+00:00
Reddit is a self-perpetuating AI-engagement machine.

Seems like 90% of the content there is now either reposts from Reddits first decade (2008-2018), engagement rage-bait, or really low-effort posts from newly registered users (who might be real, but they are normies so they ask really mundane boring questions that could be googled in seconds).

I truly believe it now exists only to serve as training data for the highest bidder to pay out the initial investors, everything else be damned.

I wouldn't use it for anything important.
by DamonHD | 2025-05-13 19:42:04+00:00
> If a system breaks in common scenarios, like international travel, it’s not a secure system. It’s a hostile one.

I have spent many hours on the phone over the last few days fighting tooth and nail to get my savings back to my account with British bank A from British bank B (just recently bought by A, as it happens) in small chunks because reasons.

I have explicitly raised the point "if this punishes the innocent so hard in a simple legit case like this, wasting hours of everyone's time, is it actually working?"

In response to the first of three (!) complaints that I have filed during this trauma, the bank conceded on all the points and awarded me a significant compensation sum ... which I may never be able to get at!

Plus people possibly from the bank keep trying to call me and ask me to prove who I am with data that would let a phisher into my accounts, and are effectively unreachable if I try to contact them through a safe route... Including the fraud and complaints people... Duh.
by pwg | 2025-05-13 19:42:05+00:00
> using some off the shelf system from one of the big vendors

This also gives the bank 'cover' should an exploit be uncovered in "big vendors" system. They (the bank) are safe liability wise (or at least they think they are) because they used "approved vendor Y" for their authentication system.

If they created their own system, then they would be unable to offload the liability onto someone else.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-13 19:42:28+00:00
I have heard from doctors and lawyers that there comes a time in your career when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.

It sucks that this perception attaches to people at this point in their career. Many become managers at this point because that's an easy way to have broader impact and show career growth when you don't _really_ care about engineering.

If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field, everyone knows where your priorities are. It's okay that you aren't that interested in engineering. It does mean that it's harder to get a job than someone who really is, especially in tight markets. You're also not going to find employment below your level because they know you're going to jump ship when the market shifts. It does mean lowering your standards on certain things, like the "100% remote" requirement.

For the last 20 years, there has been tremendous demand for software engineers that has allowed people to coast. That demand is cooling down for a variety of reasons, AI being one of them (but IMO not anywhere near the most significant). That cool-down really started in ~2021-2022 and really hasn't picked back up. When the market cools down, the unremarkable old-timers are sadly the first ones to be shown the door.
by edanm | 2025-05-13 19:42:41+00:00
You're missing the case of it telling you not to see a doctor and it's right, in which you save a lot of time (and potentially money).

Mistakes will happen, that's the nature of statistics of this nature. But don't forget that saving 1,000s of people time is worth something, even if you never directly see it like you do the one case that it didn't catch.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-05-13 19:43:33+00:00
Arm vs x86 matters a lot for Intel since they don't make Arm CPUs. x86 used to be a massive moat for Intel/AMD. The rise of ARM market-share means that that moat is draining. 10 years ago, AMD and IBM were the only competition (and they were both in rough shape). Now Intel is competing against AMD, NVidia, Qualcom, Amazon, and Arm. Even if Intel can make the best CPU again, they no longer can charge monopoly prices for it. If you have a 10% faster CPU, that only lets you charge a small premium over everyone else.
by gruez | 2025-05-13 19:43:51+00:00
The biggest hurdle to money laundering is getting past KYC at the creation stage, which requires you to have stolen identities and/or identity documents, getting past the anti-fraud gauntlet, and probably intercepting any documents/cards that get mailed. Setting up a device farm that can receive SMS OTPs is simple by comparison. All you need as a $60 android phone and an app with SMS access.
by Earw0rm | 2025-05-13 19:44:19+00:00
Optimise is never a neutral word.

You always optimise FOR something at the expense of something.

And that can, and frequently should, be lean resource consumption, but it can come at a price.

Which might be one or more of: Accessibility. Full internationalisation. Integration paradigms (thinking about how modern web apps bring UI and data elements in from third parties). Readability/maintainability. Displays that can actually represent text correctly at any size without relying on font hinting hacks. All sorts of subtle points around UX. Economic/business model stuff (megabytes of cookie BS on every web site, looking at you right now.) Etc.
by itishappy | 2025-05-13 19:44:35+00:00
Oops, pretty big mistake on my part. I gave the formula for force and labeled it acceleration. Way too late to edit, but the correctly labeled formulas should have been:

F = G * m1 * m2 / |r|^2 * r_unit F = G * m1 * m2 / |r|^3 * r

Or as acceleration, by dividing out an `m` using `F=ma`:

a = G * m / |r|^2 * r_unit a = G * m / |r|^3 * r
by nostrademons | 2025-05-13 19:45:04+00:00
Quality can lead to sales - this was the premise behind the original Google (they never spent a dime on advertising their own product until the Parisian Love commercial [1] came out in 2009, a decade after founding), and a few other tech-heavy startups like Netscape or Stripe. Microsoft certainly didn't spend a billion $ marketing Altair Basic.

The key point to understand is the only effort that matters is that which makes the sale. Business is a series of transactions, and each individual transaction is binary: it either happens or it doesn't. Sometimes, you can make the sale by having a product which is so much better than alternatives that it's a complete no-brainer to use it, and then makes people so excited that they tell all their friends. Sometimes you make the sale by reaching out seven times to a prospect that's initially cold but warms up in the face of your persistence. Sometimes, you make the sale by associating your product with other experiences that your customers want to have, like showing a pretty woman drinking your beer on a beach. Sometimes, you make the sale by offering your product 80% off to people who will switch from competitors and then jacking up the price once they've become dependent on it.

You should know which category your product fits into, and how and why customers will buy it, because that's the only way you can make smart decisions about how to allocate your resources. Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that." But if you are sitting on one of those gold mines, capitalizing on it effectively is orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to market a product that doesn't really work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
by dakr | 2025-05-13 19:45:10+00:00
> Why are you parading your ignorance of my position as an informed rebuttal?

Nicely put, but I say ignorance because your post was a flurry of questions asking someone else to tell you information about multiple subjects rather than adding substantive information or viewpoint to the conversation.

> Not an argument that these advances would not have been made otherwise, such as by research directly in medical imaging, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.

You've asked a question that is impossible to answer, but the reality is that the benefit happened, and it's not the only one. It seems that the system has some merit, although yes, there's no way to prove that there wasn't a "better" straight-line-to-the-answer way to do it. How can you know the straight-line path ahead of time? You can't map the territory without going out there and looking. Basic research in multiple areas, allowing for cross-pollination has done a really good job at that over the years.

> Ditto for mathematics, which for centuries has progressed without direct public funding.

This one really doesn't make sense. Who paid Riemann? Who paid Newton? Universities are not a new thing, and funding them with state money has been there from the start. Even figures perhaps not as strongly associated with universities like John Herschel or Tycho Brahe got their money from the state one way or the other (aristocrats, or given money to advance the knowledge and/or image of the state).
by halyconWays | 2025-05-13 19:47:01+00:00
I tried it for a while with the best AR glasses I could find at the time, XReal Air 2 Pros with an Xreal Beam, and although I could see the potential, it wasn't good enough to get work done. The screen size was too small, the resolution too poor, and it was a little too jittery and unnatural feeling.

Are the Xreal One's that much of a step forward that you can use it for serious work? Even on my Quest Pro I find it just on the edge of being too annoying to do coding-work. Web browsing is decent.

And second question, worth buying the One or waiting for the One Pros?
by darkmighty | 2025-05-13 19:47:16+00:00
There are many kinds of vulnerabilities. Most are pretty mundane afaict. Breaking sandboxes and reading out your entire RAM is basically game over, existential vulnerability (second only to arbitrary code execution, though it can give you SSH keys I guess).

The mitigating factor is actually that you don't go to malicious websites all the time, hopefully. But it happens, including with injected code on ads and stuff that may enabled by secondary vulnerabilities.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-13 19:47:38+00:00
That’s what it does unprompted.

Prompt engineering involves (among other things) anticipating this and encouraging the model to ask clarifying questions before it begins.

Separately but related, models are getting better at recognizing and expressing their own uncertainty; but again they won’t do that automatically; you need to ask for that behavior in your prompt.

And finally; models aren’t yet where they should be with regard to stopping to ask questions. A lot of the Devin style agentic products are going to push & eval their models for their ability to do this, so it’s a capability you can reasonably expect to see from future models and will make a lot of my post obsolete.

So right now you need to ask the model to ask you clarifying questions and tell you what it’s uncertain of - before it goes off and does work for you.
by ourguile | 2025-05-13 19:48:18+00:00
I use Obsidian for kanban (with urgent tasks) and for drafting longer writing, while using Remnote for tracking most other general information. Both work really well for me, for different purposes. I use Obsidian more as a visual information processing medium.

I will say, it's really helpful to open up excalidraw through Obsidian and create a quick flow chart or drawing with my team.
by taurath | 2025-05-13 19:48:20+00:00
I think your statements belie a sense of honor in both trying to find enjoyment and in developing master with what you do. But I also don't think the underlying dichotomy is the how the GP phrased their characterization of others as "bad" and "making it someone elses problem".

That implies not only a value judgement dichotomy but also an added heap of shame of the morality on those on the wrong side of that value judgement.

Those are not the same things as being okay doing the work you're paid for and not reaching higher - people who do that may have a much better sense of the business value they are providing, and may be trying to avoid an experience of being exploited, or prioritizing their health and well being for the long term rather than the short term needs of the organization that pays them. There's often not a good way to know who is who.

Most of the time when enticed with a reward, people will work harder. When they aren't enticed enough, they tend not to, and that level is different for everyone. Companies seek those who have internal reward structures so they don't have to offer very much to entice people.
by stanac | 2025-05-13 19:48:38+00:00
I always thought that MS will make something like that. Android phone with "business" app store and docking support for external screen and peripherals. IIRC one of the last windows phones was from HP with dock support. I guess after the windows phone they just gave up.... There was an attempt at making dual screen ms android phone which was a failure (at least from business perspective).