MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2025-06-16 22:38:11+00:00
As I said elsewhere:

> Posting on Arxiv is a great way to signal that you don't intend to monetise something, aren't pretending to be an influencer and not posing as some thought leader.

In short, I'm not trying to build a community, I'm not trying to get followers, I'm not trying to build an email list.

I want to publish something to the world, but I'm not going to run the gauntlet of peer review publishing.

Arxiv aligns with my goal for this.
by toast0 | 2025-06-16 22:38:12+00:00
You're welcome. :) IIRC, the check was written so that if the platform was one of the enumerated platforms (android, s60, s40, bb) give a 1 year, otherwise give a lifetime, which was intended to be iPhone gets lifetime, but then windows phone happened.

IIRC, you had to have signed up with windows phone, switching phones to windows phone wouldn't grant you lifetime (switching to iPhone while the app was paid on iOS would; a delay on that was added to avoid abuse of borrow your friend's iPhone, re-register and then switch back).
by JohnMakin | 2025-06-16 22:38:48+00:00
"The cloud" isn't the problem nor is migration to it. The problem is single points of failure in a vast, super-connected, global network.

To demonstrate my point, say someone like cloudflare opted to get "off cloud" and run their own datacenters. Half the web would still go down if they had some issue in their datacenters. If anything, the economy of scale and resiliency of a huge cloud network is far beyond what any single operator can ensure for their own service. If this wasn't the case, cloud services couldn't be as profitable as they are.

It isn't the panacea people seem to think it is. One critical service going down, regardless of whether it's cloud hosted or not, has ripple effects in the broader network.
by o11c | 2025-06-16 22:38:51+00:00
Hmm, "cloudfail" is already in use, and "cloudfuckyou" while descriptive is profane enough that it will cause unnecessary friction with certain people, and "clownflare" is too vague/silly (and is less applicable to other service providers).

So I propose "cloudfart" - just rude enough it can't be casually dismissed, but still tolerable in polite company. "I can't access your website (through the cloudfart |, it's just cloudfarting at me)."

Other names (not all applicable for this exact use): cloudfable, cloudunfair, cloudfalse, cloudfarce, cloudfault, cloudfear, cloudfeeble, cloudfeudalism, cloudflake, cloudfluke, cloudfreeze, cloudfuneral.
by imiric | 2025-06-16 22:39:50+00:00
> Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable!

The kind of person who prefers this setup wants to read (and write) the least amount of code on their own. So their ideal workflow is one where they get to make programs through natural language. Making codebases understandable for this group is mostly a waste of effort.

It's a wild twist of fate that programming languages were intended to make programming friendly to humans, and now humans don't want to read them at all. Code is becoming just an intermediary artifact useless to machines, which can instead write machine code directly.

I wish someone could put this genie back in the bottle.
by kergonath | 2025-06-16 22:39:56+00:00
> Personally I think that every single person on earth is both the dullest person you have ever met and the most interesting person on earth, it just depends on your perspective.

You are most certainly right, but I don’t think that this is in contradiction with how the Club works. Everyone is dull and interesting depending on the situation and the audience. The Club is for when you found or saw something interesting and important to you, but your audience disagree, does not notice, or does not care.

Nobody is fundamentally dull, but everybody is being dull at some point.
by rramadass | 2025-06-16 22:39:59+00:00
This seems to be a riff off of the "Diogenes Club" invented by Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes Stories - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_Club

"There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere."
by rchaud | 2025-06-16 22:40:23+00:00
Have you considered that you may be making the surface-level analysis? I paid $3 for Whatsapp in 2010 on the Blackberry app store. They had a staff of ~20 people handling messages across almost 200 countries.It became the defacto global messaging app because it was available on every single platform, not just the Apple/Google duopoly VCs cared about.
Show HN: I built Feynman for YouTube – a sidebar AI tutor for students
by Bslou | 2025-06-16 22:40:34+00:00
Hi HN, I’m a UCLA student and I built this extension for myself to make studying from YouTube videos more interactive:

On-video Q&A: Ask “What does this step mean?” or “Why is that formula used?” and get concise answers based on the video’s title & description.

Practice problems: Automatically generate quick exercises (with hints) tailored to the video’s content so you can learn by doing.

Clean math rendering: Full LaTeX support (inline or display) so equations look exactly as they should.

Zero friction: Just install the extension, open any /watch page, and the AI tutor appears in the sidebar—no extra tabs or uploads.

Auto-reset: Switch to a new video and the chat history and context reset automatically, so it always stays relevant.
by kwijibob | 2025-06-16 22:40:43+00:00
YouTube announced in March that they have 125 million premium subscribers.

I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads.

I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing.

Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver.

https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-sub...
How to get my ECG data?
by fraserphysics | 2025-06-16 22:41:04+00:00
I wore a heart monitor for a month and want the data. I've called and exchanged email with "Bio Telemetry, a Phillips company", and all I've received is a stack of paper with a "Daily Patient Report" for each day. (Well I've also received a statement from BCBS saying that they won't pay Bio Telemetry $9,000). My first/primary question to HN is:

Do you have advice on how to get the actual data?

My second question for non-US readers:

Does $9,000 seem excessive?

Background: For 10 minutes in April I was seeing double. Fearing that it was a transient ischemic attack, MDs ordered lots of tests. The heart monitor was to check for arrhythmias that could cause a clot. I was surprised that the study found ventricular tachycardia; see: https://www.fraserphysics.com/page2_ecg_report.pdf

Coincidentally, I have been thinking about ECGs and have written code for analyzing them; see Section 6.3.1 of my book at https://www.fraserphysics.com/book.pdf. My third question is for anyone who knows about ECG analysis technology:

Is the analysis technique I describe in Section 6.3.1 interesting/novel?

PS. None of the test results are very disturbing. I believe that my event was related to the migraines that I have all too often.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-16 22:42:38+00:00
"There must be a way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy."

Internet is a paid service.

When I first accessed the internet in the 1980s, the only paid "service" necessary to use it was internet service. There was not the plethora of VC-funded third parties trying to act as intermediaries. The term "internet" amongst younger generations usually means only www sites, maybe app "endpoints" and _nothing else_. This is such a waste of potential.

Today's internet is more useful than the 1980s internet. But I do not attribute that to third party intermediaries that only seek to profit from other peoples' use of it. I attribute the increased utility to technological improvements in hardware, including networking equipment. I do not attribute the increased utility to "improvements" in software, and certainly not the proliferation of software distributed for free as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising services.

The idea of paying for what these intermediaries try to call "services" makes no sense to me. Certainly, paying these intermediaries will not prevent them from data collection and surveillance for commercial purposes. (There are already examples.) It only subsidises this activity. Perhaps people believe these intermediaries engage in data collection, surveillance and ad services because "no one will pay for their software" instead of considering that they do so because they can, because there are few laws to prevent them. It was unregulated activity and is stilll grossly underregulated activity. It is more profitable than software licensing.
by phillipcarter | 2025-06-16 22:43:25+00:00
Logging in OTel is logging with your logging framework of choice. The SDK just requires you initialize the wrapper and it’ll then wrap your existing logging calls and correlate term with a trace/span in active context, if it exists. There is no separate logging API to learn. Logs are exported in a separate pipeline from traces and metrics.

Implementation for many languages are starting to mature, too.
by probably_wrong | 2025-06-16 22:43:37+00:00
Isn't that true for everything, though? If I weren't a software developer I wouldn't know that I have to worry about questions like "has this plane been rebooted in the last 51 days?" [1] or "does this bank offer anything other than SMS as second factor?".

Maybe structural engineers feel safer after their Master's when they traverse a bridge, but I bet that's more the exception than the rule.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...
by 6510 | 2025-06-16 22:43:59+00:00
Things would improve a lot if we added offline abilities to html documents. I think atm there is no way to guarantee a website stays in the cache(?)

Designing a system to decide when to keep something is tricky. Maybe each visit and each click should extend the expiration date and increase the storage for static documents. Say, 10 visits should be enough to buy 1 mb of permanent storage to be spend on however many pages it takes starting with the frequently visited pages then a manifest or the order of links on the front page then the first from each sub page etc

It should also be possible to have the browser manage updates rather than every man for himself with each website testing the connection, checking for updates and stitching things back together again. There are quite a few schemes it could follow, smaller requests would require more complicated backends. Different pages with different update frequencies.

I think the single star bookmark button could have 1-5 stars with 5 assigning somewhat generous data to the website and 3+ allowing a prompt for very large things.

Then, since I'm serving static content anyway I really couldn't care less how the user obtains the files. If there is a copy of the website on a network all you need is a public key or to trust the user (at the price of annoying prompts warning you on every page view and every request)

If it all works well enough HN could be a tiny website managing only active discussions. If you have the key and a working connection to some other users most of the archive could be there. The catching priority could change to the rarest pages.
by jyounker | 2025-06-16 22:44:09+00:00
Yeah, you have to be really careful about how you use LLMs. I've been finding it very useful to use them as teachers, or to use them in the same way that I'd use a coworker. "What's the idiomatic ways to write this python comprehension in javascript?" Or, "Hey, do you remember what you call it when..." And when I request these things I'll try to ask in the most generic way possible so that I then get retype the relevant code, filling in the blanks with my own values.

That's just one use though. The other is treating it like it's a jr developer, which has its own shift in thinking. Practice in writing details specs goes a long way here.
by josephg | 2025-06-16 22:44:12+00:00
I don’t think you understand why things are funny.

Almost everything that gets a laugh in a comedy show isn’t funny because it’s clever. What happens is the comedian says something “obvious”. They say something that you were kinda already thinking - even if you weren’t consciously aware of it. We laugh because we’re acknowledged and feel seen for what we were already thinking, and when lots of people laugh it feels good because we feel connected to the group. Our laughter is a release of tension connected to feeling part of the group.

If you don’t believe me, do the experiment for yourself. Watch a comedy show. When people laugh, ask yourself why they laughed then.

My favorite example is this clip of Billy Connolly from back when he would play the banjo on stage. Just as he goes to play the first note, the string on his banjo snaps. There’s this awkward pause, and tension in the audience. Then he looks up at the crowd and says “Well that’s just gone and F-ed it, hasn’t it?” And everyone laughs. My take is this: We were all holding tension. He said the obvious thing. We laugh because suddenly everyone realises we aren’t alone in our tension - suddenly we’re all (including the comedian) in this experience together.

“Offensive” humour is even more subversive than people think because it makes it common knowledge that we were all thinking some thought. It’s an opportunity to collectively acknowledge of our humanity. And that’s something some people (perversely) want us to deny.
by pixelpoet | 2025-06-16 22:45:31+00:00
> Until relatively recently, many people could get to grips with a computer only by attending a university. Now everyone has a smartphone, meaning non-graduates are adept with tech, too.

Sorry but, that's just hilarious (being able to ride a bicycle doesn't mean you can casually get in an F-35 and take off!), and must stem from a lack of understanding of computers. No wonder the author is grumpy about AI vs journalism, the AI would do a far better job here.

Anecdote: my first computer came with QBasic, and I taught myself programming basics from its excellent help; what's shipping with every mobile phone teaching Gen Z+ about programming, or even basic understanding of how files and directories work?

For some more substance to that argument, if a little dated (2021): https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

I don't think it's because Google or Apple don't have enough resources to ship programming tools and expose more of the underlying OS, rather a deliberate decision to reinforce passive consumption.

> Across the EU the number of 15-to-24-year-olds employed in finance

As a German, I'm dying to hear more about these 15-18 year olds illegally employed in finance! Shouldn't they be finishing high school (18) or Abitur (19)? I'm not kidding, please tell me more about these 15 year olds employed in finance, in particular!
by tptacek | 2025-06-16 22:46:23+00:00
Ok so this all makes sense but it is basically the exact message I got off the other Zitron post. Tech skepticism I get! But these posts are like 8,000 words; are people skepticizing tech... recreationally?

The post upthread that suggested this was basically just a criticism of how journalism operates was clearer to me (still a point I think he could have made in half as many words, but at least a distinct point).
by cortesoft | 2025-06-16 22:47:14+00:00
> Evil is a threshold, it's not a competition with limited spots

No, but our enforcement has limited resources. We can't arrest and jail every offender of every crime, so we pick and choose where to spend our enforcement resources. All the money spent pursuing, arresting, trying, and imprisoning this guy could have been spent going after people like the Sacklers.
by michaelt | 2025-06-16 22:47:31+00:00
Sometimes. I just fed the huggingface demo an image containing some rather improbable details [1] and it OCRed "Page 1000000000000" with one extra trailing zero.

Honestly I was expecting the opposite - a repetition penalty to kick in having repeated zero too many times, resulting in too few zeros - but apparently not. So you might want to steer clear of this model if your document has a trillion pages.

Other than that, it did a solid job - I've certainly seen worse attempts to OCR a table.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/8rJeHf8
by giantrobot | 2025-06-16 22:48:14+00:00
Serving user generated content is very expensive in terms of infrastructure. More expensive in many ways than streaming studio generated content.

The scales of the two models are very different. Ingesting content is more complicated with user generated content because there's few guarantees about formats (encoding, color, file formats). Serving the content is also more complicated because it's not as friendly to edge caches as studio content. Part of the expense of YouTube is the long tail of content. Popular content might live in edge caches but YouTube serves up old unpopular stuff too.
by kergonath | 2025-06-16 22:49:10+00:00
> The trust of peer review as a stamp of quality among academics is dwindling

The thing is, peer review is not a stamp of quality, and never was. It is just the basic level of due diligence. The referees cannot reproduce the results most of the time for a lot of very good reasons. They are here as a sanity check, to ensure that the work avoided common pitfalls and actually makes sense.

What most people do not understand is that articles are not good because they are peer-reviewed; it’s the lack of peer review that is a red flag. Amongst reviewed articles, a lot of them will turn out to be wrong or flawed in ways that are impossible for the reviewers to find out.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-06-16 22:49:51+00:00
I think that it's rude to include in your message, any thoughts or afterthoughts you haven't yourself read.

I reason that this is because: Including it in your message is implicitly asking others to read it; all people are equal; asking an equal to do something you can do, but aren't willing to do, is sometimes considered rude.

If you've personally verified the claims and sources there, then feel free to make the claims yourself, citing the sources. Why not do that? That way, everybody wins :)
by jhallenworld | 2025-06-16 22:49:52+00:00
I went looking for such a better list. One thing I found is this, for drinking water contaminants:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584401...

It would be nice to have a list like this for the Group 1 substances, I mean something that shows the amount vs. the risk and the number of cases caused by the substance.

For benzene in drinking water it has 0.15 μg/L corresponding to 10e−6 lifetime cancer risk. Estimated number of cancer cases from benzene in drinking water in the USA is 1 vs. 43500 from arsenic.
by psviderski | 2025-06-16 22:50:12+00:00
Thanks! For zero-downtime deploys, it does simple rolling updates one container at a time in a similar way k8s or swarm does it. It starts the new container alongside the old one, waits for it to become healthy, Caddy picks it up and updates its config, then removes the old one. The difference is that this process is driven by your CLI command (not a reconciliation loop in the cluster) so you get an instant feedback if something goes wrong.
by lelandbatey | 2025-06-16 22:50:50+00:00
There is no amount of static material that will perfectly conform to the shape and contours of every mind that consumes that static material such that they can learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it.

Having a thing that is interactive and which can answer questions is a very useful thing. A slide deck that sits around for the next person is probably not that great, I agree. But if you desperately want a slide deck, then an agent like Claude which can create it on demand is pretty good. If you want summaries of changes over time, or to know "what's the overall approach at a jargon-filled but still overview level explanation of how feature/behavior X is implemented?", an agent can generate a mediocre (but probably serviceable) answer to any of those by reading the repo. That's an amazing swiss-army knife to have in your pocket.

I really used to be a hater, and I really did not trust it, but just using the thing has left me unable to deny its utility.
by kergonath | 2025-06-16 22:52:25+00:00
> Anyone who has published a "scientific paper" in the last decade or so either "distrusts science" or is more likely than not a mid-wit at best.

That is very unhelpful, to say the least. The amount of noise has increased, but it does not mean that the scientists who know their subject disappeared. They are still around and not any less bright than their predecessors were 30 years ago.
by ab_testing | 2025-06-16 22:52:59+00:00
I book with hotels directly almost all the time and never receive marketing spam just regular mail about my upcoming start. Also booking with the hotel lets me select options not available on booking sites like king vs 2 queen bed options, ADA compliant rooms and even floor options. Also if you have AAA or some other memberships, those codes can easily beat discount sites like Booking.com
by hombre_fatal | 2025-06-16 22:53:31+00:00
You are so used to the idiosyncrasies of k8s that you are probably blind to them. And you are probably so experienced with the k8s stack that you can easily debug issues so you discount them.

Not long ago, I was using Google Kubernetes Engine when DNS started failing inside the k8s cluster on a routine deploy that didn't touch the k8s config.

I hacked on it for quite some time before I gave up and decided to start a whole new cluster. At which point I decided to migrate to Linode if I was going to go through the trouble. It was pretty sobering.

Kubernetes has many moving parts that move inside your part of the stack. That's one of the things that makes it complex compared to things like Heroku or Google Cloud Run where the moving parts run in the provider's side of the stack.

It's also complex because it does a lot compared to pushing a container somewhere. You might be used to it, but that doesn't mean it's not complex.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-16 22:53:42+00:00
That's certainly true but I think there's also a very real issue as described by GP. Research gets cited in a political setting as a rhetorical tool. That cycle does a lot to erode trust in the establishment because it incentivizes non-scientists (who are otherwise uninvolved) to behave as though the process is a partisan effort to be interfered with for the benefit of one's "team" rather than an objective pursuit to be funded at arms length for the betterment of society at large.

Obviously reproducing results as part of peer review is not a workable (or even coherent) solution. I don't pretend to have any idea what a solution might be. The obvious issue is that academic publications were never intended as political tools and should not be made into that.

On several occasions I've had interactions with laymen where I found myself thinking "if only you hadn't had access to pubmed and way too much motivation we'd both be better off right now" yet I firmly believe that free and open access to information is a huge net benefit to society on the whole.