MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tanaros | 2025-06-05 15:48:15+00:00
> In the spirit of good science and as a happy taxpayer for the cause of these organizations, we should still be open to their scrutiny. A simple question we should ask, after all we're good scientists, is whether these groups are at their appropriate funding-to-success level or not, particularly in an era of a spiraling debt crisis.

I agree, in principle. However, this is a trap.

Here’s a playbook:

1. Declare, loudly, that a problem exists. The problem doesn’t have to be real, but it’s better if it is.

2. Announce, even more loudly, that you are going to address the problem in a way that’s suspiciously self serving.

3. Implement your preferred solution as rapidly as possible. The “solution” can be as flawed as you like. It may or may not actually fix the original problem; that part is unimportant.

4. When people react to your implementation, they sort themselves into three buckets: supporters (partisan or otherwise), detractors (partisan or otherwise), and “reasonable people” who “see both sides.”

5. While the “reasonable people” are still debating whether it was a good idea to cure the patient’s brain tumor by decapitation, move on to the next “problem” that needs to be “fixed.”
by hedora | 2025-06-05 15:48:29+00:00
Obviously, it's not as good as a lab, but I have an Ambient Weather indoor PM 2.5/10/CO2 meter, and the numbers it's produced over the last few years are extremely plausible. Someone might end up correlating the two.

Overall, their whole setup is a nice plug and play experience. My only complaint is that I want a 900MHz <-> WiFi / PoE bridge so that I can place temp + humidity sensors further from the house. e.g., in cellars, forested spots, etc.

Here's what would make me consider replacing / augmenting my system with Air Lab devices:

- Weather proofing - Integrated solar panel charging solution so the 7.5 day battery life turns into 7.5 days without sun. - Battery life estimates for WiFi mode that mean the solar panel would work, or a (weatherproof) BLE <-> WiFi/PoE bridge, assuming the BLE range (through a wood wall) is at least 100 feet. - PoE on the sensor board would be nice to have. - I like that these have VOC/NOX sensors, which my current setup is missing. I don't like that they're missing PM sensors. - I don't care about the screen; a blinking LED for debugging would too. - If it were small enough to go in my pocket, I'd care about the screen. I wonder if cell phones will eat that use case though.
by pkdpic | 2025-06-05 15:48:41+00:00
I love it and I want to buy one for every on of my family and friends.

Just curious though does it cover finer particles and if not just curious why? Same question I guess for a general AQI rating. The one random (probably poor quality) portable AQI monitor I have covers different levels of fine particles and that seems really useful during fire season when its bad (in Nor Cal). But of course I'm not super knowledgeable about any of this.

Anyway fantastic project, I absolutely love it.
by jakeydus | 2025-06-05 15:48:50+00:00
> Personally, I don’t think he’s very excited about electric cars anymore.

I agree with this. I'd also think that Tesla's board has got to be concerned about his generally erratic behavior. I know that CEOs and high-profile engineers can be pretty erratic ("DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!") but the drug use and constant tabloid exposure can't be worth whatever actual talent he's bringing to the table anymore...right?
by gus_massa | 2025-06-05 15:49:09+00:00
> Could the research have been legitimate?

I assume yes.

> How is this research normally done?

You fill a lot of paperwork and get a lot of authorizations.

> Would that University of Michigan laboratory have the necessary biosafety level or no?

Perhaps. That is part of the details that go in the paperwork, and anyway not every request is aprobed because so some things are too risky.
by lyu07282 | 2025-06-05 15:49:29+00:00
It seems that one side of the EU wants to ensure there is no competitors to US big tech and the other wants to work towards independence from US big tech. Both seem to use the privacy cudgel, require so much regulation that only US tech can hope to comply so nobody else competes with them, alternatively make it so nobody can comply, we just use fax machines again instead of the cloud?

Just hyperbole, but it seems the regulations are designed with the big cloud providers in mind, but then why don't they just ban US big tech and roll out the regulations more slowly? This neoliberalism makes everything so unnecessarily complicated.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-05 15:50:49+00:00
> Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison.

That's got to be an extremely weak effect. No snake gets an individual benefit from eating the newts. They get a collective benefit, that predators recognize the species as poisonous, in which all snakes, poisonous and delicious alike, share equally.

The problem is large enough that actually-poisonous animals routinely have delicious mimics of entirely different species who free-ride off of the work the originals do to be poisonous.

You can't explain why snakes apparently need to avoid sending a dishonest signal with a theory that predicts that mimics don't exist.
by hedora | 2025-06-05 15:50:51+00:00
I was worried our sensors had that autocalibration mode. Our house has new concrete floors. They alternate between absorbing + outgassing CO2 (depending on room temperature), so sometimes our living room reads below 400 ppm.

From what I can tell, the sensors haven't drifted, so they're not using the "below 420 ppm => recalibrate" heuristic.
by nalekberov | 2025-06-05 15:50:59+00:00
Here you go: https://consumerrights.wiki/Signal_Data_Collection

I would never, ever trust anything that asks me to login using my phone number - which by nature is identifier. They have their own motivation to require phone number - but I will never buy this kind of things.

That said, being open source doesn't mean it's private - at the very least they can collect enough metadata tied to my phone number. If my messages are sent via centralized servers owned by someone other than me who already have my identifier, there is no reason I have to trust them.

Saying something against Signal always hurts some people's feelings, as if Signal is sacred object.

There, I said it. You are free to downvote me. But that won't change the fact that they have collected data, just like WhatsApp et al.
by thewebguyd | 2025-06-05 15:51:10+00:00
> The fact they are so popular is indicative that most people value the service over their privacy, or simply don't care.

Or, the general populace just doesn't understand the actual implications. The HN crowd can be guilty of severely overestimating the average person's tech literacy, and especially their understanding of privacy policies and ToS. Many may think they are OK with it, but I'd argue it's because they don't understand the potential real-world consequences of such privacy violations.
by jeffhuys | 2025-06-05 15:51:14+00:00
If you never noticed the thought police, you were of the kind of people that Twitter wanted there to exclusively be. That's okay, but not a realistic view of the world. However, people with differing ideologies were pushed away. Yes, that includes literal nazis. But that also includes people who don't agree with the status-quo and want to see something different. The old twitter gave the impression of a world where 99% of the people agree with the current state of things, which is just not reality.

X is the only platform where you can see the real state of the world, raw, unedited. That's INCREDIBLY valuable and I'm absolutely baffled by how everyone here seems to celebrate censorship. We fought wars over this.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-05 15:51:45+00:00
> pointers are real

Pointers are an abstraction that are no more or less real than any other abstraction. They belong to particular languages, but they are not intrinsic to computer science as such as if they were some kind of atomic construct of the field.

> you can't just put a LISP book on top of an x86 chip [...the rest is confusing...]

I'm not talking about what, in today's contingent market and incidental state of the art, is practical. Obviously, if you want to run any program in any language, you have to target some architecture. The point is that the architecture is utterly incidental as far as the language per se is concerned. Lisp is not "less real" because you need to translate it into machine code. The machine code of a particular architecture is only there to simulate Lisp on that architecture. You can in principle have different architectures with their own machine code that can be used to simulate the very same Lisp.

> Computer science is, to be honest, not interesting or useful without a machine to use it on.

Computer science is very interesting without a machine, but how interesting you find it is neither here nor there. The point isn't to do away with machines, or that the machine has no practical importance. The point is to say that the machine is only a tool, and not the subject matter of computer science.
by kees99 | 2025-06-05 15:51:47+00:00
A lot of quack tech is technically somewhat useful. Oxygen-free copper, occasionally used in "audiophile" cables - technically is a better electrical conductor (compared to regular copper), by a whooping low single-digit %.

Exact same effect could be achieved by making conductor that very same single-digit % thicker. Which is an order of magnitude cheaper. And ohmic resistance is not that important for audio-cables anyway.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-06-05 15:51:51+00:00
This very much "depends".

Many algo strategies are indeed programmatically simple (e.g. use some sort of moving average), but the parametrization and how it's used is the secret sauce and you don't want that information to leak. They might be tuned to exploit a certain market behavior, and you want to keep this secret since other people targeting this same behavior will make your edge go away. The edge can be something purely statistical or it can be a specific timing window that you found, etc.

It's a bit like saying that a Formula 1 engine is not that far from what you'd find in a textbook. While it's true that it shares a lot of properties with a generic ICE, the edge comes from a lot of proprietary research that teams treat as secret and definitely don't want competitors to find out.
by ahofmann | 2025-06-05 15:51:58+00:00
As others have noted, my take is slightly unreasonable, but reflects the reality of them. To be a bit less "stressed, bored and angry ape"-ish, I still see the problem with IPs, that are not as rememberable as possible, and I also think the website should have one of their IPs front and center and reachable without scrolling.

DNS Servers are a strange product. It is very high stakes and very low stakes at the same time.

Without DNS nothing works anymore. Slow servers are a mayor pain. DNS is *the* single point of failure in our electronic lives. So everything is high stakes.

At the same time, DNS is boring as hell. Everyone can run their own DNS server in minutes, there are resolving DNS servers everywhere, you can choose whichever, they will all work like 99,999% the same. It mostly makes no difference, at all, which DNS server someone uses.

So if someone wants to break into that market, they need to be as convincing as possible. Why should I change? How much energy does it take to change? How likely is it, that this new service will be faulty, slow, or does things different, so my users and I are blocked and therefore angry? And if they are angry, can I tell them "oh, google messed up, the internet is broken, nothing I can do here, just wait a bit", or do I have to say "sorry for selecting an unreliable service, I will repair it for you (for free)".

Google DNS and Cloudflare captured the marked with "we are the fastest, and biggest, you will never experience downtime or slowness". And they proved (mostly) that I can count on that.

Quad9 take is "we are fast, big, and we will fight for freedom". Maybe. I honestly forgot, because I can already choose from two others. I just know, that if 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 fails, I try 9.9.9.9, if that also fails, my network config is definitely fried.

In this space, it is ultra hard to create a new product. Remove friction, get more users. This is all, I wanted to say.
by busterarm | 2025-06-05 15:52:02+00:00
How many people in the US do you think actually forage wild plants and fungi?

The number of hospitalizations is somewhere around 10k a year. For ~1500 of those it's at least life threatening. ~100ish end up with organ failure or permanent neurological problems. ~10 of them die. That's every year.

That might be mildly dangerous compared to other hobbies, but if you isolate for actual practitioners of the hobby, suddenly those numbers look extremely dangerous.
by edwardahn9 | 2025-06-05 15:52:32+00:00
Hey HN,

I built real-time photorealistic avatars running entirely on Quest 3 hardware. It uses feed-forward Gaussian Splatting to hit >60fps on mobile VR chipsets and runs through WebXR, so users can join calls directly from their browser without downloading apps.

The surprising part: users say it feels more "real" than video calls despite being rendered. Something about proper depth and eye contact tricks your brain into feeling present with the other person.

The main technical challenge was balancing visual fidelity with Quest's performance constraints while keeping it accessible via web standards. Most systems either need desktop hardware or fall into the uncanny valley.

It’s not publicly available yet, but curious what HN thinks about the approach and potential applications in and beyond social VR.
by wat10000 | 2025-06-05 15:52:34+00:00
If it's remixed then it would be a derivative work and you'd need permission from the original copyright holder, just like if you literally remixed a song, or made a movie based on a novel.

IMO the only reason there's even a question about whether LLMs can legally be trained on copyrighted works without permission is that the training is being done by (agents working on behalf of) rich people. If you or I scraped up every copyrighted work we could get our hands on without ever asking permission, trained an LLM on it, and then tried to sell access to the result? Just ask Aaron Swartz how that sort of thing goes, and his actions were orders of magnitude less.

Humans don't forget copyrighted material but we also don't normally memorize it. It takes substantial time and effort to be able to reproduce copyrighted material with just your brain.
by robomartin | 2025-06-05 15:52:41+00:00
From the article:

"In the filing, OpenAI alleged that the court rushed the order based only on a hunch raised by The New York Times and other news plaintiffs. And now, without "any just cause," OpenAI argued, the order "continues to prevent OpenAI from respecting its users’ privacy decisions." That risk extended to users of ChatGPT Free, Plus, and Pro, as well as users of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API), OpenAI said."

This is the consequence and continuation of the dystopian reality we have been living for many years. One where a random person, influencer, media outlet, politician attacks someone, a company or an entity to cause harm and even total destruction (losing your job, company boycott, massive loss of income, reputation destruction, etc.). This morning, on CNBC, Palantir's CEO discussed yet another false accusation made against the company by --surprise-- the NY Times, characterizing it as garbage. Prior to that was the entirety of the media jumping on Elon Musk accusing him of being a Nazi for a gesture used by dozens and dozens of politicians and presenters, most recently Corey Booker.

Lies and manipulation. I do think that people are waking up to this and massively rejecting professional mass manipulators. We now need to take the next step and have them suffer real legal consequences for constant lies and, for Picard's sake, also address any influence they might have over the courts.
by Spooky23 | 2025-06-05 15:52:57+00:00
Markdown is like the new WordPerfect for some people, who want expressive written paths to format text.

Like with WordPerfect, there are people who get great utility (attorneys in WP, developers with Markdown), but 80-95% of people don’t get anything out of it.

It’s also one of those things where the constraints are an advantage. Markdown is great for internet facing text content, while many aspects of the mainstream wysiwyg editors are really descended from solutions for placing text on paper.
by riskable | 2025-06-05 15:54:19+00:00
The legal situation you describe is a matter of impossibility and unrelated to the OpenAI case.

In the case of a warez site they would never have logged such a "conversation" to begin with. So if the court requested that they produce all such communications the warez site would simply declare that as, "Impossibility of Performance".

In the case of OpenAI the courts are demanding that they preserve all future communications from all their end users—regardless of whether or not those end users are parties (or even relevant) to the case. The court is literally demanding that they re-engineer their product to record all communications where none existed previously.

I'm not a lawyer but that seems like it would violate FRCP 26(b)(1) which covers "proportionality". Meaning: The effort required to record the evidence is not proportional relative to the value of the information sought.

Also—generally speaking—courts recognize that a party is not required to create new documents or re-engineer systems to satisfy a discovery request. Yet that is exactly what the court has requested of OpenAI.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-06-05 15:54:21+00:00
css is Turing complete, XSL-T is Turing complete, so I don't think Turing completeness is a good measure of if something is a general purpose programming language. I would argue for environmental completeness - does the language have the possibility of accessing everything in the operating system it runs in? If so, it is environmentally complete and usable as a general purpose programming language.

Despite something being a general purpose programming language there are some tasks it may be better at than others. Visual Basic is a general purpose programming language but really you would most often use it for a particular subset of purposes. Elixir it seems is not good for writing a CLI.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-06-05 15:54:24+00:00
No conceivable harm in what sense? It seems obvious that it is harmful for a user who requests and is granted privacy to then have their private messages delivered to NYT. Legally it may be on shakier ground from the individual's perspective, but OpenAI argues that the harm is to their relationship with their customers and various governments, as well as the cost of the implementation effort:

>For OpenAI, risks of breaching its own privacy agreements could not only "damage" relationships with users but could also risk putting the company in breach of contracts and global privacy regulations. Further, the order imposes "significant" burdens on OpenAI, supposedly forcing the ChatGPT maker to dedicate months of engineering hours at substantial costs to comply, OpenAI claimed. It follows then that OpenAI's potential for harm "far outweighs News Plaintiffs’ speculative need for such data," OpenAI argued.
by pchangr | 2025-06-05 15:54:36+00:00
Feminism, in my understanding, advocates for gender equality. It doesn’t deny differences among genders but addresses the flaws in the system that unfairly punish or prioritizes one gender over other. And achieving gender equality sometimes requires gender specific accommodations. I.E. Feminism would promote gender specific accommodations so that it becomes equally accessible for all genders.

Having said that… I don’t know why your comment is flagged but I can tell you that your first sentence is written in a way that already makes it difficult to understand what you want to express.

It also feels a bit snarky to me.
by e40 | 2025-06-05 15:54:54+00:00
In this case, I remembered high-level plot details and nothing else. I read it when I was 7 or 8. I really did, over many years use web searches to find this book. Probably from 2007 to 2013. I think that was the time when Google was good. FWIW, this is the prompt:

What is the name of the book about a young American Indian boy whose grows up in the the of Indian culture being wiped our. His parents are killed and he becomes a bull rider, has many injuries, goes back home to find peace in nature where he grew up?
by ricw | 2025-06-05 15:54:56+00:00
I've been using elixir / phoenix / liveview for a year now, basically since LLM coding has been a thing and it's been transformative. The usual "getting started" problems were so diminished that i feel like i hardly missed a beat. The usual "this won't compile / how do i do this in a new unknown language" issues that previously could have taken hours to resolve were basically gone. My LLM pair programmer just took care of it. Coming from python / django / cue, it's a breath of fresh air. It's so much easier as all the paradigms come built in with the stack (async workers, etc). The elixir / erlang library is surprisingly complete.

With regards to producing code, it seems to be doing very well. The most impressive thing it did for me was a PDF OCR from scratch using google cloud. All i had to do was plug in my credentials, hook up the code and it just worked. Magic.

Highly recommended.
by myrmidon | 2025-06-05 15:55:20+00:00
You are absolutely correct, and framing makes a huge difference on how such statements are perceived ("women are 65% the strength of men" vs "men are 50% stronger" vs "1 in hundred women stronger than average man").

But pointing out that there is a 30% area overlap glosses over the main point in this context in my opinion: If you are going to have any benchmark ("need to be this strong to safely pilot"), then that benchmark is either going to be trivial for most men or it's going to be almost impossible to meet for almost every woman.

I put this number here because it was quite surprising to me when I learned about this; naively, I would have expected something like 1/10 women to be stronger than an average man, but that is off by a lot.
by drcongo | 2025-06-05 15:55:22+00:00
Agreed. We use both Sentry and Bugsnag (or whatever terrible name it has now) on different projects, and over time Sentry's interface has gotten considerably worse while Bugsnags got slightly better. I don't know if Sentry is aimed at significantly different users to us (an agency with many projects, mostly Django), but the sheer information overload when trying to understand an error is so bad that I ended up building a tool that receives Sentry webhooks and displays the information in a logical, sparse and easily digestible way.

Bugsink looks nice and straight forward, and if anything other than email - the absolute worst medium for notifications - lands in there I'll probably make the switch.
by busterarm | 2025-06-05 15:55:33+00:00
Who cares? We don't live "before salt". Human use of salt _predates writing_ by about 3000 years.

You wouldn't choose to do manual typesetting (or copying books by hand!!!) today either versus alternatives.

If you're _just_ looking to add umami flavor to a dish today, you'd be crazy to pick foraging for wild mushrooms over Aji no Moto.
by rafram | 2025-06-05 15:55:34+00:00
SvelteKit for sure, and any other JS framework that uses the built-in Request class (which doesn’t check the Content-Type when you call json()).

I don’t know the exact frameworks, but I consume a lot of random undocumented backend APIs (web scraper work) and 95% of the time they’re fine with JSON requests with Content-Type: text/plain.