MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-28 07:05:33+00:00
What do you think will happen when the EU regulates the “centralized” social media companies? Kids will just flock to other services that don’t care about EU regulations or use a VPN.

We see something similar in the US with age verification for viewing porn in some states. Mainstream porn sites that I’m sure you have heard of that aren’t based in the US just ignore the laws and VPN sales skyrocket in those states.
by vintermann | 2025-07-28 07:05:41+00:00
Sinks is about flows. The question is about reservoirs. Forests are a long term carbon reservoir. Yes, it's possible to regrow it and let it stay that way. But we don't do that if we regularly chop it down for wood pellets. If we regularly do that, then the carbon in it will spend more of its time in the atmosphere and cause trouble, even if it wasn't pumped from a fossil reservoir.

This is why you can't ignore land use changes in carbon budgets. It's a sound argument, it's not ridiculous at all.
by cs02rm0 | 2025-07-28 07:05:59+00:00
The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.

On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.

Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
by gorgoiler | 2025-07-28 07:06:02+00:00
The VPN trick potentially won’t last long. We’ve seen it go stale already in the world of intellectual property rights. For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)

One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.

The more troubling thing about these laws is enforcement. The threat of fines only works against websites that map to a business entity. For anything else there will surely see a ramp up in the size of The Great British Firewall Ruleset, edited by the courts, and distributed to the Big N (5?) ISPs.

What will become of the smaller ISPs that refuse to block illegal sites?
by frosted-flakes | 2025-07-28 07:06:44+00:00
The bit about Mozaik hits home. I use that software every day. It's terrible and I hate it and it's so bad that you have to quadruple check everything before cutting anything... but it does work, and it's cheap. The custom cabinetry company I work for has nested thousands of sheets of material using it, which has allowed the company to grow well beyond the manual cutting they used to do.

But the software is horrendously bad, and I struggle to understand how so many serious faults that have existed since the very beginning have never been fixed. Faults that hinder usability to the point you want to bash your head in. The fact that Mozaik is still in business (and has even been acquired!) is simply because there is no competition in the space—alternatives are either incredibly expensive (tens of thousands of dollars per year), or not suited to production use.
by close04 | 2025-07-28 07:07:56+00:00
> an overzealous technocrat than authoritarianism

Maybe an easy to manipulate technocrat with an authoritarian figure guiding them from behind.

> the goal of the legislation is to ensure adult content is not provided or actively pushed to children

It always starts with the children or terrorists. It's an easy way to sneak the idea in your head. You wouldn't want children to be harmed or terrorists to win, would you? Once you got used to the though, everything else follows.

Name something you want or like I can lazily turn it into a "think of the children" situation.
by aqrashik | 2025-07-28 07:09:46+00:00
Thanks! The radio buttons as well as check boxes do show an outline so that they can be used in PDFs where no existing outline exists. If the PDF already has these outlines, the widgets can be resized so that the outlines of the widget match the existing ones.

You can erase existing signatures by overlaying a new signature widget on top of it and specifying a solid color as the background.

The frontend uses React, with Firebase handling most of the backend stuff.
by Nullabillity | 2025-07-28 07:09:55+00:00
Any modern (made within the last ~20 years) electric stove is going to just have a flat top with markings, just like an induction stove.[0] Before that you'd have a flat surface with a cast iron disk protruding for each hot surface.[1] Less trivial than the flat surface, but still not too bad. I've seen.. maybe.. one with an exposed coil in my entire life, and that thing was ancient. Faaaaar from "generally use".

[0]: https://www.electrolux.se/services/eml/asset/782bdf32-f709-4...

[1]: https://www.electrolux.se/services/eml/asset/fe80a43d-0b1c-4...
by nitikasharma13 | 2025-07-28 07:10:03+00:00
Perplexity Pro is now free for all Airtel users. Chances are, you’ve already heard the news and maybe even activated it. If not, now is a great time to do so. This partnership brings major benefits to both sides. Perplexity gains access to millions of Airtel users, while Airtel strengthens its offering by giving subscribers access to one of the most popular AI tools available today. But what about users who are already paying for tools like ChatGPT Plus or Gemini? Should they consider canceling their subscriptions? Is the free Perplexity Pro plan good enough to replace these well-established AI platforms?

That’s the focus of this blog. Rather than diving into technical benchmarks or feature lists, we’re comparing Perplexity Pro and ChatGPT Plus based on real-world tasks and honest user experience. This is a practical test to help you decide which tool is the better daily companion: Perplexity Pro or ChatGPT Plus.
by waste_monk | 2025-07-28 07:11:36+00:00
Are they intended to be? Assuming the burners are different sizes - I would not expect the same setting to equal the same wattage on different size burners, as intuition would dictate that a large burner would be more powerful for tasks like wok cooking. What does the operator manual say?

It really depends on the quality of the appliance; something like the Breville Control Freak can give you induction cooking with temperature control down to the degree, whereas my cheap countertop Tefal induction hob just gives a few settings with broad power ranges and you have to figure out what works best for you.
by yorwba | 2025-07-28 07:11:42+00:00
> The German constitution guarantees Freedom of Speech?

Article 5 of the Basic Law guarantees freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by broadcast and film. It immediately restricts those freedoms with "limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons and in the right to personal honour." https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...

Many kinds of speech aren't covered by the enumerated freedoms in the first place, and "protection of young persons" is the basis for age-verification requirements.

Though given that the US constitution claims to guarantee freedom of speech while many things that people would ordinarily consider speech remain illegal, maybe "freedom of expression within limits" and "freedom of speech" is a distinction without difference in practice. But I think the former approach is more honest.
by MOARDONGZPLZ | 2025-07-28 07:12:01+00:00
So I see what you’re saying. You’re talking about the whole system. Take land and then plant trees, the trees sequester carbon as they grow, some of them fall to the forest floor continuing to sequester carbon. But, I think the issue with your argument is, this process isn’t indefinite. The natural cycle is that these trees will decay, fall, rot (releasing carbon naturally) or natural forest fires will burn them anyways (releasing carbon naturally). Then more trees will take their places and sequester carbon, ad infinitum in the cycle that has taken place for the last 2 billion years since the Paleoproterozoic era.

But I see no difference between humans speeding this cycle by planting quick growth trees, cutting them down, releasing their stored carbon, planting more. It’s the same thing being sequestered and released continuously.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-28 07:12:10+00:00
Not only apps like Blender.

I really want to be able to pencil write on the coding apps on the go, now that handwritting reckognition has gotten good enough, but so far most of them provide a very lame experience.

It is like people don't really think out of the box on how to take advantage of new mediums.

Same applies to all those AI chat boxes, I don't want to type even more, I want to plain talk with my computer, or have AI based workflows integrated into tooling that feel like natural interactions.
by Mr_Minderbinder | 2025-07-28 07:12:45+00:00
Paradoxically (or not) this is precisely what makes their scholarship better than that of a “distant” observer. The problem is that truly neutral authors are also often indifferent ones. Since the Ottomans had such a large influence on the history of Hungary, the scholars of that nation are far more interested in that topic and therefore will study and research it to a much greater level of detail than a scholar working in English from the Anglo cultural sphere where that history is less relevant to them. Also “distant” observers will lack a lot of the context necessary to interpret the events and topics in question. The best books on the American Civil War will be written by American scholars working in English, their biases notwithstanding. To make matters worse there is a natural human bias rooted in in-group vs out-group psychology where information provided by an out-group (information in a foreign language) is viewed with more scepticism than that provided by an in-group, even when the topic at hand concerns the out-group.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-28 07:14:33+00:00
So not also using Github, LinkedIn, TypeScript (any FE framework that uses it), any Microsoft owned studios games, no Linux kernel contributions, GHC contributions,....

It is kid of hard to avoid nowadays.

Here a session with him related to VSCode history,

"The Story of Visual Studio Code with Erich Gamma and Kai Maetzel"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTYx7MCIK7Y
by vintermann | 2025-07-28 07:14:52+00:00
We have laws regulating what personal information you are allowed to ask for, and what you're allowed to do with it. These laws have teeth too, at least in the EU.

Passively snooping on health info you have no business looking on gets health personnel sanctioned regularly in the present system. It would be even more risky if they actively had to ask for the information they didn't need.

Of course, for medical information there often has to be emergency overrides because you might need immediate help and you (or your designated trusted person) might not be accessible and capable of giving active consent.
by febusravenga | 2025-07-28 07:18:32+00:00
But corn is _stored_ energy that can be used at any time. PV is energy ar the current moment. Seems like this 20x loss the cost of storage...

Interesting take though, I'm not saying that growing corn is best way to "produce stored energy", but in your comparison it's almost like direct competition to for PV + batteries of any sort.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-28 07:19:23+00:00
My personal code doesn't get uploaded to GitHub anymore, and I open my LinkedIn twice a year or so.

I don't do Web Development, I live in the trenches. Since I don't own a desktop system anymore, I don't honestly game.

I'm exposed to them via systemd and Linux Kernel, yes, but at least both are licensed with GPL.

At least I'm trying to minimize my exposure.

For more context, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44634786

Thanks for the video, btw. I'll take a look the moment I have time.
by griffzhowl | 2025-07-28 07:19:37+00:00
I think the rotations in the Lorentz group just reflect the isotropy of space, which comes down to the quite natural idea that if you observe a physical system from a different direction it doesn't change its dynamics. The full symmetry group of special relativity is the Poincare group, which includes the spatial translations, reflecting homogeneity of space.

The gauge groups are interesting in being extra symmetries beyond the spacetime ones, and yet they're closely related to spacetime symmetries, e.g. SU(2) being the double cover of the rotations SO(3). I also find it interesting that the groups that are physically basic, such as SU(2) being the one required to represent the phenomenon of spin, are also mathematically significant, in this case since SU(2) is the unique simply-connected group associated with the shared Lie algebra of SU(2) and SO(3). That shows some kind of deep connection between mathematics and physics. I'm just at the beginning stages of learning QFT and differential geometry so I don't have a feel for why that is or what it means at an intuitive level, and haven't seen any explanation for it. I think at the moment it's just a feature of our deepest experimentally-verified theory and so it would need a deeper theory to explain it.
by csb6 | 2025-07-28 07:19:43+00:00
As a counterpoint, Dijkstra [0] makes a distinction between what he calls “postulational” and “operational” (more like what TFA is describing) formal methods. (Sidenote: I think people nowadays would use “denotational” instead of “postulational” (e.g. denotational vs. operational semantics), but Dijkstra wrote this in the 1980s)

Instead of thinking of a program as a set of potential execution traces, he advocated thinking of programs as formulas (e.g. pre/postconditions) that can be used to construct proofs without having to simulate any executions. His idea with weakest preconditions was to derive code from the desired logical properties, not to prove that a priori written code satisfies those properties, reckoning that his way would be less work and result in more elegant programs.

I am just an amateur but it seems like formal methods as a whole is often conflated with model checking and other operational formal methods.

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD101...
by bawolff | 2025-07-28 07:21:15+00:00
My reading of their comment: A piece of paper (or bit in a computer) means nothing if the person who wants to take your property puts a gun in your face.

I think this is a problem with most blockchain solutions. They purport to replace existing societal controls, but depend on them to actual enforce anything. So you are left in the situation where either traditional solutions work so why bother with a blockchain, or traditional solutions aren't working, in which case the blockchain isn't worth the imaginary paper its written on. Either way, the blockchain solution is worthless.

Edit: i commented before i rtfa. Shameful i know. Appearently this is not a blockchain thing. I still think most of my comment applies.
by conductr | 2025-07-28 07:22:23+00:00
> brokers need to be licenced real estate agents (even as a buyers agent in many states), so I suspect there's a relatively decent culture of people who are serious about selling their business going through brokers and resulting in listings on at least one of the major platforms.

Works like this in US too. Commercial brokers rely on their network and not listing things on a market. Even most commercial real estate property for sale in the US is unlisted. It’s a weird industry, there are listings site but they only reflect a minor percentage of what you’d find if you drive around looking at for sale signs.
by menaerus | 2025-07-28 07:22:41+00:00
Ok, I can see how I didn't manage to fully explain myself - by replying to your "collisions" argument I actually meant something more than that and while it seemed obvious in my head what I wanted to say, I can agree that my wording was imprecise. Sorry about that.

What I pictured in my head is that the ingestion workloads in contrast to the read-only workloads are different in the fact that collisions in former can trigger hash-map resizing/rehashing and which is why I say that these are two distinctive workloads. Moving bunch of data to and from the buckets.

So, my hypothesis is the following: if I PGO the implementation using the dataset (volume, data_distribution) that it triggers a handful of such resizing/rehashing operations, and we observe the positive improvements in wall-time runtime performance, what are the chances that using the same binary but now over a completely different dataset will preserve the same runtime performance improvements? What you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that the improvements will be the same regardless of the dataset (and even type of workload) and I am saying I am not so sure about that.
by exodust | 2025-07-28 07:23:00+00:00
They're coming for AI tools next. Here in Australia they're rolling out the academic socialist activists on the public broadcaster. These experts know how to keep us safe apparently.

This morning it was all about "think of the children" in the context of banning AI tools that could potentially be used to make AI generated CSAM. Even adult nudity is in the firing line. Ban the lot was the advice from the expert. Not just banning access, but making it a crime to even possess the tools.

What next? Ban paint brushes because someone might use them to paint offensive images?
by duckerduck | 2025-07-28 07:23:23+00:00
I'm working on a development tool for specification-driven development. It uses LLMs to verify that your specification files and implementation do not drift. More specifically, I am trying to lower the number of false positives I'm currently seeing. I find that the LLM will hallucinate issues when there are no discrepancies, or become forgetful in the case of long documents (like RFC texts). The first step in improving this is to expand my evaluation suite so I can reliably measure improvements.

https://github.com/rejot-dev/semcheck/
by sc077y | 2025-07-28 07:23:24+00:00
I recently saw an interview without someone on the mac team and what's interesting is that the original Mac team had a lot of friction because of this philosophy. Jobs constantly asked unreasonable design constraints of his engineering team, the team prepared two laptops one with the "esthetic" laptop and one with the pragmatic design. One vastly outperformed the other and Jobs conceded, this was a constant pattern for the engineering teams at Apple. What you see before you is not the esthetic version but the pragmatic version. Sometimes Jobs was right but most of the time he was delusional.
by Aachen | 2025-07-28 07:23:37+00:00
The tool could have a mode where it just reads the cryptographic chip in your ID card via NFC and passes on the information to the verifying party. This information is signed by your government and they could verify it with the public key

Instead, they're trying to shoehorn your device into providing the same safety level and, in doing so, making it by design impossible for you to control your own device. Obviously if the sites trust a device that you control, you can make it tell them anything. The ideological part is that it's not your device anymore then and imo we should oppose that. The technical solution is to use the hardware security chip you already have with a reading mechanism that (nearly?) every smartphone already has and even works on any OS that can run a USB NFC reader. It could be an entirely open standard
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-28 07:24:37+00:00
Interested to know how you've been burnt by wireguard; what did it not do that you were expecting? What failures have you experienced with it that were the fault of wireguard?

I've been using it (fairly simply, mind you) and it's been pretty solid for a number of years, and was as administrative relief in comparison to OpenVPN which I'd been using before wireguard existed. Single UDP port usage makes me query your comment about impenetrable IP table rulesets.

(OpenVPN was great for it's time too, the sales reps at the company where I introduced it loved the ability to work from the road, way back early 2000's)
by pjmlp | 2025-07-28 07:25:01+00:00
As developer I was a bit less excited as it kind of settled the victory of COM over .NET after the Longhorn/Vista civil war at Redmond.

So while it was indeed a great version of Windows, having COM as the new way of shipping Windows APIs wasn't that welcoming, it is kind of incredible how for such a critical technology on Windows development, Microsoft keeps shipping cluncky frameworks to write and consume COM.

There was even the famous Hilo sample that was praising this as the way forward,

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/

https://github.com/microsoftarchive/msdn-code-gallery-micros...
by stereolambda | 2025-07-28 07:25:39+00:00
If there's an argument here, it's a mess. You first talk about speech. Commerce is barely speech--it's actually using the public market--and there is a legitimate opinion that applying civil rights to companies is already a corrupt abuse of our society. Perjury is strictly limited to one context existing since the dawn of time (courts), it is also very proceduralized what they can ask you, and even then there's a carveout for not incriminating yourself. Conspiracy and blackmail are only secondarily about speech. There's a criminal intent that you either made clear yourself or they have to prove.

The internet is like media (press) or communication by letters. Both extremely established in terms of guaranteeing freedom of speech and in the latter case, also secrecy. And the ID identification (that you then make your argument about) is only loosely related to free speech strictly. It's about being constantly searched and surveilled with a presumption of crime.
Show HN: AI Equalizer – Personality sliders for building a better AI friend
by FicPeter | 2025-07-28 07:25:45+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been exploring how people relate to AI not just as a tool, but as a mirror, partner or friend — depending on their mindset and needs.

This project is called *AI Equalizer*: a conceptual interface where you set fixed “personality levels” of your AI assistant – such as empathy, rationality, mental culture (regional worldviews), depth, directness, or motivation.

Core idea: – Imagine sliders like on a sound equalizer – You fix attributes (e.g. empathy at 40%, strictness at 70%) for 7 days – AI behaves consistently, like a friend with stable values – It’s not about mood-based tweaking – it’s about *forming character and will*, for both AI and user

Why? Most AI chatbots adapt too easily to user whims, which breaks long-term trust. This explores a new model – what if AI resisted you just enough to help you grow?

Currently testing as a concept (no public app yet), early version visualized here: [LinkedIn post with visuals](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-equalizer-peter-fic-jbsee) (no signup required)

Looking for: – Feedback on idea clarity and feasibility – Collaborators, UI/UX thinkers, skeptics, minimalists – And if you ever felt your AI assistant was too obedient, I’d love your thoughts!

Thanks Peter F.