MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by red_admiral | 2025-07-02 11:35:07+00:00
My understanding of US current policy:

> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case

Already the case. Mostly for the kind of dumb criminal who is suspected of murder and has been found googling "defences to murder" and "how to hide a body".

> the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities

If there's a court order (good) or a national security letter (occasionally good but very open to abuse). Maybe the NSA or some guy in DOGE has automatic API access to this data anyway.

> you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits

Already the case for youtube and reddit content marked NSFW - either by the creator or by a fairly stupid algorithm. (You can see these boobies, but not those ones.) But the age verification is mostly "open a new account and enter a birth date". Also reddit has the dumbest age verification/login bypass ever. (Your honor, editing an URL is nation-state level hacking and we can't reasonably defend against that.)

> all visits to all sites will be recorded

Something something Permanent Record.

> you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet

Ok this one is cheating a bit, but don't you need a google (or samsung etc.) account to set up an android let alone access the internet?

Also cheating a bit but you need a login and contract with your ISP to get on the internet too.
by pfdietz | 2025-07-02 11:35:44+00:00
Solar panels can be engineered to also optimize cooling, by selectively increasing their reflectivity at wavelengths that are neither useful for electricity production nor for radiation of their waste thermal energy.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/fan/publication/Li_ACSPhotoni...

"[...] we design a photonic cooler made of one- dimensional photonic films that can strongly radiate heat through its thermal emission while also significantly reflecting the solar spectrum in the sub-band-gap and ultraviolet regimes. We show that applying this photonic cooler to a solar panel can lower the cell temperature by over 5.7 °C."
by amarcheschi | 2025-07-02 11:36:12+00:00
After doing a course in uni in ethics of Ai I made my final essay about chat control and breaking encryption, somebody on reddit asked me to read it. If anybody is interested, the "political" section gives a lot of information about the current debate on eu and encryption. It's not up to date to the the latest developments, but it's definitely better than nothing. There are also a lot of references that are useful if someone wants to dig further. You can read it here (truly, if you're on hn save time and skip the technical debate): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A8x4a76ArVDil1xaUe3jF42p...

Regarding this, the question "is e2e weaker if anybody else have the key" is ridiculous, and I feel very negative towards politician having absolutely no clue when talking about encryption. I'm not asking to understand encryption well, just to know why the position of cs people are so against such measures that eu commission would like to adopt
by vinceguidry | 2025-07-02 11:36:57+00:00
For me, is not a friendship unless there's regular, in person interaction, online doesn't count. Even if I'd gotten them onto another platform the only thing it would have been used for is coordinating more in person events. I've had to end online interactions because it became clear i couldn't value the relationship. Bar was perfect. Then a huge hospital opened up across the street and they didn't want a run down bar there.
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-07-02 11:37:17+00:00
Then the solution is to cut taxes on income, and cut government spending.

Ideally there'd just be a 10% tax across the board - sales tax, income tax, etc. like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9%E2%80%939%E2%80%939_Plan

No complicated exemptions, or complicated progressive bands, just keep it simple and eliminate bureaucracy. Then people can manage their own pensions and insurance.

This could be accompanied by a Georgist Land Value Tax to encourage development and innovation too.
by robenkleene | 2025-07-02 11:38:18+00:00
The missing piece that this perspective leaves out is that Figma's success is at least partially due to timing of the rise of flat design. I wrote about this in my analysis of software transitions, here's the relevant section (https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...):

> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.

It's still difficult for me to wrap my head around that this has actually happened, because it's unheard of in other media editing industries for software to go backwards in capabilities. I always compare it to if movies suddenly stopped needing special effects, then of course the entire existing movie-making pipeline would be re-evaluated.
by ryzvonusef | 2025-07-02 11:38:21+00:00
as a pakistani natively bilingual in urdu and english, it's doubly annoying, because it doesn't have urdu, it has hindi. While the languages are very similar but still different enough to get annoying and confusing.

So it tries to dub urdu videos (as 'hindi' videos) into english, or dub english into hindi, which is useless for me both ways.

Instead of dubbing, make better subs! YouTube subs fail to track when using the video speed feature, so if i am using any other speed playback than 1x, the subs don't load on time, and sometimes get skipped, fix that!
by wqaatwt | 2025-07-02 11:39:07+00:00
It’s more about the price than quality. When you can make products that are just as good (outside of some niche areas) in China/etc. for a proportion of the cost there is very little reason not to do that unless you have no competition.

There are some premium brands that can (partially) pull it off like KitchenAid but that’s an exception.
by incomingpain | 2025-07-02 11:40:20+00:00
chatgpt and claude said 27.

grok said 42, the correct answer.

deepseek r1 chose 25.5, 25, 38, then 12. So pick middle, then pick middle high, then pick middle low.

ask chatgpt between 1 and 53, and then it picks 42.

phi4 went with 25

qwen3 went with 25
by Xss3 | 2025-07-02 11:40:45+00:00
How are you defining a solid object with 'no wavelength'? Black would be the perceived colour, or lackthereof, of said object. The laser would see it the same as any colour of cube though.

The point is eyes are extracting more information from the image.

Visible light interactions with the object exists in reality and capturing that information brings the image closer to reality, not further. It tells you more about the cubes properties.

As an extreme example, you might have a space documentary start by showing an image with a few stars, saying "it seems quiet", then showing the same image with a bunch of colourful gasses visible, saying 'but the reality is beyond what our eyes can perceive, in infrared the image is full of detail'.

Reality, actual reality and not our perception of it, is made up of every detail, the more of that information you can capture the closer to reality the image.
by flyinghamster | 2025-07-02 11:41:52+00:00
Um, why was someone's perfectly reasonable take downvoted to oblivion? Too much of a newcomer? Too many Welch devotees here?

As far as I'm concerned, Welch turned GE from an industrial behemoth that more than lived up to its name, to a pale shadow of itself that has sold off almost everything. "Outsource Everything" has been an absolute disaster for our economy that will take decades to dig out of, if we even have the will to try.
by kleiba | 2025-07-02 11:42:01+00:00
Interestingly, the court order in question demanded that real estate should be taxed higher than the status quo - instead, the conservative government decided not to collect that tax at all any more.

Wikipedia claims that this decision was partly due to the max tax rate being at 53% at the time. Today, it has dropped to 42%, but for some strange reason, the wealth tax has never been reinstated.
by rco8786 | 2025-07-02 11:42:52+00:00
You are confusing technology for product.

The product space they entered, UX design tooling, was very crowded. Sketch and InVision were the kings and there were a dozen other reasonable options to choose from (including ones in browser with real time collab and other interesting tech).

Figma entered that market later and won on a combination of technology and product innovation aka execution.

But they absolutely entered a crowded market.
by conartist6 | 2025-07-02 11:43:45+00:00
Yeah I can't help but think he is starting to more closely fit the definition for mercenary.

For example, I'm on a mission to build a better code editor for the world. That's cost me 4 years of my life and several hundred thousand dollars.

He wanted one, so he bought it for 3 billion. I think he's doomed to fail there for pretty much the exact reasons he states here...
by lemoncookiechip | 2025-07-02 11:44:04+00:00
>“Made in the USA” became synonymous with poor quality and high prices.

This. It's like everyone collectively forgot. If that time period had the internet meme culture of today, “Made in the USA” would've become one the same way "Made in China" did.

Capitalism wreaked havoc on quality goods, while prices skyrocketed. Then when given the chance, they all packed up shop of their own free will to create even cheaper goods while politicians did nothing to stop it, and in-fact incentivized it.

Now we blame those countries for "taking away" manufacturing, when it was the greedy capitalistic US company CEOs, shareholders and US politicians who did it, while those countries simply capitalized on the opportunity and built themselves up.
by bluecalm | 2025-07-02 11:44:47+00:00
Instead of calling for more surveillance, government overreach, and other communist wet dream fantasies like a global registry of wealth they could have started by fixing things in their own countries. One good way would be to start taxing assets they control like land. Tax land value and suddenly there will be incentives to build more. Tax land value under big touristic resorts and use that revenue to fund local services instead of killing middle class with taxes on their productivity as they are currently doing.

Instead of complaining about rich people buying big houses and a lot of land around just tax that - that aligns incentives and makes presence of rich people profitable for local communities.

What they want to do instead though is first tax assets people have in other countries which don't influence them what so over and then if those people want to leave they cry foul as well - you will stay and you will like it - exactly as in communist Cuba.

>>There’s a real need to know who the beneficial owners are behind companies and legal structures used to conceal wealth,” said Mr. Gascón

Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. If you tax assets and get rid of corporate income tax replacing it with revenue based taxes (like a new digital tax idea or a tax on big super market chains) and a land value tax then it doesn't matter who is behind what as the local entity has to pay anyway. If you build an attractive country companies and people will pay you to live and do business there. Why are you so obsessed on their total wealth? Is it maybe more about control and power than paying your "fair share"?

The thing is they don't want fair taxation. They want to take wealth of productive people and give to their ever increasing number of cronies. This kind of toxic thinking geared towards punishing productivity and making sure no one gets ahead too far is a cancer in Europe and imo major reason old EU countries stagnate instead of growing.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-02 11:45:30+00:00
Grill brush bristles in your food are the "they went on a vacation and brought back flesh eating bacteria" of the culinary world. The fear-mongering greatly exceeds the danger.

Edit: There are approximately 130 ER visits per year[1] on account of grill brushes. Mowing your lawn (something else people do on about the same frequency in the summer) is far more likely get you, as are god knows how many other things.

[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/ama...
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-07-02 11:45:32+00:00
The housing crisis isn't due to investment, but onerous government regulation that makes it near impossible to build - decades-long planning processes, dozens of consultations (local public, and NGOs, etc.)

That's exactly what I mean by removing bureaucratic processes to unlock investment.

But the "many" can learn useful skills and innovate to also make a lot of money. Everyone should be able to start a business easily - without excessive capital requirements or expensive notaries. STEM education should be free and widely available (or with very low interest loans if we let the loan interest be decided per subject, per student grades, etc.)
by 999900000999 | 2025-07-02 11:45:41+00:00
Honestly I’d be happy to work at any FAANG. Early FB in particular was great in terms of keeping up with friends.

I’ve only interviewed with Meta once and failed during a final interview. Aside from online dating and defense I don’t have any moral qualms regarding employment.

My dream in my younger days was to hit 500k tc and retire by 40. Too late now
by bayindirh | 2025-07-02 11:45:54+00:00
I have never been judged so hard in a very long time, thank you. You get extra points for making assumptions about my location, living conditions and political views from a single IP address.

That was really great. Kudos.

BTW, you can't be more wrong about me than that comment, even if you tried harder(er).

We normally don't talk about that here, but seriously, prejudice is running high in this instance.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-07-02 11:46:30+00:00
I work at an e-waste recycling company. I had about 120 decommissioned HP thin clients come in last week. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with them. We have buyers that might be interested in them. I opened them all up and they all had 8 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD. While grinding through them, I realized that was more than the laptop I went to college with ~18 years ago. I haven't turned any on, but I would not be surprised if the CPUs in them are faster too. I didn't realize thin clients/dumb terminals had to be so powerful these days.
by sandpaper0897 | 2025-07-02 11:46:38+00:00
Location: Bucharest, Romania

Remote: Only

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, NextJS / ReactJS / VueJS / Svelte, React Native / Expo / Electron / Tauri, NestJS / NodeJS, Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Postgres, Neo4J, TimescaleDB, Redis, Inngest, Hasura/GraphQL, ONNX / Transformers.js, CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Vercel, Nomad), Git, MetaMask/Web3 wallets, DIDs / VCs, RAG / LangChain, OpenTelemetry / Grafana, RabbitMQ, K8s, etc.

Resume: https://standardresume.co/r/sandpaper--resume

Email: sandpaper.hn@fastmail.com

I’m a software developer with 12+ years of experience building all kind of apps, from decentralized applications, on-device AI agents, real-time collaboration frameworks, and blockchain-based platforms - all while wearing many hats across frontend, backend, mobile, DevOps, security (OSCP certified), OSINT, and knowledge-graph domains. Lately I've been active in the AI space like LLM powered apps, agent orchestration (mastra, langchain, llama index, convex), decentralized identity (DID / VC), local-first (Automerge), on-device inference (ONNX), multi-platform apps.

I'm looking for a job and can help you guys with anything. Thanks.
by snickerbockers | 2025-07-02 11:47:23+00:00
Honestly even that is pretty incredible. At the very least that's enough date to count family members, possibly ID them if they have different-shaped bodies, and identify certain activities with obvious silhouettes (eg, sex).

I don't think it justifies the impending orwellian hellscape this technology will eventually unleash, but one positive thing about this that has me a bit excited is that this could easily clear up many ambiguities in criminal cases. for example, fairly often a death will get ruled as a suicide but victim's relatives and friends will insist that it must have been a murder; imagine being able to use this technology to definitively prove whether or not there was another party present when the victim died.

Or in rape cases where the defendant is protesting their innocence, knowing the body language of the victim and the defendant could be a vital clue because you might be able to observe the victim fighting back.

Again, I don't think the positives outweigh the negatives to the point that it could ever justify an invasion of privacy on this scale (you might as well just make everybody let the government set up a thermal camera in their house!) but it is interesting to think about the problems this could solve.
by samiv | 2025-07-02 11:47:33+00:00
This is wrong.

The rich people are stiffling the economy and displacing a large swath of working people. This process will hollow out the economy and produce more poverty and more inequality.

For the wealthy people there are two ways to invest.

1. Invest in passive assets such as stock market, property, valuable items, gold etc. 2. Invest in new businesses.

What are they doing? Mostly 2. How do we know. Simple.. look at the real economies. The western economies are growing (barely) at around 1-2% per year. The wealthy (since pandemic) grow their wealth at 10-20% per year. Where is this growth coming from? Certainly not from new business development since the real economy is not growing. The only way it can come is by taking a bigger slice of the pie, i.e. displacing middle class by subsuming their wealth.

This is harmful to the economy and will lead to the collapse of the economy and the society.
by rco8786 | 2025-07-02 11:47:48+00:00
Yea I'm not trying to take away from any of that, nor provide generalized advice. Only addressing the crowd of people who will shy away from pursuing (or poo poo others) when their idea isn't some sort of original innovation that nobody's ever thought of before.

Every successful company had some sort of edge. Some sort of advantage that other companies in the space don't have. For Figma that was high level tech execution. For something like, say, LaunchDarkly, that was a killer enterprise sales team. For something like Liquid Death, it was pure marketing and positioning. Just to use some other examples of companies that launched into crowded spaces and succeeded.

It could be anything, but it's always something, and no advice should be generalized.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-07-02 11:47:52+00:00
Fortunately, there are still plenty: financial services / capital markets, tech, biotech / pharma, media / entertainment, e-commerce, higher ed.

Obviously, there are lots of players in those categories, but the U.S. is at or near top of the pack there. We just happen to be optimizing for the wrong thing right now.

I heard a columnist say, incredulously, “China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry”
by xbmcuser | 2025-07-02 11:47:55+00:00
Western freedoms are for themselves not for the rest of the world. Israel is committing a genocide has been killing Iranian civilians with not a peep from the west in years. Even in the current war Israel was attacking and killing civilians and the so called Iran the axis of evil only attacked military and intelligence buildings but the world it to believe that Iran is the bad guy. Which mainstream media outlet or politician has the guts to say anything against Israel anyone that says anything is removed.

Even the recent NY mayoral primary the question being asked again to a Muslim candidate were will you visit Israel does Israel have right to exist like what has that got to do with being NY mayor. Now if they asked if Jewish citizen have a right to live in NY and feel safe etc that would be valid question wtf has Israel got to do with it.
by mjburgess | 2025-07-02 11:48:51+00:00
Anna's Archive full torrent is O(1PB), project gutenberg is O(1TB), many AI training torrents are reported in the O(50TB) range.

Extract just the plain text from that (+social media, etc.), remove symbols outside of a 64 symbol alphabet (6 bits) and compress. "Feels" to me around a 100TB max for absolutely everything.

Either way, full-fat LLMs are operating at 1-10% of this scale, depending how you want to estimate it.

If you run a more aggressive filter on that 100TB, eg., for a more semantic dedup, there's a plausible argument for "information" in english texts available being ~10TB -- then we're running close to 20% of that in LLMs.

If we take LLMs to just be that "semantic compression algorithm", and supposing the maximum useful size of an LLM is 2TB, then you could run the argument that everything "salient" ever written is <10TB.

Taking LLMs to be running at close-to 50% "everything useful" rather than 1% would be a explanation of why training has capped out.

I think the issue is at least as much to do with what we're using LLMs for -- ie., instruction fine-tuning requires some more general (proxy/quasi-) semantic structures in LLMs and I think you only need O(1%) of "everything ever written" to capture these. So it wouldnt really matter how much more we added, instruction-following LLMs don't really need it.
by ur-whale | 2025-07-02 11:48:58+00:00
> Integers are much faster to process than floating point

This was common and accepted knowledge circa 1990-2005.

Is that still the case?

In 2025, I'm not so sure, and if speed is indeed what you're after, what you typically want is to pump calculations into both the floating point units and the integer units in parallel using SIMD instructions, something that should be easy on an embarrassingly parallel problem like Mandelbrot.

And regarding precision ... I was under the impression that proving with 100% certainty that a point (x,y) actually belongs to the Mandelbrot set is basically impossible unless you prove some sort of theorem about that specific point.

The numerical method is always something along the lines of "as long as the iteration hasn't diverged after N iterations we consider the point to be inside".

And both N and the definition of "diverged" are usually completely arbitrary ... so precision, meh, unless you're going to try draw something with a zoom of 1e+20 on the frontier.