MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by superkuh | 2025-07-02 14:45:01+00:00
Spoken like someone with no lived experience of winter. But yes, the vast majority of people do live in temperate regions on the coasts. And for them heat pumps are a great idea. I'm not anti-heat pump. It's great technology.

But saying, "It's not a complex issue at all." is an extremely provincial mindset. For California? Yes. But there's more to the USA than the coasts and south.

And re: capital cost, because of the required in-ground loops the payback is much, much longer than air units which require no excavation. Still, a great choice for new construction if there's a normal heating backup and you can roll in the extra cost to the bank loan. Not so attractive for existing houses.
by juped | 2025-07-02 14:45:08+00:00
Maybe tailscale thinks it can dodge enshittification by means of having the worst, most self-parodic name of all time ("tailscale"), which will lull VCs into a stupor? (I can remember it's a VPN and not a CDN only because the name is so bad it's memorable.)

Raising more money for what appears to be a working, useful product certainly doesn't inspire confidence, after all.
by soulofmischief | 2025-07-02 14:45:11+00:00
Knowledge is learning relationships by decontextualizing information into generalized components. Application of knowledge is recontextualizing these components based on the problem at hand.

This is essentially just compression and decompression. It's just that with prior compression techniques, we never tried leveraging the inherent relationships encoded in a compressed data structure, because our compression schemes did not leverage semantic information in a generalized way and thus did not encode very meaningful relationships other than "this data uses the letter 'e' quite a lot".

A lot of that comes from the sheer amount of data we throw at these models, which provide enough substrate for semantic compression. Compare that to common compression schemes in the wild, where data is compressed in isolation without contributing its information to some model of the world. It turns out that because of this, we've been leaving a lot on the table with regards to compression. Another factor has been the speed/efficiency tradeoff. GPUs have allowed us to put a lot more into efficiency, and the expectations that many language models only need to produce text as fast as it can be read by a human means that we can even further optimize for efficiency over speed.

Also, shout out to Fabrice Bellard's ts_zip, which leverages LLMs to compress text files. https://bellard.org/ts_zip/
Show HN: Send email to fill Google Forms
by QueensGambit | 2025-07-02 14:45:15+00:00
Hello HN,

One week before my YC interview, my doctor told me I needed an open-heart surgery. I found myself explaining my condition again and again to different doctors across multiple hospitals. Filling out forms and getting appointments became a full-time job. I remember thinking: what if I could just take photos of all my reports, email them, and the hospital system could auto-extract everything? That idea led to what we’ve built: Semantic Email.

With Semantic Email, a patient can take a photo of their insurance card or referral letter, send it via email, and AI automatically fills out a Google Form, syncing data to Sheets and Drive — ready for integration into systems like EHR. While healthcare is personal to me, this works for any business on Google Workspace. Would love to hear your feedback and where you think this could apply beyond healthcare.

---

Try it free - https://promptrepo.com/email-to-form/

Demo video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLj4pXC30wM

Why we built it - https://guesswork.co/support/post/forms-must-die.anc-f4c5374...
by nico | 2025-07-02 14:45:16+00:00
For reference (according to Google):

> The English Wikipedia, as of June 26, 2025, contains over 7 million articles and 63 million pages. The text content alone is approximately 156 GB, according to Wikipedia's statistics page. When including all revisions, the total size of the database is roughly 26 terabytes (26,455 GB)
by dspillett | 2025-07-02 14:45:52+00:00
> floating point is definitely much faster than integer arithmetic these days, for most comparable operations.

Is that true of code running on CPUs? My GPU can run rings around the CPU at floating point, and probably itself at integer arithmetic, but I find it hard to believe any CPU is faster at a floating point version of an algorithm than an integer version of the same (assuming both are well, or equally badly, optimised).
by SilasX | 2025-07-02 14:46:11+00:00
Possibly, but I generally see it as a problem from pretty much everyone, especially specialists, speaking to people outside their domain, to be horribly miscalibrated about what jargon the layperson understands, or to just not give it any thought.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/

So you don't need to explain it by any specific failing of the OP, it's common among the lucid as well.
by kashunstva | 2025-07-02 14:46:32+00:00
> What are those clowns gonna do? go back to the US or find a next country to travel to? … Researchers are supposed to think long term

I will ignore the ad hominem part of your argument because it’s mean-spirited and does nothing to contribute to the discussion. Instead I would focus on the reality of research funding. Liking or disliking the current administration has little or nothing to do with their decision to immigrate. Their field of expertise is an area known to be a target of this administration’s skepticism; and given that they have been capriciously withdrawing funding from numerous disciplines, its logical they will do the same here. What would you suggest they do for four years (or more) while their research is unfunded?
by danaris | 2025-07-02 14:46:52+00:00
I'm sorry, *what*?

Saying "the entire institution of higher education is not collectively responsible for this specific bad economic policy choice" is somehow equivalent to saying "we should go kill hundreds of thousands of people to protect the poor Kurds/Palestinians/Israelis/etc"??

No; even leaving aside your apparent (and wild) misconception that "academia" is a unified, monolithic body akin to the medieval Catholic Church, unless you're willing to dial down your rhetoric to something less self-indulgently overdramatic and engage with actual reality in a vaguely reasonable manner, I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion.
by hagen1778 | 2025-07-02 14:48:03+00:00
My understanding is that with Prometheus+Grafana, and the rest of their stack, you can achieve the same functionality as Datadog (or even more) at much lower costs. But, it requires engineering time to set up these tools, monitor them, build dashboards and alerts. Build an observability platform at home, in other words.

But what about other open source solutions that already trying very hard to become an out-of-box solution for observability? Things like Netdata, Hyperdx, Coroot, etc. are already platforms for all telemetry signals, with fancy UIs and a lot of presets. Why people don't use them instead of Datadog?
by komali2 | 2025-07-02 14:48:04+00:00
> One of the observable features of capitalism is that there are no hungry people. Capitalism has completely solved the problem of hunger. People are hungry when they don't have capitalism.

This is as fascinating to me as if someone walked up to me and said "Birds don't exist." It's a statement that's instantly, demonstrably provably wrong by simply turning and pointing at a bird, or in this case, by Googling "Child hunger in the usa," and seeing a shitload of links demonstrating that 12.8% of US households are food insecure.

Or, the secondary point, that hunger is only when no capitalism, demonstrably untrue, since the countries that ensure capitalism can continue to thrive by providing cheap labor, have visible extreme hunger, such as India. India isn't capitalist? America isn't capitalist? Madagascar isn't capitalist? Palestine?

> It's just that billionaires often are not enemies of society, but source of social well-being.

How can someone not be an enemy of society when they maintain artificial scarcity by hoarding such a massive portion of society's output, and then acting to hoard and concentrate our collective wealth even more into their own hands? Since when has "greed" not been a universally reviled trait?

> we see it all the time, most of the world can hardly be called capitalist. And the less capitalism there is, the worse.

I genuinely can't understand what you're seeing in the world to think the global economy is not capitalist in nature.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-02 14:48:31+00:00
This does nothing dude. Literally nothing. OpenAI or whoever are just going to hire people like me who dont get caught. Stop ruining the experience of users and allowing cf to fill the internet with more bloated javascript challenge pages and privacy invading fingerprinting. Stop making cf the police of the internet. We're literally handing the internet to this company on a silver platter to do MITM attacks on our privacy and god knows what else. Fucking wild.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-07-02 14:48:40+00:00
Meta just wants to have a story for its stock price to go up.

It is definitely worth spending a couple hundred million to make your stock price go up tens of billions for several months.

Presumably not all of that hundreds of millions in investment will be waste, too.

Meta knows they have close to a 0% chance of overtaking ChatGPT or Gemini.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-02 14:48:43+00:00
Realistically lots of multi-national companies have an EU presence, so concerns about “violating sovereignty” are sorta moot. Huawei probably wants to do business in the EU which requires following EU law.

As an aside: in general a sovereign country can do whatever they want in their own territory, this includes the right of the country to bind itself to treaties. So in your hypothetical,

> Does your home country observe the EU’s violation of its sovereignty and throw you in a home country jail?

This doesn’t look like a violation of sovereignty to me; the non-EU has decided to enforce an EU law. Why? I don’t know, maybe it makes business easier for the multinational companies of the non-EU country.

Countries can also do things like apply secondary sanctions to an entity. So, again hypothetically, the EU doesn’t need to be able to enforce a ruling against you. They can make you toxic to anyone who wants to do business in the EU.
by epistasis | 2025-07-02 14:49:13+00:00
This is simply untrue and backforming extreme right-wing ideology as a reason for why people voted for a ln entire candidate.

One things that fascists do when voted into power is assume that any random strange ideology as part of the platform is now so popular that it must override existing law and procedure, and that is exactly what Trump is doing here. Which is why these researchers are leaving. Not because they are doing something the public dislikes. The public looooves scientific research.
by homefree | 2025-07-02 14:49:14+00:00
It’s still supervised, the Austin robotaxi is running unsupervised with newer software in a more controlled rollout.

For supervised minimal intervention is fine and 99% of the time I’m just sitting there watching. It’s still extremely valuable and useful and something nobody else is close to. It makes driving a lot simpler and safer. I already think it’s better than most people and would rather have a driver use it than not if I’m a passenger.

Unsupervised will be amazing if they can pull it off generally and will have major market effects, but obviously it’s harder for the reasons you describe.
by servowriter | 2025-07-02 14:49:15+00:00
The only part of this that is semi accurate is that SAS interface devices are a bit of a chore for the home user. I have an ATTO HBA in my Mac Pro 5,1 and it works like a charm with LTO-7 external drive. Otherwise, there are no format compatibility challenges; no stringent environmental issues. The 6 TB LTO-7 tapes are cheap and with LTFS, pretty easy to use - like drag and drop easy. I’m not sure what other issues you have encountered but if you have enough data to justify the investment, using tape in 2025 is quite straightforward.
by sneak | 2025-07-02 14:49:24+00:00
marcan does a much more detailed job than I do:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30495647

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30044019

GNU/FSF are the anticapitalist zealots that are pushing this EULA. Just because they approve of it doesn’t make it free software. They are confused.
by mynameisash | 2025-07-02 14:49:27+00:00
> On a per mile basis it was cheap

Just to make this concrete: I keep spreadsheets for all my vehicles, and I enter every single fuel up. My family's CRV costs $0.161/mile to drive.

I bought a VW ID.4 in January, and I also track its recharges. That car costs $0.030/mile. I don't know yet about maintenance, but just for the daily driving, gas costs 5.36x that of an EV. What would be a $45 fill-up of gas is an $8.40 electric bill.
by paulcole | 2025-07-02 14:49:28+00:00
I think this says more about how little you know about commercial production of jeans and cakes than how complex cakes and jeans are.

This is the classic HN trope of:

"things I like and think about a lot" = "real and complex things" and "things I don't like and don't think about a lot" = "simple things that anyone can do with a little time and effort"

Kind of like how when anyone here says they can't get "serious work" done on an iPad they always mean development work. And that somehow executives, marketing professionals etc. who work effectively on an iPad aren't doing "serious work."
by TimorousBestie | 2025-07-02 14:49:37+00:00
> I struggle to understand those who would short-sell Tesla, unless they have some kind of emotional hangup against Elon Musk or government efficiency?

It’s objectively clear that the company is in a bad market condition, and you don’t need to have an “emotional hangup against Elon Musk or government efficiency” to know it’s bad business to alienate your potential customer base and deliver shockingly bad public appearances.

If Ford’s CEO was stumbling-down drunk or higher than a kite at a presser, I’d short Ford too.
by jfengel | 2025-07-02 14:50:04+00:00
Relationships are about more than offspring.

If money is tight, having a live-in partner is a cost saving. It doesn't have to be a romantic partner, though there are advantages to that.

In other words... I suspect that there is more to your sons not dating than the challenges of raising a family. And that's perfectly fine; not everybody has to pair off romantically.

If they do want a family, but without a romantic pairing... that's probably not a good idea. If they're hoping for a partner for the sole purpose of breeding without romantic attachment, they're going to find few takers no matter how much money they make.
by xphos | 2025-07-02 14:50:12+00:00
I think we are mixing up timelines here the rent seeking and financializing happens in 1981 onward not starting at 1991 when the USSR dissolves

There is just not any real accountability to the next generation of stock holders its classic optimizing toward the local minimum and is why some many private equity firms annihilate companies and sell them for parts. We use to have unions than Regan eliminate tons of union power and bars the governments union's from arguing. We have structural barriers in existing laws against sector wide unions, so the remaining unions have no incentive to build competitive sectors just competitive wages without respect to economics.

I think companies have just pushed and pushed for labor laws that favor larger companies and players. That hollowing of the rule set has dropped a bomb in companies optimization functions. You cannot choose not to do stock buy backs now because the stock holders complain and leave for a someone more willing to inflate assets. If you want the clearest picture look at Intel they spent tremendously on stock buy backs because it was good for investors and let there RnD budget cratered when compared to its competitors. They basically aren't a respectable company anymore but those stock investors aren't destroyed they moved to Nvidia and Apple.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-02 14:51:17+00:00
I know people get upset when open source is used when open weight is more correct (happily here open weight is specifically being applied).

My question: is open weight even interesting? What does that really offer? Does it allow one to peer into the biases (or lack thereof) of a model? Does it allow one to train a competing model?

Would open source be something different and preferable — or are "weights the new source" in this LLM world we are finding ourselves in?

I'm trying to educate myself.
by picohernandez | 2025-07-02 14:51:34+00:00
I was chatting with my sister last weekend. As a hobby, she creates and sells wedding invitation and other designs at an online marketplace site called Zazzle. She was telling me all about how that site implemented some automatic bot detection and it sounded like it was a total disaster. Real content creators were getting wrongly flagged as bots and then getting blocked from using the site just for using the most fundamental site functionality, and to make it worse, then it was apparently impossible for them to get past the captcha challenge or whatever it showed next. She forwarded me a link to some support forum discussion about it and it was mindboggling the troubles that some of the content creators there had to go through:

https://community.zazzle.com/t5/technical-issues/bot-test-wo...

My sister said that her sales figures are way down compared to what they used to be and she didn't know if this bot flagger was disrupting real paying customers too. She said it had flagged her a couple of times, although she was luckily able to get past the bot challenge. She has pretty much given up on making and uploading new designs because of what was happening to other content creators there. She's now scared to use the site because she doesn't want to get wrongly locked out of her account.
by ben_w | 2025-07-02 14:51:42+00:00
> What happens when people really will die if the model does or does not do the thing?

Then someone didn't do their job right.

Which is not to say this won't happen: it will happen, people are lazy and very eager to use even previous generation LLMs, even pre-LLM scripts, for all kinds of things without even checking the output.

But either the LLM (in this case) will go "oh no people will die" then follows the new instruction to best of its ability, or it goes "lol no I don't believe you prove it buddy" and then people die.

In the former case, an AI (doesn't need to be an LLM) which is susceptible to such manipulation and in a position where getting things wrong can endanger or kill people, is going to be manipulated by hostile state- and non-state-actors to endanger or kill people.

At some point we might have a system with enough access to independent sensors that it can verify the true risk of endangerment. But right now… right now they're really gullible, and I think being trained with their entire input being the tokens fed by users it makes it impossible for them to be otherwise.

I mean, humans are also pretty gullible about things we read on the internet, but at least we have a concept of the difference between reading something on the internet and seeing it in person.
by rickdeckard | 2025-07-02 14:51:42+00:00
Beside of the fact that App-Developers don't have the option to "stay on iOS18 or switch to Android", that statement is equivalent to "Stop criticizing my country. If you don't like what it is doing, find yourself another country".

Developers (and users) are citizens of that ecosystem, serving other citizens and contributing to its economy. It is their right to judge and criticize directions being taken.

The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this (especially when he continuously makes efforts to increase the difficulty to LEAVE that ecosystem), and other citizens should not take any offense from this at all.
by diggan | 2025-07-02 14:51:59+00:00
Some quick "on top of my head" math tells me ~10% of the population in Spain lives in Madrid or Barcelona, so that pretty much makes it a minority in my head. Put another way, the majority (90%) of the Spanish population lives somewhere else than in Madrid or Barcelona.

Even if you count the greater metropolitan area (where I'm part of the Barcelona one myself, although I live 30 minutes away from the city), you only get up ~20% of the population living in either Madrid or Barcelona. Even then I'd say we're in minority compared to the people who don't live in either those "metropolitan" areas.
by brahyam | 2025-07-02 14:52:08+00:00
What a train wreck, there are thousand more apps in store that do exactly this because its the easiest way to use openAI without having to host your own backend/proxy.

I have spend quite some time protecting my apps from this scenario and found a couple of open source projects that do a good job as proxys (no affiliation I just used them in the past):

- https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm - https://github.com/KenyonY/openai-forward/tree/main

but they still lack other abuse protection mechanism like rate limitting, device attestation etc. so I started building my own open source SDK - https://github.com/brahyam/Gateway
Ask HN: Looking for a Google Maps Contact
by jmarneweck | 2025-07-02 14:52:41+00:00
Hi HNers,

I am looking for a contact at Google on the Maps / Directions team who can assist with fixing various issues with Googles datasets for Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban.

Maps issues for South Africa includes incorrect suburb names on addresses (for example Matroosfontein pulls through for addresses in Delft (official suburb name according to the City of Cape Town Official Suburb names dataset.

Editing addresses one by one to fix suburb names to fix issues with geocoding issues takes a few months to go live on the geocoding API.

There are also routing issues where Google Maps chooses routes that does not make sense. Also with the directions API it ignores valid routes from areas like Strandfontein instead of going up the M17 (Old Strandfontein Road) instead of the N2.

The distance matrix seems to have incorrect distances for addresses where you expect it to go via M17 instead of the N2.
by SilasX | 2025-07-02 14:53:02+00:00
In theory, yes. In practice, the typical specialist designer is going to optimize for things that come at the cost of accessibility.

But yes, in general you're absolutely right, that a good designer will take into account all factors, including accessibility. But the way that "design" has evolved in practice in means that the thing we all think of as "web design[er]" is not optimizing for it.
by glasss | 2025-07-02 14:53:34+00:00
I thought it was a good video, but similarly I had an issue with how he discussed the loss of the skilled trades and professions in the US. He did a good job highlighting that these jobs are rare, don't pay well and are important, but he made it seem like we all just accidentally stopped investing in local manufacturing, or that we just let those skills erode. Leaders at these manufacturing companies moved things over seas, laid off the skilled workers, busted up unions, and overall sold off this skill set in order to sell cheaper products and make more money for themselves.
by ARandumGuy | 2025-07-02 14:53:38+00:00
In general, the people who like EVs hate Elon's politics, and the people who like Elon's politics hate EVs. This significantly reduces the amount of people who want to buy a Tesla.

This is the risk when you tie your brand to a single person, especially someone who loves being in the spotlight. Whenever that person does something controversial, that reflects poorly on the brand.