MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RGBCube | 2025-07-29 23:41:47+00:00
This whole rant is uninformed & it seems like the author is completely ignorant of anything happening outside his well.

But I'll bite the Rust rant anyway.

> Where's your SSL?

Right here: https://www.memorysafety.org/blog/rustls-server-perf/

It's an order of magnitude faster than OpenSSL, and almost double the speed of BoringSSL.

> Where's your operating system?

There are lots of OSes written in Rust, but nobody expects them to replace a well-established piece of software like Linux (and _even Linux_ is integrating Rust, because you can't RIIR the kernel overnight). That's why it's shining in the embedded sector, with stuff such as Tock: https://github.com/tock/tock, or many, many other OSes available today. Oxide Computers uses Rust, Volvo writes a lot of their systems in Rust. I also know a few unnamed MIC companies in Turkey using Rust for their software. Anduril also uses Rust.

Rust also runs the Internet, Cloudflare is primarily Rust and AWS is one of the biggest users of Rust. So many more examples but these are the biggest.

Half my environment is Rust: Helix/Zed my editors, my version control system (jj), my shell (nushell), my Window Manager (niri), the build system I'm working on in Rust to build it all, Firefox which is partially Rust, and I actually enjoy using these greatly, because they're fast, well designed and secure.

Has the author written anything in his life that's not games or toys?
by giantg2 | 2025-07-29 23:42:57+00:00
I don't know of any studies looking at this specifically, but there are numerous groups and programs that use honeybees as an outreach tool for environmental education. There are studies about the effectiveness of experiential learning vs classroom only learning. One indicator that this is working is the fact that most people in general think about honeybees when you say the bees or pollinators are dying. The steps of reducing pesticide use and planting pollinator friendly yards is universally beneficial.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/how-bee-...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8569223/
by Zak | 2025-07-29 23:43:19+00:00
It appears the long lens on that phone is 120mm-equivalent ("5x") and any intermediate zoom is just cropping. A 2x "zoom" (crop) would get pretty close to the field of view of the author's dedicated camera lens, but with further reduced image quality.

Actually using the iPhone telephoto for a group photo like the one shown in the article would require the photographer to stand a considerable distance from the subjects, and then we might start noticing a little perspective distortion from the 45mm-equivalent lens on the Sony.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-29 23:44:18+00:00
That's because the LLM assumes you mean for the host to open the door.

As an autistic person I can assure you that people filling in information you neither gave nor implied is the norm for human conversations. In that sense, the LLMs are being human-like.

If you explicitly tell it you didn't forget to have the host open the door it gives you the right answer:

> There is a game show with three closed doors. One has a car and two have goats. I pick a door. Then, without opening my door or any other door, the host asks me if I want to switch my choice to one of the other two doors. What is my best strategy and what are the probabilities?

Gemini: This is a classic probability puzzle known as the Monty Hall problem, though your description presents a slight variation. The optimal strategy depends entirely on whether the host opens a door or not. Your Scenario: The Host Doesn't Open a Door In the situation you've described, where the host asks if you want to switch your choice to one of the other two doors without opening any doors, there is no advantage to switching. Here's a breakdown of the probabilities in your specific scenario: Your initial choice: When you first pick a door, you have a 1 in 3 chance of selecting the door with the car. This means you have a 2 in 3 chance of having picked a door with a goat. The other two doors: The combined probability that the car is behind one of the other two doors is 2/3. Switching your choice: If you decide to switch, you are essentially choosing one of the other two doors. Since there is no new information (a door with a goat has not been revealed), the 2/3 probability is evenly split between those two doors. Therefore, your chance of winning by switching to a specific one of the other doors is 1/3. In this case, your odds of winning are 1/3 whether you stay with your original choice or switch to one of the other doors.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-29 23:44:28+00:00
We’re so close to laptop-free travel!

Imagine running linux in UTM (the fast jit version, not the nerfed appstore version) with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse and VR sunglasses (eg. xreal make good ones that plug in to usb-c), on your iPhone.

Or carry a phone that can run linux on bare metal - or can run Wayland in Android Terminal, a new feature in Android 16.
Show HN: Zkshare – PIN protected secret sharing with client-side encryption
by streetsmartai | 2025-07-29 23:44:36+00:00
zkshare.dev I built zkshare to share secrets securely without trusting the server.

*Features:* - Client-side encryption with 6-digit PIN - Server never sees your secrets in plaintext - Wrong PIN attempts don't destroy secrets - Single-use tokens that self-destruct after decryption - Python CLI for .env files + React web app

*Tech:* Rust backend (Axum + Redis), React frontend, Python CLI

*Try it:* ```bash git clone https://github.com/streetsmart-ai/zkshare.git cd zkshare/backend && cargo run cd zkdotenv && python3 test_zkcloud_encrypt.py ```

Open source, MIT licensed. Would love feedback on the security model!
by HardCodedBias | 2025-07-29 23:44:42+00:00
Brain blood perfusion is quite amazing.

I don't understand from their research if

1) The the blood flow is following the computational/metabolic demand (via the endothelial cells communicating via gap junctions)

2) the brain is signaling the endothelial cells directly.

Maybe the paper explains it, or maybe more research required.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-29 23:46:03+00:00
That’s one aspect of quantitative finance, and I agree. Elsewhere I noted that anything that is structured data + computation adjacent it has an easier time with, even excels in many cases.

It doesn’t cover the other aspects of finance, perhaps may be considered advanced (to a regular person at least) but less quantitative. Try having it reason out a “cigar butt” strategy and see if returns anything useful about companies that fit the mold from a prepared source.

Granted this isn’t quant finance modeling, but it’s a relatively easy thing as a human to do, and I didn’t find LLMs up to the task
by hnuser123456 | 2025-07-29 23:46:20+00:00
All these photos also seem to be taken at a further distance at a higher zoom with the digicam. Use 2x mode on iphone and step back a bit and the perspective/distortion should be similar. 12mp is still plenty. Also, they didn't mention if they turned off face smoothing on the iphone.

Google a couple years ago, however, made a big stink that they were forcing an always-on filter to "enhance" the appearance of dark skin on Pixels, so yeah you might need a real camera to get accurate photos of subjects with darker skin if you have a pixel.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-29 23:46:24+00:00
"Healthy capitalism" isn’t an option distinct from government intervention. Healthy capitalism it is government-regulated capitalism. Any system where competition is protected depends on active, ongoing government enforcement of the rules. Without that, markets naturally tend toward monopoly or oligopoly.

Advocating for "healthy capitalism," is advocating for a system where government sets boundaries and steps in to preserve competition. That places it firmly within the spectrum of government-regulated options, not outside or apart from them.

It's tempting to imagine ideal or the worst versions of each option and then claim, "what I want is none of these." Instead, we should look at whether our preferred scenario is actually possible within the real-world range of choices. In this case, "healthy capitalism" is only possible when government is both the referee and the enforcer, so it's a version of the government option, not a separate path.
by chpatrick | 2025-07-29 23:46:43+00:00
Computers might be accurate but statistical models never were 100% accurate. That doesn't imply that no reasoning is happening. Humans get stuff wrong too but they certainly think and reason.

"Pattern matching" to me is another one of those vague terms like "thinking" and "knowing" that people decide LLMs do or don't do based on vibes.
by btbuildem | 2025-07-29 23:46:48+00:00
> so I searched the web and found tinkercad.com has a circuit simulator where you can drag and drop all the components and see if and how it works. It worked for simple circuits, but for mine, the astable multivibrator, it didn’t for some reason. I tried falstad.com/circuit; the same thing happened. It also didn’t work. I searched the web for the reason, and I’ve noticed that sometimes these simulators don’t work well for complex circuits.

If anyone knows of a hobby-grade circuit design and simulation software (on macos! or online), I'd be so grateful to have it mentioned. I've tried kicad, diylc, fritzing, and a few other options, and nothing really "works". It's like the minds of people who created these are broken in a certain tragic way that just does not yield itself to making useable software.

The holy grail for me would be something that allows to design the electronic, then spatial aspects of circuits -- from testing the functionality, to making the board (and bonus points for stripboard support!)
by SkyPuncher | 2025-07-29 23:47:07+00:00
I do interviews for my company. We allow AI (and even encourage it). Use or lack of use of AI has zero correlation with candidate performance. In fact, I’d say there’s a slight negative trend against those who use AI.

We have candidates build a _very_ simple fullstack app. Think something like a TODO app, but only like 2 core functions. This is basic CRUD 101 stuff.

I’ve seen a boatload of candidates use AI only to flame out after the first round of prompting. They literally get stuck and can’t move forward.

The good candidates clearly know their fundamentals. They’re making intentional decisions, telling the AI scoped actions to take, and reviewing pretty much everything the AI generates. They reject code they don’t like. They explain why code is good or bad. They debug easily and quickly.

LLMs are very, very talented but context still matters. They can’t build proper understanding of the non-technical components. They can’t solve things in the simplest way possible. They can’t decide that to explain to the interviewer “if performance is a concern, I’d do X but it’s a time-bound interview so I’m going to Y. Happy to do X if you need”.
by aeon_ai | 2025-07-29 23:47:10+00:00
It's not intended to be uncharitable - You clearly value many things I do (the world needs less attention-seeking, energy greedy shitty software).

I don't know how else one gets information and forms an opinion on the technology except for media consumption or hands-on experience. Note that I count "social media" as media.

My proposition is that without hands-on experience, your information is limited to media narratives, and it seems like the "AI is net bad" narrative seems to be the source of perspectives.

Skepticism is warranted, and there are a million ways this technology could be built for terrible ends.

But, I'm of the opinion that: A) The technology is not hype, and is getting better B) That it can, and will, be built -- Time horizon debatable. C) That for it to result in good outcomes for humanity, it requires good people to help shape it in its formative years.

If anything, more people like you need to be engaging it to have grounded perspectives on what it could become.
by tptacek | 2025-07-29 23:47:25+00:00
I love it; it's a big-company reformulation of the classic vulnerability researcher's "reporting transparency" process: post "Found a nasty vuln in XYZ: 6f0c848159d46104fba17e02906f52aef460ee17d1962f5ea05d2478600fce8a" (the SHA2 hash of a report artifact confirming the vuln).
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-29 23:47:26+00:00
>AatT

How are they doing at the lisps (or any popular speclang; I hunched that you might not have as many anecs here)

IYE?

Could be a clue to how much training they have had on orgs -> how long it would take to trickle down the psych models to the subalterns/ gen-a/z

To what extent are specs the analog of combinatorics in the quest to learn org design via reinforcement?

Ed: 聖人は天を手本とし、賢者は地を手本とし、智者は古を手本とする。

https://gendai.media/articles/-/117722?page=2

Reminds me of the united colors of Dee Hock

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-Visa-logo-look-so-similar...

(Quora link just to demo the extent of corporatist white-washing XD)
by quickthrowman | 2025-07-29 23:47:27+00:00
Union electricians and plumbers make good money, and the non-union shops that do commercial work have to pay close to union wages plus some fringes to get enough manpower. I pay $100/hr for a union journeyworker electrician in a metro area of ~3 million, $106 for a foreman, and $112 for a general foreman. Both of those include fringes, the split is about 55/45 or so. The contracts are for three-year terms with raises every year.

Residential construction is a whole different ballgame that I’m unfamiliar with, but I’d imagine that’s where the average gets dragged down.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-29 23:49:16+00:00
Because the scale of space means that by necessity, humanity will cease to be a monolith. There’s simply no way for a culture that’s scattered across the Sol system and eventually multiple star systems to move as a single piece.

Instead, it’ll splinter into many groups that all undergo independent cultural evolution, each going in its own direction, many of which will be unimpeded by the others. Just by sheer numbers, eventually one (probably multiple) will find a better way forward that leaves the baggage of humanity’s past behind and allows it to become incredibly prosperous.

The chances of something like that happening on Earth seem much lower. We’re too stuck within our local maxima and too beholden to self-preserving power structures for substantial change to occur.
by TomNomNom | 2025-07-29 23:49:27+00:00
There's a bunch of open source work in the robot combat space, but it doesn't have to be used for robot combat specifically. The Malenki Nano is a great example: a tiny, open source receiver with three speed controllers on a single board. It has two PWM channels for servos too so you could do a ton of interesting projects with it.

https://github.com/MarkR42/malenki-nano

https://shop.bristolbotbuilders.com/product/malenki/
by its-summertime | 2025-07-29 23:49:31+00:00
> Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.

Considering there are 2 photos of the same subjects, this reasoning becomes very order-dependent, we don't know the order of the photos taken, so we shouldn't be judging the photos on things affected by that.
by rorylaitila | 2025-07-29 23:50:14+00:00
I didn't see if you were doing this, but there is an additional use case that I had when using hot swapping like HTMX: updating other links on the page to reflect the URL state, when those links are outside of the swapped content.

While the server can use the URLs to update the links in the new HTML, if other links outside that content should also reflect the changes params, you need to manually update them.

In my progressive enhancement library I call this 'sync-params' https://github.com/roryl/zsx?tab=readme-ov-file#synchronize-...
by onetimeusename | 2025-07-29 23:52:56+00:00
Not to be confused with mining or carpenter bees that also like logs. My mom's yard has some carpenter bees that live in the ground. They are as big as bumble bees but more black and a male drone hovers around in a certain area above the females and will dive bomb other male carpenter bees. The male bees will follow you around if you go into their area but they never stung anyone.
by mindslight | 2025-07-29 23:53:34+00:00
So, foundation - as a libertarian I learned a long time ago that one has to be very careful to not let one's ideals be selectively used in service of justifying the actions of entrenched power. This is all too easy to do with lofty ideals of individual freedom, by framing authoritarian control as freedom for some powerful actor (ie de facto government).

Or for a financial example closer to the subject - if I'm incensed by the overgrown and out of control NSA/DEA/ATF, extrapolate to harping on the need for less government in general, but then my arguments get taken up and only used to attack less hardened public-good-providing agencies like NPS and USPS - I haven't actually succeeded at my original goal! Rather my ideals have been abused to by people who don't actually care about my ideals, aren't looking to increase individual liberty, and merely want to destroy NPS and USPS - likely to focus on growing the type of agencies that I originally started off against!

As such, the motives of people actually carrying out the actions are highly relevant, and this is exactly why I keep coming back to discussing these motives. If the reasoning here is actually about money, we would expect to see reductions in costs across the board, perhaps some unevenness based on priorities, but still with the biggest cuts being on the biggest expenditures. However instead, we see $5T in new debt (monetary inflation), and increased wasteful spending on many things. Their goals are clearly not about fiscal responsibility.

So then if we're espousing an ideal of fiscal responsibility, it behooves us to condemn and distance ourselves from this administration. First, because they're burning the credibility of our lofty ideal rather than using it to create reasonable solutions in good faith. Second, because if they're cutting things based on a different metric than efficiently spending public funds, it actually means that public funds are then being spent less efficiently - so we're actually going backwards.
by kevingadd | 2025-07-29 23:53:54+00:00
Maybe this is just a fundamental moral divide but a lot of people do think it's reasonable for someone to say that a grocery store shouldn't sell guns, or that a payment processor shouldn't process gun sales. Just for one example.

If you love guns, substitute something else you dislike. Currently people are aggressively pushing to prohibit the sale of adult entertainment, for example, and doing so by trying to get payment processors to block those transactions.

It's very common for people to hold the opinion that stores and payment processors should be opinionated as well and discriminate in terms of what they allow to be bought or sold.

And that's completely ignoring the question of how laws governing commerce interact with this. If you do business with a sanctioned entity the government's going to get angry real quick AFAIK, regardless of whether the business was itself harmless.
by 93po | 2025-07-29 23:54:31+00:00
I'm not sure what your original point was.

Either it's that serving AI as a business model is impossible to run at a profit, which I easily demonstrated is not the case. If it's just serving the model, then yes, it works, and there's tons of businesses doing just that and operating at a profit.

Or is that's the expense of evening running a GPU to serve a model is not worth the value that the model running on the GPU is capable of making, which is demonstrably not true, given that people are paying anywhere from dozens to hundreds of dollars a month, and there is an eventual payback period for both the cost of the hardware and electricity there.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-29 23:54:37+00:00
Pattern matching has a definition in this field, it does mean specific things. We know machine learning has excelled at this in greater and greater capacities over the last decade

The other part of this is weighted filtering given a set of rules, which is a simple analogy to how AlphaGo did its thing.

Dismissing all this as vague is effectively doing the same thing as you are saying others do.

This technology has limits and despite what Altman says, we do know this, and we are exploring them, but it’s within its own confines. They’re fundamentally wholly understandable systems that work on a consistent level in terms of the how they do what they do (that is separate from the actual produced output)

I think reasoning, as any layman would use the term, is not accurate to what these systems do.
by o11c | 2025-07-29 23:54:58+00:00
Note that you can store longer state (at least 64K; more not tested) in the fragment (`location.hash`); obviously only the client gets to see this, but it's better than nothing (and JS can send it to the server if really needed).

For parameters the server does need to see, remember that params need not be &-separated kv pairs, it can be arbitrary text. Keys can usually be eliminated and just hard-coded in the web page; this may make short params longer but likely makes long ones shorter.

You absolutely should not restore state based on LocalStorage; that breaks the whole advantage of doing this properly! If I wanted previous state, I would've navigated my history thereto. I hope this isn't as bad as sites that break with multiple open tabs at least ...
by alessandro_may | 2025-07-29 23:55:36+00:00
Hi Hacker News community, we’re the founders of Maybind. We’re excited to share our platform and whitepaper for your thoughts.

Maybind introduces an innovative Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for securely creating and hosting Human Digital Twins (HDTs), trained to authentically reflect an individual's communication style, knowledge, and personality based on private conversations. This deep personalization brings substantial challenges related to trust, privacy, and security, as traditional AI services cannot provide the necessary data control and isolation, leaving a significant market gap.

Maybind addresses these challenges through its privacy-by-design platform, ensuring stringent data security. Each Human Twin runs in a secure, isolated sandbox environment with robust privacy controls. User data remains strictly protected, and developers interact with twins only through constrained internal APIs, preventing unauthorized data access. The platform, leveraging serverless technologies like Google Cloud Run, continuously audits and improves its security measures, emphasizing user consent, data encryption, and meticulous isolation of individual data stores.

Looking forward, Maybind anticipates Human Twins becoming as prevalent as smartphones, playing integral roles in daily life and digital legacy management. Acknowledging the technical and ethical challenges ahead, this whitepaper serves as an open invitation for critique and collaboration from those dedicated to shaping the future of personal AI.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-07-29 23:56:36+00:00
> When bread is 2+ days old? More like pulling a rubber by your own teeth. Hopefully you don't have a gum disease or you will lose them.

true only for average supermarket bread. I'm very lucky to have a baker nearby, and even at comparable price points, 2 days old bread is still better than "fresh" store bought
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-29 23:57:34+00:00
It is funny, as the metal 3D printer I've been working on is designed to handle printing/repairing large girder structures. Making things work in vacuum is an interesting design challenge, but also opens a lot of design possibilities for arbitrary structures that can't launch on cargo rockets.

People are often too judgmental these days, and youth must make their own decisions about the world they want to live in.

If you know the history of how JPL started, than you can probably guess it is the "odd" ones that tend to change science for the better. =3