MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rbanffy | 2025-07-01 08:33:15+00:00
I'm not really into trains, but it would be great if one day I found a 1970's computer room in my basement, complete with cold water lines, 3278 and 3279 terminals, and some tape drives...

I'd be happy to discover a basement, even if the first thing I'd do would be to call the police to check if nobody went missing near my neighborhood in the past few decades.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-01 08:33:15+00:00
Exactly. All the free market logic assumes that barriers to entry are low. They are incredibly high and the market is naturally prone to converging on a single solution. There's basically room for two smartphone ecosystems. Microsoft/Nokia couldn't sustain a third. Android-adjacent things like Amazon Fire and Tizen have little market share.

> factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing

Ironically in the contract manufacturing area the market is actually efficient. Small batches just cost more as an intrinsic fact about manufacturing. I guarantee you could get a quote for any quantity of manufacturing above 1, you just wouldn't like it.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-01 08:34:18+00:00
My experience here in the UK, despite getting the highest "tier" of survey carried out on my (current) home when buying it, was that within the 74 page report they produced, there were at least a dozen occurrences of the surveyors recommending a "specialist".

They avoid any liability by saying, "we couldn't survey under the floor", we recommend getting in a specialist. "we can't assess the roof structure", we recommend getting a specialist.

By the time all was said and done, we were looking at tens of thousands of pounds in further "specialist" surveys, which nobody realistically is going to do only to decide after that you won't buy the house.

I can imagine once you're looking at houses priced in the millions it might make sense, but blowing the equivalent of your deposit just isn't tenable.
by 0xEF | 2025-07-01 08:35:23+00:00
The problem is interpretation. The key phrase is "interference with privacy" which is ambiguous yet all encompassing. You say it says nothing toward solicitation or manipulation where I interpret both of those acts as "interference with my privacy." Not saying your version is wrong, by the way, just different from mine as a example of where the protection falls apart.

My gut feeling as that no matter how much additional and specific language we add to any bill of privacy rights, there will always be holes or work-arounds due to interpretation and semantics. This is how lawyers in most robust legal systems make their living, after all. The data that results from robbing us of consent, privacy and agency when engaged with websites, web/mobile apps and software is so insanely valuable that the people interested in collecting and selling it will be happy to keep one step ahead of whatever language we come up with that attempts to mitigate their actions.

We need a different solution, one that returns us to the levels of implied trust I remember from the late 1990's/early 2000's Internet, one that prevents corporate entities from being the dominant drivers behind its growth and development. However, I am not technical enough or imaginative enough to even guess at what that solution might be, so from my perspective, the battle is already lost and we are at their mercy unless we avoid having an online presence as much as possible...a bit like that old classic movie War Games, the only way to win is not to play.
by DoingIsLearning | 2025-07-01 08:36:45+00:00
> Average user is not multilingual

I don't know your reality but literally anywhere in the 744 million users in Europe if you consider the technology literate average of internet users I guarantee that someone who is not even bilingual is precisely the exception.

I would hazard say the same is true in most of Asia and Africa perhaps less so in South America where Spanish/Portuguese are more monolithic.
by defrost | 2025-07-01 08:37:00+00:00
Full headline 77 chars to long, edited hard.

Justice Department Announces Coordinated, Nationwide Actions to Combat North Korean Remote Information Technology Workers’ Illicit Revenue Generation Schemes

Law Enforcement Actions Across 16 States Result in Charges, Arrest, and Seizures of 29 Financial Accounts, 21 Fraudulent Websites, and Approximately 200 Computers

..

Today, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts and the National Security Division announced the arrest of U.S. national Zhenxing “Danny” Wang of New Jersey pursuant to a five-count indictment. The indictment describes a multi-year fraud scheme by Wang and his co-conspirators to obtain remote IT work with U.S. companies that generated more than $5 million in revenue.

..

etc.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-01 08:37:09+00:00
> O(n) is worse than O(n^2) for small n.

It can be, it isn't necessarily. And I don't care about small values of n. If I'm spinning through two lists of size 5 it doesn't matter if option A is slightly faster than option B, both options will run on the order of nanoseconds. The lower time complexity solution will continue to be reasonably fast as the input grows, pretty soon the difference will be measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days... Using a worse complexity solution for small inputs is a micro optimization you can use some times but it is a micro optimization. Using the best time complexity is what I like to call a macro optimization. It's the default solution. You might deviate from it at times, but you're much better off using complexity to guide your decisions than not doing it. Once you know what you're doing you can deviate from it when appropriate, some times worse complexity is better in specific cases. But 99.9% of the time, best time complexity is good enough either way.

I usually don't need the code I write to be optimal. It doesn't matter if it's a bit slower than it technically could be - as long as it's fast enough and will continue to be fast when the input grows.

Some times you may want to squeeze the absolute maximum performance and in that case you may be able to micro optimize by choosing a worse complexity solution for cases where you know the inputs will always be small. If that assumption ever breaks, your code is now a bottle neck. It can be useful thing to do in certain niche situations, but for the vast majority of code you're better off just using the best complexity solution you can. Otherwise you may come back to find that the code that ran in a millisecond when you profiled it, now takes 20 minutes because there's more data.

How do you run a profiler in CI? Do you hook it up to your tests? You need some code that runs with actual input so I guess you either profile the test suite or write tests specifically for profiling? Or maybe you write benchmarks and hook a profiler up to that?

This sounds like it could be a useful technique but very time consuming if you have to write the profiler tests/benchmarks specifically, and kind of useless if you just hook it up to your general test suite. I want my tests to run fast so I don't use big data for testing, and you won't really see where the bottlenecks are unless you're testing with a lot of data.
by treetalker | 2025-07-01 08:37:10+00:00
Currently in Versailles in a hotel without air conditioning (albeit on the shady north side of the building). During the day it's not so bad with the windows closed, drapes drawn, and tabletop fan. (Speaking as someone accustomed to Florida temperatures, humidity, and widely available air conditioning.)

In the evening, say 19h00, the sun is low and it's quite pleasant out. ("It's a dry heat," as we say!) I always forget how far north Paris and Versailles are: the sky still has some light past 22h30 this time of year.

Keep cool and stay safe, mes amis !
by v3ss0n | 2025-07-01 08:37:17+00:00
Zulip's topic focus chatting get the work done and kept information organized, very easy to search and assign tasks. That's huge upgrade over IRC since information is organized at the protocol level.

i agree matrix is desirable to replace slack only in case of where E2E is necessary.

For companies, inspection of chat logs may needed by top management in case of dramas.
by martypitt | 2025-07-01 08:37:31+00:00
Diagrams look great - well done.

Reminds me of a similar project years ago that was doing the same thing - they ultimately struggled with monetization and folded (I forget the name) -- however this one is MIT OSS, so I'm guessing that's not a key concern right now.

Note that your "Built with the Isoflow library" link at the bottom to isoflow 404's to https://github.com/isoflow/isoflow
by masswerk | 2025-07-01 08:38:32+00:00
> How is there not at least an option…

Haven't we learned in the last 15 years or so that options are bad for users? ;-)

Moreover, watching videos in a foreign language with subtitles in that same language used to be a popular tool for learning languages. Clearly, the proliferation of language skills is a serious danger to the market for AI generated instant translations and must be stopped at all costs.
by matsemann | 2025-07-01 08:39:07+00:00
Yeah, I think apps just should have a sorted list (/tiers) of languages they support, and pick whatever first has a match in the user preferences. If the app supports two languages equally well, then choose the one first in the user's preference list.

So for me having no,en (in the future where this works I would dare to have no first):

app is in english, has auto translated norwegian: choose english app is in norwegian, has auto translated english: choose norwegian app is in norwegian and english equally: choose norwegian app is in french, has english translation: choose english
by detaro | 2025-07-01 08:39:40+00:00
People usually mix up things: The clear clause in their ToS is about selling Steam keys. A dev on Steam can generate Steam keys and sell them wherever they want, and Steam does not take a cut on those. For those, there is an explicit clause that says that you need to match the pricing on Steam.

For just selling the game elsewhere, there is no such clause, and there are games that e.g. are cheaper on Epic and explicitly say that's because Epic takes lower fees. But there are also devs claiming that Valve pressured them in private to not do that, and that's what the lawsuit is about.
by Etheryte | 2025-07-01 08:40:31+00:00
> Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they?

This is such an odd claim that I struggle to even find a good way to approach it. Have you seen, as an example, all of Northern Europe? I don't think I even know anyone who is lactose intolerant, dairy is a major food group for practically everyone here, regardless of age. I'm guessing you must come from a very different cultural and regional background.
by afandian | 2025-07-01 08:40:39+00:00
This dredged up a question I had two decades ago and never looked up. Perhaps someone here knows.

I got to use a Tascam DA-38 a few times. It was an 8 track and I could have sworn it had punch-in recording. It used DTRS, not DAT, but apparently it shared the helical scan. Presumably the 8 tracks were interleaved on a single bitstream, so how was it possible to seamlessly replace one track live? Was there more than one head? How did the clock sync work for simultaneous reading and writing?
by cdrini | 2025-07-01 08:41:13+00:00
+1 for subtitles. I do think that subtitles don't gain the same level of traction; and people complain about auto-translated subtitles as well (and auto-subtitles on their own!). I think auto-dubbing might be more successful at allowing folks from smaller languages/communities the opportunity to gain audiences outside of those smaller languages/communities.

The main difference between youtube and foreign language films is most creators on youtube don't have a budget for professional dubbers, so you either only watch big creators who do have that budget, or you have to compromise.
by nextaccountic | 2025-07-01 08:41:25+00:00
It's funny because some time ago (months? years?) people would say that you just didn't prompt the LLM well enough. But now LLMs are better and prompting isn't as arcane as before, so the next frontier is giving them the proper context. See this HN thread currently in the front page

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44427757
by sshine | 2025-07-01 08:41:30+00:00
> I got a nickel every time I spent 15 minutes replacing a trivial use of clap with pico-args and thus reduced the binary size and compile time of some project by at least 80%, I would have at least three nickels.

Hahaha, awesome. Thanks for the pico-args recommendation.

It supports the bare minimum.

I sure would like deriving-style parsing and --help auto-generation.

I think deriving-style unavoidably causes build time and complexity.

But it could be done without the dependency explosion.

There's a list of options here:

https://github.com/rosetta-rs/argparse-rosetta-rs#rust-arg-p...

Among the ones you recommend, argh supports deriving, auto-generates --help and optimizes for code size. And its syntax is very comparable to clap, so migrating is very easy. gumdrop seems very similar in its feature set (specifying help strings a little differently), but I can't find a defining feature for it.
by latexr | 2025-07-01 08:42:41+00:00
> This is probably a controversial opinion

Not very. Plenty of people, including on HN, agree with you.

> but I actually use my iPhone because it's locked down with a curated app marketplace and secure payment system.

Except it’s not. That argument would be much stronger if the App Store weren’t full of scammy predatory apps which regularly top the top grossing charts.

> I don't want alternative payment methods or app stores.

And I don’t want everything to be a subscription, yet here we are. Just like I have to avoid the majority of apps today, you’ll avoid other App Stores if that is what you want.

You’re at a significant advantage because ignoring other stores is much easier, and opening up the iPhone to third-party stores has an effect on the policies of the main App Store. This is plainly demonstrated by the acceptance of the emulator from the creator of an alternative store. So even by not using those third-party ones, you’re benefiting.

> They're essentially trying to make it impossible to purchase a product I want, which is more monopolistic than the current status quo.

That doesn’t make sense. There’s no monopoly on a product which doesn’t exist.

> iPhones do not have any sort of monopoly on phones.

You don’t have to be a monopoly to be harmful to consumers. Companies have realised that long ago and it’s time consumers do too.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-07-01 08:43:03+00:00
Attention Is Everything.

To direct attention properly you need the right context for the ML model you're doing inference with.

This inference manipulation -- prompt and/or context engineering -- reminds me of Socrates (as written by Plato) eliciting from a boy seemingly unknown truths [not consciously realised by the boy] by careful construction of the questions.

See Anamnesis, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy). I'm saying it's like the [Socratic] logical process and _not_ suggesting it's philosophically akin to anamnesis.
by wonger_ | 2025-07-01 08:43:05+00:00
Nicely done! Those time-saving features are really valuable. I'm working on something similar for home inspectors.

- looks like your output report is an HTML page of text and media. Do you generate any PDFs?

- how much time does a report take to complete?

- how long have you been developing sewerreport.com?

- how many customers do you have?
by bodge5000 | 2025-07-01 08:43:12+00:00
There's a slight difference, real customers care if the software feels slow, not if its using Electron or React. You might argue that they're one in the same, and I wouldn't disagree, but they don't know that (or arguably care about that), and so don't know what to look for and what to avoid. By the time they realise the software they're using is slow, they're often too embedded in it to quit for that reason alone.

The real question is; has your girlfriend stopped using teams since finding out how slow it is?
by pjc50 | 2025-07-01 08:45:21+00:00
Depends. English first language countries remain mostly monolingual. But the rest divides into:

- educated people are expected to learn English in school and end up consuming English media anyway (where you'd expect >50% multilingual, but not everyone)

- country has many official languages (many people are multilingual, but not necessarily in English; e.g. India, Indonesia, possibly China)

- country has literacy problems (not so many left now, maybe in sub-Saharan Africa)

- proud monoglots of a language that isn't English: Japan, France (but even here a lot of people consume English media anyway)
by theknarf | 2025-07-01 08:45:47+00:00
The article says that local-backups are still going to be a thing, and that it'll use the new format (so that you can restore ex an Android backup on iPhone and the other way around). Presumably you'll have to bring your own solution for storing the backup, but if its just a file / archive then you can store it however you store the rest of your backups.
by d3vnull | 2025-07-01 08:45:52+00:00
What's keeping anyone from using a trustworthy camera to take a trustworthy picture of a screen displaying an AI generated image?

And that's the low tech version. Taking a trustworthy camera and plugging the CMOS sensor connector into an LLM that generates its output as RAW data that feeds into the sensor isn't that hard if you want to make extra sure you're not detected.

Such a system might even cause more harm than good by giving people the impression that real/AI images can actually be certified.
by M95D | 2025-07-01 08:48:21+00:00
Other people noted this is a very bad privacy issue. Just thinking: since when laptop manufacturers encourage reuse instead of buying new? It would lower sales!

I belive user tracking is the real purpose of this tech. It would have the ability to track the user no matter what OS is installed. Windows does tracking, Google does tracking, all websites have tracking, and now they want a piece of the pie too. PCFax is just a disguise - an alterative purpose more acceptable to the public than what it really is.

And now, thinking ahead: what would be the next logical step for them? Ad popups directly from the firmware?
by arkx | 2025-07-01 08:48:21+00:00
Isn't Steam (or more specifically steamwebhelper.exe) using Chromium Embedded Framework for web views? It's already a 64-bit process for me on Windows.

I also do wish they'd upgrade the client completely, but WoW64 isn't going anywhere. It's probably discussions like this on Linux side that would move their hand, if anything.
by edarchis | 2025-07-01 08:48:22+00:00
<edit> as pointed out by @addandsubtract, I misunderstood the extension, it's about audio translation, not just titles. Sorry about that. </edit>

If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations.

DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/
by evertedsphere | 2025-07-01 08:48:33+00:00
Another day, another LLM-generated blog post on the front page about a deeply human topic. Do others not detect the tells, or do you not care?

(And, no, there is no "respond to content rather than style" issue here. There is no meaningful content here. That would be the prompt, but of course the author doesn't want to just post that.)
by torginus | 2025-07-01 08:49:02+00:00
I just had my first experience with a customer service LLM. I needed to get my account details changed, and for that I needed to use the customer support chat.

The LLM told me what sort of information they need, and what is the process, after which I followed through the whole thing.

After I went through the whole thing it reassured me everything is in order, and my request is being processed.

For two weeks, nothing happened, I emailed the (human) support staff, and they responded to me, that they can see no such request in their system, turns out the LLM hallucinated the entire customer flow and was just spewing BS at me.
by tecleandor | 2025-07-01 08:49:42+00:00
I've checked an SoS review [0], and it seems like it was a multi-head operation (although I don't know if that's what enables the track punching):

> The ability to monitor off tape during recording is due to the DA38's 4‑head drum layout.

--

0: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/tascam-da38
by csnover | 2025-07-01 08:50:10+00:00
> But in your case, you’re investing time upfront to avoid a heavier dependency

This is very confusing to me. What of this API[0], or this one[1], requires “investing time upfront”? With argh, you already know how to use all the basic features before you even start scrolling. These crates are all practically interchangeable already with how similarly they work.

It is only now that I look at clap’s documentation that I feel like I might understand this category of reply to my post. Why does clap need two tutorials and two references and a cookbook and an FAQ and major version migration guidelines? Are you just assuming that all other command-line parsers are as complicated and hard to use as clap?

[0] https://docs.rs/argh/latest/argh/

[1] https://docs.rs/gumdrop/latest/gumdrop/
by jsvaughan | 2025-07-01 08:50:12+00:00
We've got 3x spectrums, two 48k rubber key ones and a plus2. we've even got such random things as a Trickstick :)(https://worldofspectrum.org/hardware/feat4.html). I got them out of the loft the other day but the biggest problem i found is that few of the original game tapes still work. did manage to play Jetpac though :)
by lichtenberger | 2025-07-01 08:50:32+00:00
I'm working on a side-project in my spare time since the end of 2012 (before at the university) with some gaps, which is an append-only DBS with time travel capabilities using a custom storage engine based on COW tries and a (still I think) novel page versioning strategy called Sliding Snapshot. Recently I began work on pooling pages for reuse and a custom allocator for variable page sizes. Before, I had created new instances whenever a page was read from disk instead of reusing instances, so the allocation rate was really high for parallel transactions.

https://sirix.io | https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix | http://brackit.io
by cdrini | 2025-07-01 08:50:49+00:00
+1! That's a reasonable take. The takes on here saying Google is a shill for introducing this feature, that no one wants it, that it's useless, are the takes that I found frustrating in this comment thread.

But also I might just be lucky, I speak multiple languages and have traveled into various countries, and have never had youtube show me anything other than English wherever I go.

Edit: And although multilinguals are in the majority over monolinguals (I think, citation needed), I think being multilingual still makes you part of an even larger majority, which is humans who are unable to watch the majority of videos due to language.
by bayesianbot | 2025-07-01 08:51:23+00:00
I thought democracy was doomed not long after I first learned about it as I had already seen how 'well' people check that their beliefs match with reality. I thought I was wrong (partly to keep my sanity), that there must be some system that keeps it stable. Nowadays it is clear I was wrong - the clown show of current global democracy is nothing like what I imagined. I thought it was going to be smart, greedy leaders with complex lies that are hard to check, but instead, people are being robbed and the processes keeping them alive and fed are being destroyed all in the open, there are mostly no complex lies or smart leaders involved.

It's hard to blame AI for something that was obvious three decades ago.