MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattlondon | 2025-07-19 07:24:10+00:00
The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days?

My gut suspects not?

Perhaps in the early and mid 80s you could still buy quality products, but now is seems 99% of things are just mass-produced where ever it is cheapest. People are conditioned on Amazon to find the same product from a jumble-of-letter manufacturer who is selling the exact same thing at the lowest price. I do not trust that if I buy a "known brand" for a product that it is going to be any different from a similar same no-name thing that is 20-30% of the price (...and very possibly built in the same factory). If it's all low quality crap (which a lot of the time it is) then you may as well get the cheapest one

Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.

I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there.
by SXX | 2025-07-19 07:27:41+00:00
> That industry is also full of subscription scams

Visa / MC are the ones who enable subscription scams and benefit from them. They implemented "convinience" option of "updating" your credit card data with replacement card. So even if you cancel and replace card charges continue to pass.

They also totally able to see all the places where your card been tokenised, but they dont push banks to expose this to you.
by scarmig | 2025-07-19 07:27:57+00:00
"Marginalization" is a systemic issue; its reality isn't dependent on anecdotes or your particular happiness with your lot in life. You've got to look at differential statistics between men and women to see if either (or both!) are marginalized. College attendance, suicide rates, life span, discrimination by the healthcare system, happiness with work, number of hours worked, affliction by drugs and alcohol, callbacks for jobs, algorithmic discrimination...
by gchadwick | 2025-07-19 07:29:31+00:00
The real bottleneck is the memory, optimize your matmul architecture all you like whilst you still have it connected to a big chunk of HBM memory (or whatever your chosen high bandwidth memory is) you can only do so much.

So really GPU v not GPU (e.g. TPU) doesn't matter a whole lot if you've got fundamentally the same memory architecture.
by rtpg | 2025-07-19 07:31:46+00:00
Sure they would have! The elite of the United States that lead the revolution were all extremely mercantile and many were coming to the colonies to run their own little fiefdoms away from the crown.

One should acknowledge how many of the freedoms locked into the founding ideology of the US is pretty close to what libertarians reach out for. I don't know many libertarians arguing against Citizens United.

That isn't to say that the US can't aim for something different, and that the core of the nation today likely believes many different things.

We can choose our own destiny without trying to ascribe every good idea to what a group of people thought at the founding of the country.
by herbst | 2025-07-19 07:31:57+00:00
I built a cool tool the last week's. I spent more time on evaluating payment processor than the code itself.

I have ~5 projects in my shelf I did never launch because I didn't find a payment solution.

Got instantly banned with all of them, had to write them an email wait for days to get some response.

I usually just use crypto whenever it makes sense. And still have a hard time to believe that I can move as much as crypto as I want but a single payment from a Dubai account can get my bank account frozen for days ...
by badsectoracula | 2025-07-19 07:32:25+00:00
> One of the key aspects of the act is how a model provider is responsible if the downstream partners misuse it in any way

AFAICT the actual text of the act[0] does not mention anything like that. The closest to what you describe is part of the chapter on copyright of the Code of Practice[1], however the code does not add any new requirements to the act (it is not even part of the act itself). What it does is to present a way (which does not mean it is the only one) to comply with the act's requirements (as a relevant example, the act requires to respect machine-readable opt-out mechanisms when training but doesn't specify which ones, but the code of practice explicitly mentions respecting robots.txt during web scraping).

The part about copyright outputs in the code is actually (measure 1.4):

> (1) In order to mitigate the risk that a downstream AI system, into which a general-purpose AI model is integrated, generates output that may infringe rights in works or other subject matter protected by Union law on copyright or related rights, Signatories commit:

> a) to implement appropriate and proportionate technical safeguards to prevent their models from generating outputs that reproduce training content protected by Union law on copyright and related rights in an infringing manner, and

> b) to prohibit copyright-infringing uses of a model in their acceptable use policy, terms and conditions, or other equivalent documents, or in case of general-purpose AI models released under free and open source licenses to alert users to the prohibition of copyright infringing uses of the model in the documentation accompanying the model without prejudice to the free and open source nature of the license.

> (2) This Measure applies irrespective of whether a Signatory vertically integrates the model into its own AI system(s) or whether the model is provided to another entity based on contractual relations.

Keep in mind that "Signatories" here is whoever signed the Code of Practice: obviously if i make my own AI model and do not sign that code of practice myself (but i still follow the act requirements), someone picking up my AI model and signing the Code of Practice themselves doesn't obligate me to follow it too. That'd be like someone releasing a plugin for Photoshop under the GPL and then demanding Adobe release Photoshop's source code.

As for open source models, the "(1b)" above is quite clear (for open source models that want to use this code of practice - which they do not have to!) that all they have to do is to mention in their documentation that their users should not generate copyright infringing content with them.

In fact the act has a lot of exceptions for open-source models. AFAIK Meta's beef with the act is that the EU AI office (or whatever it is called, i do not remember) does not recognize Meta's AI as open source, so they do not get to benefit from those exceptions, though i'm not sure about the details here.

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/11811...
by freeone3000 | 2025-07-19 07:32:57+00:00
Noooo, that’s not true. Below 100, as it’s weighted for this to be true: half above half below. It could theoretically be possible for the half below to also be below 50, but this would require the other half to all be above 150, and both are absurd, because there are a whole horde of people of completely average intelligence.

Checking IQ test results, we see they follow a Gaussian with a mean of 100 and a stddev of 15.
by amluto | 2025-07-19 07:33:14+00:00
Having played with an SGP41 (a current-gen VOC sensor), you cannot correctly do anything involving a threshold. The sensor has a couple of nasty properties, all well documented in the datasheet:

- It has a lot of low frequency noise (timescale of hours to days), so you need to do some sort of high pass filter.

- The responses to different VOC compounds don’t even necessarily have the same sign.

So the sensor gives you a “raw” reading that you are supposed to post-process with a specific algorithm to produce a “VOC index” that, under steady state conditions, is a constant irrespective of the actual VOC level. And then you look at it over time and it will go to a higher value to indicate something like “it’s probably stinkier now than it was half an hour ago”.

This, of course, cannot distinguish smoking from perfume or from anything else, nor is it even particularly reliable at indicating anything at all.

Modern PM2.5 meters are actually pretty good, although they struggle in high humidity conditions. But they still can’t distinguish smoking from other sources on fine particles.
by Yoric | 2025-07-19 07:34:28+00:00
Defining async is hard. And I'm writing this as one of the many people who designed async in JavaScript.

I don't quite agree with the definition in this post: just because it's async doesn't mean that it's correct. You can get all sorts of user-land race conditions with async code, whether it uses `async`/`await` (in languages that need/support it) or not.

My latest formulation (and I think that it still needs work) is that async means that the code is explicitly structured for concurrency.

I wrote some more about the topic recently: https://yoric.github.io/post/quite-a-few-words-about-async/ .
by louthy | 2025-07-19 07:34:38+00:00
> People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then.

We literally had Puritans in Europe [1]

” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant.[1] Puritanism played a significant role in English and early American history, especially in the Protectorate in Great Britain, and the earlier settlement of New England.”

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans
by miiiiiike | 2025-07-19 07:34:40+00:00
Yeah, a "Freedom Card". Our money, they move it, no moralizing. We don't need crypto to fix this, just common sense legislation.

No company or individual should be denied the right to receive funds digitally without due process.

Companies should be free to transact with or exclude anyone, but there should be neutral infrastructure that facilitates the flow of money, with multiple players each with differing rules and risk profiles setup to help people and companies access it.

No one financial institution should be able to dictate the speech allowed on a platform.

What's the status of FedNow?
by choeger | 2025-07-19 07:34:50+00:00
A parser is trivial. It's XML and you have a schema.

What you want is a compiler (e.g., into a different document format) or an interpreter (e.g., for running a search or a spell checker).

That's a task that's massively complicated because you cannot give an LLM the semantic definition of the XML and your target (both typically are under documented and under specified). Without that information, the LLM would almost certainly generate an incomplete or broken implementation.
by allentown521 | 2025-07-19 07:36:52+00:00
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by stubish | 2025-07-19 07:37:07+00:00
I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime. Designing the reactors, building the prototype, building the real power plant... 30 years minimum. Then waiting another 13 years for the gold to stop being radioactive (although maybe radioactive gold sitting unmoving in a vault is worth as much as non-radioactive gold sitting unmoving in a vault if you pay your finance guys enough). And it requires high electricity prices to be profitable at all, so a bet against renewable energy generation and battery storage in that time frame (we don't have a shortage of gold). But yes, if you could create tantulum or something similar (expensive, in short supply, not artificially scarce because of hoarding)
by constantcrying | 2025-07-19 07:37:57+00:00
The problem with the EU regulation is the same as always, first and foremost they do not understand the topic and can not articulate a clear statement of law.

They create mountains of regulations, which are totally unclear and which require armies of lawyers to interpret. Adherence to these regulations becomes a major risk factor for all involved companies, which then try to avoid interacting with that regulation at all.

Getting involved with the GDPR is a total nightmare, even if you want to respect your users privacy.

Regulating AI like this is especially idiotic, since currently every year shows a major shift in how AI is utilized. It is totally out in the open how hard training an AI "from scratch" will be in 5 years. The EU is incapable of actually writing laws which make it clear what isn't allowed, instead they are creating vague corridors how companies should arrive at certain outcomes.

The bureaucrats see themselves as the innovators here. They aren't trying to make laws which prevent abuses, they are creating corridors for processes for companies to follow. In the case of AI these corridors will seem ridiculous in five years.
by rscho | 2025-07-19 07:38:28+00:00
The fact that this answer is so obvious to you means you have to read up on diagnostic test performance and how screening works, because it's in fact not obvious at all. I mean that in the nicest way possible. Those companies offering expensive screening are not what they seem. Whether their offering is useful or whether they're just swindling you is a question that needs lots of time, money and sweat to answer.
by pdhborges | 2025-07-19 07:38:34+00:00
It's not FUD. For all the trouble you claim to have with Postgres I experienced 0 of it in the last 4 years. The only thing extra for a simple setup is a couple of lines in your docker compose files which is completely amortised because you already have a multi process architecture with Python anyway (proxy + webserver + web server works). The upfront cost is so small that for me the expected total cost will rarely make sense even if you assume that your application has 1% of chance of scaling beyond what you can do with sqlite.
by ajb | 2025-07-19 07:43:05+00:00
He's not saying advertisers don't compete. He's saying it changes from advertising being a massive risk as well as a cost, to just a cost. So the auction is won by the company with the biggest instantaneous profit margin on a SKU, instead of the one with the biggest war chest that can afford to risk on that massive prime time slot. This change in incentive favours shitty products.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-19 07:43:15+00:00
This seems clever if we forget that it runs on a real machine. Once we remember there's a real machine we run into discontinuities and suddenly "Naive doubling" works best for a lot of cases.

At the small end, on the real machine tiny allocations are inefficient, so rather than 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, 27, 41 turns out we should probably start with 16 or even 64 bytes.

Then at the large end the "clever" reuse is a nonsense because of virtual memory, so that 1598, 2397, 3596 doesn't work out as cleanly as 1024, 2048, 4096

Folly has a growable array type which talks a big game on this 1.5 factor, but as I indicated above they quietly disable this "optimisation" for both small and large sizes in the code itself.

Of course YMMV, it is entirely possible that some particular application gets a noticeable speedup from a hand rolled 1.8x growth factor, or from starting at size 18 or whatever.
by cpard | 2025-07-19 07:43:19+00:00
From their FAQ:

"Is it worth the investment?

Absolutely. Hotels equipped with Rest have seen an 84x increase in smoking fine collection. Plus, our smoking detection technology helps prevent damage to rooms and reduce a number of future violations."

Apparently there are way more people smoking than we thought there are or the sensor just generates a lot of false positives.

The language they are using all over the site is very interesting though, see here an example:

From how it works:

"Automatically charge

If smoking is detected, your staff gets notified, simplifying the process of charging smoking fees."

With a system with false positives, it makes total sense to use real time notifications to staff to go and check what's going on, that would be legit, but then on top saying that you automatically charge?

It almost feels like they are selling a way to fraud to their customers while covering themselves against any litigation by using the right copy in there to support that it's the responsibility of the Hotel staff to go and check in real time that the violation is actually happening.
by JW_00000 | 2025-07-19 07:43:32+00:00
To give a concrete example, matrix multiplication is not commutative in general (AB ≠ BA), but e.g. multiplication with the identity matrix is (AI = IA). So AIB = ABI ≠ BAI.

Or applied to the programming example, the statements:

1. Server.accept 2. Client.connect 3. File.write # write to completely unrelated file

123 = 312 ≠ 321.
by atoav | 2025-07-19 07:45:38+00:00
> I wonder if right wing media will still be able control the narrative and place the blame on some other minority in all the down trend

That might depend on how much more dirt his followers are willing to eat for Trump. And this is somewhat hard to predict, many of them are already so deep in the con there is a significant sunken-cost fallacy at play. But I am pretty sure all of that has limits as well.
by irusensei | 2025-07-19 07:45:42+00:00
> Authelia provides authentication and authorization for services in a couple of ways. For services that support OpenID Connect it provides a very simple single sign on experience. If not, Authelia can integrate with my reverse proxy (nginx) and require the user login before the reverse proxy allows access to a service.

Recently I found out Gitea or Forgejo can act as an Oauth provider. And since these support ldap you can for example deploy a Samba AD and set it up as an authentication source for Gitea/Forgejo. If you enable the OAuth feature you can connect stuff like grafana and log in with your Samba AD credentials.

To me this is more convenient than running a dedicated auth service considering Forgejo can also provide git, wiki, docker registry (also authenticated) and other function. It's such an underrated piece of software and uses so few resources.
by ImaCake | 2025-07-19 07:46:06+00:00
Arguably, institutions like the EPA exist to moderate extremes. The EPA simulatenously prevents industry from causing cancer clusters and extinctions while also preventing eco-terrorism. All the science, surveys, and purple prose done by the EPA and consultants is arguably kinda bullshit, but it is very useful bullshit because its a whole lot better than assassinated mining executives and hospitals full of throat cancer victims.
by atemerev | 2025-07-19 07:46:41+00:00
They sure do, just like there are different states in the US with vastly different attitudes to life and everything.

And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US.

I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.
by 9rx | 2025-07-19 07:47:36+00:00
> Is there any evidence that central planning on a much larger scale is drastically more efficient?

If it were, why do we have more than one company?

> I take your point that companies themselves are usually centrally planned internally

Well, sort of. It is true that companies exist solely for the reason of exploiting efficiencies in central planning. If central planning was always inefficient, companies wouldn't exist! But, as I alluded to earlier, no company has found central planning to be efficient in all cases. Not even the largest company in the world centrally plans everything. Not even close.

As with most things in life, a bit of balance will serve you well.
Show HN: Compass CNC – Open-source handheld CNC router
by camchaney | 2025-07-19 07:48:15+00:00
Hey HN,

I am Cam, and for the past two years I have been working on Compass, an open-source handheld CNC router that brings computer precision to woodworking while keeping the user directly involved in the process.

The idea started as my senior design project at UC Berkeley, with the goal of making a more approachable CNC machine—standard CNC machines are expensive, bulky, and remove you from the tactile “maker” experience. Compass solves that by combining a handheld router with real-time robotic assistance. You move the router roughly along a design path, and Compass uses four optical flow sensors (like in computer mice) and a 3-axis motion system to auto-correct for precision cuts.

What is different about Compass: - Open source: All plans, firmware, and CAD files are available on GitHub. - Affordable: The DIY build costs ~$600 in parts, and I am selling kits for <$800. - No external markers: The sensing technology allows for positioning without external markers, so no setup or consumables required. - Portable: Fits in a backpack and is not limited by a fixed work envelope.

We recently completed our first beta program and have just launched V1 kits for pre-order. You can find more info and the launch video at the listed URL.

GitHub: https://github.com/camchaney/handheld-cnc
by p0w3n3d | 2025-07-19 07:48:22+00:00
By the way, I have no power here, but you people are ubiquitous, at least one of you is in C committee.

Hereby I propose an addition to C:

namespace something { }

Which is preprocessing to something_ before every function

class someclass { }

Which is preprocessing all the functions inside to

someclass_fn1(someclass\* asfirstparameter, ...)

And of course the final syntax sugar

cl\* c; c->fn1(a,b)

I mean this would make C much easier, as we already code object oriented in it, but the amount of preprocessing, unreadability that needs to be done in headers is simply brain exhausting
by tialaramex | 2025-07-19 07:49:48+00:00
They say 1.25+k, in this context k will be some constant, suppose it's 16 bytes

Thus you might see a curve like 13, 32, 56, 86 - this curve is aggressive to start but then much gentler. Because it's so gentle it gets the re-use upside for medium sized allocations but it incurs a lot more copying, I can imagine in Python that might be a good trade.