MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsynnott | 2025-08-29 15:30:14+00:00
> Which makes sense, but is sad for all the small towns out there with people really ideologically dedicated to "local business"

Pretty much everyone (excepting accelerationist communists, who would see near-monopolies as a failure mode of capitalism and thus desireable, as it would tend to hasten the collapse of the system) agrees that it's preferable to have more small businesses, vs near-monopolies; _that_ isn't really an ideological question. The disagreement is on what makes a good environment for small businesses. The US right would have you believe that it's all about low tax and low regulation, but the evidence doesn't seem to be on their side.

It's interesting to note that the US actually has rather few SMEs per capita for an advanced developed country; pretty much all countries in high-regulation high-tax Western Europe have more. Sweden has about five times more.

(Personal theory is that a big part of it is healthcare and other social safety nets; it must be really, really scary to leave your secure job to start a business in the US, unless you have a big pile of cash to fall back on.)
by anon84873628 | 2025-08-29 15:30:23+00:00
Yes but "what is the effect of tasers on hearts" is an interesting question when tasers are brand new. If it kills people with obvious pre-existing risks then that is not very surprising. If it kills 50% of otherwise healthy people in a way we didn't anticipate, that is alarming and important to distinguish.

Imagine someone does a quick survey to estimate that tasers aren't killing people we don't expect, and some readers respond saying how dare you ignore the vulnerable heart people. That's still an important thing to consider and maybe we should be careful with the mass scale rollout of tasers, but it wasn't really the immediate point.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-29 15:30:23+00:00
Not sure where you've worked by the "data retention policy" at places I worked made it abundantly clear that we were not to be retaining any data unless personally ordered to by a court. If a line manager, C-Level executive or board member requested me to retain data, I could refuse it under the policy.

Like many things, the retention policy was actually a destruction policy
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-08-29 15:30:25+00:00
I'm not going to defend private equity, but the article mentions only bad outcomes for services owned by private equity. To get a more complete picture, they should probably also see if there are problems with companies that aren't owned by private equity funds. And then look to see what the positive outcomes associated with both private equity owned and non-private equity owned.

Which is to say... these are anecdotes that warrant further investigation, but then ensure effort is required only for equity fund owned services by looking at the whole picture. If there are industry-wide problems and you focus your effort on private equity fund owned services and companies, you might miss an opportunity to improve the entire industry.

That being said... PE funds have a bad reputation for a reason. I would be surprised to find they're not the worst offenders.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-29 15:30:45+00:00
> And while most people don't prepare for war while choosing their packages, it's not unreasonable for a military to do so. During a war, the ability for people to govern themselves and their own projects often changes dramatically, even in democratic countries. It is entirely routine for countries to require cooperation by the force of law in war time, even the US can and has forced private companies to cooperate with war efforts. This is probably not in the security posture calculation for most of us. But it is for some.

Reading this I'm really hoping the DOD maintains mirrors of GitHub projects that are vital to them.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-08-29 15:31:43+00:00
The scraper unlike a legitimate human can load and analyse parallel websites simultaneously, so really the difference makes no difference to a scraper.

Say a user browses 10 sites, all restricted by Anubis that add 5 second to the load time, that's 50 additional seconds the user is spent waiting. A scraper with enterprise grade server hardware? that's 5 seconds for all 10 sites.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-29 15:32:18+00:00
A gentle reminder to the readers here at HN that it doesn't have to be this way. Computer Security is a solved problem[1], and has been so since the 1980s[2].

It's my strong opinion that the only methods you've seen to this point[3-7] were deliberately chosen to be ones that don't work, and make things worse in the long run.

It's my hope that things will change for the better, but when I think about what group could lead that change, there's No Such Agency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_operating_sys...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppArmor

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_permissions

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-29 15:32:59+00:00
I will admit that I am somewhat uncomfortable in how striker-type has become defacto standard pushed in most conversations I had around these. I understand the argument for it, but when it comes to firearms, convenience should not be a priority. A person handling it must be certain that it will perform as expected ( heavens know there is enough variation with plain 1911 ).
by matthewdgreen | 2025-08-29 15:33:18+00:00
There have been dozens of government investigations and lawsuits around Tesla crashes over the past decade (more likely hundreds or thousands, I'm just thinking of the ones that received significant national press and that I happened to notice.) In each of these cases, Tesla's data retention was questioned, sometimes by regulators and sometimes as a major legal question in the case. There is no way in 2025 that the retention process around crash data is some niche area of Tesla's code that the business leaders haven't thought about extremely carefully.

This is like saying "maybe nobody has recently looked at the ad-selection mechanism at Google." That's just not plausible.
Show HN: Ec2instances.info alerts for AWS pricing changes
by StratusBen | 2025-08-29 15:35:51+00:00
:wave:

Our team recently launched the ability for you to be alerted about AWS pricing changes for existing EC2 instances as well as alerts for new instances being launched and what their associated pricing is.

We've had this on in the background for a few weeks and it's alerting for new instance types faster than AWS' blog posts hit. Also whenever anything changes for existing EC2 instances you can see as soon as it changes.

If you want to set an alert, you can see this here: https://newsletters.vantage.sh/
by Aurornis | 2025-08-29 15:35:55+00:00
My comment doesn’t make sense but it’s too late to edit. To clarify: The original link was to a perplexity.ai summary of multiple news articles about the change. The mods have changed it now.

The comments here were from people jumping to co conclusions after skimming an AI summary of news articles about the link. I’m glad it got changed.
by salawat | 2025-08-29 15:36:08+00:00
I am not willing to grant the same level of exculpation on the basis of reasonable forseeability to a software/AI dev that I am to a carpenter making a chair. The history of our trade has in it found great joy in how to use things in ways they were never intended, which much more than a carpenter, puts a burden on us to take the propensity and possibility of abuse into account amongst ourselves.

So no. Mr. Altman, and the people who made this chair, are in part responsible. You aren't a carpenter. You had a responsibility to the public to constrain this thing, and to be as ahead of it as humanly possible, and the number of AI as therapist startups I've seen in the past couple years, even just as passion projects from juniors I've trained, have been met with the same guiding wisdom: go no further. You are critically outside your depth, and you are creating a clear and evident danger to the public you are not yet mentally or sufficiently with it enough to mitigate all the risks of.

If I can get there it's pretty damn obvious.
by the_af | 2025-08-29 15:36:13+00:00
I agree it's taken out of context in current AI discourse. It's just a fun anecdote.

> For what the demo actually was, Miyazaki's reaction didn't make sense.

Hard disagree. Miyazaki explains his position in the video (reminded him of a friend with disabilities, etc). Plus there's an aesthetic and art sensibility to his opinion; this is Miyazaki, not just any other author. The failure was probably on his subordinates, they forgot who they were demoing to.

It's like showing a 3D game demo to someone who fundamentally dislikes 3D in games (or gore to someone who dislikes gore, etc). I mean, sure, it could land... but most likely it won't.

It doesn't really say much about AI in general, this was Miyazaki's personal take and an amusing quote that is too much fun to resist mentioning.
by jibe | 2025-08-29 15:36:42+00:00
You are begging the question, in the classic meaning of the phrase. What issue specifically? I haven't seen a claim yet that ultimately didn't boil down to: "and the trigger was pulled".

Maybe the issue is that the 320 is too close to a competition trigger, and it isn't appropriate for a duty gun. But the gun has been under a microscope for years now, and no one has shown a design defect that causes the gun to fire by itself.
by danielfalbo | 2025-08-29 15:36:47+00:00
How to reliably HTML to MD for any page on the internet? I remember struggling with this in the past

How hard would it be to build an MCP that's basically a proxy for web search except it always tries to build the markdown version of the web pages instead of passing HTML?

Basically Sosumi.ai but instead of working on only for Apple docs it works for any web page (including every doc on the internet)
by cmcaleer | 2025-08-29 15:36:59+00:00
I always thought that Fight Club quote missed a crucial extra number: D, the cost of brand reputational damage. Maybe best expressed as multiplier <1 on revenue that converges towards 1 over time.

Maybe a decade from now this becomes a semi-obscure bit of gun lore and SIG US more or less recovers.

But right now?

If you’re in the market for a handgun, or any gun for that matter, are you going to touch SIG US’s stuff? Maybe, but there are customers who might just say that they don’t want to take that chance and go with Glock or whoever else. Do those customers come back? Why doesn’t this get brought up at every single bid for a contract SIG US makes from now on?

It’s possible that they’re still making the right EV call of course, but the medium-term hit they’re taking from a flaw like this that you don’t make right has to be massive.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-29 15:37:08+00:00
You are misreading what was said. Its not either, or.

There are two things mentioned in the context of light mediated pathways, thus two bounds, one from the lower frequency going down, and one on the upper frequency of the visual spectra going up.

The papers from the author's mentioned, specifically Hollwich, showed that when the light pathways are blocked as happened in coma patients, and eye surgeries at the time, it showed up problematically (in outcomes) and in the biochemical tests they had done in those patients, and rapidly corrected once they were exposed to natural light. Incidentally, these studies lay a strong groundwork for a causal link with the underlying biochemistry and light in people, not just correlation.

They controlled for this rigorously, comparing bloodwork for other surgeries, and similar in naturally blind people including those that lacked or didn't have normal photoreceptors. Overall it was consistent in support of light mediated pathways within the eye itself.

The depressed biochemical activity in some cases was so severe over such a length of time that it led to physical deformation of the eye which is common in myopia/macular degeneration/retinopothy, which resolved itself upon sufficient exposure to natural light in most cases. There are two loops that are impacted dramatically by light which ramp up or slow down activity in the pituitary.

Retinopothy is closely associated with spikes of high energy light waves in the Blue-Violet spectrum (phototoxicity). Macular degeneration, and Myopia with lack of Red-NIR-IR light. Hopefully that clarifies.

The papers involved were groundbreaking, and hardly anyone outside of the field of Ophthalmology have heard of these people, there are a lot of people that seek to draw fallacy and discredit because lack of evidence. There is a vested industry that would be impacted as a health hazard (all LED displays). Very little research has been done on these pathways because there hasn't been funding, similar in scope to the same way flouride research in water was done, which took India doing a comprehensive national study to show it lowered IQ in children above a certain threshold in ppm; nonetheless the fact that these pathways do exist is not disputed. There is solid science to support it.
by inetknght | 2025-08-29 15:38:19+00:00
More than a unit test -- a whole system test. But, as a software engineer with experience in robotics and drones with a focus on software safety, yes I 100% agree.

The unfortunate thing is that the state of the industry (or, my experience in it) currently is not set up to be able to do that cheaply nor at scale. Imagine you have tens of thousands of various unique problem scenarios to run through, and some might take several minutes of simulation to run the test. Even if your release cadence is slow, but especially if you have continuous deployment with dozens of micro-releases every day: how exactly do you cheaply scale such that simulation testing doesn't become a massive bottleneck?
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-29 15:38:28+00:00
Further, even the content itself has become poison. When AI reaches a level that I can trust that it works for me and not someone else I will be ecstatic to let the machine mediate my reality and filter the untrue, toxic, rage bait content of the world to /dev/null on my behalf. Let the machine rot it's brain on Reddit, TikTok, and X-twitter all day so I can spend the clock cycles on something useful, but still be sure I'm not falling behind.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-29 15:38:38+00:00
I don't get the skepticism. Sure it needs more data to be certain, but apparent phenomenon is easily observed - just look at AI generated images, of any subject or type or size.

It drives you crazy. Triggers primal fear for shape mimics and corpses. If you weren't the one looking, it gets people visibly agitated just looking at one. Stick them into fMRI and double blind them with images. It'll probably show up in the data.

It won't take much imagination to suspect same could happen with text.

Is that a transitional issue or fundamental flaw? Is this end of the world? idk. That'll be the open question.

Why does it have to be "it's because they're clinically insane and/or backwards thinking" ? Just because you can't tell apart doesn't mean nobody can't - are those people who are keen to spot AI generated data even a minority, not the majority?
by Refreeze5224 | 2025-08-29 15:38:56+00:00
I think you missed my point. I was trying to point how similar the situation programmers face with AI is to the Luddites. People think of them as anti-technology, but they clearly weren't. HN feels a lot like a forum for weavers discussing the hot new automatic weavers and how excited they are for them, without realizing the true goal and scope.
by mingtianzhang | 2025-08-29 15:39:01+00:00
Yeah, thanks for pointing out the OCR! We also found that for complex PDFs, you first need to use OCR to convert them into Markdown and then run PageIndex. However, most OCR tools process each page independently, which causes them to lose the overall document structure. For example, existing OCR tools often generate incorrect heading levels, which is a big problem if you want to build a tree structure from them. You could check out PageIndex-OCR, the first long-context OCR model that can produce Markdown with more accurate heading-level recognition.
by Syzygies | 2025-08-29 15:39:25+00:00
To clarify, I see AI as an association engine of immense scope. Others are responding with variations on this model in mind.

It has long been a problem in math research to distinguish between "no one has had this idea" and "one person has had this idea". This used to take months. With the internet and MathSciNet, ArXiv online it took many iterations of guessing keywords. Now, I've spent six months learning how to coax rare responses from AI. That's not everyone's use case.

What complicates this is AI's ability to generalize. My best paper, we imagined we were expressing in print what everyone was thinking, when we were in fact connecting the dots on an idea that was latent. This is an interesting paradox: People see you as most original when you're least original, but you're helping them think.

With the right prompts AI can also "connect the dots".
by kypro | 2025-08-29 15:39:43+00:00
> I haven't heard yet a company that actually has produced valuable product because of it. Usually the flow has been, that some Western country has created a succesful product, and then later the workforce has been changed. And almost always the quality has decreased. But it does not matter because the product got already decent market share, and it takes years for revenue to drop because of that.

Are you talking about out-sourcing or hiring the best talent from abroad with work-visas? I guess I don't understand why you would think domestic labour is inherently better? I understand this perspective with outsourcing because it can be difficult to maintain quality when outsourcing to a team in another country, but there's plenty of examples of successful tech companies hiring the best talent from abroad, no? I'd argue this is almost the norm for large tech companies in the US.

And for what it's worth, I'm not saying I agree with this. I'm just saying that if you're a company genuinely interested in hiring the best of the best it makes no sense to limit your Labour pool to the domestic market, and it rarely makes sense to consider graduates unless they are truly exceptional given their relative lack of experience.

In the past companies were simply forced to hire and train domestically because countries like India and China didn't have the education or technological access to compete with the average graduate in the US. Today most of the world is online and education is decent enough that the best talent is far less concentrated to a few geographical areas.

In a pure meritocracy (which the US is close to) in a globalised world it's quite rare that someone graphically local will be the best person available for any given role.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-29 15:39:48+00:00
Not at all, on the contrary, I chose my words carefully ("mildly sociopathic OF ME") as to avoid casting shade on others. Saying "this is how I feel", so to preclude judging others. Everyone makes their own choices, and that's fine.

Boundaries - yes sure they exist. I don't have my photo albums open to the world. I don't share info about family and friends - I know people by default don't want to share information about them, and I try to respect that. Don't share anything on Facebook, where plenty share, for example.

At the same time, I find obstacles to data sharing codified in the UK law frustrating. With the UK NHS. 1) Can't email my GP to pass information back-and-forth - GP withholds their email contact; 2) MRI scan private hospital makes me jump 10 hops before sharing my data with me; 3) Blood tests scheduling can't tell me back that schedule for a date failed, apparently it's too much for them to have my email address on record; 4) Can't volunteer my data to benefit R&D in NHS. ("here are - my lab works reports, 100 GB of my DNA paid for by myself, my medical histories - take them all in, use them as you please...") In all cases vague mutterings of "data protection... GDPR..." have been relayed back as "reasons". I take it's mostly B/S. They could work around if they wanted to. But there is a kernel of truth - it's easier for them to not try share, so it's used as a cover leaf. (in the worst case - an alibi for laziness.)

I'm for having power to share, or not share, what I want. With Google - I do want them to know about myself and use that for my (and theirs) benefit. With the UK gov (trying to break encryption) - I don't want them to be able to read my WhatsApp-s. I detest UK gov for effectively forcing me (by forcing the online pharmacy) to take a photos of myself (face, figure) in order to buy online Wegovy earlier today.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-08-29 15:39:50+00:00
While I love Garry's Mod, I don't love this article, so I'll give my pithy advice:

1) Yes, learn to program.

2) Yes, learn 3d art.

3) Enthusiastically do those things almost every day of your life.

4) Don't follow too many tutorials, just enough to unblock you.

5) Let the debugger/screen punch you in the face. Learn to love being told when you are wrong.

6) Keep your expenses low, but probably you still need to go to a relatively good college.

7) Why? That's because a large part of our world is based on needless credentialism.

8) Build tools that people literally use. This is how you know you're ready for interviewing.

9) Grind leetcode and brain teasers and common interview gotchas for your language/domain of choice, but only an hour a day max.

That's basically what it takes to get a real and good job in the industry now. No magic bullets, just hard work and acceptance of some arbitrary BS.
by gogeta_99999 | 2025-08-29 15:39:54+00:00
>Instead of relying on vector databases or artificial chunking, it builds a hierarchical tree structure from documents and uses reasoning-based tree search to locate the most relevant sections.

So are we are creating create for each document on the fly ? even if its a batch process then dont you think we are pointing back to something which is graph (approximation vs latency sort of framework)

Looks like you are talking more in line of LLM driven outcome where "semantic" part is replaced with LLM intelligence.

I tried similar approaches few months back but those often results in poor scalablity, predictiablity and quality.
by anon84873628 | 2025-08-29 15:40:00+00:00
I imagine he's been doing this so long that taking a sober, delicate, appeal-to-every-reader approach to every article just isn't fun or practical. He wants to get down his thoughts for his core reader base and move on. What fraction goes viral anyway? And so what if some people misunderstand or don't like it? You're always going to have those people anyway no matter what :shrug:
by quectophoton | 2025-08-29 15:40:04+00:00
> So, my problem with how this is modeled is it assumes order doesn't matter in one aspect, but that it does in another.

Yeah, I'm with you here. Assuming heads=girl and tails=boy:

* If order does NOT matter (GB=BG), then it means Alice-Albert (GB, Heads-Tails) is the same as Albert-Alice (BG, Tails-Heads).

* If order DOES matter (GB!=BG), then it means Alice-Barbara (GG, Heads-Heads) is different than Barbara-Alice (GG, Heads-Heads). Thereforce, GG!=GG.

Either way, the stated problem seems badly defined.