MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brewdad | 2025-08-18 22:35:10+00:00
It's also likely true that a library that bought 10 copies of a book initially is unlikely to buy 10 more copies once there have been 200 circulations and they are needing to be replaced. They may only buy 5 replacement copies since the book is likely to be less popular than at initial release so it will take much longer for the next 100 circulations to occur.

As for anecdota, I have more than once borrowed a library book and then purchased a copy so I could read it again or to finish it if demand is strong enough that I would have to wait weeks or months to be able to borrow it again.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-08-18 22:36:06+00:00
I can just speak for myself, but my F500 has been setting money on fire chasing AI. Truly terrible ideas are being pursued just for the sake of movement. Were “AI” not part of the pitch, it would have been immediately tossed in the bin as a waste of time.

Ideas which are not terrible, instead have awful ROIs. Nobody has a use case beyond generating text, so lots of ideas about automating some text generation in certain niches. Not appreciating that those bits represent 0.1% of the business ventures. Yet they are technically feasible, so full steam ahead.
by IanCal | 2025-08-18 22:36:28+00:00
> All your data is stored locally on your device, and your audio goes directly from your machine to your chosen cloud provider (Groq, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, etc.) or local provider (Speaches, owhisper, etc.)

Their point is they aren’t a middleman with this, and you can use your preferred supplier or run something locally.
by antonyl | 2025-08-18 22:37:16+00:00
Actually — while I'm here: does anybody have recommendations for per-app or per-site VPNs, especially on iOS? That's basically what I would want here: a different IP address when I open an incognito window, or for each app on my phone (e.g. Brave should have a different IP address than Gmail). I ask because while system-wide VPNs help somewhat... if I ever open anything identifying, I can effectively be fingerprinted anyways.

For example, if I start a Mullvad VPN, and open up an incognito window, but am still signed into Google (on my non-incognito window), Google now knows who I am (in both windows). Then if I browse a website that has GA (within incognito), theoretically Google could figure out who I am. This would be avoided if I shared nothing (not IP address, not browser fingerprinting) between my two windows. Is there any way to do that at scale besides just... closing everything before I go into incognito?
by smartician | 2025-08-18 22:37:18+00:00
Full disclosure: I'm a Google employee, but not in the areas mentioned in the article. This is my personal opinion.

Regarding the Nest thing: I don't think those devices stop working completely if you don't enable location sharing for the "home and away" feature. It might be bad UI that made the user think that this is the case?

Regarding photo sharing: I think that permission is necessary to show a "photo picker" inside the app that allows the user to pick and choose which photos to upload. I'm not quite sure what the alternative would look like: "he can identify specific pictures in his library and grant access to just those" --> How exactly would that work without the app having access to the pictures? Also, does the author believe the app would then secretly analyze all pictures and send content back to the mothership without the user's consent? Again, this might be a communication/UX issue...
by Eji1700 | 2025-08-18 22:37:18+00:00
I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be.

A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch".

Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy.

Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two.

Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be.

Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear.

Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way?

I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile.

I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this.

Edit- To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.
by epolanski | 2025-08-18 22:37:38+00:00
#5on5 or #pcw on irc.quakenet.org

Also, there were multiple tournament websites out there: ESL and another one I don't remember the name anymore, that hosted tournaments all time.

I remember lan tournaments in Italy with more than 60+ Counter Strike teams like Smau 2002, and you had to bring your own computer nonetheless.

It was really a golden age for gaming I swear.

People that didn't live that think that gaming is better now are severely mistaken.

Playing online videogames today is a solo experience, 20+ years ago it was the very opposite, even if you played alone you met people on the same hosted servers you liked, on forums, on IRC, in lan.

Today it's really sad.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-18 22:38:16+00:00
>Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium.

The rover ones use Pu-238.

> You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.

The Curiosity and Perserverance rovers each have one MMRTG (multimission radiothermal generator), and I've never seen a picture of the rover where it is censored, and its actually explicitly called out and shown and drawn attention to in lots of NASA publicity stuff.

https://share.google/cqF7eqAJtLH52ALtN

https://mars.nasa.gov/internal_resources/788/
by exasperaited | 2025-08-18 22:38:24+00:00
Indeed -- Coinbase has an explicit ideology and has benefited from it through Trump dropping an investigation.

If people stopped talking about politics in Coinbase offices towards the end of 2020, perhaps it was to stop staff pushing back on their very deliberate movement towards self-serving politics.

> This is Coinbase UK advertising and it is aligned with the UK right - saying the system is failing

That advert blew me away when I saw it on streaming TV. It is simultaneously quite obviously a work of art and also staggeringly reprehensible; it should be regulated as a Party Political Broadcast because it is a political statement clearly aimed to benefit Reform, for one thing.

It is also being used to persuade the very people who have not got even the base of their investment risk pyramid sorted out to just abandon all of it and work on the high risk stuff that should be at the top, which really should be attracting the attention of the ASA, who have banned adverts for less. Appalling and actually quite worrying.
by simoncion | 2025-08-18 22:38:27+00:00
> ...at it's core systemd is just a glorified script runner as well?

Yep. And it has a ton of accidental complexity in it. [0] At $DAYJOB, we ran into a production-down incident related to inscrutable SystemD failures once a year. It was always the case that the documentation indicated that our configuration and usage was A-OK. If there ever was a bug report filed, it was always the case that the SystemD maintainers either said words to the effect of "Despite the fact that the docs say that should work, that's an unsupported use case." or "Wow. Weird. Yeah, I guess that behavior is wrong, and it's true that the docs don't warn you about that.", and then go on to do nothing.

SystemD is -IME- like (again, IME) PulseAudio and NetworkManager... it's really great until you hit a show-stopping bug, and then you're just turbofucked because the folks who built and maintain it it want to treat it like it's a black box that works perfectly.

[0] NOTE: I am absolutely not opposed to complex things. I'm opposed to needlessly complex things, and very much opposed to things whose accidental complexity causes production issues, and the system's maintainers' reply to the bug report and minimal repro is "Wow, that's weird. I don't want to fix that. Maybe we should document that that doesn't work." and then go on to do absolutely nothing.
by Philpax | 2025-08-18 22:39:34+00:00
Thankfully, uv makes this a lot better, but it'll still be a while before that percolates to the entire ecosystem, if ever.

There are real concerns about tying the language's future to a VC-backed project, but at the same time, it's just such an improvement on the state of things that I find it hard not to use.
by sgarland | 2025-08-18 22:39:40+00:00
Unless I am grossly misunderstanding your notation, I have always seen RA written with the operator first. Some examples:

https://cs186berkeley.net/notes/note6/

https://web.wlu.ca/science/physcomp/ikotsireas/CP465/W1-Intr...

https://home.adelphi.edu/~siegfried/cs443/443l9.pdf
by r2vcap | 2025-08-18 22:39:43+00:00
It seems I’m not the only one who feels that Google’s ad tracking has improved a lot — to the point where it makes me a bit nervous. A few days ago, I searched for a medicine just once using Firefox’s private mode, and now both Google search ads and YouTube ads are filled with related topics. Maybe I need to reset all my Google ad tracking IDs and stop using Google for anything sensitive.
by princeofwhales | 2025-08-18 22:40:06+00:00
Another write up here, with infographics:

https://phys.org/news/2025-08-birdsong-patterns-zipf-law-abb...

They went with a robin for their leading image. The robin (both american and european) is notorious for it's wide ranging vocabulary. It can mimic many other birdcalls:

https://www.sibleyguides.com/2011/04/vocal-copying-by-americ...

Link to original study:

https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013228
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-18 22:40:14+00:00
> I remember when I first learnt about neural networks I thought maybe coupling them with some kind of evolutionary approach might be what was needed to make them work.

I did this in an artificial life simulation. It was pretty fun to see the creatures change from pure random bouncing around to movement that helped them get food and move away from something eating them.

My naive vision was all kinds of advanced movement, like hiding around corners for prey, but it never got close to something like that.

As I worked the evolutionary parameters I began to realize more and more that the process of evolving specific advanced traits requires lots of time and (I think) environmental complexity and compartmentalization of groups of creatures.

There are lots of simple/dumb capabilities that help with survival and they are much much easier to acquire than a more advanced capability like being aware of other creatures and tracking it's movement on the other side of an obstacle.
by Permit | 2025-08-18 22:40:24+00:00
> I acknowledge, by the way, that I use Google services to run my vanity domain, including my web site and mail server. It's a hassle to move all that, but one I am ever nearer to taking on.

> And a final response is for the engineers who work for these big tech companies simply to refuse to build systems that work this way. If you're at Google, you have agency – you decide what code you write. Yeah, I know: "No" might get you fired. But there are other jobs.

Am I to understand that it’s too much of a hassle to move domains but not to change jobs (after being fired, no less)?
by taeric | 2025-08-18 22:40:41+00:00
No, this assumes you know what you want for a query. Which, seems largely fair?

Like, how would you send this question to someone? Or how would you expect it to be sent to you? If your boss doesn't tell you from what table they want some data, do you just not answer?

And sure, there could be ambiguities here. But these are not really fixed by listing the sources first? You would almost certainly need to augment the select to give the columns names that disambiguate for their uses. For example, when you want the teacher and the student names, both.

And this is ignoring more complications you get from normalized data that is just flat out hard to deal with. I want a teacher/student combination, but only for this specific class and term, as an example. Whether you start the from at the student, the class, or the term rosters feels somewhat immaterial to how you want to pull all of that data together for why ever you are querying it.
by bluebarbet | 2025-08-18 22:40:52+00:00
>but I can find just about any [DRM-free] audiobook I want on either Downpour or libro.fm

Just had a browse of Downpour. They say that it's mostly DRM-free. I don't get it. How come the rights holders don't complain? My experience of DRM-free e-books is that the available titles are, let's say, nothing I would want to read. And audiobooks have higher production value because of the voice acting. What A-list authors are narrating their own books and then allowing them to be sold DRM-free?
by crazygringo | 2025-08-18 22:40:56+00:00
That clause of your license wouldn't be legally enforceable.

Your license can only operate with what copyright allows you to withhold initially.

A license that banned AI training cannot be enforced. It is meaningless. The same way you can't write a book with a license that readers are not allowed to write reviews of it.

Fair use cannot be restricted by license like that.

(You can engage in individual contacts with people, with terms like NDA's work, but those actually have to be signed and stuff, and you can't do it with public information like published writing.)
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-18 22:40:56+00:00
The way I see this is in terms of attractors (in the sense of dynamics).

The dynamics are characterized mostly by institutions and rules rather than ideology.

The idea of liberalism was to get the institutions correct and so create a stable democracy.

If you destroy the institutions then the ideology behind why you did it doesn't matter. Just like it doesn't matter why you remove a load bearing wall in a building. You're at the mercy of primate emotions and everything tends toward oligarchy. That was just as true in the Soviet Union as in countless other countries throughout history.

Oligarchy is an attractor, and you need careful planning to avoid the whirlpool.
by skywhopper | 2025-08-18 22:41:25+00:00
Bad UI is an intentional decision by the app developers to shepherd folks into thinking they have no choice.

As for how to make photo library access selective, iOS does this just fine. The app thinks it’s seeing everything, but it can only see what you selected. Plus Apple has made it easy to edit those choices. And if you do grant an app unlimited access, it checks in every once in a while to be sure you still want it (particularly if you don’t use the feature very often).
by weatherlight | 2025-08-18 22:41:39+00:00
:disksup.get_disk_info/1 (from :os_mon) just calls into the underlying OS once, grabs the info, and returns it. It’s not a blocking “long-running monitor” the way a NIF doing I/O in a scheduler thread would be. https://www.erlang.org/docs/26/man/disksup#get_disk_info-1

^ just use this.

:disksup.get_disk_data/0, which caches results in the :disksup server that updates every N seconds (configurable) which is what you are referring to.. https://www.erlang.org/docs/26/man/disksup#get_disk_data-0
by quantgenius | 2025-08-18 22:42:58+00:00
The idea that simply having a lot of parameters leads to overfitting was shown to not be the case over 30 years ago by Vapnik et al. He proved that a large number of parameters is fine so long as you regularize enough. This is why Support Vector Machines work and I believe has a lot to do with why deep NNs work.

The issue with Vapnik's work is that it's pretty dense and actually figuring out the Vapnik-Chervonekis (VC) dimension etc is pretty complicated, and one can develop pretty good intuition once you understand the stuff without having to actually calculate, so most people don't take the time to do the calculation. And frankly, a lot of the time, you don't need to.

There may be something I'm missing completely, but to me the fact that models continue to generalize with a huge number of parameters is not all that surprising given how much we regularize when we fit NNs. A lot of the surprise comes from the fact that people in mathematical statistics and people who do neural networks (computer scientists) don't talk to each other as much as they should.

Strongly recommend the book Statistical Learning Theory by Vapnik for more on this.
by Hizonner | 2025-08-18 22:44:10+00:00
It's worse than OTA updates. I'd expect most of these to use the cloud for a lot of their "thinking", and definitely to be controllable from the cloud on a minute-by-minute basis. Lose the WiFi and you can expect to lose a big chunk of the capability you paid for.

... and you can expect the subscription costs to keep going up. None of those OTA updates are going to give you any new value unless you pay more.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-18 22:44:28+00:00
> The people who say "everything is political" always seems to mean "you have to agree with my politics, and you aren't allowed to ignore it".

Nope. When I say it I just mean, everything's political. There is no part of human life that is untouched by some kind of politics.

I don't give a shit whether you agree with me or not. I just don't think we can talk about politics if you don't see that politics isn't a narrow profession that people who don't have proper jobs do for a living; it's one of the great flows of human social energy.

(Politics and sport: two interlocking alternatives to violence and war. 2026 is going to be a very interesting year because of this)
by taeric | 2025-08-18 22:45:15+00:00
I'm assuming you are largely just not thinking this one through? We are not modeling the domain, we are describing some data we want to select. Without knowing how it is modeled, I can give a brief "top line" for expected select statements on many data models. "I want average_weather, year, zip_code", "I want year, college_name, degree_name, median_graduate_salary, mean_graduate_salary", "..."

I don't think it is tough to describe many many reports of data that you would want in this way. Is it enough for you to flat out get the answer? No, of course not. But nor is it enough to just start all queries at what possible tables you could use as a starting point.
by amluto | 2025-08-18 22:45:18+00:00
Wow. It’s fun to compare the US bicycle routes to the bicycle routes in the Netherlands.

Here’s the first Wikipedia photo of USBR 1:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Bicycle_Route_1#/media/...

Look, it’s a road on which is possible, but not necessarily desirable, to ride a bike.

The Netherlands has at least two systems:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LF-routes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered-node_cycle_network

and neither article emphasizes the dramatic difference between these and the US system, possibly because it’s utterly obvious to anyone who has ever used the Dutch system: the Dutch bike routes are far, far higher quality. You can bike from almost anywhere to almost anywhere with the bulk of the route (at least outside of a city center) on paths are well separated from cars or even nowhere near a road at all. A lot of them even separate pedestrians from bikes or separate fast bikes from slow bikes. Even the worse bike paths are better than most bike paths in the US. If you ride the bike paths to a major store or a mall, you will generally find that the dedicated bike parking is closer than the car parking. If you go to a smaller store, a cafe or a house, you will be able to get from the nearest bike path to the building without crossing a traffic lane. If you go to a busy area, you might find a double decker bike parking lot!

This works well in a country with more bikes than people. Those paths are heavily utilized.

The US has excellent bike paths as well, but they are largely the exception, not the norm, and the almost entirely fail to connect into a cohesive system on which you can safely bike from point A to point B without ending up on nasty roads for large fractions of the trip.
by C-x_C-f | 2025-08-18 22:45:31+00:00
These are very cool, thanks. Do you know what kind of jobs are more likely to require Gaussian process expertise? I have experience in using GP for surrogate modeling and will be on the job market soon.

Also a resource I enjoyed is the book by Bobby Gramacy [0] which, among other things, spends a good bit on local GP approximation [1] (and has fun exercises).

[0] https://bobby.gramacy.com/surrogates/surrogates.pdf

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0383
by foota | 2025-08-18 22:45:43+00:00
This is a part of Android natively. I assume that since most users intend to use Google Photos to manage their photos that it would request access to all photos.

I don't believe that Google would upload your photos remotely that haven't been backed up through Google Photos. Technically it sounds like their privacy policy would allow photos uploaded to Google to be used for training a model within Photos (e.g., I suspect their Ask Photos AI was probably trained on Google Photos data?) but it states that it won't be used for Ads or for training models outside of Photos.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-18 22:45:49+00:00
> For a language where there is supposed to be only one way to do things

That's not what the Zen says, it says that there should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it.

That is, for any given task, it is most important that there is at least one obvious way, but also desirable that there should only be one obvious way, to do it. But there are necessarily going to be multiple ways to do most things, because if there was only one way, most of them for non-trivial tasks would be non-obvious.

The goal of Python was never to be the smallest Turing-complete language, and have no redundancy.
by hephaes7us | 2025-08-18 22:46:13+00:00
Speaker diarization is the term you are looking for, and this is more difficult than simple transcription. I'm rather confident that someone probably has a good solution by now (if you want to pay for an API), but I haven't seen an open-source/open-weights tool for diarization/transcription. I looked a few months ago, but things move fast...
by ed | 2025-08-18 22:46:51+00:00
My advice was actually the opposite. It's harder to take a new channel from 0-1 than it is to take an existing channel from 1-2. so in my experience it's better to double down on what's working. only branch out to new channels when you have the resources, or you've maxed out your existing channels. FWIW I don't think your channel is just SEO, it's also content marketing like this HN post. Keep it up!