MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wat10000 | 2025-08-14 12:12:36+00:00
QR codes feel like such a step backwards compared to NFC. The UX with current mobile OSes is not good. And if you require an app, or even worse an active data connection, well, I much prefer a quick double-click of my phone’s side button and then putting it near the payment terminal. And I’m really skeptical about security. NFC is vulnerable to relay attacks and QR codes can be secured by using one-time codes or rolling time-based codes, but showing a bright high contrast “scan this to take my money” image in public feels very wrong.
by Ezhik | 2025-08-14 12:12:53+00:00
The Fxtec is so damn cool if you can get your hands on one. It can actually straight up run Debian. I also managed to run VS Code on it natively via Termux.

I also had a Gemini PDA, which is basically the Psion 5mx keyboard glued to a shitty Android smartphone. Such a nice keyboard, but such mediocre and unsupported CPU...
by lightedman | 2025-08-14 12:13:02+00:00
"I can assure you, Meta is well aware of the situation, and a Luigi isn’t going to have a chance in this situation."

Luigi was a dude with a 3D printed gun.

I have LASERs with enough power to self-focus, have zero ballistic drop, and can dump as much power as a .50cal BMG in a millisecond burst of light which can hit you from the horizon's edge. All Zuck needs to do is stand by a window, and eyeballs would vaporize.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-14 12:13:04+00:00
The pretence that three almost entirely unrelated "intellectual property rights" somehow make ideas property, at least akin to personal property and sometimes even akin to real property (aka land to lay people) is very silly. Each is silly in its own distinct way, with the most defensible probably being Trademark, an extension of the rather older legal concept of "Passing off". But really abolishing all three of them might be a reasonable step, up there with getting rid of smoking.

Do you remember when there was smoking on aeroplanes? The little glowing sigil telling you not to smoke would go out at cruise altitude and then you could fill the already inadequate and stale air with smoke. Who thought that was a good idea? Well, a lot of the same people who thought Copyright was great. Maybe all the lead damaged their brains?

Does any of this somehow mean what the LLM companies are doing is good? No. But we can't understand what's happening if we insist on giving it the wrong name. Russia is not in Ukraine to undo nazification, the babies Israel is starving aren't terrorists. "But I want to use this word" doesn't make it the correct word.
by al_borland | 2025-08-14 12:13:17+00:00
How good do you think the tips will be for someone waiting table who has 0 experience and doesn’t know the menu? This also sounds like a big risk if they wait on a table with any food allergies.

That’s why I figured bussing tables, or some other back of house job would make more sense. Maybe the waitstaff shares tips with everyone; I think it depends on the place… but are full time waitstaff going to want to share tips with someone making $200k who is cosplaying as a service worker for a day?
by lemonberry | 2025-08-14 12:14:02+00:00
The worst part for me personally is that almost everyone I know cares about this stuff and yet they keep all of their Meta accounts. I really don't get it and frankly, find it kind of disturbing.

I know people that don't see anything wrong with Meta so they keep using it. And that's fine! Your actions seem to align with your stated values.

I get human fallibility. I've been human for awhile now, and wow, have I made some mistakes and miscalculations.

What really puts a bee in my bonnet though is how dogmatic some of these people are about their own beliefs and their judgement of other people.

I love people, I really do. But what weird, inconsistent creatures we are.
by account42 | 2025-08-14 12:14:29+00:00
> They're doing exactly what I said - adding PoW (anubis - as you point out - being one solution) to gate access.

Which is a shit solution where everyone suffers.

> Another great solution? Just ask users to login (no js needed). I'll stand pretty firmly behind "If you aren't willing to make an account - you don't actually care about the site".

No I won't create an account to check if a search result has what I'm looking for. Not will I sign up to a forum before I know what the culture is like. We already had this shit with communities moving to Discord, we don't need fuck up the remaining web as well.
Ask HN: YC founders, would you use a map to meet other alumni nearby?
by leonagano | 2025-08-14 12:14:37+00:00
I run FoundersAround, an opt-in map where startup founders can see other founders nearby and meet in person.

I’m thinking about adding group filters to the map, starting with YC founders, so you could:

• Instantly see which YC alumni are in your city • DM or arrange coffee meetups • Arrange coworking days with founders

Would this be useful to you?
by pavlov | 2025-08-14 12:16:14+00:00
Tove Jansson, author of the Moomins, also illustrated "The Hobbit" in the 1960s.

Her version turned out controversial because Gollum is a giant compared to Bilbo. Turns out Tolkien hadn't described Gollum's size anywhere, and the author actually reworded future editions of the book to make it clear that Gollum is a small creature.

You can see the image here:

https://www.thepopverse.com/jrr-tolkien-the-hobbit-tove-jans...

In my opinion Jansson's "Hobbit" is a great interpretation by a legendary artist, and this Gollum controversy has overshadowed it too much.

The Soviet 1970s version (the OP link here) has an obvious debt to Jansson's illustrations, but the style is much more conventional and stiff. Jansson's linework and compositions are exquisite.
by lazide | 2025-08-14 12:16:25+00:00
And yet, Mr. Trump is up there trolling the world like he loves to do, and Zuck is out there doing whatever he wants.

The reality is, all those ex-navy seal Dad’s are (generally) wishing they could make the cut to get on those dudes payroll, not gunning for them. Or sucking up to the cult, in general.

The actual religious idea of Karma is not ‘bad things happen to bad people right now’, the way we would like.

Rather ‘don’t hate on king/priest/rich dude, they did something amazing in a prior life which is why they deserve all this wealth right now, and if they do bad things, they’ll go down a notch - maybe middle class - in the next life’.

It’s to justify why people end up suffering for no apparent reason in this life (because they had to have done something really terrible in a prior life), while encouraging them to do good things still for a hopefully better next life (if you think unclogging Indian sewers in this life is bad, you could get reincarnated as a roach in that sewer in the next life!). So they don’t go out murdering everyone they see, even if they get shit on constantly.

There is no magic bullet. Hoping someone else is going to solve all your problems is exactly how manipulative folks use you for their own purposes. And being a martyr to go after some asshole is being used that way too.

This is also why eventually an entire generation of hippies turned into accountants in the 80’s.

shrug
by decafninja | 2025-08-14 12:16:28+00:00
Same. My impression was that if you can pay for it, American healthcare is unrivaled.

And by “pay for it”, I don’t mean the typical employer provided insurance and visiting the usual doctors.

I mean high end concierge care that starts at five figures minimum to buy in annually before any other expenses.

A PC doctor is just a phone call away, and they’ll use theirs and their organization’s connections and resources to get you whatever additional care you need quickly and effectively.
by ionwake | 2025-08-14 12:17:14+00:00
I did just that , got the r 32gb ram one so I could run qwen.

Might still be early days I’m trying to use the model to sort my local notes but I don’t know man seems only a little faster yet still unusable and I downloaded the lighter qwen model as recommended.

Again it’s early days maybe I’m being an idiot I did manage to get it to parse one note after about 15 mins though.
by favflam | 2025-08-14 12:17:32+00:00
Sarah Williams (forgot the name) testified in US Congress as to Facebooks strategies on handling governments. Based on her book, it seems Brazil has been the most effective out of major democratic governments in confronting Facebook. Of course, you have China completely banning Facebook.

I think Mark Zuckerberg is acutely aware of the political power he holds and has been using this immense power at least for the last decade. But since Facebook is a US company and the US government is not interested in touching Faceebok, I doubt anyone will see what Zuckerberg and Facebook are up to. The US would have to put Lina Khan back in at the FTC, or put her high up in the Department of Justice to split Facebook into pieces. I guess the other hope is that states' attorneys' general when an anti-monopoly lawsuit.
by fph | 2025-08-14 12:18:34+00:00
Do you think this would work?

- Mr. Z: There's no warranty whatsoever. However, I might fix it for a small consulting fee.

- Company X: You either fix it, or we spread the word that you're irresponsible and everyone will inevitably migrate to libW.

- Mr. Z: Ok, and I'll spread the word that you are a cheapskate.
by Arch-TK | 2025-08-14 12:18:36+00:00
kind of feels unnecessary honestly...

Automating webroot is trivial and I would rather use an external rust utility to handle it than a module for nginx. I guess if you _only_ need certs for your website then this helps but I have certs for a lot of other things too, so I need an external utility anyway.

And no dns-01 support yet.
by landl0rd | 2025-08-14 12:18:58+00:00
Mangione is going to either die rotting in prison, or preferably get sent to the electric chair. His life will be wasted. Meanwhile, UNH is continuing to do business as usual. One way or the other, mangione will die knowing his life was wasted, and that his legacy is not reform but cold-blooded murder.

Call it a “day of rage” or just babyrage but we build systems so our bus factor can increase above 1. Just killing people no longer breaks them. It makes someone nothing more than a juvenile murderer.

I don’t really care what lasers you have, I’d suggest you choose a different legacy for yourself.
by permo-w | 2025-08-14 12:21:10+00:00
>forbidding private parties to most anything

well thank fuck for that! besides financial self-interest, why would you want private parties doing anything with AI and biometrics whatsoever? if anyone is to at all, it should be publicly accountable bodies that aren't operating based on a profit motive, but really it should be none at all!

>It gives them political points, because now people less-in-the-know will think that they are actually protecting privacy, which is again, not true.

this entire sentence stinks of "I just don't like the EU and I'm just going to criticise it no matter what". people in the know? people who have read the law specifically stating that facial recognition can only be used in severe, clearly-defined cases, with judicial approval, in highly time-limited windows? people who've read that if it is to be used post-hoc, it has to have judicial authorisation linked to a criminal offence. and you're saying that this in no way protects privacy?

the UK is rolling out AI police vans all over the country to try and recognise people they have on lists. no judicial approval is required, there's no time-limit, and as far as I'm aware there's no restriction on what crimes it's used for either. private companies are allowed to use it, obviously equally with no judicial approval

essentially mate, I think you need to have a good look at whether your opinions here are coming from "I genuinely think the EU's legislation is an issue here" or "I don't like the idea of the EU in general and I'm going to criticise anything it does"
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-08-14 12:21:13+00:00
> This isn't a question of socialised vs privatised system as all health systems in Europe have a mix of both. (England is a big outlier here)

In what way is the UK an outlier?

Are you saying that there's no privatised healthcare in the UK?

If so, what would you call:

BUPA https://www.bupa.co.uk/

Vitality https://www.vitality.co.uk/
by bell-cot | 2025-08-14 12:21:14+00:00
For those disinclined to read the article...

> [...] users, regularly answered highly intimate questions. These ranged from the timing and comfort level of menstrual cycles, through to mood swings and preferred birth control methods, and their level of satisfaction with their sex life and romantic relationships. The app even asked when users had engaged in sexual activity and whether they were trying to get pregnant.

> [...] 150 million people were using the app, according to court documents. Flo had promised them that they could trust it.

> Flo Health shared that intimate data with companies including Facebook and Google, along with mobile marketing firm AppsFlyer, and Yahoo!-owned mobile analytics platform Flurry. Whenever someone opened the app, it would be logged. Every interaction inside the app was also logged, and this data was shared.

> "[...] the terms of service governing Flo Health’s agreement with these third parties allowed them to use the data for their own purposes, completely unrelated to services provided in connection with the App,”

Bashing on Facebook/Meta might give a quick dopamine hit, but they really aren't special here. The victims' data was routinely sold, en mass, per de facto industry practices. Victims should assume that hundreds of orgs, all over the world, now have copies of it. Ditto any government or criminal groups which thought it could be useful. :(
by jona777than | 2025-08-14 12:21:30+00:00
> It was at the same time depressing (I’m dumb), liberating (I don’t have to pretend I’m not dumb anymore) and exciting (I have a chance to be not dumb anymore).

> Learning is hard work, and if you don’t respect the process, it won’t happen.

These two ideas resonate well with me. My experience in pursuit of steady and sustainable growth in any area of interest has had these in common. You have articulated them well enough for me to realize that. I appreciate that.

I am also at a similar point in life that sits at the intersection of building consistent habits that support goals and balancing priorities like family life. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” has never been more applicable.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-14 12:21:53+00:00
> it was clunky AF last time I tried to use it https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/debug-ocaml-code/10867/18

Yes, I see what you mean now. You encountered a bug around system thread and dune didn’t properly pass your artifacts. That’s indeed annoying.

I deeply dislike dune myself and never use it. I just use the Ocaml toolchain like I would a good old C one which might explain our different experiences.
by danaris | 2025-08-14 12:22:45+00:00
See, this type of attitude is genuinely part of the problem.

People look at websites/apps/etc that are engineered for maximum "engagement" through dark patterns and they don't think it looks like something nefariously designed to catch and milk your attention, so it must be just fine, right?

And part of this is because they're so used to the dopamine-drip-inducing style that they think that sort of thing is just "normal;" part of it is because many websites, and before them newspapers, magazines, and TV shows/ads, do try to catch your attention, just in less ruthlessly-optimized ways, and part of it is because that ruthless optimization doesn't actually have to look like anything particular. It's not always Candy Crush Saga with obvious sparkly rewards and microtransactions.

And so the...whatever the Internet design equivalent of the Overton window is, drifts ever farther toward that end of things.
by akudha | 2025-08-14 12:23:30+00:00
$1 for the first user, $2 for second, $4 for third...By the 30th user, it would be painful even for mega corps. By 40th, it would be an absurd number.

Might also be worth trying to force them to display a banner on every page of the site "you're on facebook, you have no privacy here", like those warnings on cigarette boxes. These might not work though, people would just see and ignore them, just like smokers ignore warnings about cigarettes.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-14 12:23:49+00:00
I am not seeing how the two are mutually exclusive.

I think there needs to be a pretty fundamental shift in society for us to continue to function if, for example, everyone was essentially on welfare. Not sure what they are supposed to all be doing in the "Star Trek universe" for example. Somehow "Logan's Run" comes to mind — you know, if we actually still got together with each other. ;-)
by arrowsmith | 2025-08-14 12:23:50+00:00
Palestine Action broke into a British military base and sabotaged millions of pounds' worth of equipment. What did you expect the government to do exactly — shrug it off? What kind of message would that have sent?

The Terrorism Act 2000 gives "serious damage to property" as one definition of terrorism so I find it hard to argue that the government was doing anything more than neutrally applying the law here. Those protestors knew full well they were supporting a proscribed group and they were warned what the consequences would be. Protesting in support of Palestine remains entirely legal in the UK just as long as you don't use the name and branding of this one specific group.

I'll probably regret posting this but there are some extremely disingenuous half-truths in this thread and I think that readers should know the full context.
by jon-wood | 2025-08-14 12:24:54+00:00
I kind of wonder how much of the apparent paranoia from politicians is that they always hear the worst. I doubt its coincidence that Home Secretaries almost invariably turn into huge supporters of surveillance and cracking down on things, and I think that probably comes from the fact they get a briefing everyday from various organisations who's entire reason for existence is to find and keep track of the very worst people. If I were in that position I imagine I'd find it difficult to keep perspective as well.
by myrmidon | 2025-08-14 12:25:23+00:00
> For a profit making company, this means it loses its competitiveness and then falls. For government, this means it gets a bigger budget.

I would argue that with companies, the expected outcome is that they accumulate and then stabilize at a "typical" level of bloat. For software, Google is a good example: Much more bloated than they used to be, but still competitive enough, and looking stable.

Governments also have some ways to de-bloat, mostly from internal and external pressure (like Greece).

I think that consistently getting services at no-bloat prices is just not realistic in general over longer timeframes; Netflix, Google, Uber, Amazon, ... give countless examples of excellent early price/quality ratios that got inevitably worse over time.

My hypothesis is that for our current understanding of what a government is supposed to provided (which did expand significantly since WW2, but mostly for good reasons) we have now reached a "bloat-stable" budget, and there is just no "easy" way to slash this budget without hurting the services (even though in a hypothetical bloat-free environment these could be provided for less).

Here is interesting data which seems to kinda support my point, with government spending as GDP percentage for the US, Germany (less GDP/capita) and Switzerland (more GDP/capita): You can see budgets rising post WW2 across the board, and then stabilizing in the 30-40% range (slightly higher for the poorest country, which makes sense). I would have honestly expected to see those trending up even for the last decades (which they don't really) and Covid was also less prominent than I would have assumed:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/government-spending-vs-gd...
by roscas | 2025-08-14 12:25:42+00:00
Nice one. AI gone wrong for TheVerge.

Just don't go to those sites like this one. These sites are always full of ads, they sell their user's information, just read their "privacy".

Other than HN, I also read theregister and phoronix because their content is good and you do get news about what is going on.

As long as you don't get "news" from Fakebook and Twitter, you are safe.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-14 12:25:56+00:00
Bottom line: Statistical and probabilistic techniques are not suited to producing deterministic results.

In other words, the output from current LLMs will always contain a significant amount of arbitrary, random data --- aka BS.

This; combined with their high operating costs, severely limits the applicability of LLMs.

Traditional computing offers highly accurate results at low cost. LLMs turn this upside down and offer questionable results at high cost.
by tremon | 2025-08-14 12:26:02+00:00
Then you get to handle all the same criticisms that are usually lobbed at MS Office: no single user ever needs more than 15% of the functionality, but still receives the additional baggage of the other 85% -- whether in terms of memory footprint, reduced performance or UI clutter. The ability of FOSS to be optimized for specific use cases is one of its biggest strengths, and that has nothing to do with "choice" itself, no matter how much you try to disparage it.
by sillyfluke | 2025-08-14 12:26:26+00:00
This stat is way less interesting when it turns out the main driver for the drop is the economy, which my bet is on, and which is why the article buries that cause and puts it towards the end of the article. If the stat can't survive a booming economy it's kind of meaningless.

But it might be very interesting for another reason: it might be confirming the perception of the economy is at an all time low as well.
by fsflover | 2025-08-14 12:26:34+00:00
Which previous devices? Can you provide some links?

Librem 5 has open schematics [0] and runs an FSF-endorsed distro [1]. What else do you need for the verification [2]? Otherwise Linux could also be a honeypot, right?

[0] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/l5-schematic

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641

[2] https://puri.sm/posts/hidden-operating-systems-in-chips-vs-s...
by cobbzilla | 2025-08-14 12:26:36+00:00
Really! What kind of an American am I if I don’t even know how to sue someone!?

I’ll admit enjoying my newfound knowledge. I’m not actively looking to be litigious, but it’s great to know I’m ready if it comes to that again.

On a more practical note, the whole process was lengthy, but very clear and fair. We have a justice system, someone committed fraud against me, so I turned the cranks on the machine and got some justice. fwiw, I was also mentally prepared to lose, and learn what I did wrong if that happened. Not being too emotionally attached to a legal situation is a very good policy.
by nis0s | 2025-08-14 12:26:49+00:00
On state funding: Trump tariffs are going to cut deep enough into flexible spending for a lot of countries.

On private funding: I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Asian universities excelled at engineering because the U.S. universities were distracted on too many fronts. If the U.S. schools are forced to focus on STEM, then this whole calculus changes.
by DrScientist | 2025-08-14 12:27:21+00:00
> No, it was not. You moved the goal posts from artists deserving a livelihood to copyright issues, and I called you out for that.

Nope. I never said artistic's deserve a living - I said that people deserve protection from their living being stolen via copyright violation. You are confusing what I said, to what you mistakenly understood. I don't understand why your original misunderstanding is somehow a character flaw of mine.