MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pyrale | 2025-08-04 23:26:39+00:00
> It will operate as a subsidiary company based in Europe. That means it's 100% subject to European law, not American law.

As a subsidiary company, does Amazon retain operational control over that branch?

If so, it's subject to the CLOUD act, and therefore, not compatible with EU rules.

> Amazon remains the owner and controls the technology, yes.

So, basically, the answer is that the EU subsidiary is not independent. Consider Lavabit's story, the US admin would have no issue asking Amazon to trojanize their tech.

> their reputation will be forever ruined

That happened 20 years ago.

> It's not in Amazon's corporate self-interest to allow a back door like that.

They wouldn't have a say in the matter.
by contingencies | 2025-08-04 23:26:46+00:00
Planting a garden does rob the local ecosystem. Even purely native gardens lack the diversity, in particular mycodiversity, of undisturbed areas. While long term native planting can move an area back toward endemic biodiversity, it is rarely or never achieved (I'm not aware of any well-cited claims to the contrary).

It is similarly naive to view the introduction of a species through the lens of pollen quantity being 'surplus' or 'enough'. The presence of rival pollinators affects native insects whether or not there is a shortage of food - for example by discouraging presence, by occupying nesting sites, by altering endemic predation webs, and similar.
by em-bee | 2025-08-04 23:27:24+00:00
Do you expect the terminal developer to know all the keybindings you currently use

i expect terminal developers to keep keybindings to a minimum.

come to think of it, i can't think if a single keybinding that i need from a gui terminal. the only keybindings i need from a terminal are those for tmux, so if a terminal replaces tmux (like wezterm is able to) then those are ok, but otherwise when i run tmux in a gnome terminal then there isn't a single key binding that i need for gnome, except possibly copy and paste.
by amiga386 | 2025-08-04 23:27:40+00:00
It is not.

But if you show HN something... and it makes HN-reading KF users think "OH EXPLOITABLE!!!111!" so they post it to KF... they're basically going to test if your moderation works or not. If you only have some automated rules or even "AI" as the moderation, not humans, then they're very quickly going to work out what gets past your automated filter and what doesn't, faster than 4chan can make Microsoft's Tay say "Hitler did nothing wrong".

Then the KF users will gloat about the slur-ridden fish they've made.

Then KF-reading Sharty users will learn about it, the rest of the Sharty will join in the game.

Then they'll get angry that your "normie" userbase has given a Palestine flag fish named "River to the Sea" the most upvotes, and an Israel flag fish the most downvotes, they'll want to cheat and hack their own creations to the top. So they'll start looking for an admin interface.

When they find one, but find it needs credentials, the first place they'll go looking for password clues is all your socials, all your previous forums, basically your whole identity. And if they hit paydirt, of course they'll post whatever they find, because for them, doxxing people is fun too.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-04 23:28:30+00:00
Apologies for the vacuous pos, but all these walls out in nowhere has been such a long long mystery to me!

It seemed so hard to imagine why anyone would have needed these, that folks were so worried about property lines! Never any evidence of fence posting, often not high enough to really do much (that might have been a shift over time though, wall falling/dirt gathering). But wall after wall, through forest after forest!
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-08-04 23:28:32+00:00
I want JS with sound types. It's interesting how sound types can't be added to JS because runtime checks would be too expensive, but then so much of what makes JS slow is having to check types all the time anyway, and the only way to speed it up is to retroactively infer the types. I want types plus a "use typechecked" that tells the VM I already did some agreed upon level of compile-time checks and now it only needs to do true runtime checks that can't be done at compile time.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-08-04 23:28:53+00:00
Ok, so your opinion is that in X number of years, we may well hit some new level of decarbonization where we have severely contained or reversed the effects of climate change and so on, thanks to a relatively decentralized cooperation between all countries, even historical bad actors.

My position is that that is all theatre, that even if we do achieve that it will be temporary (nth industrial revolution, nuclear war, etc), and that we will eventually be the cause of our own worldwide collapse-- all while thinking we have control to the very end.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-04 23:28:54+00:00
I don't think most comments here or in the general discourse are protecting the content ?

I'm trying to find a good analogy. Perhaps if someone in your town built a giant meat grinder in their backyard, and as a test run they requested the vilest and most heinous criminals to be sent to them, you'd still see a private entity getting to grind the people they want as a serious issue.

Not wanting to spend a second on that issue, just because of who got sent there, would be quite a position.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-04 23:29:41+00:00
But once you have carefully inspected 8 trees and thrown them away, you may need to start from sapling after-all.

And what about when you need a Forrest? Seed from trees grow new trees. A whole Forrest cannot be inspected and discarded over and over.

> but for small (yet critical / high-value) features

These are the features than need the human attention. These are the features that are the most fun for a human to make. These are the features that make the human improve the most. So it's the last ones i would leave to the AI.
by goosejuice | 2025-08-04 23:30:39+00:00
Tesla infamously doesn't have a marketing team, so that one should be easy to answer unless they rehired for that. Not sure on the latest there.

When you get your Tesla and attempt to turn on the features described, it has a dialog with a warning and you have to agree to understanding before proceeding. If you choose to ignore that, and all the other clearly marked and accessible warnings in the manual and not learn how to operate it, is that not on you the licensed driver? Isn't that what regulations and licensure are for?

I'm very much in favor of consumer protections around marketing, but in this case there were none that were clearly defined to my knowledge.
by nijave | 2025-08-04 23:31:04+00:00
This is a place testing and benchmarking can definitely save you money.

It's the same as compute--you can skip testing and throw money at the problem but you're going to end up paying more.

We have some pretty basic guidelines at work and I think that's a decent starting point. They amount to a few example prompts/problem types and which OpenAI model to try using first for best bang for your buck.

I think some of it also comes down to scale. Buying a 5 pack of sledgehammers isn't a terrible value when everything comes in a "5 pack" and you only need <= 5 tools total. Or more practically, on the small end it's more economical to run general purpose models than tailor more specific models. Once you start invoking them enough, there's a break even and flip point where spending more time on the tailored or custom model is cheaper.
by ziml77 | 2025-08-04 23:31:46+00:00
Atomic Shrimp has an aside in a recent video about how to identify AI writing. It's worth a look https://youtu.be/VeD9dUUFl-E?t=668

He's not the only one to point out these things that LLMs (currently) tend to output, but this is one of the shorter overviews of the tells you can spot.
by tstrimple | 2025-08-04 23:32:04+00:00
> And as a corollary, every complex system that works came from a simple system that works.

"Do the simplest thing that works" is one of the few core architecture principles I stick my neck out for time and time again. Why write a simple function when you can spend a week accounting for every imagined corner case and implement modular expansion capabilities! Please... stop...

I empathize with the debugger story. If you're super deep in a language it makes sense to know the debugger inside and out. But stdout is universal and I've never been a specific language developer rather than being able to jump into whatever is needed.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-08-04 23:33:18+00:00
What will really make it sink in is looking at what the highest paid athlete you know of earns in a year and estimate what their earnings are while they’re just there sitting in the couch, having a meal ($25k accumulates during an average meal) or taking a crap ($2500) - they earn about $200k in their sleep, for example.

Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.
by danso | 2025-08-04 23:33:34+00:00
Apologies if this has been discussed in one of the many subthreads, but is there a reasonable explanation for the finding that the crashed Tesla "deleted its local copy" of the crash data?

> Within ~3 minutes of the crash, the Model S packaged sensor video, CAN‑bus, EDR, and other streams into a single “snapshot_collision_airbag-deployment.tar” file and pushed it to Tesla’s server, then deleted its local copy.

Putting aside the legal implications wrt evidence, etc — what is the ostensible justification for this functionality? To a layperson, it's as bizarre as designing a plane's black box to go ahead and delete data if it somehow makes a successful upload to the FAA cloud server. Why add complexity that reduces redundancy in this case?
by quuxplusone | 2025-08-04 23:33:50+00:00
It's worth noting that you can target the Z-Machine (which gets you nice web platforms like Parchment) without using Inform as your source language. I informally maintain (I did not originally write) a C compiler for the Z-Machine, which I have used to port several games of a similar vintage: https://quuxplusone.github.io/Advent

It occurs to me that it would be nifty to make a BASIC compiler for the Z-Machine.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-04 23:34:33+00:00
> If so, it's subject to the CLOUD act, and therefore, not compatible with EU rules.

I'm assuming the CLOUD act is the entire reason why they're explicitly going with European-only staff.

That way Amazon can honestly say it has no operational control to violate EU law because there's no American employee they can command.

Operational control isn't all-or-nothing. European employees will do whatever Amazon tells them unless it breaks European law, in which case they won't. Amazon is intentionally setting it up in a way that it won't be able to do anything about that.
by evanjrowley | 2025-08-04 23:36:46+00:00
F-Droid, the FOSS-centric alternative app store for Android, provides similar information for each app. F-Droid goes a bit farther on things mobile users care about, like calling out if an app sends telemetry or requires a paid subscription. I like that this Is it really FOSS? project examines a project's potential impact on the FOSS community by questioning whether it is VC-funded, requires a CLA, and other interesting characteristics like that.
by prosaic-hacker | 2025-08-04 23:37:23+00:00
I teach in a tech/trade vocational program where 1/2 the students are your generation. All kinds of reasons they are there. (Didn't do well in High School, College, University, Grad School, Gaming in their parents basement since they were 10)

When one of the skills click (some try 2 or 3 of the ones we teach) and they start working the says that life is happening for them. The failures, in retrospect, become steps the had to take to get where they are. Perseverance is probably good personality trait to develop.

I chose my handle to have the word prosaic in it because I did many thing in tech (and other fields), none at extraordinary levels, but all done by learning by trying things out. You don't have to be wildly successful in life, prosaic can be good enough.
by cnst | 2025-08-04 23:37:32+00:00
The prior OpenIPC thread from earlier today is literally 75% about thingino:

OpenIPC: Open IP Camera Firmware — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44758463 — Aug 2025 (106 comments)

The cheapest camera that you can install this onto, is Cinnado D1, which retails at under $14.99 USD FBA on Amazon Prime in the US:

https://github.com/wltechblog/thingino-installers/tree/main/...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP — ≤ $14.99 FBA for Cinnado D1, #3 best-seller in "Dome Surveillance Cameras"

Some older Wansview, TP-Link, Wyze and Imou are also supported.

Part of the reason these cams are sold so cheap, and are directly imported into the US by the brand owners, is because they're making all of their money from the subscriptions. It's also the reason why buying a single camera is actually cheaper than buying a pack.
by rapnie | 2025-08-04 23:37:41+00:00
This made me do a search on the missing Iraqi billions, as I remember there were details at the time how it was packaged in pallets and flown into the country. Couldn't find that, but according to The Guardian [0]:

> Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/20/usa.iraq
by _carbyau_ | 2025-08-04 23:38:24+00:00
If onscreen, Peppa annoys me immediately and constantly. Just the plain tone of voice or something. A single word irritates me, let alone being such a willfully unhelpful, ungrateful brat.

I flatly refuse Peppa pig in my house. Not on TV, not on streaming, not on anything.

That little pig is only good for cartoon bacon, ham, porkbelly...
by harmmonica | 2025-08-04 23:38:45+00:00
I always thought one of the biggest problems with modern education is not spending enough time teaching people about interest rates/return on investment. If everyone just understood what you're pointing out here--just really "got it"--I feel like the world would be in a much better place. It's not dire (I don't think?), and I know we've come a very long way, but, man, it could be so much better.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-04 23:38:48+00:00
Ah, you're right: it doesn't have dedicated FP8 cores, so you'd get significantly worse performance (a quick Google search implies 5x worse). Although you could still run the model, just slowly.

Any M3 Ultra Mac Studio, or midrange-or-better Macbook Pro, would handle FP16 with no issues though. A 5090 would handle FP8 like a champ and a 4090 could probably squeeze it in as well, although it'd be tight.
by gugagore | 2025-08-04 23:38:51+00:00
You don't have to precisely represent the float in decimal. You just have to have each float have a unique decimal representation, which you can guarantee if you include enough digits: 9 for 32-bit floats, and 17 for 64-bit floats.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/they-sure-look-...
by tonyarkles | 2025-08-04 23:40:02+00:00
Riffing a little bit after skimming this paper that was published a few years ago: https://radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/starlin.... Apologies for the acronyms, I'm going to do my best to remember to define them.

The SVs (space segment/satellites) in LEO (low-earth orbit) are going to be moving across the sky quite quickly relative to each GT (ground terminal). This is going to be inducing a pretty significant Doppler shift on the signals. Most of the linked paper is focusing on doing ground-based positioning, using the Starlink constellation as a GNSS-type source and talks specifically about how the Doppler shift at the ground is significant enough that not only does the carrier frequency need to track the Doppler shift but also that the baseband signal will be compressed/dilated.

For the SV, though, the same effect is going to happen. The GT is going to be transmitting back to the SV and the SV's going to need to do Doppler compensation in order to successfully decode the OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) signals from the GT. Throughout a pass, each GT is going to have a different Doppler signature based on its position on the ground relative to the SV. The SVs also need to know their positions in orbit with a high degree of accuracy, especially if they've turned on the SV-to-SV laser-based communication (not sure on that). By taking the SV's known trajectory and the per-GT Doppler measurements and making a couple of assumptions (e.g. GTs are stationary), I'm 99% sure you could solve a maximum-likelihood position for each of the GTs. I think you could do it with a single SV but if you have multiple SVs collaborating on it I suspect you could get a quite accurate solution very quickly.

Edit: one other thought I had while writing that up. If they designed the constellation to work this way, I also think it would be possible for the GTs to pre-compensate for the Doppler shift before transmitting, but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone actually doing that. The tradeoff there is GT transmit complexity vs SV receive complexity. I would love if someone pointed out an example of a system that actually does this, but I've only ever worked with systems that just use something like a PLL/Costas loop to track the Doppler shift without needing to estimate it directly. If they did do pre-correction it would definitely make it harder for the SVs to estimate the GT positions. It would make the GTs significantly more complex though and I would seriously doubt that Starlink would go through that effort to make the GTs more expensive and eliminate the ability to identify where they are on the ground.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-04 23:40:56+00:00
No, the bottom rate in the American tax system is 10%, it's not untaxed... And that's only for income up to $11k, so the median American waiter is actually in the next bracket up (12%) for the majority of their income (they get $11k at 10%, and $21k at 12%). Similarly, the bottom rate in France is 11%, and is not untaxed. The UK has a 0% bottom rate, but it jumps to 20% well before you get to waiter wages.

No tax on tips will positively affect American waiter wages at basically every level. It's pretty simple math.
by giantrobot | 2025-08-04 23:41:35+00:00
> Colonizing the Milky Way only takes 1 million years if you can travel 10% of the speed of light.

This statement comes up all the time as if it automatically wins any discussion of alien civilizations. It contains a number of huge possibly specious assumptions. The first and most obvious is that even a long-lived civilization could construct a technology allowing a non-trivial amount of mass to accelerate to 0.1c and more importantly decelerate at the destination to a relative velocity of zero to facilitate the colonization.
by nosignono | 2025-08-04 23:41:54+00:00
Weird. I tore up my lawn and replaced with wildflowers, native perennials, deep mulch from local leaf litter, and a small vegetable plot. I don't think I robbed the local ecosystem in the slightest. In fact, I'm fairly confident I did the opposite. But you seem convinced it's axiomatic that planting a garden robs the local ecosystem...
by Den_VR | 2025-08-04 23:41:55+00:00
Different tools in different years as expectations have changed. The TI-89 is incredibly powerful, but has to give way to MATLAB and Wolfram Alpha. It used to be productive to “google” your problems. Going further, there’s now LLMs writing python code to do calculations. Hard to say what’s next, but I’m sure what is considered ethically questionable today will be acceptable and the new thing will be the new questionable tool.
Show HN: I built the fastest VIN decoder
by samsullivan | 2025-08-04 23:42:58+00:00
Decodes any VIN in ~20ms with zero network calls. I compressed the entire NHTSA vehicle database into a 21MB SQLite file that runs completely offline.

No API keys, no rate limits, no servers. Just download once and decode forever. Works in browsers, Node.js, Cloudflare Workers - anywhere SQLite runs.

Would love any feedback and to answer any questions about the implementation.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-04 23:43:11+00:00
> The main limitation is that the same flashcards must be studied by multiple students, which doesn't generally apply.

I think only a kernel of the same flashcards, because in my mind new cards would quickly find their position after being reviewed a few times, and might displace already well-known cards. I see the process as throwing random cards at students, seeing what's left after shaking the tree, and using that info to teach new students.

The goal, however, would definitely be a single standard but evolving set of cards that described some group of related ideas. I know that's against Supermemo/Anki gospel, but I've gotten an enormous amount of value out of engineered decks such as https://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjuga....

> I also love the idea of the market, you could even extend it to evaluate/write high-quality flashcards.

It's been my idea to drive conversational spaced repetition with something like this.
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-04 23:45:10+00:00
Isn't that the point of it? To allow Delta to fill in the demand curve for a flight more exactly? If they have only 3 or 4 prices (first class, business, economy, maybe a firesale price 24 hours before the flight) they're leaving money on the table. At least some customers are paying less than the demand curve would permit, geometrically.

Of course I'm assuming the AI actually knows the demand curve, and can accurately assess specific customers' utility function.
by api | 2025-08-04 23:45:52+00:00
My intent was to express skepticism about the idea that Palantir alone is anything other than a contractor behaving like a contractor. They’ll bid on anything and so will any other contractor. I get skeptical when something like that is held up as a big bogey man. I think it’s a distraction.

The real issue is that people voted for this. All of it.

Anyone who voted for Trump after J6 knew what they were getting. All the people with buyers remorse about Trump make me think of this parable:

https://www.northerncherokeenation.com/boy-and-the-rattlesna...

“You knew what I was when you picked me up.”
by metalman | 2025-08-04 23:45:56+00:00
"turning sex into", ha! try tuning into some ancient summerian writing, where the original riot girl, the Godess Innana sings songs of effusive praise for her "ghalla" it's quite clear that she's not guessing about what is possible, ha! edit: the premise of the article is like something time warped from the victorians....who lived under a rock or something
by jk-jeon | 2025-08-04 23:47:36+00:00
A way to achieve perfect round-tripping was proposed back in 1990, by Steele and White (and likely they are not the first ones who came up with a similar idea). I guess their proposal probably wasn't extremely popular at least until 2000's, compared to more classical `printf`-like rounding methods, but it seems many languages and platforms these days do provide such round-tripping formatting algorithms as the default option. So, I guess nowadays roundtripping isn't that hard, unless people do something sophisticated without really understanding what they're doing.
by spdionis | 2025-08-04 23:48:26+00:00
The comparison would be towards other languages in its class: Python, Ruby, Javascript.

Besides the shared nothing architecture mentioned by sibling:

- A more mature community and ecosystem for open source packages e.g. basics like following semver

- One single clear option for package management, which is also by far best in class

- Simply better performance except maybe compared to javascript

While the rest of the options may tick one of the above boxes, none of them ticks all 3.