MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Arainach | 2025-08-15 03:53:14+00:00
It's easy to make a puzzle that's hard. "Guess the number in my head" is hard. It's not fun for the solver or reasonable. "Unscramble this text which was XORed with the Windows 3.1 solitaire EXE" is likewise.

Good puzzles, even hard ones, should have some idea which way to approach them and should offer a method of attack other than brute force.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-15 03:53:17+00:00
> most definitely without Woz there’d be no Apple.

I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days.

What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision.

Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.
by ako | 2025-08-15 03:53:33+00:00
You can give it some documents, or classroom textbooks, and it can turn those into rdf graphs, explaining what the main concepts are, and how they are related. This can then be used by an llm to solve other problems.

It can also learn new things using trial and error with mcp tools. Once it has figured out some problem, you can ask it to summarize the insights for later use.

What would define as an AI mental model?
by throw10920 | 2025-08-15 03:54:14+00:00
> Currently when new vulnerabilities pop up (i.e. xz-utils compromise, log4j shell), people are quick to blame the maintainers for it. Why shouldn't companies instead be responsible for these vulnerabilities?

They are. I've never seen a single example of a company that was able to dodge legal liability for something bad that happened as a result of an open-source software package that they used.

The problem is that software companies generally aren't liable for anything that happens as a result of their software. If you store the code to a safe with $100k in OneDrive and Microsoft deletes that file by accident, they have zero legal liability - regardless of whether the fault was in Microsoft's proprietary code or some open-source library that they use.

That's the more fundamental problem that needs to be addressed first - that tech companies have extremely few responsibilities to their users, in a way that's unlike most other industries that have come before.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-15 03:54:47+00:00
You're right about Little Boy, i'd misread kilos as pounds, oops, and sorry. That said, my main points stand:

First, that lack of financial resources wasn't an obstacle to the Bomb. Hitler had his government spend absurdly colossal sums on other and ultimately useless things mainly because of his stubborn fixations (real surprise, that) and even with the scientific brain drain due to Nazi persection of jews and dissidents of all stripes, enough sharp minds remained in Germany to pull it off I believe, but only if the whole concept had been taken seriously enough, early enough and with good planning and funding.

Secondly: Assuming they'd actually developed the bomb, delivery would have been a very solveable problem at that point for stopping a western Allied invasion dead in its tracks.

Stopping the vast soviet army would have been a different matter entirely, especially if they only developed the atom bomb later in the war. I'm not entirely sure about even a nuclear weapon being enough to put a brake on that level of thirst for revenge, combined with so much military force for applying said revenge.
by eviks | 2025-08-15 03:55:31+00:00
> then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded.

The rounded laptop corners is a similar design decision. And also it doesn't look weird to me at all compared to rounded corners for windows, especially when they introduce visible desktop garbage in those now-not-perfectly-covering-rectangles corner areas
by GoatInGrey | 2025-08-15 03:56:30+00:00
On the contrary, the US-led coalition achieved military victory in Afghanistan in under 60 days. Which is an incredible feat. Though what that coalition failed to achieve, and where people try to adjust the definition of tactical victory, was the nation-building goal of creating a functional, independent Afghanistan government. The counterinsurgency aspect was the process of protecting that fledgling "nation".

The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
by ViktorRay | 2025-08-15 03:57:46+00:00
For what it’s worth I personally read The Hobbit for the first time as a child a few years after watching the first Harry Potter movie.

So when I read The Hobbit I imagined the trolls to be similar to the giant troll from the first Harry Potter movie. The one that goes after Hermione when she’s crying in the restroom and then Harry and Ron have to save her.
by buzer | 2025-08-15 03:57:49+00:00
> Reading the data doesn't mean they can impersonate you, as the device wouldn't give you access to private keys used for authentication (lets even say these are deleted), only encryption.

They would gain access to anything that isn't separately protected. Every application doesn't necessarily store their authentication in that separate storage that gets wiped and if there is such a storage, there isn't really anything prevents applications from using that storage for other purposes, for example storing the encryption key for application's data.

Gaining access to files, photos, email and such could be used for, for example, blackmail or identity theft.

If politicians, police, intelligence agencies and military are not ready to entrust their data behind the same "escrow" mechanism then clearly they don't trust it enough. If it was as perfectly protected from abuse as claimed then they would have no reason to not trust it as well.
by hattmall | 2025-08-15 03:59:00+00:00
I think the idea is more or less that this has changed. Like how much more hype can you sell when you are approaching 500B valuation, 1 billion users and a huge burn rate. Uber is the classic example of the startup with huge burn and high valuation and it's peanuts compared to the AI arena. But uBer disrupted a huge market with a very clear value proposition and monetization strategy.
by kenjackson | 2025-08-15 03:59:39+00:00
Yours is wrong. Yours would work if you liked all the clothes there but then one day they stopped selling Kanye West’s Nazi shirt that you liked because people found it offensive. And then you stopped shopping there because of that.

The analogy requires you giving up what you want because they stopped carrying something others find offensive. Not that they don’t sell what you like all up. In which case it makes perfect sense not to shop there.
by nneonneo | 2025-08-15 04:02:36+00:00
This is very common in Chinese now. The older generation, many of whom didn’t learn pinyin, just use voice input to send messages; the younger generations just use pinyin input and similarly can’t handwrite beyond the simplest characters.

The phenomenon of forgetting how to write is called 提笔忘字 (tíbǐwàngzì - to pick up the pen and forget the character). It was previously covered here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41959256
by interpol_p | 2025-08-15 04:03:25+00:00
Safe area can account for things that are not just a notch. It's used across Apple platforms to indicate anything that might need to occupy a dedicated region on the screen: notch on iPhones, home indicator, iPadOS traffic light buttons, menu bar, curved edges of displays, and so on

Your container views can extend the safe areas for their children as well. In our apps, which allow users to run their own custom projects, we increase the safe area for our UI so that users can avoid it in their own rendering

Safe area is a fairly neat and functional API. The unfortunate thing is the older `CGDisplayCopyAllDisplayModes` API is just lumping all resolutions together
by volkl48 | 2025-08-15 04:04:03+00:00
Not a lawyer but the de facto law has always appeared to only care about uploading.

Torrenting gets you in trouble because uploading at least a little bit is inherent to how it (and some other P2P) is supposed to work, and that's enough for a case.

Cases against people just downloading have always appeared to be very rare/non-existent, at least from when I used to follow the news on this stuff more. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone threatened for solely downloading off direct download services, for example.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-15 04:05:18+00:00
It doesn’t really matter how popular the democrats are, wherever the economy is around the midterm election will be out purely at the republicans feet since they control all branches of government. Unless Trump somehow gets lucky and America is able to magic up factories and supply chains that took China two decades to build, people are going to be pretty angry next year and a blue wave is all but guaranteed.

But ya, I guess “playing nice” is no longer in style, and taking the moral high ground (eg either CA’s non partisan redistributing process) is simply no longer viable or appreciated. Democrats have to show backbone…Or maybe we just need to find next Obama or Clinton (Bill not Hillary)…uninspiring leaders like Newsom aren’t going to do it, also AOC is old enough to run for president now, I think. Going slimy like Trump doesn’t feel right.
by waltercool | 2025-08-15 04:06:38+00:00
It's usually the opposite.

When a company requires lot more energy, power plants are expected to produce lot more.

When a power plant produce a lot, the low consumption rates tend to get cheaper. It's gets cheaper to produce energy as the demand increases.

This is, of course, considering the input material is not scarce, like hydro power plants or wind power. Everything else (coal, oil, nuclear, gas, solar) should be easy to increase supply/demand.
by BenFranklin100 | 2025-08-15 04:07:06+00:00
Corporate taxes are blunt instruments. They preferentially hurt workers. The C-suite decides how higher corporate taxes affect the company, and it’s not by lowering the CEO’s salary. It’s by firing people, hiring less, and making less investments in the business all else being equal. Corporate taxes also distort decisions of small business owners, who will pay out profits as salary to themselves rather than reinvesting the money in the company so as to avoid paying taxes on profits twice, first as a corporate tax and the second time as an income tax.

A better solution is to slash corporate taxes and raise income taxes on high earners. This will end the practice of offshoring the story describes, and also spare workers the negative effects of corporate income taxes.
by blendo | 2025-08-15 04:07:06+00:00
Yes. With $10 million in the bank, earning 4%, you'll see $400,000 a year, less taxes.

Whereas with $10 billion, you'll get $400 million a year, or about $7.5 million PER WEEK!

I think guys like Musk and Andreesen (&SBF) might have gone insane just trying to spend their money.
by throwaway422432 | 2025-08-15 04:08:56+00:00
It actually first jumped significantly after the earnings call the day before the election.

A 54% growth on the commercial side, being added to the S&P500, 1b in free cash flow, etc. Since then there have been constant announcements of more success resulting in buy-ins from all the big institutional funds including sovereign wealth funds.

Sure, the political connections are there, but is that why everyone's buying?

https://www.palantir.com/q3-2024-letter/en/
Ask HN: Meaning of initial decision parameter in rasterization?
by shivajikobardan | 2025-08-15 04:09:48+00:00
I am talking about initial decision parameter in rasterization algorithm for lines specially.

For slope between -1 and +1, we get p0=2dy-dx

But I am unable to find how it was derived and neither do I understand what it means.

It should mean something on the line of "where to put the first pixel"....However, we just put y=mx+b and voila we get that as shown here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvTMfJY0GCg

which is too nonsense for me to digest.
by danans | 2025-08-15 04:10:03+00:00
I'd caution from reading too much into numbers like this. 400 applications is borderline spamming, putting quantity over quality, which employers would notice.

It can be far fewer if you have a focus/specialty and specific industries that you target.

No doubt though, it's a slog right now. My recent process was around 10 applications - which became 3 interviews - and the last 2 were offers, one that came via a recruiter. Even this is a marked increase in difficulty vs 4 years ago.
by sqircles | 2025-08-15 04:11:32+00:00
The thing that seemed to work best for me was reaching out to dev shops in my area and starting a conversation even if they didn't have a position posted. Go to meetups and talk to people, join their discord, etc... and job fairs, as lame as they seem, produced contacts for me that are still reaching out "just in case" even though I found a position eventually.

What's old is new again. Get those soft skills warmed up and go out and shake hands.
by zerocrates | 2025-08-15 04:12:02+00:00
"Safe area" is terminology that has a history of being used with displays: defining the portion of a TV screen where viewers could be reliably expected to be able to see content and on-screen graphics without them getting clipped off by the overscan.

I assume they also wanted to choose something that would still be named appropriately if they had other kinds of notches or things in the future (and that even now it already accounts for, say, the curved corners where things also can't display).
Ask HN: How is Cognition able to raise at $10B?
by thereitgoes456 | 2025-08-15 04:13:59+00:00
I'm looking for real answers and to understand the thought process particularly of investors. Please try not to answer with "VCs are idiots", unless you absolutely must.

Cognition AI, the makers of "Devin" and recent acquirers of Windsurf, raised recently at a $10B valuation [1]. This is about the same valuation as Cursor, which is the fastest growing AI consumer app in the world, with $500MM ARR, beloved by many programmers.

Meanwhile Devin launched with an immediate scandal and continues to have poor reputation. It is not used by anyone I know, seems to be targeted at enterprise, and has announced a single-digit number of deals with companies. Something makes me think they probably do not have $500MM ARR or anywhere close. They have no background in ML, hiring only contest programmers. So how are they raising at much higher valuations than any other company in this space with much less of a track record? Is it possible they are a great behemoth behind the scenes?

For investors, how do they expect to make their money back? Could Google or some other company buy Cognition at $10B, or $20B, or even $5B? Are there strong clauses that protect investors in these situations? How can they possibly not lose a bunch of money here?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/cognition-cinches-about-500-million-to-advance-ai-code-generation-business-f65f71a9
Ask HN: How do you like your RSS feed?
by willemlaurentz | 2025-08-15 04:14:42+00:00
For some years I serve a feed.rss with excerpts (title, intro, date and url) from my blog (willem.com/blog). I noticed that traffic has increased significantly on the feeds.

I want to improve the experience, how do you like your feeds best? Complete with images? Any examples of websites you really enjoy (via rss?)

For those with eReaders, I also consider adding ePub and PDF support. I just want to facilitate the reader and reading - don't care about keeping traffic on my own webserver.

Thank you for chiming in!
by artahian | 2025-08-15 04:14:52+00:00
I agree - Postgres has been on the rise for the past years, but I think the reason for MongoDB going down in popularity is not reflective of its own progress - MongoDB has only been technically getting better and they’ve recently bought Voyage AI which is now bringing built-in embeddings with MongoDB Atlas vector search.

The previous startup I’ve co-founded has been running on MongoDB since 2014 and everything was great for over 10 years of using it as our main db, hosting over million users and large enterprise customers.

A lot of this is obviously subjective, but we’ve always found MongoDB’s flexibility work great for a startup’s constant db changes. And we also believe that the existence of “Supabase for MongoDB” will be a good reason for more people to use it.
by Arainach | 2025-08-15 04:15:01+00:00
It's objectively true.

Republicans pass tax cuts which increase the burden on the poor and the middle class for the benefits of the ultrarich (not the majority of their voters).

They destroy government programs that benefit the majority of the population - health care, antitrust enforcement, free tax filing, environmental protections, tax audits of rich tax cheats.

They oppose any programs which provide benefits to the public - broadband standards, net neutrality, social services, cybersecurity, weather satellites, libraries, public schools, so many more.

The vast majority of their voters are hurt by these policies and are quite literally voting against their interests.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-08-15 04:15:18+00:00
The chatbot gurus 10 years ago were parroting the same thing. Nobody needs an app, everyone ll use a chatbot. And now "nobody needs a saas, everyone ll use an LLM" Sounds familiar? You got 1 part of the entire thing wrong "The large language model has effectively read the entire internet’s worth of React docs and StackOverflow threads, so it produces reliable code in that stack with minimal fuss."
Show HN: AskSpot – Ask and Answer Questions with People in Your Area
by MakotoCroCop | 2025-08-15 04:15:28+00:00
AskSpot lets you ask and answer questions with people in your area, anytime. Whether you need local recommendations, quick advice, or want to connect with nearby residents, AskSpot makes it easy to share and discover location-based insights. I built this because I often wanted quick, reliable answers from locals when traveling or exploring my own city, but couldn’t find a simple, privacy-friendly tool for it. Built with SvelteKit + Firebase, it supports hierarchical location codes so users can see relevant questions from their country, region, or neighborhood. Currently live and free to try — I’d love your feedback, bug reports, and ideas for new features!
by chasing0entropy | 2025-08-15 04:15:32+00:00
Plex is garbage spyware. You cannot use the client/server offline, go ahead and reatrict your Plex server to lan only and try to log in from a client.

Jellyfin is an excellent solution right now. I'd say the desktop and mobile app is early Netflix quality now. Completely open source, and has click to run binaries for almost any OS.
by elahieh | 2025-08-15 04:15:41+00:00
Here's what's up for sale from RR Auction

https://www.rrauction.com/jim-sanborn-kryptos-k4-solution-au...

The Wired piece has Sanborn saying the reserve should be "around $300,000."

It sounds like Sanborn really doesn't think it'll be solved before the auction date of 20 November (his 80th is on 14 November). If it does get solved due to this publicity bump, that's huge earnings foregone.

Perhaps he knows it is still an "unreasonable" challenge even with the 24 known letters.
by unsignedint | 2025-08-15 04:16:07+00:00
Well, my point is that what you’re experiencing with anime and other content from Japan when accessed within Japan is actually quite normal. It’s the same reason I can hardly ever find content here in the U.S., especially from major movie studios, that includes Japanese subtitles or dubs.

I’m sorry you have to deal with that limitation. I can relate, since I also want to enjoy media in Japanese. Fortunately, having lived here long enough, I can at least comprehend it without subtitles.

Am I happy about it? No, but unfortunately, that’s the reality for now.
by pabs3 | 2025-08-15 04:17:40+00:00
Found a FAQ about it:

"Failure to comply with vulnerability reporting, cyber incident reporting, or essential cybersecurity requirements could trigger administrative fines of up to €15 million or 2.5% of global turnover. Other obligations include €10 million or 2% of global turnover."

https://www.windriver.com/resource/eu-cyber-resilience-act-f...

Also more details in this one:

https://codific.com/cra-fines/

Apart from fines, "Beyond financial penalties, non-compliant products may also be prohibited or restricted from being made available on the EU market, or authorities may order their withdrawal or recall. This can lead to significant reputational damage and loss of market access."
by Seattle3503 | 2025-08-15 04:18:19+00:00
I touched on this in another comment. We are already doing age verification today, and poorly.

> There is a lot of this going on in this thread and frankly it is quite frustrating. Texas and France are two jurisdictions I know implemented privacy laws and now porn websites are collecting PII. I know this because when I traveled to Europe, my account on an adult website (gasp, yes I admit to having one) started asking me for ID. When I tried to proceed through verification with their chosen third party the flow requested a video of my face. Yuck. When I got back the US, it was still requesting face verification. I talked to support and, basically, once I used a French SIM card it "blew a verification fuse" and the only way to get my account back was to send that video of my face. I found this unacceptable, so I abandoned my account.

> If we refuse to find a workable solution that respects privacy and is based in open standards, we are going to cede this space to private third party companies.

When we deny the government a role, we cede this territory to private companies that are accountable to no one but their shareholders. I'd rather develop ID standards that protect privacy while providing access.
by x-complexity | 2025-08-15 04:19:28+00:00
> The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.

Easy: The largest ship in the world by area. (Goal - either 500m x 500m, or at least 0.25km^2 with the breadth >= 300m)

The current status quo for bulk carriers are the Valemax ships (360m x 65m), with each one costing around $100 million. (actual figure wildly varies, but sticks around that number)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valemax#Sale_of_ships

https://www.tradewindsnews.com/containerships/evergreen-adds...

(500 * 500) / (360 * 65) = 10.683760683760683

10.68 * $100 million = $1.068 billion

Even just going with 5 Valemax ships side-by-side (360m x 325m) costs half a billion.
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-15 04:20:26+00:00
Is that still going on? I was just reading about it in the Sarah Wynn-Williams book and it sounded like the EU was cracking down on it and bunch of execs were making backroom deals at Davos in the late 2010s to try to get extensions and sweetheart deals of various kinds.

EDIT: Sigh, yeah looks like the famous Double Irish loophole closed in 2020, but there's another scheme that's come up since 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
by jack1243star | 2025-08-15 04:20:37+00:00
> A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it.

They definitely do, it's just that hand writing has become a more niche use case in modern society (regardless of the language).

If you removed all kanji in a block of Japanese text (replaced with kana), I'd expect at least a 50% reduction in reading speed for natives, and some errors in comprehension. They're fundamental to the language.