MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gruez | 2025-08-15 00:03:54+00:00
>Facebook chose to pool the data they received from customers and allow its use by others, so they are also responsible for the outcomes.

"chose" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Suppose you ran a Mastodon server and it turned out some people were using it to share revenge porn unbeknownst to you. Suppose further that they did it in a way that didn't make it easily detectable by you (eg. they did it in DMs/group chats). Sure, you can dump out the database and pore over everything just to be sure, but it's not like you're going to notice it day to day. If a few months later the revenge porn ring got busted should you be charged with "intentionally eavesdropping" on revenge porn or whatever? After all, to some extent, you "chose" to run the Mastodon server.
by II2II | 2025-08-15 00:04:14+00:00
I live in a "walkable city". By walkable, I mean the old parts of the city that predated the automobile (and weren't destroyed in the name of modernization) are walkable. New parts of the city are completely unwalkable. If you came here, you would notice that massive numbers of people walk in the old parts of the city. Even the people who drive into the old parts of the city tend to walk once they are there. In the new parts of the city, virtually all of the pedestrians you see are on their way to or from a bus stop.

That said, there is more to a walkable city than a bunch of sidewalks. It also has to offer what people want and what they want must be easy to access. Something similar can be said about piracy. It wasn't streaming services that stymied piracy, it was cheap and easy access to legal sources of music and video. Even then, cheap was likely a secondary factor (as long as the price was reasonable).
Show HN: Nabu (TTS Reader and LLM Playground on Android)
by mewmix | 2025-08-15 00:04:19+00:00
With the latest launch from Google I've added support for Gemma 3 270M, the speed for local LLM to TTS token time is incredible! This is an heavy obvious work in progress - any contributions or tips would be welcome. The idea is to have a fast moving edge model playground, and maybe have some utility (like the e reader) on the side.
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-15 00:05:00+00:00
Not all LED light is bad, architectural-grade LED fixtures that have external drivers, 0-10v dimming, 90+ CRI, plus reflectors and diffusers output high quality light. They’re also designed to last for 50,000 hours or more.

Most consumer grade LED lamps are shit, the driver is built into the base and they can’t shed enough heat so they degrade quickly and die, and a lot of people just buy 5000k lamps that put out 1500 lumens which looks harsh and artificial. A 2700k lamp that puts out 800 lumens will look much closer to an incandescent lamp, I buy Philips lamps personally and they work well.
by gruez | 2025-08-15 00:05:38+00:00
Except in this case it's unclear whether any intentional decision went on at meta. A better analogy would be if someone sent you a bunch of CSAM, it went to your spam folder, but then because you have backups enabled the CSAM got replicated to 3 different servers across state lines, and the FBI is charging you with "distributing" CSAM.
by metalman | 2025-08-15 00:06:16+00:00
BLARG! there is a very very good chance that there are other mechanisms for triggering pain responses, like unnatural chemicals, such as concentrated ethenol or diesel fuel, photo copier fluid, etc, that can cross the blood brain barier, causing intense pain in many cases, but have little effect if applied topicaly. on the flip side, one rather interesting thing about pain, is that it impossible to trigger pain from a memory, but then there are cases of symptoms of phantom pain in lost limbs, so I feel strongly that there will be new knowledge soon about pain, especialy as there a number of promising non opiod pain relievers that use completly different pathways to block pain.
by scubbo | 2025-08-15 00:06:17+00:00
a) GNU Terry Pratchett

b) In case you are one of today's Lucky Ten Thousand, this is a reference to the real-life Ceremony Of The Keys[1]

[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/ [1] https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/t...
by Seattle3503 | 2025-08-15 00:06:17+00:00
> Parental Controls is the right answer but absolutely agree that parental controls suck. As a parent, I'd love just any level of better control. I don't even care if I have different controls per manufacturer as long they're pretty complete and capable.

> If the EU can mandate USB-C, they can mandate all technologies include powerful and capable parental controls.

> There is no need for age verification -- parents know how old their children are. Parents are providing children with the devices and often the means of connectivity as well. This is and has always been a parenting problem. If the government wants to assist parents, I'm all for that. But age verification is not the answer.

We no longer live in the era of a single family computer. Parents don't know about all devices their children will use to access the internet, so filters aren't going to cut it.

A good implementation of age verification would assist parents, as you suggest, while denying control to the government. IMO parents should always be able to bypass the block for their children. If the government wants to "block" Wikipedia, the parents should be able to give it back to their kid.
by idle_zealot | 2025-08-15 00:06:19+00:00
> There are so many devices now, we can't assume we control or know about all devices our children may have access to.

This is specifically a solution for a world with many personal devices. The devices a child has access to are their own (in child mode), someone else's being lent to them (the analog loophole, not solved by child mode or proof-of-age), and public devices at schools, libraries and the like, which are typically locked down.
by tzs | 2025-08-15 00:07:25+00:00
Note: this comment is just about what is technically possible, not what should actually be done.

Actually those issues could be addressed by using a sufficiently large threshold system to protect each message's decryption key, so that in order to decrypt a message a large number of people have to agree that it is justified.

You could make it for example so that a message can only be decrypted if it is approved by judges in 3 different federal circuits, with at least 2 judges in each of those 3 circuits approving, and also approved by at least 2 outside civil rights groups chosen from {ACLU, EFF, Amnesty International}, and INTERPOL.

If that's not good enough we could also make it so that for each message the threshold system includes 5000 random citizens with smartphones and at least 3000 of them must agree.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-15 00:08:03+00:00
All immigration changes culture. And the United States is probably the best proof of that that you could possibly wish for. Anglo-American culture is a very tiny slice of American culture. Your position is essentially statist: you want the world to stay the way you found it. But the world evolves and it does so on a timescale that that is noticeable on a single human life span. Like that whole groups of people have to sit at the back of the bus (if they're allowed on in the first place), write books on how to survive while driving in certain parts of the country and like that they suddenly have rights. And the countries they were forcibly imported from had cultures noticeably different from the one where the Anglo-American (and Dutch, and German and other countries besides) owners (or so they claimed) people came from.

If you want to emigrate to a place that is static then you will quickly find out that you can't, not really. Switzerland has been trying to do this since forever and is failing badly at it, other experiments in the same direction have led to civil wars and ugly offshoots like apartheid. You either accept that any immigration at all will change culture or you will have to drastically reduce your exposure to the world around you to maintain the illusion.

Capital loves immigration: it provides for cheap labor. That's the end of your static culture. And good thing too.
by overfeed | 2025-08-15 00:08:33+00:00
> There was no “aftermath of 9/11.”

For you there wasn't, and like you said earlier, there's no representative "brown person" experience. I have first-hand experience that's the definitely included an aftermath, one person stopped wearing hijab after being taunted, another started going by "Mo", and yet another - who's not even muslim - started dyeing her hair a color much lighter that its natural color to better pass as white.
by jodoking | 2025-08-15 00:10:20+00:00
you brought some great points. what we are hoping to do next iteration is to add audit logs of actions taken (of high risk actions) that way even if the user "accidentally" blank agrees their mcp service to take the rm action then at least they can see if the action was something they typed or suggested by the LLM.

if you have some improvements around this space love to chat and collaborate!
by Lerc | 2025-08-15 00:10:29+00:00
Being able to make a small change is good when every thing is well defined small parts. You can change the part you want and then use everything else as per normal. If everything is so tightly integrated that you end up having to maintain a fork of a large project, it doesn't work out so well.

I don't know which is true for this particular case, but I'd hazard a guess that it is a much bigger task than it needs to be.

I have seen Gnome devs talk of removing features because people were using them the wrong way. Not that people weren't using the features at all, just not for the purpose for which they were written. Experiences like that make me think that pull requests wouldn't get you very far either.
by gruez | 2025-08-15 00:11:44+00:00
To extend your analogy further, what if instead of an AI assistant, it was your friend who listened to your secret, and instead of him sending your data to facebook, he told that to google (eg. "hey gemini, my friend has hemorrhoids..."). Suppose further that google uses Gemini queries for advertising purposes (eg. upranking ad results for hemorrhoid creams). Should gemini be on the hook for this breach of trust? What if, instead of a big evil tech company, it was the owner of a local corner shop, who uses this factoid to inform his purchasing decisions?
by lemonberry | 2025-08-15 00:12:26+00:00
In the 80's I'd see people airbrushing t-shirts in the mall and at the beach. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I never did any myself, but I loved watching the artists work. The chrome effect was just awesome. I'm sure a lot of it would be considered campy or tacky today, but age does that. There's nothing like the awe and wonder of being a kid.

Aside: I was more into painting AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) miniatures. I still have most of my books and dice. My miniatures may be around here somewhere too, but I have 3 generations of stuff to go through to find it. I want less screen time though and plan to pick up some paints and miniatures soon.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-08-15 00:13:15+00:00
CEO hype turns out to be hype. More news at 11.

This piece's bias hurts its credibility. "It can’t even label a map" doesn't tell a story about the things these tools are useful for. And you know that something hundreds of millions of people are using has got to be pretty useful, or people wouldn't spend their money on it.
by idle_zealot | 2025-08-15 00:13:28+00:00
> Most time travel theories ignore the fact that the earth is not fixed in space

This is a misconception that bugs me. The problem isn't that the Earth isn't fixed in space, it's that there's no such thing as a fixed point in space. Position is only defined relative to other objects. If you're going to use time travel in a story or something then it has to use something like an anchor object to determine destination. I.e. the relative location of the traveler and the anchor is replicated from the future to the past.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-15 00:13:56+00:00
I like Woz, was never a fan of Jobs. And I mean that with regard to their personality — not their skillset.

My sense though, after having seen Woz talk a few times now, is that he seemed (seems?) to be on a tear to make sure his legacy is known. Now I would never say that he came across as a braggart in his talks ... but intent on making sure it is established that is was he the designed the Apple II (not Jobs, for example).

I always feel a bit of sadness though. It seems that he dropped out as the chief architect of the hardware not long after the Apple II ascendency. I'm thinking of the Apple IIGs, etc. — certainly the Lisa and Macintosh.

It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed — just thousands of very dense 4-layer traces and lots and lots of components.

I know he was not a "mere hobbyist" — he worked for HP for crissakes, but the machines became more like spreadsheets, less like "art" if you know what I mean.
by sakesun | 2025-08-15 00:14:53+00:00
When I was young, I was fascinated by the paper "Language-Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm"[1] and was eager to see how the future would unfold. Decades later, I finally decided that perhaps just using Python—and making a good living—is fine by me.

[1] https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/mps/docs/La...
by wakawaka28 | 2025-08-15 00:15:44+00:00
It's not "nearly impossible" but actually built in: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake.1.html#cmdo... For the actual compile time you can easily insert a wrapper script. To be honest I haven't done that in over 4 years, but it has been done by many and it is easy.

There may be times when CMake itself is the bottleneck but it is almost certainly an issue with your dependencies and so on. CMake has many features to assist you in speeding up your compile and link time too. But it would take a series of blog posts to describe how you should try to speed it up.
by gmane | 2025-08-15 00:16:20+00:00
I'll give a half-baked counter to this: we know gravity impacts the flow of time through relativity. There is currently no evidence that time travel wouldn't be impacted by gravity in some way. Maybe the way time in time travel interacts with gravity protects you from this problem? Probably not, but it has just as much evidence to support it as your claim of time travel will dump you in empty space.
by msgodel | 2025-08-15 00:16:35+00:00
It sounds like most of it is just bad communication.

This would be a lot easier if they just published the weights for their models even if they did it with a delay of a couple years like Grok was supposed to. By keeping everything secret and then having some of the worst naming conventions anyone has come up with everyone just gets confused and frustrated. Combine that with the normal rug pull feeling of hosted software and the anxiety people get with SOTA AI and you have a perfect storm of upset users.
by Seattle3503 | 2025-08-15 00:17:06+00:00
> Not we can't, but we shouldn't. All the current solutions are terrible, and are either trivial to fool or mass surveillance machines. We shouldn't be stupid enough to go for either option because it'll either cost a fortune while giving us nothing, or cause immeasurable harm when the National Porn Viewing Database inevitably gets used to blackmail everyone.

It seems like we could get "good enough" solutions that would reduce the amount of explicit material we show to kids, as well as push back the age where children are first exposed. I don't think a good technical implementation will require a "National Porn Viewing Database", but that's what we will end up if engineers and technologists dig in their heels and say "no". It is already happening in places like France and Texas.

> We're trying to (poorly) use technology to solve a social problem. If we can't figure out a way to do so using technology without significant downsides, then perhaps we shouldn't be using technology to solve the problem at all.

Technology created this social problem; its given us unprecedented access to explicit material. These aren't playboy's under the bed. Technology can help remediate.
by gerdesj | 2025-08-15 00:18:15+00:00
I used AutoIT to remove old AV from roughly 6000 PCs across 20 odd countries back in 2002. I still use it from Zenworks on some customer sites, 20+ years later.

Old school Windows apps are not "flowing" they generally use a toolkit and AutoIT is able to use the Windows APIs to note window handles, or the text in various widgets and so on and act on them.

These are not complicated beasts - they are largely determinant. If you have to go off piste and deal with moguls, you have a mode called "adlib" where you deal with unusual cases.

I find it a bit unpleasant that you describe part of my job as "untenable". I'm sure you didn't mean it as such. I'm still just as cheap as I was 20 years ago and probably a bit quicker now too!
by snvzz | 2025-08-15 00:19:02+00:00
RVA23 is very important to the RISC-V ecosystem.

Unlike RVA20 (which is almost the same as RV64GC), RVA23 is comparable to x86-64v4 and ARMv9.

It being the baseline means the CPU will be running RVA23 code practically all the time.

This makes x86 particularly handicapped, relatively speaking.
by jdprgm | 2025-08-15 00:19:03+00:00
Netflix has gone to almost complete shit over the past few years. One of the things that really stood out as a strange choice for them considering their long term status as the "tech" innovator coming for media has been segmenting plans on resolution. I don't understand why they don't want to always put their best foot forward especially considering I assume bandwidth is always getting cheaper? And we seem upper bounded by 4k for the foreseeable future.
by rashidae | 2025-08-15 00:19:13+00:00
I wrote a short post on something I keep running into:

Not all software is equally easy for AI agents to integrate with.

Some have stable APIs and IDs. Others change identifiers, have no API, or require fragile UI hacks.

MCP is great for standardizing how agents talk to tools, but it can’t magically fix bad or inconsistent software.

If you’re choosing software for agent integration, knowing this difference matters.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-15 00:19:13+00:00
Your comment is a bizarre tangle of different concerns, of which none make even a tiny amount of sense.

- If you download without uploading much, what does that have to do with the costs of piracy?

- If you upload as well as download, how will that increase the amount you pay for 50 watts of electricity?

- In what possible sense is storage not free? You already have the storage. Putting things on it is free, unless you get to the point where you need to buy additional storage. You don't need to retain the things you pirate any more than you need to retain the things you stream.

-- Even if you decide to do that, storage is an utterly trivial cost.

- Stipulating that 50 watts a month costs $10, your network stack draws less than 25 watts. Given that storage will never add up to any amount you'd notice, it will take less than one month before piracy blows rental out of the water on costs, after which its lead will increase forever.
by jacobgkau | 2025-08-15 00:20:31+00:00
There's probably humans you're going to have to interact with in the course of donating to animals, who will benefit from you donating to animals (if not skimming off the top directly by way of being employed by the charity, etc). If you truly want to make sure none of it goes to any human, you'd basically just have to burn it (and maybe hope that does something bad to the economy to get back at the other humans).
by zahlman | 2025-08-15 00:20:54+00:00
>We're eager for your feedback

It's very obvious that you also used an LLM to generate this post, and I see nothing here to convince me that this "novel methodology" would actually improve results.

Please also note that HN does not use Markdown for post formatting, and requires an additional line break between bullet-point list items (because they are actually just paragraphs).
by burnerRhodo | 2025-08-15 00:22:09+00:00
I essentially did the same thing... wrote a program, tried them all, went to emacs, back to a text file, then i started just writing down the 6 most important things for me to do that day. If i don't finish them, I write them back down at the start of the day. It was incredibly liberated because only after i finished those 6 things could i think about doing any other thing besides those 6 things.

Now i just prompt ChatGPT to recall my todo list and usually am working with the model to do whatever coding task, call prep, random analysis anyways, so it knows when i complete the task.

tried Everything -> emacs/ .txt -> top 6 on paper -> top 6 through an LLM.
by Akronymus | 2025-08-15 00:22:21+00:00
> How on earth do you go about genealogy data?

My extremely naive approach would a scheme where you have a header containing a list of used types of information fields, then a list of entries for people, then relationships (genealogical descendants, familial relationships with a start and end date (optional, YMD format, that you only fill in with as far as you know, so if you only know the year, you just set that.)) then a list of various events, then a list of supporting documents with a confidence value, where each document has a list of people and a list of events they are relevant to. then a list of basically freeform fields, that can link to events, documents, people, etc. where the types are defined in the header.

typing this out at 2 in the morning, so sorry for the incoherence.
by const_cast | 2025-08-15 00:23:03+00:00
> I am not proposing anything. I am saying we would all be better if FOSS contributors focused and consolidated their effort.

Sure, and then maybe after that we can also solve world hunger and then all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.

What you want is worthless, actually, if you don't have a plan on how to get there. We all want more polished software, less CO2 in the air, and more butter on movie theater popcorn.

If you want people to not fork, then you're either going to have to invent mind control or force people not to fork.

Well option 1 hasn't been invented yet. And option 2 is called closed source software.
by throwaway173738 | 2025-08-15 00:24:42+00:00
You’re positing some unknown influence will cause everything to work out well in the ends without any evidentiary basis. Occam’s Razor suggests that you’re more likely to be wrong than parent.

Of course the idea that your point of origin must be fixed from time A to time Z if you’re willing to allow for time travel is itself flawed. If you could somehow move an object to an arbitrary time you could move them to an arbitrary point in space, and your ability to calculate may be significantly greater on the grounds that you’d have more advanced technology than us. It’s all scifi woo though until someone actually time travels.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-15 00:24:50+00:00
Supply and demand means that corporations attempt to maximise their revenue. If the cost of providing a good service eats into their profits, they will provide a bad service.

This idea that "markets will provide" is eccentric, and obviously empirically wrong.

Markets are there to extract value and reinforce power imbalances. Consumer happiness is reliably at cross purposes with that.