MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by newyorkahh | 2025-08-19 13:57:20+00:00
Hostile actions would be IE’s strategy for monopolizing browser in 90s and Google paying Apple and Mozilla to monopolize search starting in 2004, killing off Reader in 2013.

Taking over standards groups is a gray area with tradeoffs. It helped Google preserve monopoly in search but clearly devs and the web benefited as well.

XHTML2 was panned because it was super strict without clear benefits. Keeping HTML backwards compatible is clearly a very good thing. I don’t fully understand the author’s passion for XSLT- it’s cumbersome and it wasn’t popular with devs.

I agree with the headline and some aspects but XML is a bad hill to die on and much of the writing is hyperbolic and more than a little out of touch.
by gibspaulding | 2025-08-19 13:57:45+00:00
I grew up in a part of the US that was “settled” in the mid 19th century. The absolute oldest buildings are just now approaching 200 years old and there aren’t many of those even. From that perspective it’s astonishing to be able to see the work of someone’s hands from so long ago. Obviously there were native Americans here long before European settlement, but evidence of their presence has been so thoroughly erased that it feels like everything you see sprung up in the last century. Even our forests are new, as pretty much the entire state was clear cut by the start of the 20th century.
by throwfaraway4 | 2025-08-19 13:57:58+00:00
>it is never a win when a powerful company or government lobbies for a specific carve out for only it's customers or its country.

This wasn't an "Apple only" law -- it would have affected all platforms with data on customers that live outside the UK.

>This isn't a win, this is solidifying and reinforcing the idea that different laws should exist for different classes of people - those who can afford to make the government look the other way and those that can't.

Corporations are not people. The people can afford to vote out politicians making laws that go against the will of the people.
by halJordan | 2025-08-19 13:58:16+00:00
Good is a little more proscriptive than that. Its not hard to see the difference between the, we can call them gen1, ai functions and gen2/3 functions we have now. The difference between gpt-3.5 and NotebookLM.

But HN has spent the last 3 years with it's head in the sand wrt stochastic parrots so it tracks that how far we've come is not apparent
by _heimdall | 2025-08-19 13:58:54+00:00
JSON correlates to XML rather than XSLT. As far as I'm aware, XML as a standard is already done as well.

XSLT is more related to frontend frameworks like react. Where XML and JSON are ways of representing state, XSLT and react (or similar) are ways of defining how that state is converted to HTML meant for human consumption.
by card_zero | 2025-08-19 13:58:59+00:00
> computer programs are treated as literary works under the Copyright Act

So this applies to published adblockers and things, I guess. You could roll your own, just like you could tear pages out of a book you bought. You could mod a game privately.

If the adblocker-or-whatever is published, it's like publishing a mod to somebody's book. Like a script you point at an ebook that changes it. Is that considered the same as publishing a copy the book with small parts changed? Why?

The article highlights the line in the German copyright act about exclusive rights to "the translation, adaptation, arrangement and other modifications of a computer program". I'm unclear on the scope here. I don't think this applies to people making edits to copyrighted programs in private.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-19 13:59:28+00:00
> (you sign away all rights to the things you made free) tiers.

Do you have a source for this? Or are you speculating?

> but it's out of principle

Great that it works for you. I have limited time for hobbies and I can’t justify making choices based on principle to avoid hypotheticals that even you admit aren’t going to happen.

> but don't complain other people should do the same because you can.

I’m not complaining. Anyone who wants to use a certain software based on principle is free to do so.

I’m sharing recommendations from my own experience and that of my peers. If the goal is to focus on the project you’re trying to do instead of fighting with software then people should be aware of their options.
by cluckindan | 2025-08-19 13:59:58+00:00
Based on years of daily close observation, I’m fairly certain most bird species sing/speak multiple different languages.

Predator warning calls are universally understood as warnings, even though species like great and blue tits tend to also vocalize to identify the threat after the warning. All birds in the same ecology recognize the warning part.

The ”danger remains, stay put” call is a long, single high tone, repeated every couple seconds. All the small birds know to sit still on a branch until the calls have ceased.

Those are examples of a ”universal language”, messages broadcast as wide as possible.

Another language type is calls specific to one species (and friends), a ”friend language”, if you will. This includes things like ”hey, where are you”, ”hey, where’s food” and ”hey, there’s food, come here”. These calls are invariably called at a lower volume than the universal ones: birds don’t like party crashers, especially if there’s not enough food to go around for all the flocks in the neighborhood.

Last, there is a ”familial language” optimized for information transfer. It is often used when a parent bird is teaching their young to be a bird. It sounds nothing like the other languages, and is best described as ”modem sounds”: dense bursts of modulated chirps which can only be heard a few meters away, only when no other birds are present and the situation is safe.

I believe this last one is practically undocumented in ornithological literature, or dismissed as meaningless ”warbling”. However, as it is the most information-dense bird language, I think it needs the most study.
by mkw5053 | 2025-08-19 14:00:28+00:00
Ha, fair point! Let me try again :)

People have tried using modern AI to crack lost languages. In some cases it works a bit. For example, a model learned to match Ugaritic (an ancient Semitic language) to Hebrew with no “dictionary” at all. In another case, a system called Pythia can guess missing letters in damaged Greek inscriptions with higher accuracy than human experts.

But with truly lost scripts like Linear A or Proto-Elamite, we run into two problems: there are only a few hundred very short texts, and we don’t have any bilingual “Rosetta Stone” to anchor them. AI can spot patterns, cluster symbols, and even suggest likely word boundaries, but it cannot yet produce actual translations. The current hope is to combine image recognition (to clean up messy symbols) with language models guided by rules of possible sound systems, then loop in human experts to check or reject the guesses.
by dc396 | 2025-08-19 14:00:53+00:00
I'm confused. There are no "special characters" in domain names -- they're length-tagged 8-bit clean. Hostnames (as opposed to domain names) are limited by convention to a subset of ASCII, but that shouldn't impact resolver logic.

What resolvers silently discard (or do anything else weird with) requests with QNAMES that have non-hostname queries (which aren't "malformed")?

The "special character" thing sounds like a red herring: IIUC, dnsmasq isn't dealing with lost responses correctly, creating a window for birthday collision attack?
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-19 14:00:54+00:00
Yes and they are only as far as I know enforced for Mac App Store apps. But once an app has free reign to read and write anywhere on a shared folder, it defeats the purpose as opposed to being able to read and write to the apps own folder and the user can choose a file from another folder explicitly.

But what do sandboxes have to do with greed?
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-08-19 14:01:47+00:00
I get that pizza at home is a whole hobby, yes. And if you don't want to do it, it's all of those things that you say.

1) My pizza oven runs on gas not electricity. Not that this is better environmentally. Some run on wood.

2) I'm getting better results than I can get in a local pizza place. Cheap pizza is not great pizza. Home pizza making has a learning curve, it's more of a niche thing than e.g. cooking a steak or burger.

For grandparent post, Pizza is of course not a "dessert", it's a savoury main course. Full of white flour, cheese fats, and salt. So also not health food.
Show HN: Python file streaming 237MB/s on $8/M droplet in 507 lines of stdlib
by b_llc | 2025-08-19 14:02:22+00:00
Quick Links:

- PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/axon-api/

- GitHub: https://github.com/b-is-for-build/axon-api

- Deployment Script: https://github.com/b-is-for-build/axon-api/blob/master/examp...

Axon is a 507-line, pure Python WSGI framework that achieves up to 237MB/s file streaming on $8/month hardware. The key feature is the dynamic bundling of multiple files into a single multipart stream while maintaining bounded memory (<225MB). The implementation saturates CPU before reaching I/O limits.

Technical highlights:

- Pure Python stdlib implementation (no external dependencies)

- HTTP range support for partial content delivery

- Generator-based streaming with constant memory usage

- Request batching via query parameters

- Match statement-based routing (eliminates traversal and probing)

- Built-in sanitization and structured logging

The benchmarking methodology uses fresh Digital Ocean droplets with reproducible wrk tests across different file sizes. All code and deployment scripts are included.
by iamjackg | 2025-08-19 14:02:24+00:00
This technique was also used in mid-late non-motion-plus Wii games to smooth out the pointer movement! Early games hadan incredibly twitchy pointer because they were simply mapping the IR data 1:1 to cursor movement, whereas later ones have an invisible circle around the cursor and only move the cursor itself once the circle edges start "dragging" it.
by albertzeyer | 2025-08-19 14:03:21+00:00
> The current generation of robotic lawn mowers sucks. Basically all of these bots drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration and repeat.

I recently (a few weeks ago) bought one. While researching on the available options (which seemed relevant to me), actually almost none of the robots work this way. Most of them systematically go through the lawn. I think from those that I checked, only the Worx Landroid does it randomly.

I was searching for some model which works without wires, because I was too lazy to set this up. Basically, in general, I wanted sth which required as little effort as possible.

I decided for eufy E15, which uses camera (no GPS, no wires, no lidar, nothing else really). And it just seems to work. It creates a map first, and then systematically goes over the lawn. I didn't really need to do anything.

(I'm not affiliated with eufy in any way. I'm just quite happy with it so far.)

That said, obviously, having an open source variant of such a robot would be even nicer (if it works)! So I'm quite happy to see such a project.

This robot here uses GPS, as far as I can see, as the sole technique for navigation and localization. From reports that I have read, GPS mostly works fine, except for some cases where it does not (where GPS coverage is not great). Camera on the other side always works (during daytime). Maybe this could be added to this project? Of course, using the camera is probably quite a bit more complicated, and more prone to errors, but overall might be more robust and reliable.
by kylegordon | 2025-08-19 14:03:26+00:00
With such sweeping statements, it clearly matters to you. However, time matters to me. Others are entitled to have different priorities from you.

My Luba 2 has saved me 3 weeks of manual mowing over the past year and my lawn has never looked better. Frequently complemented by others.

It's just a lawn and a lawnmower. I'm not playing keeping up with the jones, hoa bullshit or whatever other nonsense Americans invent. It's just a Scottish garden for the wildlife to roam in.
by nelox | 2025-08-19 14:03:43+00:00
It is baffling that anyone in tech branding thought Gemini was a smart name. The NASA Gemini program is remembered as a near-disaster. Gemini 8 went into an uncontrolled spin that almost killed Neil Armstrong and David Scott, and Gemini 9A failed to dock because of a botched shroud. More than once, engineers were seconds away from losing crews outright. Yes, Gemini served as a bridge between Mercury and Apollo, but it also exposed how fragile the whole effort was. If you want your product name to inspire confidence, why pick a project where “not killing astronauts” was the biggest win? It feels like someone skimmed a Wikipedia page and thought “twin astronauts, neat” without recalling that Gemini’s legacy is one of narrowly averted catastrophe. If the goal is to project reliability, safety, or trust, Gemini is an odd hill to plant your brand on.
by the_snooze | 2025-08-19 14:03:43+00:00
It's a contributing factor, but not something to solve. It arises from our multi-layered forms of government, where states are very strong and hold a lot of power to themselves. Some states have ballot initiatives. Some don't. Some states allow for ranked-choice voting for certain offices. Some don't. Some states (like California) love direct democracy and having lots of elected offices that are normally appointees in other places. This is why it's states--not the federal government--that run elections; each state has a different political system that sets the requirements for elections.
by echelon | 2025-08-19 14:04:04+00:00
> It's not my problem if someone from the Big Red East does something with my work as long as they share it too.

They also don't always do that. Look at the super popular BOOX e-ink notebooks. 100% in violation of the GPL, and has been for years, yet available to buy in common retailers such as Best Buy.

These are edging out popular devices, such as reMarkable, which are GPL compliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_Boox#GPL_compliance
by lesuorac | 2025-08-19 14:04:37+00:00
Tbh, as long as you make the mail obviously not placed by them they'll take it. (as in don't need to use a flag).

Like they always shove (or drop) it into the mailbox so when there's letters that are obstructing the box from closing properly they know they didn't place them there so it's outgoing and they grab it.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-19 14:04:38+00:00
I am not sure about the legality of game mods.

Most companies tolerate them, sometimes encourage them, as long is it is not disruptive. Cracks and cheats however are definitely illegal and companies often take action against people who write or use such tools, usually account bans, but there have been some lawsuits the game company won.

Fundamentally, there is no difference between a cheating tool and a harmless mod, and many mods are baltent copyright infringement using assets without a license. But because mods are generally beneficial to the company, they have no intention to use legal means to stop them.
by j_chance | 2025-08-19 14:04:39+00:00
Thanks!

> Existential reality is not made up of information

> Potential and potential resolving (true entropy) is the underlying phenomenon not state (information).

I think this leads to the question "is information a function of perception". Knowledge of resolution of potential is information, and the properties of entropy should pass through IMO

What about when information is encoded into physical state? If I sample an entropy source and record each sample as magnetism on a disk, information becomes a physical phenomenon?

How can we be sure there are no non-human entities observing all resolutions of potential at any given time and then modifying reality (e.g. existing beyond our understanding). Also consider actors at future points in time that may observe and act upon information that formed in the past. e.g. it's easy to dismiss the information from a dinosaur dying thousands of years ago, until some random human discovers it's toe and triggers a full excavation.

I don't have an answer to this, I just don't feel confident dismissing information as not a physical phenomenon itself. It's certainly a real feedback mechanism, it's just unclear if an actor is required for it to be a phenomenon.
by yetihehe | 2025-08-19 14:05:01+00:00
Let's assume that I have an idea on my mind that could potentially change the power generation and usage landscape and society (think 80% efficient solar power AND 80% reduction in power usage in data centers AND increase power output from most existing power plants by 30% AND solve power storage problem), but I wonder how should I approach distributing it. Should I somehow prevent Chinese, Israelis and USA from having this and using it to enhance oppression of other nations? How would you approach such political problem as a CEO?
by HankStallone | 2025-08-19 14:05:52+00:00
I asked an LLM to guide me through a Salesforce process last week. It gave me step-by-step instructions, about 50% of which were fine while the others referenced options that didn't exist in the system. So I followed the steps until I got to a wrong one, then told it that was wrong, at which point it said that was wrong and gave me different instructions. After a few cycles of that and some trial-and-error, I had a working process.

It probably did save me some time, so I'd call it a mild success; but it didn't save a lot of time, and I only succeeded in the end because I know Salesforce pretty well and was just inexperienced at this one area, so I was able to see where it was probably going off the rails. Someone new to Salesforce would have been hopelessly lost by its advice.

It's understandable that an LLM wouldn't be very good at Salesforce, because there's a lot of bad information in the support forums out there, and the ways of doing things in it have changed multiple times over the years. But that's true of a lot of systems, so it's not an excuse, just a symptom of using LLMs that's probably not going to change.
by alnwlsn | 2025-08-19 14:06:43+00:00
I came to FreeCad with some years background in Inventor, NX and SolidWorks. The jump from any of these to FreeCAD is not very big; you're doing a lot of the same things. But, most of the problems FreeCad has are solved in those, so you can sort of do anything in them and be none the wiser. In FreeCAD, you need to think a little bit more on how it's going to do things.

But most people don't learn the big CADs first, they learn Fusion. The few times I've tried Fusion, it's given me a headache. It's probably a bigger headache going the other direction.

Then, there are those who do all their CAD work in OpenSCAD. They scare me.
by igleria | 2025-08-19 14:07:14+00:00
I know that technically you can configure your torrent client to disconnect if by some reason the vpn connection dropped, but I was so paranoid about f*ing it up that I just accepted defeat. I think living there for 4 and a half years really changed me (still waiting on red lights while on foot even if the street is dead at 3 AM, for example).
by foobarian | 2025-08-19 14:08:21+00:00
Regardless of how good the perimeter wire bots are, it's also not true that the more advanced generation "sucks." I have one and it works perfectly fine (Mammotion Luba 2). The hardware is great, positioning is great; there is always stuff to nitpick on the software side but at the end of the day that's great as well.
by gnfargbl | 2025-08-19 14:08:58+00:00
> Axel Springer’s argument is that when Adblock Plus blocks or manipulates its website code (‘computer program’) present in the user’s browser, that amounts to a violation of its exclusive right of modification available under § 69c (2) and its reproduction right under § 69c (1).

A direct analogy here would seem to be a newspaper publisher arguing that if a reader chooses to fold up the newspaper into an origami duck, then the publisher's copyright has been infringed.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-08-19 14:09:05+00:00
a square of tall grass and weeds isn't all that pretty and outright annoying if weeds are of the painful kind.

Like, yeah, there are more interesting things to do with your lawn but they all require more effort than dropping a robot charging station and letting it do its thing.

Also the clover patch is probably gonna regrow, mine do... tho I don't try to ground them to the ground
by Bender | 2025-08-19 14:09:32+00:00
America has only one real city. We need a few more of them. How can we get them?

NYC has some unique attributes and history that helped create what this blog is talking about which I can barely even begin to scratch the surface of. I am not a proper historian nor an expert in geo-politics.

- First it has to be in a strategic location with shipping ports and easy access to rivers for low cost transportation of goods and people. NYC has ports and a long river.

- There will need to be and economic explosion to fund all of this. Something has to pay for the subways, trains, ships, harbors, etc... New tech? Manufacturing war-time equipment? I suppose it will need to be on a coast line close to wherever the next major wars will be fought. Trade was a big part of NYC's past. Global trade is winding down and will not likely return so this new city will need to provide something that everyone regionally wants but does not require global shipping security.

- One will need to bring back manufacturing so there needs to be an industrial zone and tie into that regional distribution of waterways, train tracks, etc...

- Something will need to attract banks and other big finance. There will need to also be really good tax incentives.

- There will need to be an abundance of housing. That became a serious problem in NYC so I suppose this will need to be solved ahead of time as people know better now. They need a place to raise a family.

- Big cities and big trade equal big crime so that will need to be headed off from the start unless that is one of the funding sources. NYC had gone through many iterations of organized crime.

The more I think about it this could easily turn into a really big book. There is so much more to how NYC was created. Surely there must be books that cover its history and economic evolution. If someone attempts this I hope they can use "lessons learned" and not repeat the same mistakes. My selfish and greedy hope would be less sky-scrapers and more under-ground tunnels, buildings, parking, etc... HVAC needs to become a thing of the past. Coober Pedy figured out how to keep living spaces cool without HVAC. Do we have any multi-trillionaires that could fund this?
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-19 14:09:37+00:00
When considering law, it's always worth noting that the specific particulars are arbitrary and path-dependent. I think it'll be hard to draw any kinds of conclusions on this ruling (which doesn't find against ABP, merely kicks the issue down to the lower court for reconsideration, not unlike Oracle v. Google with regards to API copyrightability) without reading the whole thing.

(One piece in particular I'm personally naive on is what German legal precedent says about consumer's right to modify consumed material. In the US, an author's copyright doesn't stop me, the reader of a copy I bought, from highlighting the book up, or crossing out passages I don't like, or tearing pages out, or turning the thing into a delightful booksafe. Naively, I'd believe ABP should be considered in that category of thing: an accessibility tool people use to modify the material they consume to better fit their needs. It doesn't modify the author's original work and it doesn't grant the reader the right to transmit the modified work to someone else, so I'm unclear on how copyright protection should be thought to enter in here, and I bet the text of the ruling clarifies).