MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-08-14 11:08:14+00:00
Of course we understand how they work, don't panic. Some of us are not even surprised at the results thus far, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We have understood how neural networks function for 50 years or more. I think the interdisciplinary nature of the technology is significant, NN draw from many areas of scientific study and if you are missing any piece of the puzzle then some mysteriousness arises for you. But take heart, as I said, there are people who are not surprised one iota by what is happening.

Dozens or perhaps hundreds of people have considered embarking on the brute force approach being pursued, nobody decided to try until a few years back because it is mathematically limited, costly, and might just make our problems much worse before it can make them better in any important way.

What is very salient is that 10 of the most powerful corporations and the leaders of the largest countries have decided on this route and they could force all software engineers to wear extra long, wide red ties if they wanted to so buckle up. It looks like we are riding this train all the way in the hope that cash + time will solve the truncation of the science.
by noelwelsh | 2025-08-14 11:09:34+00:00
What you describe is entirely normal in my experience learning lots of stuff and teaching many others. It might help you to let go of the idea that learning is a linear process where you master one topic and move on to the next. As I learn more I'm continually getting a deeper understanding of basic material I "mastered" decades ago. I often tell my students I don't think their understanding is complete but it is sufficient to move on, and the later material will help them get a better understanding. And it does!
by zosima | 2025-08-14 11:09:59+00:00
> the EU has literally banned facial recognition by law enforcement across the entire bloc.

This is simply wrong:

They have banned _live_ facial recognition - and with exemptions such as e.g. for terrorism and other severe crimes, which is becoming quite broad.

They are allowing facial recognition when done after-the-fact for law enforcement. Probably also for petty crimes.
by benrutter | 2025-08-14 11:11:14+00:00
> Without federation, we end up having to choose between:

> Centralizing into huge profit-oriented websites, where we're powerless

> Hosting our code on a small website where we're in control and freedom but isolated from the community

Yes, yes, yes, yes!!!! This would be a huge boost for everyone. I'm sure I'm not alone in disliking github, but begrudgingly using it quite a lot[0] because realistically, the alternatives create barriers to entry for a lot of people.

I think this will take a long time to catch on, but hopefully in several years time, the point where all the world's open source projects were beholden to a single tech giant will seem like a strange footnote.

[0] I've shifted a lot of projects to codeberg, but still mirror them all to github.
by Lockal | 2025-08-14 11:11:16+00:00
Not sure how "hosted on the same domain" transforms into "developed by the same group". I've seen many independent small github projects that were transferred to freedesktop, how they banned Hyprland, etc. They also host a variety of topics (and even more in mailing lists, from systemd to libreoffice), not just desktop-related, managed by different teams.
Setting up shop as self employed in the US
by opminion | 2025-08-14 11:11:28+00:00
Moving to the US from Europe as software developer, with an ongoing contract with a customer abroad.

What kind of professional help should I look for? I've seen that I need a CPA (Accountant) and I'm reading up on tax resources in Freelancer's Union web site.

Should I try to use a web app such as TaxAct or should I make sure I speak with a human accountant, even if my set up, once ongoing, should be quite straightforward?
by voidhorse | 2025-08-14 11:11:40+00:00
The answers in the replies are all good but the real reason is because in category theory the construct that models function types is called an "exponential product". The choice of that name stems from the reasons explored in the replies, in particular from the fact that the number of total functions from A to B is aka ways determined by an exponent (cardinality of B raised to the power of cardinality of A)
by nicbou | 2025-08-14 11:11:52+00:00
The main issue with AI is that it still relies on the industries it destroys for its training data. You still need people to cover the news, to review products, to write about their feelings and to find new things to talk about. AI just denies these people an audience or attribution.

This is where the particle wood analogy falls apart. IKEA creates its own goods. AI relies on the work of the industry it's destroying.
by graemep | 2025-08-14 11:12:34+00:00
> was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."

The EU courts have sometimes been helpful, but the EU lawmakers have been atleast as bad as the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

As other comments have pointed out the EU has also pushed a lot of other privacy invasive legislation.
by tgv | 2025-08-14 11:12:35+00:00
> People want addictions.

I think that's incorrect. Many addicts despise their addiction. A better way to look at it is: people can get addicted easily. Nobody gets addicted to paper press lubricant. The addiction is initiated by a positive experience, which often means: pleasure. Paper press lubricant doesn't provide that, but alcohol and facebook do.

It may not be much of a distinction, but sometimes it helps to think about/see it in another way.
by ddingus | 2025-08-14 11:12:42+00:00
It seems to me your ability to discriminate has been impacted.

I have always pictured it working this way:

In the Cochlea, we have all the fine hair like sensors. The spread of them determines our range of frequencies, and this declines with age. Usually not too much, but could be as much as half. 10 to 12khz.

Good news in that is all the good stuff we crave is below 10khz. Don't sweat age related hearing loss too much.

The number of these sensors determines our ability to hear concurrent sounds, or complexity.

The shape of them impacts how loud sounds need to be to be heard.

Chances are, your loud exposure had harmonics that impacted many of these sensing hairs, but not in one place. The result is a loss of discrimination of concurrent sounds.

There are plenty to cover the frequency range, so things do not seem muffled or low. Their shape is good, not worn so you hear faint sounds well.

The lower number of them is the issue. Or, they are still there, just bent-- something prevents them from contrubuting.

Another way to think of this is in reverse:

Say you had 30 oscillators you could start at any frequency and time. How complex of a sound could you make? Now cut that in half.

What is lost?

The most complex, concurrent sound cases.
by gary_0 | 2025-08-14 11:13:02+00:00
Underrated in proprietary and non-software tech, too. It's horrible when infrequent tasks turn into bespoke shitshows every time they crop up because nobody wrote down how to solve the problem. Having to figure things out from scratch every time is ridiculously inefficient. Even worse if it leads to customers having slightly different copies of the same kind of software or device configuration because there's no documented process to follow. I know from experience.
by demurgos | 2025-08-14 11:13:03+00:00
> I don't know much about go, and I've only scratched the surface with node, but as far as node goes I think it just distributes JS?

As a sibling comment posted, Node packages have no issue distributing non-JS assets. Since the very beginning, the "package.json" file had support for the "arch" and "postinstall" fields to distribute precompiled binaries or compile on install, for example using node-gyp. If you split your precompiled binaries and use optional dependencies then only the right package for your machine is downloaded.

In all package managers, distributing native code may be uncommon but it's always supported well enough (Node/npm/yarn, JVM/Gradle, PHP/Composer, Ruby/gem, Rust/Cargo, etc). What's unique about Python is how messy all the packaging handling is compared to other languages.
by fennecbutt | 2025-08-14 11:13:25+00:00
No it didn't, lmao. Modern hellscape nightmare of false news, parroting misinformation and general apathy to actually checking facts.

Kodak has even had to release a statement in response to this nonsense.

Anyway, buy Kodak film, maybe they'll bring some of the older ones back after they've cleared debts.
by mhh__ | 2025-08-14 11:13:58+00:00
Governments should do this, but as a but as a way to create value and do things that are strategic but not locally optimal. Not just because some lawyer writes in some extra funding for ffmpeg (or whatever).

Small teams making software to solve problems, and then gradually aiming to hire for end users to be able to code (this is a good way of achieving the "less people, higher salaries" dream)

If we treat it as infra then I fear slightly that we'd end up like the Victorian to modern transition where the idea of public infrastructure being run by the people who built lots of it in the first place is unimaginable i.e. Britain's railways and many roads were built to make money, but we are now (I'd argue) so risk adverse and allergic to prices being allowed to signal anything that we would never actually allow this to happen now.
by noirscape | 2025-08-14 11:14:02+00:00
In the case of Debian, they have a pretty different stance when it comes to what the role of a distro is compared to Arch.

Arch is essentially completely freeform; you, the user, are going to be making a lot of technical decisions on what you want your system to look like. It's perfectly okay for Arch to ship 4 different versions of the same type of tool, as long as all 4 are being used. The Arch wiki reflects this; it's focused around giving you a lot of options, while not going too in-depth on what you'd want to do with them. Want to swap out NetworkManager for wpa_supplicant because wpa_supplicant is easier to configure from a terminal? Perfectly fine, go ahead. Most arch packages as a result don't heavily deviate from upstream unless it's absolutely necessary to get them running.

Debian uh... isn't that. Debian still offers choice, but Debian has set the unenviable goal for themselves to provide a "stable" userland experience. This means Debian offers less options, but the options they do offer are also fixed on certain versions with sometimes pretty derivative versions compares to upstream. Their documentation as a result can get much more in-depth, just by virtue of having less to cover than Arch does.

A basic example here is setting up a webserver stack (so webserver, php and mysql); on Debian, you pick between apache2(+mod_php) or nginx/php-fpm and install mysql. Debian takes care of wiring all the permissions, user groups and all that stuff and giving you a "sane" default folder capable of serving PHP scripts on port 80 that anyone can use. It's a lot easier and nginx' configuration is specifically changed to resemble the apache2 vhosts. Arch doesn't do this; arch gives you the upstream versions of all these packages and then asks you to wire them together so that they work.

It means they attract pretty different audiences as a result; Debian users value stability/set and forget (also helped by Debian release cycles basically lasting the same length as most LTS releases of other distros), while Arch users are more conditioned to having to occasionally change their config files on updates.

That's also reflected in what their wikis aim at. Debian wikis generally can be version locked to their release; Arch wiki needs constant updating as things change.

They're different extremes here; most distros usually sit on one side or the other of this sorta thing (with the only real correlation being that dpkg-based distros usually lean more towards the Debian model), but there's also the pseudo-rolling release distros like Fedora, which try to offer similar stability to Debian but much shorter release cycles, so you'll always be running something at least close to the latest version.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-14 11:14:28+00:00
I mean, I was using nobara and my brother had showed me arch once and it looked so cool and he used to say, " that I have ran arch" and so I was watching a lot more arch content / linux too so I decided to try it to be "good at linux"

Not many regrets aside from the times that I accidentally deleted my hard drives so many times that I can't count on fingers lol, its still a little fun lol. Ricing it with hyprland and I am truly happy with my system.

I also have nix but I couldn't really love it aside from the fact that nix-env is really really cool.
by adrai | 2025-08-14 11:14:42+00:00
Hey, thanks for the great questions!

Offline-first: That's a key distinction. The Vaultrice SDK is currently designed for "online-first" and "offline-sometimes" use cases. Its main strength is real-time, consistent synchronization that relies on an active connection.

Proper offline-first support with automatic conflict resolution is on our roadmap, as we have a backlog item for it ;-) However, you can easily achieve a robust offline capability in your own code today by using localStorage as a fallback.

Here’s a simple wrapper pattern (not tested, just for illustration) that reads from Vaultrice when online and falls back to a local cache when offline:

import { NonLocalStorage } from '@vaultrice/sdk';

// --- A simple offline-first wrapper --- function createOfflineStore(credentials, id) { const vaultriceStore = new NonLocalStorage(credentials, id); const localCacheKey = `vaultrice_cache_${id}`;

// Helper to get local data const getLocal = () => JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem(localCacheKey) || '{}'); return { // SET: Write to both Vaultrice (if online) and localStorage async setItem(key, value) { // Always update the local cache immediately const localData = getLocal(); localData[key] = value; localStorage.setItem(localCacheKey, JSON.stringify(localData)); try { // Attempt to write to the cloud await vaultriceStore.setItem(key, value); } catch (error) { console.warn('Offline: Data saved locally.', error.message); } }, // GET: Try Vaultrice first, fallback to localStorage async getItem(key) { try { const item = await vaultriceStore.getItem(key); if (item) { // Optional: Update local cache with fresh data const localData = getLocal(); localData[key] = item.value; localStorage.setItem(localCacheKey, JSON.stringify(localData)); return item.value; } } catch (error) { console.warn('Offline: Reading from local cache.', error.message); } // Fallback to local cache return getLocal()[key]; } };

}

Production Readiness: Yes, for its intended use case, Vaultrice is ready for production. We've put a lot of focus on a layered security model (from API key restrictions to E2EE) and built it on top of Cloudflare's infrastructure, which gives us a reliable and scalable foundation.

Hope that helps clarify things! Appreciate you checking it out.
by muzani | 2025-08-14 11:14:43+00:00
I hate to sound like that guy, but Claude has access to Gmail and you can just ask it to sort your mail, figure out which ones need to be responded to, unsubscribe and so on. If you procrastinate on signing up for events like I do, ask it to add a deadline to the calendar to RSVP to the event.

Most of my problem with mail is also replying them and remembering the critical ones from a month back that I opened late at night and forgot to respond to. Claude drafts those for you as well. It's often wrong, but it gets me past the blank page. It's also good at sounding both authoritative and apologetic, just stuff like this which I end up taking hours to draft emails for.
by awjlogan | 2025-08-14 11:15:25+00:00
Much of the actual day to day work is. Typically graduate students, so they’ll be 22-26. That’s not a critique of their intelligence or potential. Students get progressively more experienced of course, but professors aren’t writing code most of the time.

A problem with academia in general is the lack of staff positions. Post docs finish their time then it’s either leave academia or become a professor. There’s few positions for those who want to just do research as a career, rather than pushing for a professorship. This means there isn’t a stable and experienced core of people.
by renegat0x0 | 2025-08-14 11:15:42+00:00
I come from Poland, where the streets are generally quite peaceful. Some of my friends from France and Germany say things feel less peaceful there. They believe immigration has played a role in that. I’m not here to agree or disagree — I can only share my own experiences.

The more disruption there is in society, the more people seem willing to accept increased control by authorities. I'm not necessarily saying this is part of some grand plan, but it does seem convenient for politicians when circumstances justify stronger control measures.
by ahdanggit | 2025-08-14 11:17:20+00:00
I would strongly suggest speaking with a human accountant. I did this recently after doing some contracting on-the-side for a couple years and I should have done it sooner. It cost me something like $50 for an hour of their time and had I done it sooner I'd easily have saved $5000 in taxes. They can help you understand things like how to pay estimated quarterly taxes so as to avoid the penalty of not doing so. What you can and can't deduct (there was a TON of things I could have deducted) and how to track and log it.
by graemep | 2025-08-14 11:18:10+00:00
Academics in CS seem to write quite a lot?

Obviously slanted to certain areas (OSes and languages, rather than say word processors), relevant to research, but still.

It has not historically quite important.

Of course, it would be great to fund experienced people just to do this - and a better use of the money currently subsidising commercial R & D at the moment in many countries.
by dmpk2k | 2025-08-14 11:18:17+00:00
Having once been poor I understand you, but this is missing the bigger picture. If you're going to improve at mathematics you need to put serious time into it.

Instead of an hour of extra work every day, you're doing math instead. At minimum wage that's around two grand lost over a year. Even if MathAcademy was free.

Also, I recall seeing MathAcademy being free if you can demonstrate financial need.
by mtts | 2025-08-14 11:19:29+00:00
FWIW my experiences with MathAcademy roughly overlap OP’s: it’s really hard work and adult life seriously interferes with making speedy progress (notice their own success stories are with teenagers who can devote hours upon hours on racing through the - very good - curriculum).

They say 1 point is equivalent to 1 minute of work and that you should earn at least 45 points a day. Well, for me 1 point is nowhere near 1 minute of work: I’m sloppy and sometimes downright stupid so it’s 1,5 minutes at best and often much, much more.

Banging your head against a wall every day for more than an hour (sometimes much more) just to get to what they consider to be the minimum of 45 points is no fun, and probably even counterproductive. I managed to keep it up for four months and made reasonable progress during that time (on getting back to where I was at the end of High School, 30 years ago) but it also burnt me out. I’ve now scaled it back to 30 minutes (not points!) a day. As a result my progress is now glacial.

Also, they’re very much of the “just do lots of problems and you’ll learn mathematic concepts and principles by osmosis” school of math instruction. For me I had to buy a textbook to get some extra explanation.

The good thing is that the problems seem well thought out and the spaced repetition system definitely works (for me, anyway).

I’m going to keep it up, because I have enough disposable income to afford it (though it is much too expensive for what it is) and I really want to bring my math skills up to a level where I can follow along the math in ML papers (and also because math, it turns out, is kind of elegant and interesting). I could go the self-study route, but then I’d have to spend time and effort guiding myself and figuring out what it is I needed to work on. If nothing else, MathAcademy is good at taking care of this for you so you can focus on the math itself.
Show HN: A color challenge that will break your faith in your eyes
by MinZhou | 2025-08-14 11:19:39+00:00
It looks easy: a grid of identical colors, except for one that’s just slightly different. At first you’ll spot it instantly. Then the differences shrink, the grid grows, and you start doubting your monitor, your eyes, and yourself.

https://trickle.so/apps/colorfind

Curious to know how far you get before you can’t see it anymore.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-14 11:19:49+00:00
This is why eSTREAM’s decision to leave MCU-class software essentially unaddressed puzzles me. What do I use on an 8-bit or 16-bit controller with no wide multiplies and no barrel shifter? Before this (which seems fine if not exactly tiny at first glance), there was... Gimli (with the same caveats)? Speck?

I’m guessing that the chip area of hardware AES is utterly inconsequential compared to all the peripherals you get on a modern micro, but the manufacturers are going to keep charging specialized-applications money for that until we’re all on 32-bit ARMs with multipliers and ChaCha becomes viable.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-14 11:20:11+00:00
To duopoly exploiting customers? Europe knocked down transfer fees to 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit card. All fees for the merchant sum up to something around 1%. So anything on top of that, that Visa customers pay in US is pure exploitation. And US government isn't doing anything so people see alternate solutions for this problem.
by vessenes | 2025-08-14 11:20:19+00:00
I want to play!

But..

localhost:~# echo -e "\x00XR2K" | nc clearsky.dev 29438 AXR2KP xr2000.leo.spacenet:send a single 0 byte followed by 'XR2K' for documentation

printf has the same problem. Is it me?
by myrmidon | 2025-08-14 11:20:53+00:00
> Stopping once Meta stops the censorship would cause people to learn about what’s happening in Gaza, which I’m guessing is more important to the authors than exposing Meta’s censorship machine.

This is exactly my point. This framing makes it clear that the leaks are not about publishing information that the leakers believe is vital to get out-- it is about leveraging the resulting fallout.

> Snowden was also achieving political goals with his publishing

It is perfectly fine, expected even, for a whistleblowers ethical/political goals to align with them blowing the whistle (duh).

But If you, at the first opportunity, turn around unprompted (!!) and go "I'll stop publishing immediately if you just do what I want" then you're not actually a whistleblower past that point in my eyes.

Does not mean that you are automatically wrong, or a "bad guy" or even acting unethically-- but you do give up significant moral high ground by doing this regardless.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-14 11:21:09+00:00
> Secondly it costs the consumer nothing. The cost goes to the merchant. If anything the customer gets rewards.

Ultimately customer pays for everything. Credit card companies just prevent merchants from revealing the costs of using credit cards to customers. Which should be illegal.

> Fixing Visa doesn't work because the people that matter don't think it's broken.

People don't know it's broken because regulator doesn't do their job and lets credit companies police merchants.