MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freehorse | 2025-08-15 03:08:54+00:00
My most annoying experience has been some providers blocking VPNs. I pay for an account, I log in with my account, I use a vpn with ip in the country I made the account with and use my account, and still I am blocked. I don't want to stop my vpn just for the sake of streaming, I would rather pirate the content.

A second one is subtitles. Somehow the streaming services decides which subtitles I need and which I don't.

It is funny how we went from pirating content being normalised, then being frown upon, and now getting normalised again.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-08-15 03:09:59+00:00
> Do some people have such a clear and strong mental image that they can effectively inspect, zoom in and manipulate a mental image as well as a real visual image

yes, 100%, and more than that. Even with eyes open I can overlay a completely different environment and stop "seeing" the real world. When I close my eyes I find it difficult to really see blackness. Example: when running laps, I count laps by seeing a giant number fixed in the sky over the lap marker, each number a different material (flaming, made of ice, a trimmed hedge, etc).
by lucideer | 2025-08-15 03:11:07+00:00
Compression is an entirely different thing.

Compression isn't just gain adjustment - it's a specific type of audio processing that increases perceived "gain" (loudness) of the entire source audio by "compressing" the levels of loud frequencies & increasing the levels of quiet frequencies.

Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time. It doesn't reduce dynamic range.
by Bender | 2025-08-15 03:11:29+00:00
The only privacy preserving option is to add a single RTA header on the server side. Laws could have required any site or service that has adult or user generated content to simply add RTA [1] headers and require clients to make a best effort to detect the headers and trigger parental controls if enabled. That's it. Not perfect, nothing is. All the liability could have gone to the parents where it belongs.

No third party traffic, nothing to leak, nothing to track. Simple as. Not everything has to be a service or a business model.

[1] - www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
by al_borland | 2025-08-15 03:12:05+00:00
4. Plex lets you cache stuff locally for a plane or when you’re traveling. That’s usually what I do when I’m going somewhere. I did try streaming from my house to a hotel in India a decade ago… it technically worked, but I had to set the resolution so low that it wasn’t fun to watch. I assume that’s better now, but I just cache stuff before I leave now.
by Dig1t | 2025-08-15 03:12:14+00:00
There are many places in the US where you can buy a house for less than 50k.

If you want prices to drop in popular areas then we have to make it easy for people to actually build houses and increase supply in popular areas. Of course giving homeowners a say about whether housing is allowed to be built near them, of course they are going to vote against it because they have an incentive to keep prices high.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-15 03:12:50+00:00
API endpoints for recipes across sites over the internet or your banking app aren't open. Maybe the AI could crawl it, but does that work at scale? Can it do it without error or being blocked?

And for lots of apps, it's about users and data. There's been a million Twitter clones over the years but very few ever caught on. An AI generated Twitter won't get users...
by recursivecaveat | 2025-08-15 03:13:06+00:00
The turing test basically subsumes all tests that can be text-encoded, no? Like if you feel that LLMs are abnormally bad at a kind of writing like an All Souls essay, you just ask the other chair to write you such an essay as one of your questions.

To be clear, I'm not aware of anyone actually running any serious turing tests today because it's very expensive and tedious. There's one being passed around where each conversation is only 4(!) little SMS-sized messages long per side, and chat gpt gets judged to be the human side twice as often as the actual human.
by wintercarver | 2025-08-15 03:13:47+00:00
Nice post! Enjoy your blog's overall aesthetic too. Perhaps correlation in sense of style, though, as I also used RTK to learn to write Kanji, loved it, and now, ~15 years after that escapade, am kind of in a similar bucket (can write some characters, but mostly just read). I still think RTK great overall method and would do it again!

Also, shoutout to Fabrice, creator of Kanji Koohii -- that was my first foray into SRS back in ~2007/2008, after which I found Anki (pre-mobile).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-15 03:13:56+00:00
I don’t think we’re ever going to build houses again at the rate we did before the 2008 GFC. A substantial portion of people who work in construction are undocumented (and will be targeted for deportation by this admin for the remains of their term), zoning remains a challenge, cost of materials continues to inflate. How many years would it take to get back up to speed? 5? 10? What does the economy look like then? Will enough young folks go into the necessary trades to meet the demand for this labor? We might keep building along at the anemic pace of today, but I argue we’ll never build again at the rate we did pre GFC.

https://eyeonhousing.org/2020/01/a-decade-of-home-building-t...

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-t...
by mockingloris | 2025-08-15 03:14:05+00:00
> You can be technologically brilliant and at the same time not dialled in to those kind of social/people dynamics.

I came to that realization rather late. Now, I reflect often to optimize for this.

(Anyways, better late than never)

I suppose it's related to game theory and I am of the opinion that it's not spoken/written about enough.
by AndyNemmity | 2025-08-15 03:15:04+00:00
My source of learning is trying weird ideas. I wanted to learn about agents and how they worked, so I built an autonomous consensus based set of AI agents with no human intervention to build a software collective.

In that process, I learned interesting things about how agents work. Then I used those ideas, to build agents for other tasks, and I have been working on improving those with other weird ideas.

Through these process, I develop opinions about how they work. They may be incorrect, but it gives me a certain kind of insight into them, and how to adjust them.
by cpgxiii | 2025-08-15 03:15:04+00:00
One could say that "the point" of MCAS was to be an implementation detail, something that you would often deliberately hide from software documentation so that users don't design around internal details.

There's something of a history of aerospace vendors omitting "implementation details" that end up contributing to serious accidents (e.g. if you get an Airbus far enough out of the normal envelope protections, you lose stall warning), and an equally sordid history of flight and maintenance crews improvising procedures to the observed (rather than designed/specified) behavior of aircraft systems.

Arguably, the single biggest systematic risk in the current pilot training system is that crews overlearn to the implementation details of their training, rather than the actual principles and flight manuals (e.g. training inadvertently training for quick engine shutdowns, when the consequences of shutting down the wrong engine in reality are much more serious).
by aurareturn | 2025-08-15 03:16:03+00:00
Are they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources.

It's like saying "our crypto mining energy is carbon neutral" but ignoring the fact that if the carbon neutral energy is going into crypto mining, it's not going into something more useful. If crypto mining buys all the carbon neutral energy sources, then those sources aren't being used by other industries.

We have limited carbon neutral energy production.
by tiltowait | 2025-08-15 03:17:17+00:00
Not the OP, but I interviewed a candidate for a remote position. He was kind of halting in his responses, until he suddenly wasn't. Borderline erudite, and I recognized some LLM speech patterns. I told my manager I thought he was using an LLM, but we hired him anyway.

After a few months on the job, he hadn't done any meaningful work. His responses to support tickets were clearly written by an LLM and offered only the most generic (and therefore unhelpful) support. He was eventually let go, and deservedly so.
by Fordec | 2025-08-15 03:17:17+00:00
> The tax strategies these companies use are known

Links to an article from 2017 about a tax loophole that was closed in 2020 [0]. As an Economist that by his Wikipedia article [1] dedicates so much of his time talking about the Irish tax regime, he should be well aware of this fact.

[0] https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2024/10/14/the-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_W._Setser
by pornel | 2025-08-15 03:17:20+00:00
Yeah, Rust isn't OOP, which is usually fine or even an advantage, but GUIs are one case where it hurts, and there isn't an obvious alternative.

> gtk-rs you are pulling in 100+ crate dependencies and who knows what lurks in those?

gtk-rs is a GNOME project. A lot of it is equivalent to .h files, but each file is counted as a separate crate. The level of trust or verification required isn't that different, especially if pulling a bunch of .so files from the same org is uncontroversial.

Cargo keeps eliciting reactions to big numbers of "dependencies", because it gives you itemized lists of everything being used, including build deps. You just don't see as much inner detail when you have equivalent libs pre-built and pre-installed.

Crates are not the same unit as a typical "dependency" in the C ecosystem. Many "dependencies" are split into multiple crates, even when it's one codebase in one repo maintained by one person. Crates are Rust's compilation unit, so kinda like .o files, but not quite comparable either.

A Cargo Workspace would be conceptually closer to a typical small C project/dependency, but Cargo doesn't support publishing Workspaces as a unit, so every subdirectory becomes a separate crate.
by dingl3berry | 2025-08-15 03:17:28+00:00
i played with nyxt for about a month

what makes me go back to normal browser is the search feature

nyxt search results are in modal which takes half bottom part of screen

the upper part of screen is the site text

so it's hard to get whole screen view of what o'm searching because half of real estate is taken by search modal

i prefer the / to search, n to next search with full screen

even firefox default ctrl f / g is also okay, because ot shows the whole page
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-15 03:17:35+00:00
It's worth noting that lots of projects claim to be "Proofs of Useful Work" without the academic rigor to actually prove so. The attacker of course being one of those who has failed to do so.

1. Their paper has not been accepted by any conference or journal.

2. Neither author on their paper is an academic (or practicing engineer or researcher) in the fields of computer science, economics, game theory, or cryptography (or any maths in general). The one is a C-level exec with what seems to be minimal CS experience and the other is a psychology professor. Neither author appears to have qualifications to be able to assume some level of rigor (before looking at the underlying work).

3. The paper is a bunch of text and buzzwords about AI and AGI intermixed with some academic history and some discussions on psychology. Of the 47 pages of the paper, only about 1-2 pages are semi-technical in major with an additional ~3 pages of code included to show their algorithm. There are two graphs relevant to the protocol on those 1-2 pages and neither one addresses any security aspects, instead showing it's performance at doing the "useful" part. So again to reiterate, their "academic paper" on the security of their PoUW algorithm includes no rigorous analysis of the protocol.

TLDR They aren't doing PoUW. They are doing cooperative compute with a centralised or federated coordinator dishing out rewards.

Proofs of Useful Work do actually exist and are an interesting field but they take a lot of rigor and analysis to be accepted and not immediately ripped to shreds. What the attacker claims is not even close to meeting that bar.
by qrios | 2025-08-15 03:18:00+00:00
‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe).

US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner.

"The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation

"Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)

"The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege

"In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film...

"Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye

If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.
by sdesol | 2025-08-15 03:18:01+00:00
> being forced on us all anyway, which kind of sucks

Business is business, and if you can demonstrate that you are needed they will keep you, for the most part, but business also has politics.

> probably monitoring how much we use the "AI" and that could become a metric for job performance

I will bet on this and take it one step further. They (employer) are going to want to start tracking LLM conversations. If everybody is using AI, they (employer) will need differentiators to justify pay raises, promotions and so forth.
by ehnto | 2025-08-15 03:18:25+00:00
Very interesting, definitely the first step towards writing a character for me is picturing it in my head. If it's particularly challenging I might, still in my head, project it onto the page and that seems to give my brain the spatial data to begin translating it to real world movements with the pen.

But even still I also can barely write maybe 5% of the kanji I can read. As well words are often made of multiple kanji, but if you showed me the kanji separately I don't always recognise them as part of a word I do know. Recalling a kanji into my minds eye doesn't seem to be part of the skillset of reading, maybe just a by-product of long term repeat exposure.
by Dwedit | 2025-08-15 03:18:36+00:00
It's not the same thing. Normalization is scanning to see what the highest volume scale you can use without introducing clipping, then multiplying every sample by that scale.

Compression is very different. The volume scale isn't constant, and the original sound is distorted significantly. I often use a compressor to listen to video game streams because they tend to have the game audio be way too quiet. Having the compressor on causes the game audio to become louder with some minor distortion, but distorts the streamer's voice significantly.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-15 03:19:20+00:00
My point was a kludge effectively purges most of the installed base... thus removing the traditional advantage Microsoft has leveraged over the years. Notably, it additionally undermines any kind of benefits ARM could offer over amd/intel chips.

Microsoft is not Apple, and users that purchase half of what they expected will not end well. The Apple community has already experienced massive shifts in hardware, and naturally deprecates old software in shorter life-cycles.

Maybe the app store will save them... lol =3

"It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest; the only way to deal with him is to outvote him." (William Jennings Bryan, 1893)
by owlninja | 2025-08-15 03:20:33+00:00
I'll choose your comment to agree. I was a pirate in the 90s and early 00s, even though it took forever - it was "free"! Several years ago I was guilty of calling people out by saying that the real reason they pirated things is because they simply didn't want to pay. Fast forward to now and I can afford several services but it is just getting out of hand. My less tech-savvy family will hear about a show or movie and I have to google where the hell it is even available, and are we already subscribed to that service. Then I had a friend setup the whole AAR suite, and it has been a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure what the answer is but I am just about done having money extracted from me every month...
by tambourine_man | 2025-08-15 03:21:22+00:00
And a player that doesn’t suck. How many times have I hit rewind only to go back 30 min instead of 10 sec because the service lost track of where I was.

Pressing rewind is akin to Russian roulette, to the point where I’ve mostly given up, lest I risk ruining the mood while trying to scrub back to where I was.

Amazing how what was table stakes in the 90s seems like unattainable tech these days.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-08-15 03:22:14+00:00
It helps distinguish them. Seeing all numbers as e.g. black vinyl makes them blend together in my memory.

Visualizing something lets you leverage visual and spatial memory, but even then: if I were really running past N real giant numbers which all looked identical, I'd lose track just the same. Distinguishing them visually makes them all unique and memorable. The color infuses the entire track and the sky, actually, so it requires little focus, because it's right there in the background.

Basically like the memory palace from Moonwalking with Einstein, but less work, because they don't have to be consistent over time.

(thanks for "topiary" :) beautiful word)
by mingus88 | 2025-08-15 03:22:32+00:00
I think it’s natural for homeowners to be resistant to new builds in the same way office workers hated the move to cubicles.

I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn.

These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous.

In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?
by chao- | 2025-08-15 03:23:55+00:00
I agree with all of that, but I think there is additional nuance. I would love if the path were as simple as:

(1) Make housing easier to build.

(2) Receive sufficient housing supply.

Even if you make it easier to build houses, there is a market for the capital that housing developers access. Currently, that market also assumes that prices will go up (or at least not go down). Thus, once we go far enough past the point where existing prices are higher than the return on new housing, even all of our dream reforms may not lead to a flood of new housing starts.

I want to be clear: loosening zoning, reforming regulations, and so forth, are all still worth doing. It is better than nothing. But if the result is a shock of supply, the financing for new homes from the biggest players will dry up. That doesn't make a solution impossible, but it does complicate it.
by joules77 | 2025-08-15 03:24:21+00:00
Experts are regularly stunned by ant hills. That doesn't mean we emulate ants. Subject matter Experts are examples of narrow intelligence.

All you have to do is look at how terrified the Chinese are of dealing with any kind of Uncertainty/Complexity/Problems without neat answers in a textbook and you learn quickly there is nothing interesting going on in China under the surface.
by kjellsbells | 2025-08-15 03:24:53+00:00
This is great, but a part of me wonders if our industry isnt putting a bandaid on a problem that we ourselves created.

Consider your typical early-2000s era Windows app. It would expect a mouse, but for power users, keyboard shortcuts would be available for every action, even if clunky. For example, Alt F tab tab tab to get to some input field, enter text, tab Alt R Return.

By about 2015 these were all straightforwardly scriptable with AutoHotkey amd similar tools.

But too late: by 2015 even Windows users were using web apps, where the keyboard bindings are variable or non existent, where the entire UI can change overnight, etc. I see some RPA approaches desperately trying to decode the DOM or match pixel elements. It's wild, as you point out.

I guess what I'm wondering if going after legacy Windows apps is a small TAM already largely solved, whereas the SPA/webapp market is gigantic, growing every day, and woefully, miserably, broken as far as automation is concerned.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-15 03:24:58+00:00
While I completely agree with hiding who you are for work, I code switch for work with the best of them. I am a customer facing consultant in rooms with decision makers, I aired all of my dirty laundry with my now wife because I didn’t want to waste my time or hers.

We had been working together for two years. But not in the same department. I just started talking to her one day in the parking lot and she finally said “are you going to stop staring at me and ask for my number”.

I was not thinking about dating at the time. I had just come out of a bad situation less than a year earlier and I was trying to get my financial house in order - it was 2011 and I had made some bad real estate decisions before the housing crash and I was trying to get my career on track.

I was happy with just hanging out with my long term female friends at the time and they provided all of the emotional and companionship needs I had with no complications. My friends and I traveled together, went out on “dates” (do you call it that when you are just doing date like things with no emotional or physical expectations?) etc.

When I told my now wife all I was going through it didn’t scare her away. She was just as up front with me. We were married seven months later. 15 years in, I still don’t feel like she kept anything from me that I didn’t know about her during the first two weeks and vice versa.

This though is horrible general advice as far as dating. I wasn’t pursuing her. We knew of each other from work so I wasn’t a complete stranger and we were both in our mid 30s and divorced then and she had two boys.

I wasn’t in the headspace to seriously be in the “dating scene” then.

I know how to small talk now and have studied conversational skills for my career. If I were out there now, I would do things differently.
by wanderingmind | 2025-08-15 03:25:25+00:00
Maybe I'm using it wrong, but when I try to use the full precision FP16 model, load it into chatter UI and ask a simple question,

"write me a template to make a cold call to a potential lead",

It throws me absolute rubbish. On the other hand, Qwen 0.6B Q8 quantized model nails the answer for the same question.

Qwen 0.6B is smaller than gemma full precision. The execution is a tad slow but not by much. I'm not sure why I need to pick a gemma over qwen.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-08-15 03:25:50+00:00
> For all intents and purposes of the public. AI == LLM. End of story. Doesn't matter what developers say.

This is interesting, because it's so clearly wrong. The developers are also the people who develop the LLMs, so obviously what they say is actually the factual matter of the situation. It absolutely does matter what they say.

But the public perception is that AI == LLM, agreed. Until it changes and the next development comes along, when suddenly public perception will change and LLMs will be old news, obviously not AI, and the new shiny will be AI. So not End of Story.

People are morons. Individuals are smart, intelligent, funny, interesting, etc. But in groups we're moronic.