MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nomel | 2025-08-18 23:20:02+00:00
> Battery tech is ready for general use.

> Over 20% of cars being sold in California are EVs now

These are not compatible, if you're talking BEV. Regardless, you've provided data showing that it's not acceptable for the overwhelming majority of buyers, which matches market research [1]. And, out of that group, 30% want to switch back to gas [2]. Cost, and the massive depreciation is a factor related to current batter tech.

And, what % of commercial vehicles sales are BEV (which is included in general use)?

> and over 90% in Norway.

In California, 2023: 25% sales. 2024: 25.3% sales. There trend has slowed, maybe related to our ridiculous electric prices (fuel is cheaper, in many cases). It's very difficult to compare small European countries to a something in the US.

For some anecdotal evidence (which seems somewhat sufficient for the definition of "general"), I own an EV, and I know it's not ready for general use, because I will not be selling my gas car. In fact, I'm replacing it next month with another gas car. Most people I know have an EV (like 70%), and the majority have a second gas car that they say they will not sell. The majority of those that only have an EV say their next purchase will be a hybrid, all matching the trends shown in market research.

I'm crossing my fingers for another salt battery breakthrough, which are making their way into BEV [3].

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/25/ev-owners-want-to-buy-gas-ca...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-battery-maker-cat...
by mapt | 2025-08-18 23:20:22+00:00
Hogan (Thiel) vs Gawker and Sandy Hook vs Alex Jones provided a blueprint to weaponize defamation law for political change in an environment where right-wing journalism has turned into a defamation pipeline and then a defamation -> moral-panic -> stochastic-terror cannon that would impress Gerald Bull. These are supposed journalistic institutions, and that used to mean something, legally and culturally speaking. Making them terrified of losing the public trust once again, using some type of fast-moving wrecking ball, is a necessary component of a future where we make it out of this.

So all we need now is an angry left-wing billionaire who can launch a thousand defamation lawsuits, or the most sympathetic group of parents of dead children in history.

The last great nightly news anchor was Dan Rather, who was fired symbolically because their organization merely neutrally reported the existence of a sketchy story about possible documents that turned out to be fabricated about George W Bush's military service.
by viccis | 2025-08-18 23:21:01+00:00
I'd love to see LLM based versions procedural tasks like "radiant quests" which are generally disappointing, though I've heard it discussed before and the real challenge is keeping it from going way off the rails.

The other challenge I think you'll run into in general is that there's a huge knee jerk reaction against any use of LLMs or other popular types of gen AI in games in places like Reddit or Bluesky.
by Toby1VC | 2025-08-18 23:23:11+00:00
A lot of how I use AI is to assist me to build the software manually. I focus 1 function and ask it to fix or implement it. That's a good way to use AI. But if you mean using AI to improve existing systems, I also think that's being a done a lot. For instance, you know Krita the KDE drawing program? They naturally added a way to prompt image generation, based on your initial doodles, which makes a lot of sense.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-18 23:23:18+00:00
> Oh and I pay £1.28 per litre and 7p per KWh (for overnight car charging). The petrol price is low at the moment for here (it hit £2+ when Russia went mental).

I (in the US, California) pay less for petrol than you and more for electricity; 87p/L and 23p/kWh overnight.
by roxolotl | 2025-08-18 23:23:36+00:00
The problem with LLMs as interoperability is they only work sub 100% of the time. Yes they help but the point of the article is what if we spent 100billion on APIs? We absolutely could build something way more interoperable and that’s 100% accurate.

I think about code generation in this space a lot because I’ve been writing Gleam. The LSP code actions are incredible. There’s no “oh sorry I meant to do it the other way” you get with LLMs because everything is strongly typed. What if we spent 100billion on a programming language?

We’ve now spent many hundreds of billions on tools which are powerful but we’ve also chosen to ignore many other ways to spend that money.
by maximus_01 | 2025-08-18 23:24:08+00:00
Sure but that's what happens when you cut distribution costs to zero (i.e. the internet). It's pretty indisputable that most content online is garbage. But there is also a lot of super high quality information out there in all sorts of fields, more than there was when distribution costs were high.

There is a prevailing attitude amongst some that they aren't willing to pay for any info - and they hold that as basically some sort of weird sacred belief. I think those people, even if they came across the best piece of content ever written, would be unwilling to pay 10c for it (pre or post). I'm just saying I find that odd.
Ask HN: What is the most effective way to unblur a QR code?
by np1810 | 2025-08-18 23:24:39+00:00
In 2025, what is the best approach to unblur a QR code? And, how others would approach it — any new tools or AI workflows specifically good at structured unblurring like below?

I encountered a video with a QR code blurred out with the caption “blurred to prevent intruders” [1]. Since I had watched a Veritasium's video [2] I had some idea about its working. So with an ethical hacker spirit, I tried to recover the QR. First step failed, where I checked HuggingFace for any QR unblurring models because that is what roughly most AI ImageGen models inherently do - keep unblurring until the desired result, but found no models, though I found some relevant research papers [3].

In the end, I manually identified the QR module size (81×81) and hoped for high error correction (H) so that 30% incorrect QR will still be valid. Since the blur varied across regions, I processed it in two parts: Adobe Photoshop's Smart Sharpen worked well on the outer section, while a PS script added black pixels to the inner region and applied gaussian blur until the final image had a similarity. Eventually, ZXing library returned a decoded result [5] and I assume that the URL is valid but the session has expired so the URL is harmless.

[1]: https://files.horizon.pics/29f1785d-11a5-414b-96df-acc627b9e867?a=1672&mime1=video&mime2=mp4

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ebcowAJD8

[3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2802083.2808390#tab-citations

[4]: https://files.horizon.pics/a5297fa9-dd1a-470f-bb8f-8038d2694867?a=1672&mime1=video&mime2=mp4

[5]: https://enormicom-chat.once.com/session/transfers/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6Ik1RPT0iLCJleHAiOiIyMDIzLTEyLTIxVDAwOjA4OjMzLjc2N1oiLCJwdXIiOiJ1c2VyL3RyYW5zZmVyIn19--7e7c2a242b835fff8df00467ca14fba85c7c8139e6adad052287ce13d9c5f659
by mothballed | 2025-08-18 23:24:48+00:00
It's more likely to work if you move to Micronesia or Mexico or something like that, easy places for citizens to move to with low cost of living so you can bid on par with the other gig workers in Pakistan/India/Romania etc.

I think trying to do gig work from the states unless it is Defense contracting you're quickly going to find someone buying that might not care what geography they're drawing from which puts USA based workers at a massive disadvantage.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-08-18 23:25:05+00:00
When you include costs, "better run" takes on a whole new meaning.

But, more simply - no one is suggesting all public ownership is bad, or all private is good. There are situations where governments have just decided they aren't doing a good job running something (all things considered) and that the amount of money they'd get for selling it is a better option all things considered.
by volkk | 2025-08-18 23:25:41+00:00
> a good fit for terrible staff, have terrible business practices

I think generally the people that end up choosing terrible staff that perpetuate terrible business practices are probably pretty terrible executives/founders themselves. Talent generally attracts talent in some way. There's really almost no situations where someone really fantastic would even _want_ to work for a bad company barring huge pay, or a rare moment of desperation due to life circumstances
by tonymet | 2025-08-18 23:25:46+00:00
sure but here's an example from my mazda 3. after 17 years it exceeded it's rated range . the original full tank range was 337.5 miles. After 17 years i was getting 398.25 miles

With EVs you have a massive loss of utility over just a few years . Going from 337 miles to 320 miles in the first year is a huge loss. and down to 269mi after 10 years is catastrophic
by machomaster | 2025-08-18 23:25:51+00:00
You are asking questions that are already were answered if you cared to RTFM/LMGTFY.

Shortly:

- Unique how? Optimally genetically, but this has practical problems that the field of paleogenetics is trying to work on. Until then must use: classical morphological features, odontology, dermatoglyphics, biochemical characteristics.

- How long enough? Depends on the type of group. There are different levels of human group classification, both above the traditionally understood "races" and a lot below that.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-18 23:26:25+00:00
I feel that forcing people to vote is more authoritarian than democratic. Places like North Korea have something like 99.5% turnouts for elections. One of the advantages of living in a democratic society is the freedom to choose not to participate in it, so long as this doesn't affect others.

The idea just rubs me the wrong way.

I understand America is somewhat unusual among most Western nations that lots of people don't have passports. A driving license should serve as a good ID card but lots of people don't have one of those either. As a Brit the idea of an ID card also feels undemocratic to me. In the UK we have inexpensive passports and a national voter registration database, with signatures and adresses recorded, why would that not work in the US?
by jameslk | 2025-08-18 23:26:26+00:00
As someone who's done freelancing previously for years and also has run an agency previously for years, it really depends. I've certainly seen freelancers at double or triple these rates. If you already have clients, are well known, or you're good at selling the value of your time, you can ask for much higher. If you're just getting started or you're going through an agency, these rates seem pretty competitive. Also macro economic factors will change the equation and what you can ask for.

For those just getting started, my piece of advice is to be OK taking a lower rate initially, and just keep pushing it higher until you find resistance. If you're good at what you do, you will quickly find that you will get referrals (make sure to ask!) and can charge a ton more. It's a lot easier as a freelancer/contractor than a salaried employee since the market is much more liquid (you spend less time at one gig) and therefore you can test the waters with a higher rate much more often.

Regardless, what these companies list as what they will pay hourly isn't necessarily what you have to ask for. If you think about it from a negotiation perspective (and you have the ability to sell yourself), these are simply just the lower bound of what you can ask for.
by agarsev | 2025-08-18 23:27:55+00:00
as a researcher in NLP slash computational linguistics, this is what I tend to think :) (maybe a less strong version, though, there are other kinds of thinking and learning).

so I'm always surprised when some linguists decry LLMs, and cling to old linguistics paradigms instead of reclaiming the important role of language as (a) vehicle of intelligence.
by volkk | 2025-08-18 23:28:02+00:00
Agree with this. It's kind of like dating. No such thing as a 4.5/5 human since it's way too subjective and the enumeration of hard skills/soft skills is too high. Sometimes a fit can be an unspoken thing. You'll probably end up wasting a ton of time trying to figure out this magical algo and likely end up nowhere with it. Just my 2c
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-18 23:28:04+00:00
Human marked, human and machine readable both is good practice. Risk limiting audits after elections is good practice. CA, WA and CO at least do all this.

What does in person (with an ID) add to election security? That practice most certainly restricts voting unless there's a holiday for election day.

What keeps in person voting from being manipulated less than other good practice elections?

Why did in person voting become a big issue only just before and after 2020 election?

Why didn't anybody pay attention to what some states did after 2000 election?
by gerdesj | 2025-08-18 23:29:06+00:00
"monkey jpegs": NFT

"hodl" - I think r/WallStreetBets came up with that. Perhaps not - its too ubiquitous, similar to teh. r/WSB did originate the eating green crayons thing along with smooth brain monkeys etc

I simply mixed and matched and riffed in an old school "lock up your daughter" meme.

Sorry, I don't have a Spongebob illustration. I do words.
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-18 23:29:09+00:00
Google ‘wall duct’ for a commercial raceway system that can be recessed into a wall and is suitable for both line and low voltage conductors, including both in the same raceway if you use a divider to separate the line and low voltage conductors.

A less expensive option would be woodwork that covers a channel in the wall, romex and Cat6 cable don’t need a raceway so you could skip the wall duct. If you want to get fancy, add some hinges on the woodwork to allow for easy access :D
by foobazgt | 2025-08-18 23:29:36+00:00
> Why guess?

Manufacturers DO publish reports. Tesla routinely provides data about the lifetimes of their vehicle batteries, which turn out to greatly exceed their warranties. (This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Manufacturers just can't afford to have high warranty return rates).

The rest of your post is an attempt at hand-waving away what is a real phenomenon. EVs are still new to a lot of people, there's a lot of FUD floating around, and that can affect used vehicle prices. Markets behave irrationally sometimes, and that leads to opportunity. (In this case, getting a value buy on a used EV).

> hybrids are still obviously better

Hybrids are objectively worse. They have less all-electric (efficient, non-polluting) range, they charge more slowly, they have a more complex drivetrain with more parts subject to repair, etc. They're a better fit for a specific market segment, but that segment is small and rapidly becoming non-existent. You can get cheap EVs nowadays that have more range than my last ICE.
by hinkley | 2025-08-18 23:30:03+00:00
One of the things I always found a bit dumb about contracting houses is that the sales contact and the manager might work multiple projects but nobody else did.

Why shouldn’t I as a client get 10 hours a week from an architect and 5 hours a week from a security expert instead of paying for a whole one? We should be comparing notes with our consulting house colleagues on design problems and interpersonal dynamics, but we never have. Only when they project is going badly does anything like this happen, and then it’s done begrudgingly.
by wjrb | 2025-08-18 23:30:59+00:00
I also made pretty heavy use of plugins to manage PCs, NPCs, encounters, items (!!), custom tables, maps, and setting details in a single campaign. Led to a lot of bug reports for the D&D-specific plugins, but Dataview worked like a charm.

Having a more Obsidian-native interface for managing all of that is. Like other commenters, would definitely watch a video of you sharing your Obsidian "build" for that use-case.
by computerdork | 2025-08-18 23:31:14+00:00
Appreciate your view, and am no expert at this, but as you mentioned, the numbers do speak for themselves. Yeah, it isn't just "the good old days," we all who followed the music industry saw a huge decline in revenue in the 2000's (it was catastrophic and was as punch to the gut). It just kept going down year after year. And as you mentioned, if you adjust for inflation, the size if the industry is still smaller than it used to be...

...Also, it seems like it depends on where you look for yearly revenue. At least this research article is more like what I saw (although, not sure what numbers are correct): https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-Recorded-Music-In...

Regardless, yeah, the music industry took a huge hit, and is looking better these days with streaming (which saved it), but it's still not great.

>And that's the thing: if the prices are too high, in the absence of piracy, most people are going to just do without. There's no lost sale when someone decides to do without rather than pay a price they thing is unreasonable.

Agreed, if prices are too high, yes, they'll do with out. But in the past, on average, it seems like most people did actually purchase CD's and DVD's, me included. Most of us had quite a sizable collection, and would routinely visit music stores to pay $20 to buy a CD, just because they liked one or two songs (and that's in 90's money). Yes, the music industry took a lot of the share of revenue, but that industry still is what promoted and supported the musicians.
by tharkun__ | 2025-08-18 23:32:12+00:00
That one at least makes sense if you ask me. It's not just Github doing it. On the web side of things you'd return the same "no such thing here" page whether you don't have access or it really doesn't exist as well. So leaking more info than the page you return to users in the browser would show via the status code would not be good.

I.e. that would be the appropriate thing to do if you're trying to prevent leakage of information i.e. enumeration of resources. But you should not return 401 for this still. A 404 is the appropriate response for pretending that "it's just not there" if you ask me. You can't return 404 when it's not there and a 403 when you have no access if enumeration is bad.

So for example, if you don't have access to say the settings of a repo you have access to, a 403 is OK. No use pretending with a 404, because we all know the settings are just a feature of Github.

However, pretending that a repo you don't have access to but exists isn't there with a 404 is appropriate because otherwise you could prove the existence of "superSecretRepo123" simply by guessing and getting a 403 instead of a 404.
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-18 23:32:45+00:00
I don't know about half, but some part of it - definitely.

I'd also add, that there are some non-trivial requirements for good server daemon programs, like fork, detach from terminal, may be fork again, umask, chdir, may be close some descriptors, maintain PID file, output to syslog, drop privileges and so on. And a lot of those things are implemented in systemd, so basically you can just write very dumb server which will work properly under systemd. So some part of systemd have to be implemented in every server daemon program.
by debazel | 2025-08-18 23:33:01+00:00
> How do you know the tables you want so well, but you don't know the columns you are going to ask for?

Simply because there are a lot more columns than there are tables.

Of course, I sometimes forget the exact table name as well. However, this is mostly not an issue as the IDE knows all table names before anything has been entered. By simply entering `FROM user`, the autocomplete will list all tables that contain `user`, and I can complete it from there. I cannot do the same with the column selection unless I first write the FROM part. And even if I do know exactly which columns and tables I want I would still want autocomplete to work when creating the SELECT statement. Rather than typing `zip_code`, I can most likely just type `z<TAB>`.

That is why 99% of my select queries start as `SELECT * FROM mytable`, and then I go back to fill in the select statement. And it's not just me, all colleagues I've worked with does exact same thing.

For larger, more complicated queries, you'll have to go back and forth a lot as you join tables together, that is unavoidable, but 80-90% of my queries could be finished in one go if the FROM part came first.
by al_borland | 2025-08-18 23:33:44+00:00
I’ve been using Obsidian at work for a few years now, and things like this are why I ignore almost all Obsidian content on the web. Everyone seems to create these really complicated setups, in the name of zettelkasten, that seem nearly impossible to maintain and use in real life. If I want to make a list of movies to watch, I use a simple checklist in one note and move on with my life. I keep Obsidian simple so it gets out of my way.

I tried going down the road like you’re talking about one for managing past, present, and future trips. It technically worked, but it was so fiddly that I hated using it. I just made a few folders instead.

I suppose now, if I wanted all the metadata you’re talking about, using a base would make the most sense. But I’d still need to be realistic about how I’m going to use it. Do I care enough about future sorting abilities to turn adding a movie to a watch list into a multi-field form, where I need to consider all these potential futures to fill it out, creating a lot of friction to the action?
by notatoad | 2025-08-18 23:35:12+00:00
i think it's unclear whether newsmax is a "real" company or not. is there any indication that they're trying to make money, or are they trying to push their agenda? because they pretty clearly do have an agenda to push.

if they're a real company designed to make a profit, then sure, 1/3 of their annual revenue is plenty of incentive to make a real change, and could even be a company-ending event. If they're just a rich person's tool to influence public opinion, then whether or not $67m is a big enough number to make a dent depends on the pockets of their funders, not on the company's finances.
by cat_plus_plus | 2025-08-18 23:35:21+00:00
The implicit assumption of this article is that ideas approved by current members of community are good and ones expressed by the "shameless" outsider are bad. This would, for example, automatically invalidate Pride movement without considering merits of it's goals. It would be more fair to say that regardless of merit of ideas, stating them directly and forcefully despite community pushback can be a valid strategy to attract new members or shift Overton window.
by machomaster | 2025-08-18 23:35:54+00:00
The problem you describe only concerns people who don't know anything about the subject, but still have no shame to have strong opinions about it.

Nobody in race sciences (anthropology, etc) claim that there are only unique races that are separate from each other and don't mix. This is a clear strawman.

The fact that there is mixing between races does not mean that races don't exist. You can make an emulsion out of water and oil, but water and oil still are their own things.

And the science has all kinds of specific categorization for human groups that go way beyond the rough separation into 3-4 main races. All the mixing, separation, migration, isolation, etc have been taken into account.

It's a pity this kind of topic/science is basically a taboo in the Western World and for real info and honest discussion have to go to other systems/countries/languages.