MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-25 20:34:43+00:00
It's basic economics in the sense that it's an oversimplified toy model. In the real world, every country I'm aware of gets a substantial amount of its tax revenue from consumption taxes, and indeed the US's lack of VAT means it's currently much more dependent on progressive income taxes than peer countries. (https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-i...)
Show HN: Ishotaphoto – a free photobooth in your pocket
by devolt | 2025-08-25 20:34:46+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m Anton, and I’m building ishotaphoto.com (https://ishotaphoto.com) — essentially a free photobooth in your pocket.

Just pick the type of document you need a photo for (Green Card lottery, Japan visa, China visa, etc.) — the app already knows all the current requirements. Then upload a selfie (or snap one with the iOS/Android app) and the app takes care of the rest: • Aligns your face • Removes the background • Ensures the correct head-to-photo ratio • Prepares the image with the correct size, dimensions, and format • Gives suggestions on expressions, smiles, glasses, etc.

The motivation came from my frustration with how expensive and inconvenient it is to get a simple ID/visa photo — whether at Walgreens or using other online services. I felt there should be something fast, simple, and free.

While the tool uses AI, it’s not the “LLM/ChatGPT” type you hear about everywhere — it’s built on computer vision, face detection, and some math to handle the requirements.

I’d love to hear your feedback — whether it’s about the product itself, the UX, or potential use cases I haven’t thought of.

Thanks!
by renewiltord | 2025-08-25 20:34:59+00:00
I would never have considered this, but someone on HN pointed out that web user agents work like this. Servers send ads and there is no way for them to enforce that browsers render the ads and hide the content or whatever. The user agent is supposed to act for the user. "Your business model is not my problem", etc.

Well, my user agents work for me, not for you - the server guy who is complaining about this and that. "Your business model is not my problem". Block me if you don't want me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44975697
by neilv | 2025-08-25 20:35:08+00:00
More cyberpunk than this would be for the official author side to be a `.onion`, with a vanity subdomain that took a borrowed farm of GPUs a week to compute, and an RSS/Atom reader feed from that, plus a Fediverse/Mastodon account for the normies that you host yourself from an offshore data haven, paid for with mixed BTC, and a Reddit account just to keep some twerp from grabbing your name, all of which you access exclusively through Tor Browser, from a dedicated/compartmentalized immutable device. :)

But I'm sympathetic to authors feeling they have to be on the popular social media platforms. I don't know about big-name authors like Mr. Stephenson, but when I looked into writing fiction myself, the advice for new and less-known writers was to actively work marketing on all of Twitter/X, Instagram, especially TikTok (BookTok), and others.

(I decided it was too much demoralizing work, to not only write novels, which is grueling, but then to have to play games with TikTok influencers, if you want enough people to actually read the product of your suffering.)
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-08-25 20:35:28+00:00
To be fair, it takes a little practice IMO and until you learn how to use flux correctly etc., it can seem very unattainable to ever learn well.

I got a huge confidence boost from one of the old engineers with rubbish eyesight. Thinking “If HE can see well enough to do 0603 and smaller, then so can I!” :D

A few hours practice on scrapped electronics made a big difference for me.
by stouset | 2025-08-25 20:36:15+00:00
That's not even what's being argued here.

What's being pointed out is the retcon that "the whole damn point of the tariffs" is to end rampant consumerism. It's clear that the grand^{n}parent poster is flailing about and desperately trying to find the comfort of some coherent and intentional narrative behind a set of inherently incoherent and unintentional actions.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-25 20:36:25+00:00
Agntcy is a little more elaborate, but also notable as a massive AI tool that includes tool management. Donated to Linux Foundation from Cisco & many others. https://outshift.cisco.com/blog/agntcy-donated-to-linux-foun... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44731621
by hn8726 | 2025-08-25 20:37:31+00:00
> developers will have the same freedom to distribute their apps directly to users through sideloading or to use any app store they prefer. We believe this is how an open system should work—by preserving choice while enhancing security for everyone

I guess words don't don't have meaning anymore, how can you claim to have an open system in an announcement about closing it down?

It's also telling that the big supporters of this are apparently corporations and governments. Admittedly I don't know what "Developer's Alliance" is but they don't seem to care about developers very much, and I wouldn't surprised if they were just a "pay us to say what you're doing is good for devs" kind of thing
by uz3snolc3t6fnrq | 2025-08-25 20:37:45+00:00
my best guess is, you could've connected from a different ip once 10 years ago and it improperly geolocated that ip as being in a tiny country and now it thinks you're secretly from that country even though you've been accessing the site from a US ip forever. it's the only plausible reason i can really think of. unless they set up a "country estimation" ai or a similar newfangled system and it's convinced for some reason you're actually not american. it's too out there but you never know
by godelski | 2025-08-25 20:38:17+00:00
> leak this 10 digit code

Leak? It's a 10 digit code where you can throw out more than two thirds of them. The only leaking is getting names attached and being currently active.

I mean numbers are as terrible as social security numbers. For both of them you can take your number, add one, and get another valid number.

I'm also not sure what the correct solution is but I'm sure there's some pretty smart people out there that have some really good ideas and understand the issue with a lot of complexity (aka: I won't believe anyone who starts with "It's so simple, you just...")
by jonathaneunice | 2025-08-25 20:39:35+00:00
"From the core to the edges of the server"—what does that even mean?

Unless Google has discovered a way to directly transfer heat to the aethereal plane, nothing they’re doing is new. Mainframes were moving chip and module heat entirely outside the building decades ago. Immersion cooling? Chip, module, board, rack, line, and facility-level work? Rear-door and hybrid strategies? Integrated thermal management sensors and controls? Done. Done. Done. Done. Richard Chu, Roger Schmidt, and company were executing all these strategies at scale long before Google even existed.
by ajb | 2025-08-25 20:39:48+00:00
I remember reading somewhere that they don't operate at the level of servers; if one dies they leave it in place until they're ready to replace the whole rack. Don't know if that's true now, though.

It does sound like connections do involve water lines though. As they are isolating different water circuits, in theory they could have a dry connection between heat exchanger plates, or one made through thermal paste. It doesn't sound like they're doing that though.
by asyx | 2025-08-25 20:40:18+00:00
I think a big problem is that the users have been trained to accept the status quo. I mean back in the Feature phone days we would share Java phone games at school via Bluetooth. I’d assume kids these days generally don’t anymore.

Also, due to the cost of physical media piracy was rampant even amongst boomers. People knew and had the option to buy a dvd player that could play video cd because that’s how movies were ripped.

Even during the early iPhones we were so stripped of even basic features that a jailbreak was 100% required if you wanted to even basic things like taking videos or changing the Home Screen background.

None of this is necessary anymore. The users gets the phone and it just works from their perspective at least.

So who is going to try to run a business off of nerds like us who want to have this sort of control over our devices (I’d call it freedom but the average user doesn’t feel unfree)?
by gentooflux | 2025-08-25 20:40:34+00:00
Marine loans for boats also appear to carry 10-20 year terms. Value being subjective and all, if you find the juice tasty enough then it must be worth the squeeze.

Car loans have a bit more of an inherent predatory bent since most Americans need a car to get by. That's not to say we all need a car which costs so much that an 84 month term becomes worth considering...
by tadasv | 2025-08-25 20:40:35+00:00
i've been ~15 years in the tech industry, working as swe. I recently purchased 15 books on from proofs, calculus, linear algebra, real analysis combinatorics, diff equations to self-study math. Yes, you almost never need to use anything beyond basic math, but there's so many things to learn. And math is fun, I miss my university days.
by mountainriver | 2025-08-25 20:40:39+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm sick and tired of the big labs controlling most of the generative AI landscape. We are launching Llama Fund as a means of democratizing large scale AI model training through crowd funding.

Our platform will allow researchers to propose a training pipeline, from data curation to the number of GPUs required. Ideally they will already have a toy model working. From there users can crowdfund the effort based on milestones. Researchers can offer incentives, such as providing commercial licenses to contributors.

We hope this will open up a whole new avenue for large scale model work, powering the open source future of AI.

Would love to hear thoughts from the community!
by stackskipton | 2025-08-25 20:40:43+00:00
This is telco doing as well.

It should be illegal for Telco to allow SS7 spoofing for numbers that customer does not show they own.

Initial SIP setup shows number not to be a number they own, drop the SIP dial and be done with it.

Also, all US based phone numbers should have US based person tied to it. If they misbehave, drop them and blacklist them.

All this is solvable if we don't let phone providers get away with "Welp, the checks cleared, this is not our problem."
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-25 20:41:03+00:00
It's not the tracks itself that need to be maintained first. When they are the issue the easiest fix is to swap the rails.

What need to be done first is the gravel and then also the ties. Expensive are also trackout/switches with motors, and of course the signal boxes. What is now the big deal is adoption to newer technologies like ETCS.

What needs the fastest maintenance nowadays, though, is software :-).
by dingdingdang | 2025-08-25 20:42:30+00:00
I'm thinking it's time for a 2nd phone (in my case old one from cupboard) to become the regular daily GrapheneOS enabled driver and then keep a modern Google(tm) updated one at home for all the "official crap" whenever needed. That way I can also separate banking / paypal / etc. from my carry phone with all it's various apps that I trust to varying degrees.
by mjr00 | 2025-08-25 20:42:58+00:00
> Spotify pays an average of $0.00318 per stream. That means it takes over 314 streams to make a single dollar on Spotify. [...] By contrast, Tidal pays $0.01284 per stream ($12,840 per million), while Apple Music pays between $0.008 and $0.01 (8-10,000 per million).

This is extremely misleading. Spotify has regional pricing; for streams from the US it's around $0.01/stream (not on my music computer right now so can't see the exact number). The "average" may be a lot lower just because Spotify is available in more countries with lower per-stream rates.

> AI tracks falsely attributed to deceased artists like Blaze Foley—a country singer who died in 1989—were found on their official Spotify pages, which raises a ton of questions about how these are curated.

I hate this too and I wish Spotify would do more about it, but this is a common nefarious tactic by musicians, not by Spotify. The idea is that you upload a song with multiple artists credits including yourself + some more popular musicians. Preferably famous enough to get streams but not famous enough to get instantly noticed. Unsuspecting listeners will get your track in their Release Radar, Discover Weekly etc feeds because they're following the more popular artist. You collect the stream revenue.

People who do this should be insta-banned from Spotify, for sure, but this isn't Spotify doing anything malicious.

> In response, bands that I have never fucking heard of like Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu have announced they are removing their music from Spotify

I realize it's a metal blog but c'mon, if you're a music blogger you can take the five seconds to search (or ask an LLM...) to find out that Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu are extremely popular indie darlings, and not sub-100 follower Soundcloud artists.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-25 20:43:10+00:00
Yeah, there was at least the one lady he pushed onto the tracks right as the subway came in that I remember distinctly. Ice cold.

I think their point was that in HCF, the off the wall dramatic swings felt more like jumping the shark. In HoC, it felt totally in character for Spacey to do that. It was just better written and acted, despite the intensity of the violence being much higher, because it made sense in the context of the story, and it didn’t in HCF, at least not to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
by tguvot | 2025-08-25 20:43:30+00:00
yes. i literally wrote that they bombed a hospital after they followed up somebody who was suspected as hamas spotter with cameras for a few days. they used different ammo than they were approved to, and now there is investigation

in same hospital a couple of dozens of israeli hostages were kept for a while.

at same hospital IDF arrested in past around 100 hamas members who were hiding.

in area where combatants frequently crossdress, it's hard to know who is who

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/12/middleeast/israel-strike-arme...
by guywithahat | 2025-08-25 20:44:12+00:00
I recently bought a blood pressure monitor from Amazon, and it took two days because I couldn't buy it at work, can't buy it while driving, couldn't get it at the gym, and was too tired to look into it when I was at home.

The idea of an agent, not owned by the store (who may try to upsell me) that could look into the product and buy one sounds great. Instead of waiting two days I could have just told the AI to run the errand for me while I was at work. I don't know anything about blood pressure monitors and I don't want to learn, so as long as it's <$50 any choice is fine.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-25 20:44:25+00:00
You are thinking of section 250.104 of NFPA 70, the National Electrical Code published by the U.S.A. National Fire Protection Association. (-:

BS 7671 (IEE Wiring Regs) does not require bonding of the pipework if the mains (service) pipes and the internal (installation) piping are both plastic.
by nnechm | 2025-08-25 20:44:48+00:00
Had a similar experience with meta. Extremely opaque decision making, terrible UX. Account permanently disabled ... did not follow community standards, literally on sign up to get a dx account. It's difficult after an experience like that to see how they are so successful. Is it because their users are so addicted and ad sellers will do anything to get onboard ? It's probably just a few dark patterns here and there to bump up impressions at will.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-25 20:44:54+00:00
The distinction is at best meaningless. And, at worst, actively harmful for understanding the behavior of those systems.

We already know that you can train an "evil" AI by fine-tuning a "normal" AI on sequences of "evil" numbers. How the fuck does that even work? It works because the fine-tuning process shifts the AI towards "the kind of AI that would constantly generate evil numbers when asked to generate any numbers".

And what kind of AI would do that? The evil kind.

AI "wants", "preferences" and even "personality traits" are no less real than configuration files or build scripts. Except we have no way of viewing or editing them directly - but we know that they can be adjusted during AI training, sometimes in unwanted ways.

An AI that was fried with RL on user preference data? It, in a very real way, wants to flatter and affirm the user at every opportunity.
by matthewfcarlson | 2025-08-25 20:45:09+00:00
I've recently adopted this model (though I've been buying on the iTunes Store as it's DRM free and I have a hard time finding the larger or really tiny artists on band camp). Plexamp has been awesome and while I miss the discovery of Spotify, I am glad I left. I was a customer from 2012 to 2023 (11 years) which is kinda nuts when you think about it.
by hnburnsy | 2025-08-25 20:45:36+00:00
>"Google extensively validates components with leak testing, uses alerting systems to discover problems like leaks, and takes preventative measures like scheduled maintenance and filtration. They also have a clear set of protocols to respond to alerts and issues, allowing a large workforce to respond to problems in a consistent fashion. It’s a far cry from the ad-hoc measures enthusiasts take to maintain their water cooling setups."

How about the author compare it to MS, Meta, or AWS instead of Joe Blow buying parts online? I would hope that Google had extensive validation and clear protocols. [Roll-Eyes]
by somat | 2025-08-25 20:45:43+00:00
I always found the embedded javascript weird in an ironic sort of way.

There was postscript right, and postscript has a pretty great rendering engine. however the problem is that postscript is too powerful, as a Turing complete language it is hard to use the script results as a document. So adobe used the same rendering engine, tore out the Turing complete bits, added a bunch of structure and ended up with PDF. And the irony... they then proceeded to put the problematic Turing complete bits back in in the form of (spits in disgust) javascript. Hell, if they absolutely needed a scripting language embedded in their document(debatable) they should have put postscript back in.
by 0x457 | 2025-08-25 20:45:53+00:00
I work on multiple tasks too, it's just all of it is done is either in a browser tab or terminal tab. Usually those live in separate virtual screens, but one of my machines has an ultrawide, so I can comfortably put 2-3 tiles on it depending on what I'm working on.

Tiling is all about efficient use of space (and wasting all gains by adding cool looking gaps to post on UnixPorn). I find floating windows just hard to navigate and wasteful when 99% of time I want the app to be in a full-screen. Hence why macOS splits get me pretty much where I want to be.
by asyx | 2025-08-25 20:46:18+00:00
I think the only thing hat can save us is a jailbreak. Either for iOS or Android to let you sideload apps.

Alternatively, and that’s almost bullshit, the dumb phone trend continues and we might get devices like PDAs. Get a dumb phone and a small camera and then your PDA for everything that is essentially an app. Not sure what OS they’d run but I don’t see another way.
by qrsbrrr | 2025-08-25 20:46:40+00:00
working class kid here.

I feel this too.

Card board. Recovered cables. Recovered entire circuits of formerly used boards that fit inside my palm (#jewishConstraints) #Undisclosed parts of my how~yo (how drunk are you willing to get (to train yourself) (while raising a now 23 years old .... "kid" #PGurNOTeventrying #sry4urKId that is already "there"
by numpy-thagoras | 2025-08-25 20:46:54+00:00
It's part of a dependency relation, the function computes and produces an output that we call sqrt(2).

On the other hand, using the axioms of ZFC, one can say any real number exists without having a function to compute it, or a proof to construct it.

For an ultrafinitist, or any finitist for that matter, we say that you only need the minimum of ingredients to produce math -- you do not need to assume anything over and above that, as it's not even helpful in the verification process.

So assuming only finitely many symbols and finitely many numbers, I can produce what we call sqrt(2). We only ever verify it numerically and finitely anyways. We can never reach decimals at infinite ordinals.

So it makes no sense to say, "Hey I assume transfinitely many entities, and my assumption says these numbers exist even though the proofs and decimal expansions are only ever finite."
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-25 20:47:18+00:00
Because only 5% of American adults are highly literate with technology, 30% of working adults self-identify as "never (ever!)" using folders and files for organization, and most people have better things to do with their time to be taught to perfectly analyze the safety of an App Store. Don't hope in the next generation either - only 38% of Gen Z could successfully complete tasks more difficult than moving an email between folders, while an IEA study found that only 2% of Gen Z had reached the anticipated "digital native" stereotype level of fluency.
by donmcronald | 2025-08-25 20:47:32+00:00
I'm not positive, but i think they charge an astronomical amount for calls that don't originate from a local calling prefix. Of course you can get those, but some countries require ID.

Mainly I know that calling from a voip number was really expensive when I tried to set something up for a family member going on vacation to Europe. That probably cuts back on a lot of spam calls.
by cloudwalk9 | 2025-08-25 20:48:08+00:00
Business account though. Everyone else is just a waste of time to provide support to.

I'm a regular consumer who bought a Dell Precision laptop (which still kicks ass btw, to their credit for all their faults) and they bent over backwards because I purchased through their business side. A shipping delay got me a 100 dollar discount, and another hiccup got me 150 dollars to spend at Dell. Bought a business grade 4K monitor from them that also kicks ass and has imperceptible latency in CS:GO/CS2 with the laptop.

Sometimes even in a bleak corporate world there can be good customer service. It's the exception rather than the rule too often.
by jijijijij | 2025-08-25 20:49:01+00:00
> You think that law enforcement should enjoy privacy in the course of their duty and in public

Yes, law enforcement officers should be allowed to have e.g. confidential conversations with each other. Just like you do (or should have) chatting with your work colleagues.

> so I guess you are against body cameras then.

I am conflicted, because I don't want to be filmed during police interactions, either. It really depends on the legal setup. If they are mandatory, encrypted, only readable with a court orders, always on, not fed into the general surveillance stream (AI shit, face recognition), reliable and tamper proof, I am in favor of them, I guess. That is, if they are useful to hold officers accountable, as well. Pretty utopic, tho.

However, regarding the officers privacy they are fundamentally different than a right to film law enforcement without cause, in any "public" situation.

> For me, what you describe is very much the same as it is not allowed to film law enforcement by de facto.

Yes, but not because they are law enforcement. You can also be charged for illegally filming anyone else.

Eg. dash cams as used around the world are also not legal in Germany. They have to be constructed to loop a short time interval and only retain the recording in case of an accident. You can't continuously record traffic or public life in Germany.

Personally, I think it's quite awesome you got legal leverage against someone filming, or surveilling you against your will.
by renewiltord | 2025-08-25 20:49:06+00:00
That's really hard to believe. Brian Herbert's stuff seems sort of Fan Fiction In The World of Dune. Nothing wrong with fan fiction: The Last Ringbearer etc. are pretty enjoyable. But BH just follows on. His work has a bit of the feeling of people who lived in the ruins of the roman forum https://x.com/museiincomune/status/1799039086906474572