MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-18 19:40:14+00:00
The obvious fix for this is to either eliminate trade secret protections in favor of patents, or make them conditioned upon escrow with the government to be released to the public domain after some time (perhaps half the time of a patent).

Don't want to release your recipe ever? Tough cookies when your lead scientists bring it to a competitor.

Trade secrets are counter to the purpose of "IP" law. The public has no interest in protecting them and every interest in... not doing that.
by kelnos | 2025-08-18 19:40:32+00:00
"Better" is of course subjective. Digital is better to me: I can read the digital version on my laptop, phone, or e-reader. I prefer the e-reader, but don't like to carry it everywhere; at the very least I can always read on my phone if that's all I have on me.

I'm someone who used to be a voracious reader. In my childhood alone I would devour paperbacks and hardcovers like nobody's business. My summers were spent destroying the full summer reading list distributed by my school in weeks, and then going to the library to find more things to read. I have had thousands and thousands of physical books in my hands during my life. But I still prefer digital.

I only purchase digital books that either have no DRM, or stripable DRM.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-18 19:40:42+00:00
Generally, CDNs, e.g., Akamai, etc., are authoritative DNS providers that direct HTTP traffic to selected reverse proxies

When a customer gives a third party recursive DNS provider, e.g., NextDNS, etc., permission to "block" certain domains then the third party may act as an authoritative nameserver. Queries with RD==1 for A RRs of "blocked" domains not already cached do not need to be forwarded to an authoritative nameserver chosen or operated by the domain owner. The third party can answer these queries with whatever address it chooses, e.g., 0.0.0.0, rewrite the answers, etc.

Whether any third party DNS provider is abusing this permission^1 is not the point of this comment. The point is that delegating DNS to a third party makes it possible^2

1. This could be difficult to discover

2. For example, I have seen DNS caches that return A records for certain domains that do not match the A records returned by the domain's authoritative nameservers; sometimes the responses even falsely claim they are authoritative answers. Academic papers have been published about countries that implement censorship via DNS. Even in the US, it's common for third party DNS providers such as hotels and certain ISPs, including cellular providers, to intercept DNS traffic and direct it to their own caches, rewrite answers, etc. This includes nonrecursive queries to a domain's authoritative nameservers
by mindcrime | 2025-08-18 19:40:44+00:00
They are all in the article?

Maybe they are. I'm not here to do a deep research project that involves reading every citation in that article. If it makes you feel better, pretend that what I said was instead:

"I don't have all the relevant citations stored in my short-term memory right this second and I am not interested in writing a lengthy thesis to satisfy pedantic navel-gazers on HN."

Or, if you really know some reinvention of backprop that is not mentioned here,

WTF are you on about? I never made any such claim, or anything remotely close to it.
by Hemospectrum | 2025-08-18 19:40:50+00:00
Outright impossible. You see, the US is far more spread out than Europe. You need only look at a map to notice the insurmountable geographic barriers that prevent a Subway from being built closer to an apartment building. It simply can't be done.

Wait, sorry, that's trains. You're talking about sandwiches. Let me check my notes...
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-18 19:40:56+00:00
How easy is it to fool Reality Defender into making false positives?

Whenever I'm openly performing nefarious illegal acts in public, I always wear my Sixfinger, so if anyone takes a photo of me, I can plausibly deny it by pointing out (while not wearing it) that the photo shows six fingers, and obviously must have been AI generated.

In support of said nefarious illegal acts, the Sixfinger includes a cap-loaded grenade launcher, gun, fragmentation bomb, ballpoint pen, code signaler, and message missile launcher. It's like a Swiss Army Finger! You can 3d print a cool roach clip attachment too.

"How did I ever get along with five???"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElVzs0lEULs

https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/sixfinger-sixfinger-man-al...

https://www.museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2010/11/Sixfinger-p...
by JCM9 | 2025-08-18 19:41:20+00:00
There are some transferable assets but the challenge is the commoditization of everything that means others have easy access to “good enough” assets to build upon. There’s very little moat to build in this business and that’s making all the money dumped into it looking a bit froth and ready to implode.

GPT-5 is a bellwether there. OpenAI had a huge head start and basically access to whatever money and resources they needed and after a ton of hype released a pile of underwhelming meh. With the pace of advances slowing rapidly the pressure will be on to make money from what’s there now (which is well short of what the hype had promised).

In the language of Gartner’s hype curve, we’re about to rapidly fall into the “trough of disillusionment.”
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-18 19:41:34+00:00
1. Work tends to be work, that is, not fun. If you take your "fun" and make it your job, it often ruins it as "fun". You sound like you're looking for fun, and you should really be looking for fulfilling work, which is a different beast altogether.

2. Are you good at networking? Are you growing in competence there? Can you actually fix things? Is the work not too horrible? Are the people reasonable, and not in too great a need of debugging? If so, think well before you leave it.

3. Niches aren't forever. I've spent all my career in embedded systems, except for a five-year detour in the middle into network security software. Niches, like jobs, often are only good until they're not; there's nothing wrong with riding them out as long as they're still good.
by mrguyorama | 2025-08-18 19:41:44+00:00
VW has done this in a sense forever. My Mk7 GTI came with the "performance package" which in some years included different brakes and a limited slip diff, but in other years was literally just an ECU flash that gave it an extra 10hp for hundreds to a couple thousand extra dollars.

It was the general case in VAG cars going back as far as 2000 that the same engine hardware was sold with different software packages for different markets and trims essentially. The same trim made different performance figures in different emissions regimes too. Typically, you could take a car without the paid software boost into an official shop, pay a one time fee, and get that boosted software package.

The fix is to go to any "Performance Automotive" shop, or buy a dongle on the internet for $200 that lets you just flash whatever you want to the ECU, because VW ECUs are surprisingly "open" (compare the ECU situation that Toyota has, where ECU reflashes basically weren't a thing) and then you can run +40ish hp and kill your undersized turbo at 80k miles, or turn off the soundaktor, or add some weird regulatory quirk of rear lighting, to enable extra features that you didn't pay for like radar cruise control.

Sure, you can now pay $20 and only get that for a month, but how stupid do you have to be to do so compared to a one time $760 cost?
by vlod | 2025-08-18 19:41:48+00:00
> because the appearance of it being "real" is enough to put them off

Exactly the reason for me. I will go out of my way not to eat these 'lets-try-really-hard-to-be-meat' burgers. That means standard veggies burgers (the ones that most people complain about, which I have no problem with) and even salads if need be.

After a while (long while) being vegetarian becomes psychological and the mere thought of consuming meat turns my stomach.
Ask HN: How do get cached version of websites – other than wayback machine?
by orsenthil | 2025-08-18 19:42:57+00:00
I am looking for the cached version of an engineering blog site. It looks like Wayback machine is the only option right now. Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo - all have removed the ability to look at the cached versions. If wayback machine hasn't indexed it, where do you find it?
by tmaly | 2025-08-18 19:42:59+00:00
I started my kids at a young age on a physical mouse robot they had to instruct to navigate a maze. Scratch JR was the next step. I always found a way to keep it fun. Around age 8 I gave my daughter basic lessons in Scratch. Adding in the MakeyMakey was a lot of fun as it adds a physical component.

In sixth grade I introduced microbit to her class with the MS MakeCode block coding. I had them build their own robots from a pile of legos and mini servo motors. Each lesson taught them one small part they could use towards their final challenge to build a car they could navigate a maze with in the shortest time. They were paired up in teams of two. They learned a lot about real world engineering.

I am playing around with the idea of some LLM projects but so far I have focused on a fun project based approach.
by hardolaf | 2025-08-18 19:43:06+00:00
It's not illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended in Illinois. It is however illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended for an unreasonable amount of time in Illinois.

Here's an actual page from the government explaining the law and even providing the text of the law: https://dcfs.illinois.gov/for-families/safety/preparing-your...

If you follow their advice and your child is ready to reasonably able to be left alone unattended, you can leave even 8-9 year olds unattended for long periods of time. It's not odd for children to be home alone after school for 4-8+ hours.

Your opinion on "CPS" in Illinois (I assume you meant DCFS and not Chicago Public Schools) is based on not understanding a single paragraph of the law that is written to be readable by the general public.

Kids go all over the place in Chicago while under 14 without their parents. It's literally not an issue.
by solardev | 2025-08-18 19:43:27+00:00
It's not really a comparable concern in gas cars, though. Range matters a lot more in EV because the charging stations are much rarer than gas stations.

If you lose 15% range in a gas car, ok, you have to get off one exit earlier to refuel. No big deal. But if you lose 15% range in a electric car, that is sometimes the difference between being able to make it to the next charging station (especially DC fast charging) station or being stranded by the side of the highway and needing a specialty tow.
by peytonshields | 2025-08-18 19:43:37+00:00
Absolutely! Max and I were huge Civ fans and always tried to make the game AI deviate from its programmed strategy. We also believe you can get some really interesting story arcs by adjusting parameters like temperature and how context is presented. Some of the things you'll notice in the game is we have a no-holds barred approach -- you can fully modify system prompts and adjust how the LLM interprets the state of the world.
by bpcrd | 2025-08-18 19:44:16+00:00
Thank you! We’ve been working on this since 2021 (and some of us a bit before that), and we’re reminded every day that we are ultimately working something that helps people on the macro and micro level. We want a world free of the malevolent uses of deepfakes for ourselves, our loved ones, and everyone beyond, and feel all should be privy to such protection.
by buescher | 2025-08-18 19:44:44+00:00
What a great piece of visual information design. Another favorite of mine from astronomy is the year poster that sky and telescope publishes every year: https://shopatsky.com/products/2025-skygazers-almanac-wall-p... And Kim Long’s (The Moon Book) yearly moon calendar: https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/summer-2024/202...
by derbOac | 2025-08-18 19:44:56+00:00
In some sense, isn't this overfitting, but "hidden" by the typical feature sets that are observed?

Time and time again, some kind of process will identify some simple but absurd adversarial "trick stimulus" that throws off the deep network solution. These seem like blatant cases of over fitting that go unrecognized or unchallenged in typical life because the sampling space of stimuli doesn't usually include the adversarial trick stimuli.

I guess I've not really thought of the bias-variance tradeoff necessarily as being about number of parameters, but rather, the flexibility of the model relative to the learnable information in the sample space. There's some formulations (e.g., Shtarkov-Rissanen normalized maximum likelihood) that treat overfitting in terms of the ability to reproduce data that is wildly outside a typical training set. This is related to, but not the same as, the number of parameters per se.
by Bender | 2025-08-18 19:45:24+00:00
I am not an expert on AI but if I had to make an uneducated guess it will probably plateau at some point once business run out of ways to extract value from it. I think the sign this has occurred is when the same businesses that laid off large percentages of their staff start to re-hire them and / or start to create their own in-house AI that leverage their own big-data platforms they did not previously realize they needed. I am not sure how to define a crash in this context as not everyone will be able to create their own in-house solutions.
by znpy | 2025-08-18 19:45:32+00:00
It's on GitHub but the license seems custom and reads line more of a source-available license:

3.3) Without prior written consent of LICENSOR or an authorized partner, LICENSEE may not: - use, copy or distribute the LICENSED SOFTWARE except as provided for under sections 3.1 and 3.2. - provide commercial turn-key solutions based on the LICENSED SOFTWARE or commercial services for the LICENSED SOFTWARE to any third party. - rent or lease the LICENSED SOFTWARE and DOCUMENTATION to any third party. - modify, adapt, or translate the LICENSED SOFTWARE for any third party.

Also, the "community edition" is pretty much useless on its own:

3.4) The following optional functionalities and features of the LICENSED SOFTWARE are declared as enterprise features: - Resiliency: (a) Mirroring; (b) High Availability - User management: Quota Enforcement - Data management: (a) Storage Pool; (b) Remote Storage Targets (RST); (c) Copy; (d) Watch; (e) Index; (f) Balance All enterprise features are disabled by default. LICENSEE may not modify or delete mechanisms for licensing enforcement of enterprise features from LICENSED SOFTWARE.

So yeah, it being on GitHub doesn't make it any interesting. If I ever need something like this I'll just use good old Ceph.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-18 19:46:05+00:00
There are some cars with panels, but they can only get about 10ish miles a day with good sunshine. Stationary panels work much, much better.

> Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.

What does that have to do with EVs? The inflection point for adoption is solid state batteries, and there are some experimental factories under construction. (Solid state batteries don't loose charge when parked and can charge about as fast as filling a tank of gas.)

> Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there.

Battery exchanges are impractical because the battery is part of the frame.
by kelnos | 2025-08-18 19:46:22+00:00
That's absurd. I could potentially believe the conclusion that piracy doesn't take away from sales (that is, most people who pirate would otherwise do without, and not buy a copy). But the idea that many/most (or even some significantly-small percentage) of people who pirate will buy copies of the things they like? No, that doesn't pass the sniff test.
by kragen | 2025-08-18 19:47:20+00:00
Yeah, we really have very little idea indeed of what the immediate pre-Columbian population of America was. There was an academic consensus for generations that it was pretty sparse, but there's some strong new evidence that it wasn't, so there's a whole big debate going on now. Of course it's a highly politicized issue!

I think https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_In... isn't up to date, but it is a decent introduction to the debate.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-18 19:47:42+00:00
Unfortunately, absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence.

I obviously don't have time to read a 300 page report—I wish I did—but the conclusion says:

> With regard to total effects of online copyright infringements on legal transactions, there are no robustly significant findings. The strongest finding applies to films/TV-series, where a displacement rate of 27 with an error margin of roughly 36 per cent (two times the standard error) only indicates that online copyright infringements are much more likely to have negative than positive effects.

The conclusion goes on to discuss each type of media. Here's the section on games:

> For games, the estimated effect of illegal online transactions on sales is positive because only free games are more likely displaced by online copyright infringements than not. The overall estimate is 24 extra legal transactions (including free games) for every 100 online copyright infringements, with an error margin of 45 per cent (two times the standard error). The positive effect of illegal downloads and streams on the sales of games may be explained by players getting hooked and then paying to play the game with extra bonuses or at extra levels.

If this is what was meant by "illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games" (and it's possible they're talking about something else which isn't in the conclusion), I don't find that convincing. It's within the margin of error and includes free transactions.

Moreover, I firmly believe that we are never going to have good data on this! You're trying to measure two things that are virtually impossible to measure with any accuracy: (1) how much piracy is taking place, and (2) what would sales have been without the piracy.

(I've edited my comment to actually quote the paper)
by AftHurrahWinch | 2025-08-18 19:47:53+00:00
If a parrot squawks, "1,345 multiplied by 785 equals 1,055,825", you would be logically and factually incorrect to say 'Well, that's wrong because how would a bird know".

The historical meaning of the word 'hominem' isn't crucial to the universal logical principle of 'ad hominem'. If xenoorganisms beneath the ice-sheets of Titan are dismissing each other's ideas out of hand, they too may be committing this fallacy. The fallacy is the rejection of an argument based on its source rather than its content.
by nomel | 2025-08-18 19:48:35+00:00
> A second option is more slow chargers installed places your car spends a lot of time parked, like offices or transit stations if you park and ride.

I don't think this will ever happen. It's the worst case in most every sense. You're talking thousands of chargers, for most parking structures, to solve a problem that's mostly about current battery tech/infrastructure. When battery tech is ready for general use, this won't be needed.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-18 19:49:10+00:00
I just traded in a 6.5 year old model 3 with 75k miles.

Battery was at 87% of capacity.

The big problem was cold snaps. It had the older heating system and would lose a lot of charge in the cold. Our 2022 Model Y with the newer heating system doesn't lose nearly as much charge in cold snaps.
by joha4270 | 2025-08-18 19:49:26+00:00
Even if that might be the case now, I doubt that holds if piracy becomes truly widespread.

I would suspect A pirates book B and tells C about it, C buys book B is a lot more common than A pirates book B and likes it enough to buy it

I have no data to support this, and while I have paid for things I could access for free, but I'm sufficiently pessimistic about human nature to think that's the norm.
by Hamuko | 2025-08-18 19:49:39+00:00
We had an Alfa Romeo and it did not enjoy -20°C. That model has almost completely disappeared from the market after 20 years, with the remaining ones usually being sold as projects or for parts.

I think they also had problems with timing belts? Google results are suggesting me that they had to halve the change interval, possibly because of our shitty roads. Volvo belts also last for 10 years in their native Sweden but only 5 years here.
by mattlondon | 2025-08-18 19:50:06+00:00
Citation needed. EV chargers are actually pretty common, at least in the UK. Jump in any EV and the satnav will show you all the chargers nearby and they're basically everywhere. Sure perhaps 7kw and not 150kw+ but even grocery stores have many of those 150+ now, even if they don't have their own petrol station.
by MrJohz | 2025-08-18 19:50:11+00:00
It's harder when the source or the destination isn't all indented in quite the same way, which happens often if you start a block, press enter and end up on an indented line, and then paste the code.

I don't really get the readability argument - like the lisper I was replying to said, it's all much of a muchness. A shell where arguments are delimited by commas is a function call in most programming languages, and people don't struggle with readability there. If anything, I find having an explicit "close block" symbol a useful visual marker on the page, but I write Python fairly regularly and don't really notice much readability differences compared to any of the brace-using languages I work with.
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-08-18 19:50:24+00:00
It comes down to how much money is available to invest in new AI companies. Eventually, the money will dry out, it always does, and the whole house of cards will fall apart. My guess is that the FED will need to tighten interest rates at some point because of inflation and everyone will panic. The ones that are leveraged will close their positions and others will follow. The whole bubble will collapse. It won't happen this year but next year is open.

The whole IPO craze has not gotten into gear so we have some time. The current AI darlings will go public at some crazy multiple to earnings and people will be amazed. We should all worry after that.

For techs, people are saying that it's too late to get AI skills but I disagree. There are still a few more years to go. But don't wait too long that too will collapse.
by ckosidows | 2025-08-18 19:50:25+00:00
I'm curious if there's been any evidence Novamin actually repairs enamel or "repairs" in some other way.

IIRC, it's not allowed in the states because it's not economical to prove that it actually repairs teeth, but I think my understanding is based on some internet comments and nothing else. The studies I've seen haven't proven to effectively repair enamel, I think, but I'm also not scientifically literate enough to understand the p values they report.

I used to buy repair and protect from Canada back in 2017 but haven't used it since then. I periodically check if there is any solid evidence but I haven't seen much or I'm too stupid to understand it.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-18 19:51:23+00:00
Nah, the study shows there is a reason there is a whole wiki page for all the cases of abuse by the church. It's an epidemic, enough to see a correlation and stereotype that priests are the most likely offender. It's even in pop culture, when you think of a child abuser, who do you think of: a priest, right?

I wanna dig into studies about conservatives which also are major child abusers. Maybe the people with a conservative faith and a conservative political stance have a big overlap, there must be studies for that. I will do the research and get back to you.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-18 19:51:33+00:00
Certainly, we should keep collecting more data, but the longevity and lifecycle trajectory is obvious.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01698-1

https://old.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1jvwi14/g...

https://www.thejubjubbirds.com/hit-and-run-on-the-energy-tra...