MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ahmedhawas123 | 2025-08-18 00:20:26+00:00
This may be a bit of an irrelevant and at best imaginative rant, but there is no shortage of solutions that are mediocre or near perfect for specific use cases out there to parse PDFs. This is a great addition to that.

That said, over the last two years I've come across many use cases to parse PDFs and each has its own requirements (e.g., figuring out titles, removing page numbers, extracting specific sections, etc). And each require a different approach.

My point is, this is awesome, but I wonder if there needs to be a broader push / initiative to stop leveraging PDFs so much when things like HTML, XML, JSON and a million other formats exist. It's a hard undertaking I know, no doubt, but it's not unheard of to drop technologies (e.g., fax) for a better technology.
by mattnewton | 2025-08-18 00:21:35+00:00
I think it’s as simple as the selective pressures in our democratic system push for this rhetoric.

Politicians who pitch “I match your worldview and will implement the simple fixes you want” outcompete “I think your worldview is incomplete and this is what you really want instead”, by a lot.

Some might be very crafty and believe the second while shouting like the first. Many will actually believe the simple solution can work though.
by patagurbon | 2025-08-18 00:21:59+00:00
There is a 3rd point, that craftsmanship, machining skills, and logistics experience don’t fall from trees. As the US moves certain “lower” tier manufacturing overseas it can risk losing the experience needed to create tooling for production lines, or the industrial knowledge to build large numbers of ships, etc. The jobs argument on its face falls flat for me, but I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost.
by cogman10 | 2025-08-18 00:21:59+00:00
I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase) and they saw what you are describing first hand.

One example they gave, it used to be someone's job to load and unload the silicon wafers into the various etching phases. As time went on more and more of that manual work was replaced with automation. A floor with 50 workers became 25, then 10, then 1.

And, to be clear, this was absolutely a good thing for the product. So many yield issues were caused by manual processes.

The future of any manufacturing is that of high automation. That means low to no jobs. We aren't going back to an economy where a shoe factory employes 500 people.

What's particularly bleak, IMO, is society in the US revolves around work. Every job out there is being automated away. That's not a bad thing for quality, but what it means is there will be increasingly fewer jobs to go around.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-18 00:22:00+00:00
That's not the claim you were making earlier. (Although, strictly-speaking, it's still wrong: many factors other than genetics are involved in producing a newborn infant, famously epigenetics. If you classify these all as "genetic factors", then yes, the claim is tautologically true by way of redefining words.)

I'd be interested to see how you'd go about controlling for those other things: so far, I haven't seen anyone manage it.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-18 00:23:00+00:00
>For context: $0.18/kWh in US vs. $0.32/kWh in France and $0.36/kWh Germany.

That's as may be, but my electricity bill is 1/3 for kwhs of electrcity, and 2/3 for "delivering" said power.

As such, it seems like France and Germany may have an advantage there, no?
by latexr | 2025-08-18 00:24:46+00:00
I have never used it as a seller, but I’d consider Gumroad.

https://gumroad.com

That should allow you to effectively have a paywall, as you mentioned: someone can download the software only after paying. I’d also consider not adding DRM to it. In the end, you’re probably going to waste more time with it than the money it’ll save you, only to be cracked anyway. Perhaps consider making it free for countries with a large cracking culture, so they have no reason to do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184692

What I probably wouldn’t do is implement the online verification, for something which only works offline. It’s as a selling point that your software never accesses the web. And again, the effort is probably not worth it.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-18 00:25:06+00:00
The problem is there is no pipeline to get people into these highly automated levels of manufacturing. How can you learn about all the steps and how they’re done “manually” and all that, to be able to participate in the high end of manufacturing? It feels like an island. And once the current talent retires it may leave a void even for those highly advanced factories.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-18 00:26:14+00:00
It does not appear that qwen2.5vl is one thing, so it would depend a great deal on the size you wish to use

Also, watch out, it seems the weights do not carry a libre license https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct/blob/main...
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-18 00:26:20+00:00
>Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?

You're dishonestly compressing a spectrum of regulation down into a binary to advance your point.

There's a spectrum of regulation from black market tamales to the power company. The restaurant is like 45% of the way there. There's a lot of things that they, their landlord, etc, etc, are all but forced to do in certain ways (because of the financial impossibility of proving that any other way is fine) that effectively set cost floors.
by wenc | 2025-08-18 00:27:06+00:00
If we want US manufacturing, it has to:

1) Meet or exceed spec (this shouldn't be a problem)

2) Lower TCO than competition -- labor, automation (this is where the US is current uncompetitive on the lower-end, very competitive on the high-end).

3) Non-cost strategic requirements compared to the competition -- supply chain resilience, national security, lower lead time, consumer preference for US made (but not all products fall into these categories)

4) Benefit from policy intervention like subsidies, tariffs, tax incentives and regulations vis-a-vis competition (the problem with these protections is they make US products uncompetitive in the long run in the international market -- US cars for instance are not competitive in most countries)
by alisonatwork | 2025-08-18 00:27:08+00:00
Another possibility is they were registered as sleeper accounts in the first place. Most web platforms make it so cheap to sign up that there's no reason why an organized actor wouldn't collect accounts for potential future activation. For every dozen sites that never take off, there might be one that does, and then the actor can start to activate the accounts they stockpiled over the years for the low low price of nothing.

One way to try mitigate this is binding accounts to phone numbers and binding phone numbers to government ID, but while that kind of thing works to some degree in places like China where the audience for a site is primarily domestic, it's harder to do on an international forum. As usual, the signup mechanisms that preserve people's freedoms and (relative) anonymity also leave the system wide open to abuse.

Before I worked in this space I thought the answer would simply be to charge a nominal fee, like a dollar a year, but while that dissuades casual trolls, it is no hurdle at all for organized crime, state actors etc.
by davidcbc | 2025-08-18 00:27:14+00:00
It's a tool that we can use and discuss, but it's baffling to claim there aren't also a bunch of charlatans trying to peddle an AI future that is varying degrees of unrealistic and dystopian.

Any number of Sam Altman quotes display this: "A child born today will never be smarter than an AI" "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence" "ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived" "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies."

Every bit of this is nonsense being peddled by the guy selling an AI future because it would make him one of the richest people alive if he can convince enough people that it will come true (or, much much much less likely, it does come true).

That's just from 10 minutes of looking at statements by a single one of these charlatans.
by Etherlord87 | 2025-08-18 00:27:48+00:00
> feeling threatened by “AI”

Why the quotes there? I do feel threatened by AI, but not economically, not in the context of this article at least.

> AI will never be able to

I said no such thing.

> This can’t do the

I also didn't said that, I didn't focus on any particular thing it can't do. In general I don't voice my opinion, I think here the urge was just too strong because the examples were just too crude and I had to say if you think those are impressive, you can literally do it after a day's worth of learning; and I only flexed my expertise to give some strength to that statement and motivate people to really try.

> “This threatens both my economic stability because it will shift my market, and my social status because I have devoted 100,000 hours to practicing and expertise so that I can differentiate myself because it’s part of my identity”

I'm an OSHA inspector/instructor. I don't think what I learned in 3D will go to waste even if AI will actually start creating good 3D models (I wouldn't bet against it).
by vel0city | 2025-08-18 00:27:59+00:00
In the grand scheme of things, very few people have flipper zeros. Few even know what they are.

Meanwhile, I think a pretty high percentage of households have a screwdriver.

> All "recent" cars (as in everything from about 2000 and up) have an immobiliser

You mean some kind of wireless communication protocol that can be hacked with some kind of handheld SDR device? Why is a keyless entry trivially bypassed but an immobilizer transponder, gee, that's just impossible to hack.

Everyone can operate a flipper zero with a cusom firmware which could bypass a transponder. So then all you need is the flipper zero and a screwdriver. Wow such better security for the hassle of having to actually stick the key in the hole every time.

I'll still take the keyless option. If someone really wants in my car, they're getting in. If they really want to steal it, they'll steal it. Requiring the thief to have an RF hacking tool and a screwdriver just isn't that much higher security in the end IMO.
by gerdesj | 2025-08-18 00:28:34+00:00
Do you mean something like: There is evidence that approximately 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, homo sapiens reached the land that we now call Australia.

You can't possibly describe those people as Aborigines before arrival. Its almost as daft as describing any modern nation as being ready formed when it sticks up a flag and starts slagging off the neighbours.

The colonization that originally puts hom. sap. on Terra Horribilis, sorry, Australis is remarkable. Can you imagine just how many efforts failed? Its a long way to Aus from the last island hop. A quick scan, it look like what we now call Papua New Guninea would be a possible launch pad.
by Aeolun | 2025-08-18 00:28:41+00:00
> For example, I didn't understand why Active Directory uses search dialog boxes for every "picker" GUI control instead of a simpler drop-down or something similar... until I worked in an environment with 2 million objects in the directory.

And that’s when you realize that searching in AD is actually dog slow, and you are better off just syncing the whole thing to a proper database, then checking if the object still exists after.

Seriously, why does a search that takes 1ms in postgres take 3 full seconds in AD?
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-18 00:28:49+00:00
> 2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.

I think that I have seen that this kind of "independence" has been a driving reason for China's strategies too. I don't think that it's necessarily a defence against a war, maybe more of an economic buffer, ensuring that China, and whomever follows the strategy is no longer dependent on any other entity for parts of their supply chain.

One of the things, too, that people seem to forget is that the West (in general) has neglected their manufacturing capability in favour of the "Asian Tigers" doing the work (Japan, Korea, Taiwan), China is just the current holder of the title (for how long is anyone's guess, Japan especially has endured a sustained stagnation of their economy over the last several decades).

Germany, for a while, was a strong manufacturer, and have (so far) been using the resulting economic position to their advantage inside the European Bloc. Perhaps that's the model that the USA (and others) should be looking toward?
by laughing_man | 2025-08-18 00:30:15+00:00
People who graduated in June are having a real struggle finding a job. Companies haven't laid many people off (outside of the ones that over-hired recently, like Meta and IBM) but they're not hiring. That's just the breeze that's heralding the storm. LLMs are going to make "any degree" jobs an increasingly rare thing as time goes on.
by mc32 | 2025-08-18 00:30:25+00:00
It's obvious that any high end manufacturing in any country capable of sustaining high end manufacturing will not produce jobs like in 1950, '60 or '70. But the same is true of service sector jobs. More is being automated.

That said, we can bring manufacturing back stateside which can be highly automated and have high value while employing workers at wages much better than their service-job counterparts.

In addition, we don't have the same population growth we had in the post-war years, so we don't need to produce millions upon millions of jobs. What we need to do is stem the job losses and increase output.

We can be a bigger version of Switzerland. Sure, things get more expensive, but by and large folks live better.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-08-18 00:30:42+00:00
Well presumably those other cuisines took a long time to develop the good recipes you mention.

It’s not really biologically normal for humans to just up and completely change their culture based on logic. So while Indians have already done the intergenerational work to have good vegan dishes, in the west we don’t have that. Making a drop in replacement that works within the existing food culture does seem like a reasonable hack.
by echelon | 2025-08-18 00:31:04+00:00
This. We're in a tough spot because the know-how has atrophied. We're not making the raw inputs anymore.

Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs.

We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot.

Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it.

Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-08-18 00:31:59+00:00
The problem is that the two are equivocated regularly for political points. We want both - highly automated factories for productive output, and middle class jobs. Building the factories will bring some middle class jobs - not a lot, but there's a decent number of maintenance and operating staff even at lights out factories, and the expertise building those factories is a bunch of valuable jobs and experience that we've let China hoover up.

The problem is that these two concepts are treated as one.
by maximus_01 | 2025-08-18 00:32:12+00:00
How much do you value your time? A lot of people think like this and I'm not judging you or saying this applies to you. But I find it kind of odd when people I know who earn hundreds to thousands of dollars an hour won't pay even $0.10 for something that took them say 15 minutes to read. If their own time is worth $200 / hr, they thought it was valuable enough to use up $50 of their time. If they refuse to pay anything for the content, then in their mind the content was worth exactly $50, not a cent more to spare to the author of said content (eg $50.10, if you paid the author $0.10 and paid $50 of your time).
by dc396 | 2025-08-18 00:32:35+00:00
According to one of our new AI overlords:

Separation of Powers and Congressional Authority • Trump repeatedly challenged or ignored the constitutional boundaries between the executive branch and Congress. This includes refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas related to investigations and attempting to block the release of his financial records, which resulted in the Supreme Court reaffirming Congress’s investigative powers. • He has used executive orders to unilaterally override or undermine laws enacted by Congress, which the Constitution does not permit.

Use of Military on U.S. Soil • Trump turned to the military as a “personal police force” against American citizens, particularly in response to protests, which has been accused of violating both federal law and the Constitution’s protections for civil liberties.

War Powers Clause • He ordered military actions (e.g., bombing Iran) without congressional approval, contradicting the Constitution’s war powers clause that reserves the right to declare war exclusively to Congress.

First Amendment Violations • Trump’s actions targeting peaceful protesters, threatening lawmakers for their speech, and attempting to punish academic institutions and law firms for political reasons have been labeled unconstitutional violations of free speech and due process rights.

14th Amendment and Birthright Citizenship • His administration sought to deny citizenship to people of color born in the U.S., contrary to the clear language of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees birthright citizenship.

Punishing Political Enemies and Targeting Institutions • Trump issued executive orders and directed government agencies to retaliate against law firms and universities perceived as opponents, which experts say violates the equal protection and due process clauses.

Speech and Debate Clause • Attempts were made to investigate and potentially criminalize speech by Democratic lawmakers, threatening constitutional protections for congressional speech.

Power of the Purse • Trump encroached upon Congress’s constitutional “power of the purse” by redirecting funds without congressional approval, thus violating the separation of powers.
by martin-t | 2025-08-18 00:34:40+00:00
Out of curiosity, how do you feel working on something that is zero-sum (does not produce positive value for society, only changes where the money goes)? Would you change jobs if a positive-sum job became available?

And to risk being seen as preaching, have you read https://drewdevault.com/2025/04/20/2025-04-20-Tech-sector-re... ?
by willguest | 2025-08-18 00:35:35+00:00
This is late, probably too late, but if you really want to get into the weeds of this, here is a better summary that what I can produce, from a paper that explains it better than I can:

"The model is a work of fiction based on the tacit and false assumption of frictionless barter. Attempting to apply such microeconomic foundations to understand a monetary economy means that mistakes in reasoning are inevitable." (p.239)

https://academic.oup.com/cje/article/48/2/235/7492210
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-18 00:35:56+00:00
> Liberals lie by saying that it wasn’t a majority; yet omitting a key detail: Yes Hamas won, with 44%.

44% of the party list votes and 41% of the constituency votes; the PLC had 132 seats half elected by party-list proportional method and the other half by vote-n/top-n win elections in electoral districts (while mechanically slightly different, this tends to basically approximate the partisan effect of plurality election of multicandidate slates, where party is the main driver of preferences, though in the PLC in some districts there was an additional twist of reserved seats for Christians which went to the highest voted Christian candidate regardless of where they placed overall.)

The reason Hamas was able to secure an outright legislative majority despite having a plurality of votes in both halves of the election is largely the wildly non-proportional results of the latter: with 41% of the district vote, they secured 68% of the district seats.

Also, those results are Palestine-wide, and Hamas IIRC (I can't easily locate data by district or split Gaza/WB) way overperformed in the WB largely as a protest vote against incumbent Fatah members.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-18 00:36:37+00:00
I used to subscribe to the washington post before the most recent election. Im willing to pay for the content I see or read, but I can't possibly pay for ALL the content that crosses my vision. Like streaming services, I used to have just one, and now there are like 100. If I paid for every show I watched I'd be paying over $100/mo in streaming services. Now I pay for NPR'S premium subscription. If every writer on the internet paywalled their content behind some content network's subscription model, I would happily just not read it
by anuramat | 2025-08-18 00:36:59+00:00
Opus 4.1:

> how many times does letter R appear in the word “blueberry”? do not spell the word letter by letter, just count

> Looking at the word “blueberry”, I can count the letter ‘r’ appearing 3 times. The R’s appear in positions 6, 7, and 8 of the word (consecutive r’s in “berry”).

<https://claude.ai/share/230b7d82-0747-4ab6-813e-5b1c82c43243>
Show HN: Open WhisperScribe – Offline speech-to-text for any app
by nisrulz | 2025-08-18 00:37:24+00:00
I built Open WhisperScribe after struggling with the complexity, paywalls, or limitations of most speech-to-text tools for macOS and elsewhere. My main requirements were:

Simple, <5-min setup

Runs fully offline, locally (no data leaves your machine)

Works seamlessly in any app — just press a hotkey, speak, and your words appear where your cursor is (code editors, terminal, you name it)

Fast and distraction-free

It uses OpenAI’s Whisper model under the hood, but wraps it in a lightweight CLI tool that sits quietly in the background. The project is open source (Apache 2.0). Setup is a single script, everything is automated.

Demo, install info, and details: https://github.com/nisrulz/open-whisperscribe

Feedback and constructive criticism is welcome!
by moritzwarhier | 2025-08-18 00:37:55+00:00
Maybe they lost sleep over it, thinking

Wait, these people are clearly not just saying: Do Not Track me, they're also saying: Don't show me ads! Which is a demand that any ad-tech company must take very seriously! We can't ignore the privacy implications of our ad networks. We better avoid any such privacy concerns and comply with the user's expressed priorities.
by cssanchez | 2025-08-18 00:38:25+00:00
This makes sense if you think models will continue their current architecture and will always generate random predictions full of hallucinations. I see the next leap forward in SOA models with someone finding the right way to architect a Logic engine and a Knowledge engine necessary to implement the Provability Fabric you propose. In short, I would say a knowledge kind of bloom filter should weed out factual hallucinations, while a logic one will solve the "how many Rs in strawberry" problem.

Most likely a SOA model will implement a kind of provability fabric to set up guaranteed output rails. But if we implement this today, for example, let's say we tell a model to classify input into one of 3 set categories, the PF will guarantee the model will only output one of those three options, but it can still "hallucinate" by picking a bad category using faulty logic, breaking the rules, etc.