MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dr_dshiv | 2025-09-25 08:07:06+00:00
This is really beautiful content. I’m assuming it comes from the fact that there are Google teams tasked with digitizing old manuscripts?

I work with a library (Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica) in Amsterdam that has thousands of manuscripts from the renaissance to the early modern period… all very esoteric. We really want to get the renaissance into model training! Over 75% of books (1450-1700) are unscanned — and the manuscripts are in even worse shape.

Curious if anyone knows if there any new handwriting recognition benchmarks? I’ve noticed the main model providers have plateaued in the past year on their ability to read manuscripts / modern handwriting… I think the lack of well-designed competitive benchmarks is the issue…

I love positive examples of the intersection of AI and the humanities.
by jjcob | 2025-09-25 08:07:13+00:00
I've long accepted that Airlines charge for "better" seats. I don't care for the "good" seats. I'm happy with whatever seat they put us in.

What you seem to be missing is that some airlines have started to split up groups on purpose. When they assign seats, even if 75% of the seats are still unassigned, they put people who booked together far apart from another to make them pay for seats.

That's where it turns to evil in my opinion. Fortunately "normal" airlines don't do that yet so I know that I can avoid crappy airlines like Ryan or United.
by mkfs | 2025-09-25 08:07:21+00:00
The problem with this essay (besides DHH's hyperbolic prose, e.g., "woke orthodoxies") is that DHH, not having grown up in the US, doesn't realize that the normalization of violence in response to speech actually represents a substantial deviation from historic American norms. The ACLU was once one of the preeminent leftwing political organizations in America, and it distinguished itself through unwavering advocacy on behalf of ALL forms of offensive speech, including flag burning and extreme pornography, but also extremist politics. Progressives who thought the answer to bad speech was more speech and that sunlight was the best disinfectant were once plentiful.

Then in the 2010s, the "punch/kill Nazis/fascists" messaging took off, and now the consensus position on the left is that it's acceptable to use violence in response to speech: https://www.cato.org/blog/51-strong-liberals-say-its-morally...

DHH's misstep is that he's resorting to arguing he and others are being falsely labeled as "Nazis," but conceding, even implicitly, the assumption that it's OK to respond to speech (and only rightwing speech; "tankies" and Sharia-pushing Islamists always fit through the Overton window) with violence is already surrendering too much.
by rbanffy | 2025-09-25 08:08:05+00:00
> When we’re designing new Raspberry Pi products, we naturally look back to the computers of our childhoods: the tastefully beige BBC Micro, the Sinclair Spectrum with its rubber keyboard, the Commodore 64 “breadbin”, or the grandfather of them all, the Apple II.

Now someone needs to make the keycaps with the right themes - black with function keys for the BBC, QL-looking for the Spectrum, shades of brown for the 64, and brown with "BELL" on the G for the Apple II.
by ge0rg | 2025-09-25 08:08:07+00:00
The last two generations of Samsung NX cameras were built around Tizen Linux, and it was (and still is) easy to get a root shell on them. They still make great photos and you still can buy them used for a good price.

NX300/NX30/NX2000 had a read-only rootfs, but for NX500 and NX1 there was a persistent mod that extended camera functionality with a menu, and you can actually SSH into them and rsync your photos... while shooting!

Background: I've recently taken over maintenance of the NX-KS mod at https://github.com/ge0rg/nx-ks-mod
by Matumio | 2025-09-25 08:08:08+00:00
I once had weird results with searching specifically in the Switzerland region, it didn't find an obviously Swiss site. IIRC it was solved it by switching back to international search. I'm using Kagi exclusively, and I don't remember having such trouble recently. Maybe they fixed it.

I just did a quick test: local search for a specific law term. Kagi, Google and DDG all found the roughly same relevant sites in the top five. Each has a different top result. Google's and DDG's are a private law company. Kagi's first is an official government site. (With a suspicious non-government domain, so I had to check, but yes it's prominently linked from the main government site.)
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-25 08:08:36+00:00
> The more efficient and feasible solution to these shortages is to incentivize citizens to enter these roles.

If one would purely go by the rules of the free market, the solution would indeed not be immigration, but either automating these jobs away, rationalizing them so you need fewer employees to handle the same workload or raise the compensations and non-payroll benefits to attract more (prospective) talent.

The problem is, it's one thing if you do that for air traffic controllers. Flights are too cheap anyway, making them a bit more expensive to pay for more ATC will also reduce demand which in turn would also have positive benefits on the environment (CO2) and airport residents (noise).

But for stuff like garbage disposal handlers, wastewater facility staff and other jobs on the high-ick, low-pay side of things? These are actually and literally vital for society to survive, but if prices were raised to reflect the fact that you need to pay people pretty huge sums of money to do these jobs? Barely anyone would remain to pay for these services.

In the end, immigration has been used by Western societies as a stopgap to avoid the inevitable conclusion that the wide masses by far do not earn enough money, and now that immigration is drying up - in the case of the US, from the political climate, in the case of Europe including the UK, many people from Eastern Europe going back to their home country during Covid and discovering life there has actually vastly improved over the last decades - the cracks are growing so large they can neither be hidden nor overlooked any more.
by sjw987 | 2025-09-25 08:09:51+00:00
I've found the divide between people who switched to using a phone full time and people who still use physical peripheral based computers (even for recreational activity) is generally linked with whether the person is a digital productive/consumerist type person.

Nobody is coding or writing anything longer than an email or social media post on a virtual keyboard.

The average screen time for younger people borders on 7 hours. It's almost a third of the day or 40% of the woken day for most people. I still can't wrap my head around how that can even be possible, but then I see in public most people you look at in any given moment are reading, watching or sending/sharing something.

If the conspiracy theorists are right, the tech industry created a surveillance system beyond their wildest dreams.
by liquid_thyme | 2025-09-25 08:10:09+00:00
Take a look how many brown people have left their country of origin and are doing science in the US, writing code for big tech, and contributing to the economy. It doesn't mean that the entire worlds population should be encouraged to move to the US. And maybe the right answer for us is to slow down immigration, but fuck... how about just a thank you for all the people who are working hard out here? I don't think these people deserve to be demonized as much as they have been by this administration.
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-09-25 08:10:50+00:00
Presumably they are doing that based on browser or OS language settings rather than IP-based location? As an English-speaker living in a German-speaking land nothing infuriates me more than websites that assume I would rather have German language content simply based on my IP address rather than checking my system language.

But yes, to confirm your assumption - I followed the link above and got the English version.
by watwut | 2025-09-25 08:11:05+00:00
> doesn't realize that the normalizing of violence in response to speech actually represents a substantial deviation from historic American norms.

What alternative history you are talking about here?

Also, right wing actors including Kirk himself were promoting violence for years already. As far as American right wing goes, violence is a cool thing that makes you manly man. It is just that it should go one way only - from them to others.
by latexr | 2025-09-25 08:11:32+00:00
> and that's reason enough to have anything

I very much is not. That logic could be used to justify just about anything, from slavery to littering.

You don’t live in a world populated by just yourself, there are people around you affected by your actions. Be respectful and mindful that what you do affects others. And yourself as well, even if you don’t immediately see it.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-25 08:12:40+00:00
You have to have at least two kids for that, and with a big enough age difference for it to work.

And if it goes wrong you can get prosecuted for that and/or dragged through public infamy. In fact even if it doesn't go wrong you can probably still be reported for it.

Which is presumably a very good thing for child safety, but obviously there are these downstream effects.

Another similar thought was the theory that car seat laws act to cap more families at two children because with three, you can't legally fit both parents and the children into a normal car.
by mavhc | 2025-09-25 08:12:44+00:00
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx8/83/10795784/11125864/supp1...

We utilized a professional photographic inkjet printer (ImagePROGRAF PRO-1000, Canon), equipped with 11 ink cartridges and a chroma optimizer (PFI-1000 LUCIA PRO Ink, Canon), and used the manufacturer-recommended genuine paper (Photo Paper Premium Fine Art Smooth, Canon) for printing. To reproduce the desired reference colors for the spectral color chart, we also implemented a customized printing calibration process while maintaining the International Color Consortium (ICC) profile. The actual printed colors (output) showed notable distortions compared with the intended colors (input), which were particularly influenced by the type of paper (print sheet). For customized printing calibration, we mapped the exact relationship of the CIE xy chromaticity values between the digital color input and printed output values. After the printing process was completed, we measured the reflectance spectra of all reference colors from the printed spectral color chart (Fig. S1) using a spectrometer and a diffuse reflectance standard (equivalent to using CIE illuminant E). We confirmed that the CIE xy chromaticity values obtained from these measurements were in excellent agreement with the desired input values within the SWOP v2 gamut (Fig. 1(e)).
by quitit | 2025-09-25 08:13:00+00:00
Results may vary:

Searches for Amazon, Temu, Shein - result in each being listed in the promotional panel and then as the first result.

For Firefox: Chrome is listed in the promotional panel and Firefox as the first result (below it).

The promotional panel has a different background colour and “Ad” badge, but is otherwise identical to other listings.

Two results fit on the screen: the promotional panel and the first listing. Diverging from Google is that the ad result is obvious and doesn’t push the search result out of view.
by keiferski | 2025-09-25 08:13:34+00:00
Honestly I think there are two different audiences. The type of person that is open to traveling, exploring jobs, etc. in their twenties is different from the “institutional pipeline” track of good high school > good college > good job.

This early decision thing is functionally going to move a few pipeline kids from the corporate world to the startup world, which probably isn’t a terrible outcome. But it also reflects how YC has become a marker of institutional pipeline success for a lot of people.
by ge0rg | 2025-09-25 08:16:00+00:00
When reverse-engineering some of the Samsung NX camera firmware files, I found USB-PTP code that implements different custom remote commands <https://chaos.social/@ge0rg/114723076401717110> but I'm not deep enough into PTP to make sense of them.

Is there anywhere a group focusing on understanding and re-implementing custom PTP protocols?
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-25 08:18:12+00:00
Nuclear power has had a negative learning curve since its inception. How many hundreds of billions in subsidies to "climb it"?

Personally I think nuclear costs are closely aligned with the Baumol effect. [0] It is construction and does not become more efficient while wages rise as an economy develops.

Therefore there is a small timespan to build nuclear power with acceptable costs right when the economy is advanced enough to manage the technology but wages haven't caught up yet. Like they have done in the west.

> Are you saying even the private sector should not invest in nuclear? Why?

The private sector can do what it wants. But that is not what is happening in the west, the few construction projects that get greenlit do it on the base of absolutely massive subsidies.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
by akimbostrawman | 2025-09-25 08:18:20+00:00
No you are the one twisting it. It was about conflict of interest regardless how hard you try to throw around ad-hominems and rewrite history.

A game reviewer should not be in sexual relationships with people selling games that get reviewed. I think anybody not ideologically captured would agree.

I also find it tasteless to use the same rhetoric here as it was used back then to slander someone into suicide.
by ahartmetz | 2025-09-25 08:18:31+00:00
As a staunch Linux user, I'd rather have a Windows where I can install anything than a "Linux" where all software comes from an app store. But I expect Google to find some middle ground that allows enough freedom to develop on the OS for the OS, with enough fiddling and scary warnings to keep most users from using that mode.

For now I'm kind of neutral leaning negative on this initiative. I fear more dumbed down, locked down and centrally controlled computing on PCs.
by qdw | 2025-09-25 08:18:32+00:00
Punch-configured textiles go all the way back to the 1700s! The 1804 Jacquard Loom, which used cards, was a big part of the Industrial Revolution and influenced Babbage's Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, both of which use punchcards.

More background: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
by pmontra | 2025-09-25 08:20:01+00:00
It used to be there, 2007-2012 https://archive.org/details/safari-5.1.7-windows

I found an announcement in Italian on Apple website. It's from June 2007 https://www.apple.com/it/newsroom/2007/06/11Apple-Introduces...

The original plan with the iPhone was to have web apps, not native apps. That's why they needed to run the rendering engine of the iPhone on Windows. Then they went native and Mac only with the dev environment.

I don't think that Apple would earn one single dollar by porting Safari to Windows again.
by yacthing | 2025-09-25 08:20:11+00:00
That's a lot of words, but I think it boils down to: you're making an assumption that two calendar events with identical naming and identical time entries will always have a desired behavior of being deduped.

- Maybe you want to separately invite people to the same thing and have different descriptions, now you're increasing the number of things to equate.

- Maybe a user creates one event that is simply a title and a time, and they then want to create a second one for another purpose. However, it keeps getting deduped and they don't know why. Now you have a user education problem that you have to solve.

- Now you might think: well just make it a toggle in the settings! Okay well now you have to add a new setting and that expands the scope of the project. Do you make it opt-in or opt-out? If it's opt-in, what if no one uses it? Do you maintain the feature if there's a migration? If it's opt-out, you still have the above problems.

I could go on. And this is mostly an exercise of not underestimating a "simple" change. Calendars (and anything involving time) in particular can get very complicated.
by goku12 | 2025-09-25 08:21:06+00:00
That isn't entirely true. Perhaps it's because small content creators aren't a monolithic group. There are a few who try the alternative approaches and succeed. For example, whenever buying ebooks, I first check if the author sells it directly or through small publishers. It's always a better deal if they do. Cheaper than what you pay on amzn, DRM-free and occasionally lifetime free updates (eg: The Kubernetes book by Nigel Poulton). Despite the lower price, the author gets most, if not all of what you pay. They're sometimes liberal with the sharing policy too. They ask you to not share it around in large numbers, while conceding that just a copy or two is expected. I find this to be a reasonable demand. Therefore I encourage people to buy a copy for themselves if they like the book.

I have heard someone trying this approach with music albums and succeeding at it. The album is more likely to go viral due to the easiness in sharing, while you'll always find consumers who volunteer to pay you. While the returns per copy is low, the large number of copies means that your profits may be higher than if it were DRM-encumbered. Musicians may also like the fact that there are no powerful middlemen that they have to contend with. In fact, this is what YouTube creators already do when they choose alternative monetization paths like Patreon.

What's really needed is for people to support and encourage this model and such creators. We used to earlier blame them saying that people choose convenience and short term savings over long term market health. But that's no longer applicable. People are so fed up with being exploited under consumerism that they've started boycotting these big players to regain their independence and self sufficiency. The real issue preventing open digital markets is just the lack of awareness of their existence. This message has to be spread somehow.
by jastuk | 2025-09-25 08:21:24+00:00
You've mentioned in the docs that:

> Gemini leverages native video understanding for direct analysis, while Local models reconstruct understanding from individual frame descriptions - resulting in dramatically different processing complexity.

For people like me who haven't dabbled much with AI video processing and have no intuition for it, could you clarify the drawbacks of such a local-only approach vs what Gemini offers? I don't mean the performance or power/battery impact (that part is clear), just in terms of end-result and quality what the practical differences are.

I'm in the only-100%-offline camp here but would like to know what I'm missing out on since I won't even try Gemini here.
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-09-25 08:22:28+00:00
> If you're reading this you probably have some idea of what slate is.

Tip for anyone writing technical/product blogs: never assume readers know what your product is. They probably came in for the first time from a random link on some site like HN and this is your first (and maybe only) opportunity to get that elevator pitch in. I think this particular example is a good one, in that they immediately provide a one-sentence "refresher" that gives the rest of the post some context.

Might be also worthwhile considering a more memorable/distinctive name, unless of course this is only aimed at those who are actively and aggressively following developments in that space. The post piqued my interest enough to make me vaguely think, hmmm, I might follow that up some time in the future when I'm less busy however if I fail to bookmark it and assuming the name 'slate' loosely sticks in my head, then a Google search for 'slate', 'slate ai' or even 'slate ai agent' isn't going to bring me back to this product again.
by al_be_back | 2025-09-25 08:22:37+00:00
locking people in sure achieves at least one thing, but then so does adding two zeros. Jobs locked staff in, at Google when you a book meeting room, the wifi and lights cuts off at the end - a kill-switch approach [1].

personally, I think those hacks are cute and handy, but once you recruit well, reward and empower your staff, leading becomes much easier. At google, that approach probably helped more with their ESG policies than staff productivity. In Jobs' case, probably helped "him" stay focused rather than his staff, a meditation technique of sorts lol

Re: Juries. wasn't the main reason to prevent the world outside the court from influencing their decision?

[1] I think it's on How Google Works
by tomhow | 2025-09-25 08:23:24+00:00
We’re discussing the cynical assertion that YC is looking for founders who will be compliant and subservient to boards. I’m just pointing out that if there is any defining quality in the kinds of founders that an investor like YC is looking for, it’s that they are not compliant and subservient to anyone, including or especially boards :)

When pg and others talk about the qualities they look for in founders, they use terms like “formidable” and “force of nature”.
by nwienert | 2025-09-25 08:23:42+00:00
Yea the funny thing is that the real lie is that Safari is behind, that hasn’t been true for many years now.

The further irony is calling it the “new IE” when in fact it’s Chrome that is far more similar to the IE of old, at least in terms of the dirty tricks - dominant market share, uses it to push non-standards, stuffs in user hostile features to the brim, and spies on you incessantly. The only difference is it’s not terrible at performance.
by palmotea | 2025-09-25 08:23:49+00:00
> I suspect the economics of investigative journalism work out better for an individual who is personally invested in their work.

> Your scenario is the same for a news company. Investigative journalism takes time. And, in the meantime, you have HR departments, corporate rent, etc., you’re trying to build a media empire and your ROI is being compared against just investing in the S&P 500.

No. In the mean time, you have opinion-havers and other investigative journalists writing articles, maintaining a steady audience. An "individual [investigative journalist] who is personally invested in their work" wouldn't have the steady output to maintain one.

> And I don’t think the economics of corporate news make sense.

The economics of solo news make even less sense.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-25 08:24:45+00:00
Some stuff that could be improved with modern C++,

Instead of

static bool file_exists(const std::string &p) { struct stat st{}; return ::stat(p.c_str(), &st) == 0; }

Use the filesystem API,

std::filesystem::exists(path);

-- https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/filesystem.html
by yobbo | 2025-09-25 08:24:47+00:00
No, it is not an accusation.

If you accept that the world is not "just" (just-world-fallacy), then you will also believe that rewards are indeterministic. It follows that rewards are attributed to luck, while effort and results are (by definition) not.

There is no accusation of dishonesty in this argument, and no need to feel accused of scamming.

(One point is that people who persist longer, receive more awards because the "area" under their luck-curve is larger. And people who have lots bad luck in the beginning get discouraged and stop trying ...)
by alex-moon | 2025-09-25 08:24:49+00:00
This is depressing to be sure, but rest assured there is a long history of middle management being "the buffer" between upper management and everyone else. It's a common trope in TV shows and such.

I think one of the most important things this write up is maybe missing (though I am not super clear on how this has changed recently) is when middle management are acknowledging to their reports that the C suite are a bunch of cunts, is that they also need to be saying the same thing to the C suite themselves. "Going out to bat" literally means feeding back to upper management that what they're doing isn't going to work. This should be a fight that is ongoing. Again, privately, one to one, but you do actually need to be doing it. If you can back it up with numbers, even better.