MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gruez | 2025-09-02 21:05:44+00:00
>Equifax: In September of 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that exposed the personal information of 147 million people. The company has agreed to a global settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and 50 U.S. states and territories. The settlement includes up to $425 million to help people affected by the data breach.

How much money did they make from the breach though? The argument made by the gp was that the fines were "pocket change compared to the piles of cash they made while ignoring those regulations.". According to FTC's press release, they were fined at least $575M for "failure to take reasonable steps to secure its network". How much do you think did you think equifax saved by skimping on security? Probably not $575M. They got pwned by an outdated third party library. There's no way keeping your libraries up to date is going to cost anywhere near that amount.
by 47282847 | 2025-09-02 21:06:02+00:00
I like to distinguish between religion and spirituality, where religion is the organized form where you are either a member or not. Religion requires certain beliefs which are externally prescribed, so in joining a religion I hand over authority to somebody else than myself when it comes to values and rules. This in my eyes makes it inherently more collectivist than individualist.

https://isha.sadhguru.org/en/wisdom/article/spirituality-vs-...
by croon | 2025-09-02 21:06:22+00:00
The problem was obvious a long time ago, and if I was better at searching I could probably find a comment I made around GPT-3 having system prompts to make it more like a human, which has (at least) 2 effects:

1) Alters your trust value for correctness. I would assume some trust it more because it sounds aware like a human and is trained on a lot of data, and some trust it less because a robot should just output the data you asked for.

2) When asking questions, turning the temperature up was meant to improve variability and being more "lifelike", which of course would mean not return the most probable tokens during inference, meaning (even) less accuracy.

A third one being confidently outputting answers even when none exist was of course a more fundamental issue with the technology, but was absolutely made worse by having an extra page of useless flowery output.

I can't say I predicted this specific effect, but it was very obvious from the get-go that there was no upside to those choices.
by gruez | 2025-09-02 21:07:11+00:00
>Sounds like exactly what it is... it's too big of a class to be managed, and therefore should not be?

You missed the other 2 of the 3 parts of that argument.

>In fact, the very next line is the judge saying:

I'm not saying they're objectively right, just that there's more to the argument than "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable".
by chippiewill | 2025-09-02 21:08:57+00:00
Comparing to the UK probably isn't the best though since the UK latitude makes it not super favourable to Solar. It would be better to compare it to Southern Europe.

Spain has 40GW and GDP that's about 1/10th of China. Still, dividing China's capacity of 90GW by 10 still means they built a quarter of Spain's capacity in a month. Crazy.
by breppp | 2025-09-02 21:09:00+00:00
According to Hamas, which is also the source of the data of deaths you previously quoted, the number of births "is equal" to the number of deaths.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/senior-hamas-of...

https://www.memri.org/tv/sami-abu-zuhri-hamas-gaza-war-babie... (Around 00:40)
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-02 21:09:08+00:00
HN in 2046

> Headline: OpenAI raises 400 Trillion, proclaims dominion over the delta quadrant

> Top comment: This just proves that it's a bubble. No AI company has been profitable, we're in the era of diminishing returns. I don't know one real use case for AI

It's hilarious how routinely bearish this site is about AI. I guess it makes sense given how much AI devalues siloed tech expertise.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-09-02 21:09:09+00:00
> Let's suppose the aim of the article was indeed to learn PBR from first principles, what would it look like? Quantum electrodynamics?

Something like that, yes. A truly from-first-principles treatment of photon-surface interactions would involve an extremely deep dive into quantum numbers, molecular orbitals, solid state physics and crystal lattices (which are metals), including a discussion about how electron waves superpose to produce various conduction/valence bands with various band gaps, and then discuss how photons interact with these bands.
by kube-system | 2025-09-02 21:09:10+00:00
I don't know that much about them, but it looks like they have 57 repositories on GitHub. Are they redirecting income to enrich specific people or commercial enterprises? I don't see any anyone claiming that they are.

There is no requirement that a 501(c)(3) post everything publicly.

I completely understand and agree that sharing science is a good thing... but it is also dumb to suggest that scientists must put their head in the sand and ignore data that just happens to be under copyright. And just because it is, doesn't mean that it can't be reviewed -- it means it can't be redistributed.

I mean, for heavens sake, every science textbook I ever read in school was encumbered by copyright. That doesn't mean we should burn science text books or that the data in them is subject to some replication crisis.

I think you're building a mountain out of a molehill here.
by hashstring | 2025-09-02 21:09:50+00:00
You still ask for evidence that their recommendation algorithm is not actually not open-source, despite that I just presented to you that the last so-called “open-source” commit was made almost 800 days ago.

To summarize, you believe that because X once called X’s algo open-source, that it must be open-source (“unless proven otherwise”) in the comment section of an article that (again) explains that Twitter censors any unwanted opinions for self-interest.

I think the Flavor Aid remark was entirely warranted.
by dfabulich | 2025-09-02 21:10:26+00:00
This article proposes two options, one where you add a `<script>` tag in the XML body, which breaks validating parsers, and another approach where you attach CSS to the XML document with `<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="styles.css"?>`, but this only works with `Content-Type: text/xml` and not `application/rss+xml` or `/atom+xml`.

It would be great if browsers were to support a header (or some other out-of-band signal) would allow me to attach some CSS + JS to my XML without any other changes to the XML content, and without changing the Content-Type header.

Specifically, I'd love to be able to keep my existing application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml Content-Type header and serve up a feed that satisfies a validating parser, but attaching CSS styling and/or JS content transformations.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-02 21:10:59+00:00
> Posse Comitatus act makes it unlawful for the US military to act as a police force in the US.

Strictly speaking, that's not correct. The Posse Comitatus Act just changes the status of using the military as a police force from “allowed because any person or group can be deputized as a police at any time”, to “the US military can be used as a police force only under the laws specifically allowing and governing the US military as a police force.”

(Of course, the Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal law, which means in practice the primary mechanism for enforcing it is for the executive branch to arrest and prosecute offenders. This works tolerably well to prevent, say, a rogue sheriff calling up his buddy who happens to command an infantry company to come help out, but not particularly well to dissuade the President from directing the military for policing as a matter of Administration policy.)

In principal the courts can constrain the government based on it, as well, but it is noteworthy that the determination that the deployment was illegal in the case filed by the State of California almost immediately when courts were open after the initial LA deployment was announced on June 7 and before troops arrived on June 10 was just released, on September 2, nearly 3 months later. And is on hold for 10 days to give the government time to appeal. So, one might consider the courts to not be a meaningful constraint, here.
by lioeters | 2025-09-02 21:11:22+00:00
About embedding JSON in a script tag, I recently read an article on the risk of a closing </script> tag within the JSON that could break it.

Safe JSON in script tags: How not to break a site - https://sirre.al/2025/08/06/safe-json-in-script-tags-how-not...

As with all untrusted content, depending on where the JSON string comes from, sanitizing the output is worth considering.
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-02 21:11:29+00:00
There's nothing particularly scary or extreme about the climate of any major North American city.

Except for sub-zero temperatures. And regular 100+ degree temperatures. And tornadoes. And derechos. And hurricanes. And a bunch of other weather phenomena that doesn't happen regularly in Europe.

All weather-related excuses why those cities cannot be made less car-dependent are, to put simply, fucking bullshit excuses and just that.

Spoken like someone who doesn't understand how weather, people, or cities work.
by FredPret | 2025-09-02 21:11:35+00:00
Lived in various spots in downtown TO for nearly a decade.

The climate alone easily justifies building pedestrian tunnels.

You come across as one of those car-hating fanatics who'll zero in on literally anything about North American cities, blaming everything you don't like on Evil Car Culture.

I've lived in Europe and in North America, in both places with and without a car.

Car + N.A. is the most convenient and comfortable combination, by a very long way, even if you're stuck in a condo in the gridlocked downtown Toronto as I was.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-02 21:11:55+00:00
Suppose Apple makes devices and has an app store, but you're not required to use their app store, and then if someone can coerce Apple to censor something, anyone can route around it by using one of the others who can't be coerced, e.g. because they operate in a different jurisdiction. That's not centralized; there is no single party who can serve as a chokepoint for the bad guys to set up their nefarious surveillance/censorship apparatus.

Now suppose that only one company has an app store for a given platform, or the alternatives only exist on paper because there are too many barriers for ordinary people to use something else and then the one store still has 99% market share, or they use their control over the device to exclude apps even if you use a different store. That's still centralized and that type of centralization has to be broken in order to solve the problem.
by delichon | 2025-09-02 21:12:02+00:00
> it keeps the board focused on long term performance of monetary policy instead of focusing on the next election.

The neutral dispassionate bureaucrat is a unicorn. One might exist but I won't bet on Diogenes ever finding them. It would be a strange alchemy for political appointees to transmutate into unbiased technicians. As with SCOTUS, a longer term is mostly a longer period to apply partisan values.
by richardfeynman | 2025-09-02 21:12:10+00:00
There is an old Jewish saying: the antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence.

Whether or not I was part of the pro Palestine movement is completely irrelevant to the thread and I have no obligation to prove it to you. Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter to me and iota. But tell you what, if we can put some stakes on this (e.g. $10k if I have the goods), I'll do it for money. I'll be happy to donate to your $ to the idf.
by Lammy | 2025-09-02 21:12:15+00:00
> It's big brother mechanisms without a Big Brother.

Big Brother does exist: it's money. If there were some single named entity, people would rebel against it, so it's diluted and realized through financialization of one's interactions with other humans. Big Brother is invisible to individuals because it's us, and no individual thinks “I'm Big Brother” when it's their point of view looking out. It's an illusion that creates and enforces scarcity but only works if everyone else also believes (power word: “Full Faith and Credit”).

Check out “Wishes and Rainbows” from The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for a primer on our road to rootα: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/economic-education/wi... (favorite panel, top-right on page fifteen: ◀ 1̵1̵ + 9 ／ = 20 ▷)
by keeda | 2025-09-02 21:12:32+00:00
I don't know, anecdotally I never heard MSFT employees grumbling about stack ranking. The lack of internal collaboration seemed to be more top-down, stemming from powerful execs expanding and protecting their fiefdoms.

Compare that to, say, Amazon, where stack-ranking seems to be an unofficial yet actively enforced policy. I've worked and talked with a huge number of ex-Amazon people and each and every one of them had myriad horror stories about the dysfunctional corporate culture. On the other hand, MSFT employees seemed to have much more balanced experiences.
by michaelm244 | 2025-09-02 21:12:36+00:00
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Show HN: Making the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection Browsable
by ajhaupt7 | 2025-09-02 21:12:43+00:00
I built a website featuring the paintings at https://pomological.art and a [https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mhoodlbpfiobhfbblii...](Chrome extension) that shows a random watercolor from the collection on each new tab.

*The story*: In the 1880s the USDA commissioned 7,500+ botanical illustrations to document American fruit varieties in a time when we had over 14,000 types of apples. The collection got digitized after decades in government storage (thanks especially to Kent Whealy and then Parker Higgins), but it remains scattered across government sites, Wikimedia, and the Internet Archive, and difficult to really explore and dig into.

*The site*: Lets you filter by crop type, browse by artist or range of years, examine particular varieties, or see where specimens came from on a map. You can explore how the same variety changed in appearance over time, or browse paintings that show plant diseases. My goal is to continue to research and start to provide history and context for the varieties themselves. The Chrome extension just serves up a random painting each time you open a tab. It's a nice way to stumble across varieties you've never heard of.

*Some context:* Previous HN discussions covered the collection itself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287019, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397168). Parker Higgins FOIA'd the USDA and got them to drop their paywall after discovering they'd made a grand total of $565 over several years (https://parkerhiggins.net/2015/11/the-usda-pomological-water...).

*What's cool*: Apple hunters use these paintings to identify "extinct" varieties still growing in abandoned orchards. The Lost Apple Project matched fruit from a tree on Eastern Washington's Steptoe Butte to paintings of the Nero apple, which was assumed to be lost for a century. The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project a few years back rediscovered the Colorado Orange the same way, matching fruit from a lone tree to four paintings in the collection.

*Why I care:* I'm starting a small cidery in Oregon (called Landrace Cider) and have become obsessed with rare and heirloom varieties over the years. I stumbled across the collection a couple years ago doing some variety research on [Orange Pippin](https://www.orangepippin.com/), and it still boggles my mind that such an incredible resource exists and lives in the public domain and yet so few people have ever heard of it.

*Also:*

I wrote a more in depth slash thoughtful essay on the topic, which tells the full story of the collection and gives more context for why the USDA felt compelled to pay artists to paint fruit: https://andrewhaupt.substack.com/p/a-field-guide-to-resurrec...
by leecarraher | 2025-09-02 21:13:42+00:00
i agree, also add to that, that many python modules are foss projects that are maintained on a limited basis or budget. Refactoring code that may have some unsafe async routines would be costly for an org, and dreadful for recreation. So you can either have a rich library of modules, or go async and risk something you need not working then having to find a workaround. Personally, if parallelism is important enough, i use ctypes and openmp. If i need something more portable, i have a few multiprocessing wrappers that implement prange and a few other widgets for shared memory.
by otterley | 2025-09-02 21:13:56+00:00
What's the tangible financial impact to someone who's been deemed undesirable by Google?

Bear in mind that you can mitigate a lot of risk by operating as a business instead of establishing a relationship in an individual capacity.

And people, much like businesses, need disaster recovery plans. We advise people to have escape plans from their homes; similarly, they should have escape plans for their critical information. Almost nothing in this world is risk-free.
by eliaskickbush | 2025-09-02 21:14:13+00:00
Highly recommend to anyone struggling with linear algebra to check out Linear Algebra Done Right, by Sheldon Axler. Do always keep in mind that some concepts are very verbose, but truly out of necessity. If you're talking about an N by N matrix, you're naturally going to have to distinguish N^2 different elements.

You can go very far without touching matrices, and actually find motivation on this abstract base before learning how it interops with matrices.
by Hansenq | 2025-09-02 21:14:33+00:00
This seems like a very sensible and logical conclusion by the judge to me.

An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine because everyone else was worse. You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law--if Apple wants to make Google the default, they should be allowed to do so! The ban on exclusive contracts makes sense though; they should not be allowed to use contracts to furthur their monopoly position.

And similarly with Chrome; it made no sense to bring Chrome into this equation. Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today NOT through exclusive contracts, but because Chrome is just a better product. Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.

With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore) and AI search engines potentially shifting the search landscape, who knows if Google will still be a monopoly 5 years from now. Software moves fast and the best solution to software monopoly is more software competition.
by lucb1e | 2025-09-02 21:15:07+00:00
I don't think it's going to look much better if you add in wind capacity :(

Looking it up... 16 GW onshore and 15 GW offshore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd... This graph looks like it started in earnest in like 2005, so 1.6GW/year on- and offshore combined, peaking in 2017 with 3.5GW in one year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
by tibbar | 2025-09-02 21:15:22+00:00
Nope, it was a live coding interview, less than an hour. I personally did a double-take at the beginning of the interview. However, the long tail of people who can code up algorithms and apps quickly is very long indeed. There are certainly people I've worked with who are just multiples faster than me in this kind of situation, and I could imagine them passing the interview.
by circlemaker | 2025-09-02 21:16:16+00:00
This made me think of a much more interesting project. A compendium of information automatically extracted from research articles.

Essentially one totalizing meta analysis.

E.g. If it reads an article about the relationship between height and various life outcomes in Indonesian men, then first, it would store the average height of Indonesian men, the relationship between the average height of Indonesian men and each life outcome in Indonesian men, the type of relationship (e.g. Pearson's correlation), the relationship values (r value), etc. It would store the entity, the relationship, the relationship values, and the doi source.

Something like a quantitative Wikipedia.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-02 21:16:46+00:00
I doubt it. I've seen this for products with 10,000+ reviews. It's totally mainstream. If Amazon had a problem with it, they would have cracked down already.

What can they say, that "20% off your cart" coupons are prohibited anywhere else the product is listed? That's not feasible. You see North Face doing the same thing with sports retailers. Their jackets never go on sale, but retailers make cart-wide promotions available so you can still get the discount.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-02 21:16:48+00:00
I regularly listen to music that I would have sneered at, when I was younger.

I don't feel the need to blast it to the world, though. I have learned that music and art tastes are extremely personal, and that not wearing them on my sleeve, gives me the freedom to just like what I like.

I really enjoy being adventurous; especially in food. It took over twenty years of repeatedly going to Tokyo, to finally land something I Just. Couldn't. Eat. (Undercooked chicken)[0].

I also have learned that "Things are cliché for a reason."[1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVRylssdu-o

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/the-road-most-traveled-by/