MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OneMorePerson | 2025-09-06 17:54:51+00:00
Ah interesting, I suspected there might be some differences, unfortunate that the US hasn't made any regulation around that.

Given the context of this post being a sunscreen scandal, do you know how UVA is tested? Someone earlier was saying that sunscreen is tested on humans and you see how long it takes to get burned, if that's the case and UVA doesn't burn you, I'd be curious how these UVA filtering claims are validated.

Even among sunscreens that do a decent job filtering UVA the points in this article are still relevant: https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/whats-wrong-with-high-s...

Basically high SPF allows behavior thats somewhat unnatural. Someone with SPF 15 might get a tiny bit sun sensitive after a few hours and go back inside, where someone with SPF 50+ keeps going all day long and that might not be healthy.
by vouwfietsman | 2025-09-06 17:54:51+00:00
Yes thats a big part, but even bigger is just the alignment of teams.

Imagine team A building feature XYZ Team B is building TUV

one of those features in each team deals with messages, the others are unrelated. At some point in time, both teams have to deploy.

If you have to sync them up just to get the protocol to work, thats an extra complexity in the already complex work of the teams.

If you can ignore this, great!

It becomes even more complex with rolling updates though: not all deployments of a service will have the new code immediately, because you want multiple to be online to scale on demand. This creates an immediate necessary ambiguity in the qeustion: "which version does this service accept?" because its not about the service anymore, but about the deployments.
by rockostrich | 2025-09-06 17:56:27+00:00
> This shouldn't really big a big deal in most metro areas

Not sure which areas you're referring to but in the Northeast EV infrastructure around the metro areas is not the best. In my experience, I would have to plan out my stops if I was driving between Philly and NYC if I didn't have a 90+% charge and even then I would be worried that there would be a line or chargers would be out of order.

Taking a look at an EV map, there's only half a dozen stations around NYC with 100+ kW chargers and almost all of those chargers are in-use at 2 pm on a Saturday. Sure you can go to a slower charger or just wait, but it's a pain in the ass if you are trying to plan out a trip and show up on time.
by redwall_hp | 2025-09-06 17:56:56+00:00
One of many reasons I despise Trash-Fil-A. They go hard on forcing their employees to sound a certain way, and it's just creepy as well as being abuse of their workers.

Paying someone a pittance, or anything at all, doesn't entitle you to control over their perceived mood or how they speak. You'll have to negotiate with SAG-AFTRA if you want to hire actors.
by k0tan32 | 2025-09-06 17:57:07+00:00
Thanks for sharing your experience.

It's a fair note about tooling in general, I started with the code editing because it's the first thing before you can taste and judge the rest.

I think my frustration comes from the fact that in most other ecosystem I can use the tools I like, but in Java I have to use things like Intellij.

Intellij CE may be open source, but it is entirely owned by a private business whose primary goal is to sell their product - which affects how well are the integrated, open to accept community feedback, etc.
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-09-06 17:57:22+00:00
The reality is also that nobody (aside from Mark "I Want To Buy a State of the Art AI Research Lab" Zuckerberg) is even offering millions in cold hard cash.

Instead, they're offering something worse: the _chance_ to cash out equity that _might_ be worth that at _some_ point in the future.

Versus spending time with my kid right now. Or any of the hundreds of other more enjoyable things I can do with my time.

They're dangling a lottery ticket in front of us. I've seen the end of that movie several times myself now; enough to know the odds are long.

So yeah: no thanks.
Evelyn – Early Prototype of a Local-First AI Voice Assistant
by Plasticity_AI | 2025-09-06 17:57:51+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Ted. While recovering from a major surgery from 2022-24, I decided to finally try building something instead of just consuming. I became fascinated with AI assistants but frustrated by their reliance on cloud infrastructure and the costs that come with it.

I started wondering: could I build something that runs entirely on my own machine?

I’m not a professional programmer — this is my first real project — but over 5 months of learning and trial and error I put together a rough prototype, Evelyn.

Right now Evelyn can:

– Run fully on macOS (I’m testing on a Mac Mini M4 Pro/Macbook Pro M1). – Use Whisper for transcription. – Connect to open-source LLMs via LM Studio – Generate real-time speech with fallback layers (XTTS → ElevenLabs → macOS TTS). – Keep a simple memory across sessions (JSON-based, with dedupe + recall). – Route queries between local and external models with a basic orchestrator.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtJpAgLSmfI

This is *not a product* — just an early attempt at exploring local-first AI in a world that's hyperscaling. I use it daily to learn and to see what works and what breaks.

I’d really appreciate feedback on: – The technical approach (what would you change or simplify?) – Whether local-first assistants like this have potential vs. cloud-only. – Advice on making a project like this easier for others to try.

I don’t have source ready yet, but I can share more about the architecture and trade-offs in the comments.
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-06 18:00:08+00:00
It’s the BS “American exceptionalism” like this country was founded on “hard work” and the idea of “equality” when it was literally founded on slavery and enshrined in the constitution that an entire race of people were considered 3/5th of a person.

Right this very second, the same Republican Party who fights tooth and nail for the right to bare arms is trying not to let transgender people carry guns.

Which industrial country has a higher rate of incarceration than the US? A higher infant mortality rate? Less people covered by health insurance? A lower life expectancy?

There is absolutely no objective quality of life measurement that you can name where the median American citizen is better off than a country in Europe or in Canada or the UK.
by asadotzler | 2025-09-06 18:00:32+00:00
It's not just hearing. I can "feel" in the seat of my pants, the pull of the steering wheel, et. I have a vestibular system that knows bout relative velocities and changes which coordinates with my other senses, and more. This all allows me to take in far more than what my eyes see, or my ears hear and to build the correct intuitions and muscle memories to get good at driving and adapt to new driving environments.
by bko | 2025-09-06 18:00:46+00:00
Yeah, you're right. I think every job should be available to every person regardless of the things required from the job, personal circumstance, skillset or anything else.

If some job requires more than strictly 9-5 and cannot be done by a paraplegic, visually impaired, neurodivergent individual, the job should just cease to exist, lest we be called some kind of 'ist'.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-06 18:00:58+00:00
OCaml supports imperative, functional, and OOP just fine, and you use whichever makes more sense, and it has a REPL, too, most popular one is called "utop", but "ocaml" works. As for graphics debuggers, I have no idea if OCaml has a graphical one (if that is what you meant), but there is ocamldebug[1][2].

That said, I agree, why not just use Lua? Seems like the perfect language when you only care about the game itself and not the underlying stuff. There are many other alternatives that are better than Clojure anyways. I might be pessimistic, but I doubt Clojure is going to catch on.

[1] https://ocaml.org/docs/debugging

[2] https://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/guides/debug.en.html (contains section "Using the debugger under (X)Emacs")
by weinzierl | 2025-09-06 18:02:47+00:00
The fact that we still do not have a significant number of cars with LIDAR on our streets somewhat proves which approach the auto industry considers viable for business.

I am much more curious about the next ten years. If we can bring down the cost of a LIDAR unit into parity with camera systems[1], I think I know the answer. But I thought that 10 years ago and it did not happen so I wonder what is the real roadblock to make LIDAR cheap.

[1] Which it won't replace, of course. What it will change is that it makes the LIDAR a regular component, not an exceptionally expensive component.
by compiler-guy | 2025-09-06 18:03:01+00:00
Early compilers really did suck. They were long term big wins for sure, but it wasn't unreasonable for someone who was really good at hand assembly, on tightly constrained systems, to think they could beat the compiler at metrics that mattered.

Compilers did get better, and continue to--just look at my username. But in the early days one could make very strong, very reasonable, cases for sticking with assembly.
by Animats | 2025-09-06 18:03:27+00:00
So what does it mean for Tesla's "Robotaxi"? Is that being shut down?

It's pathetic. The Austin Robotaxi demo had a "safety monitor" in the front passenger seat, with an emergency stop button. But there were failures where the safety driver had to stop the vehicle, get out, walk around the car, get into the drivers's seat, and drive manually. So now the "safety monitor" sits in the driver's seat.[1] It's just Uber now.

Do you have to tip the "safety monitor"?

And for this, Musk wants the biggest pay package in history?

[1] https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-06 18:04:18+00:00
Okay, wow -- I stand corrected. I will edit my comments. It will take me awhile to wrap my head around Massachusett's-style state-level restrictions. While I wouldn't personally expect this to survive a Supreme Court adjudication, apparently there exists no Supreme Court ruling either upholding or striking down the prohibition on secretly recording oral conversations in public.
by hirvi74 | 2025-09-06 18:04:35+00:00
I am curious -- What the average allotted amount of paid time off is at places that implement the 996 system? I truly do not know, but I would wager it's probably not great either, relatively speaking.

I also question how much work is actually being completed in such an environment. I have never worked in nor been to Japan, but I do recall reading/hearing about how rough the work culture is over there.

However, I have read/heard that people aren't nose-down in work the entire time. It's not uncommon for people to be in the office for long periods while not actually working.

Rather, it's more about the image -- don't leave before your boss, the later you leave after your boss the better you look, etc..

So, I wonder if the Chinese 996 systems somewhat mirrors what I have read about Japan?
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-09-06 18:05:15+00:00
> With single modality sensors, you have no way of truly detecting failures in that modality, other than hacks like time-series normalizing (aka expected scenarios).

"A man with a watch always knows what time it is. If he gains another, he is never sure"

Most safety critical systems actually need at least three redundant sensors. Two is kinda useless: if they disagree, which is right?

EDIT:

> If multiple sensor modalities disagree, even without sensor fusion, you can at least assume something might be awry and drop into a maximum safety operation mode.

This is not always possible. You're on a two lane road. Your vision system tells you there's a pedestrian in your lane. Your LIDAR says the pedestrian is actually in the other lane. There's enough time for a lane change, but not to stop.

What do you do?
by username332211 | 2025-09-06 18:05:17+00:00
Not necessary. If economies of scale exist, that means that a popular product is going to be inherently superior in terms of price or quality than an unpopular one. Companies that advertise effectively can offer a better product precisely because they advertise and have large market share. (Whether they do it or not is a question of market conditions, business strategy, public policy and ultimately their own decisions.)

Surplus value isn't really that useful of a concept when it comes to understanding the world.
by lightedman | 2025-09-06 18:05:24+00:00
I have ridden in many Tesla-based Ubers with human drivers using autopilot.

Here outside of Los Angeles, about an hour east, they do not do well at all on their 'auto-pilot.'

Your area has the benefit of being one of the primary training areas, and thus the dataset for your area is good.

Try that here. I'll be more than happy to watch you piss yourself as the Tesla tries to take you into the HOV lane THROUGH THE BARRIERS.
by therein | 2025-09-06 18:05:27+00:00
The fervor with which some feel the need to defend AI is what is incredible. Adoption, innovation, impact, not so much.

The attempt to compare it with Version Control, with sliced bread, with plumbing and sanitization practices. Think of any big innovation and compare it with it until people give in and accept this is the biggest bestest thing ever to have happened and it is spreading like wildfire.

Even AI wouldn't defend itself this passionately but it conquered some people's hearts and minds.
by vanderZwan | 2025-09-06 18:06:15+00:00
Well, it cost more to design and build.

I personally would consider the total cost of dropping two atomic bombs much higher, for hopefully obvious reasons.

EDIT: Although, per the article, I might have been wrong about that:

> The loss of life was shocking. The B-29 raid on Tokyo on the night of 9 March 1945 is thought to have killed as many as 100,000 people, making it more destructive than either of the atomic bombs that were to follow.

Fascinating bit of history though, thank you for sharing.
by unethical_ban | 2025-09-06 18:06:19+00:00
A demented authoritarian needing weekly multi-hour affirmations of his grandeur from his cabinet and the wealthiest corporate overlords on the planet.

Said overlords creating numbers from fantasy-land and selling it to the citizenry as some kind of plan or commitment.

It is mild compared to the other hundred things going on (like the Defense secretary saying women shouldn't have the right to vote), but I can only comment on the ones involving technology.
by quectophoton | 2025-09-06 18:07:02+00:00
They mention that they're "demonstrating that privacy-respecting AI services are feasible", knowing their duck.ai is sending the prompts to other AI services, and then in the same paragraph they mention leaks and hacks.

To their credit, their privacy policy says they have agreements on how the upstream services can use that info[1]:

> As noted above, we call model providers on your behalf so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them. In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests, including not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models, as well as deleting all information received once it is no longer necessary to provide Outputs (at most within 30 days, with limited exceptions for safety and legal compliance).

But even assuming the upstream services actually respect the agreement, their own privacy policy implies that your prompts and the responses could still be leaked because they could technically be stored for up to 30 days, or for an unspecified amount of time in the case of the exceptions mentioned.

I mean, it's reasonable and a good start to move in the direction of better privacy, way better than nothing. Just have to keep those details in mind.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckai/privacy-terms
by biztos | 2025-09-06 18:07:05+00:00
It helped that they started in places like San Francisco, where the taxi cartel was so absurdly terrible that you'd win fans just by showing up.

I lived in SF when Uber started. We used to call Veteran's Cab because they were the only company that wouldn't ditch on the way to pick you up, but it was completely normal to wait more than an hour for a cab in the dark hinterlands of 24th and Dolores or the industrial wasteland of 2nd and Folsom. An hour during which you had to be ready to jump as soon as the car arrived. Everybody had at least one black-car driver's cell number for downtown use because if they happened to be free, you could at least get picked up.

Uber would have had a religious following of fanpersons even if all they'd done was an estimated pickup time that was accurate to within 20 minutes.
by lr4444lr | 2025-09-06 18:07:14+00:00
Consider 2 million carefully, though. Collectively in a 9-5 job over decades you would probably lose more time with your kids than you would with how much earlier you could retire with even doing the 2 million grind for one year.

Depending on the specifics, for that level of comp. I would consider it even having 2 kids.
by non_aligned | 2025-09-06 18:08:19+00:00
> Writing unit tests where needed makes you more productive in the long run.

Debatable? It has positive effects for organizations and for the society, but from a selfish point of view, you gain relatively little from writing tests. In your own code, a test might save you debugging time once in a blue moon, but the gains are almost certainly offset by the considerable effort of writing a comprehensive suite of tests in the first place.

Again, it's prudent to have tests for more altruistic reasons, but individual productivity probably ain't it.

> Writing in modern languages makes you more productive.

With two big caveats. First, for every successful modern language that actually makes you more productive, there's 20 that make waves on HN but turn out to be duds. So some reluctance is rational. Otherwise, you end up wasting time learning dead-end languages over and over again.

Second, it's perfectly reasonable to say that Rust or whatever makes an average programmer more productive, but it won't necessarily make a programmer with 30 years of C++ experience more productive. This is simply because it will take them a long time to unlearn old habits and reach the same level of mastery in the new thing.

My point is, you can view these through the prism of rational thinking, not stubbornness. In a corporate setting, the interests of the many might override the preferences of the few. But if you're an open-source developer and don't want to use $new_thing, I don't think we have the moral high ground to force you.
by mrandish | 2025-09-06 18:08:40+00:00
> There are different ways to measure this like how many years and what counts as an "AI investment"

Indeed. Anyone familiar with public company financials and budgeting (like Wall Street analysts) know any number like this is only a broad estimate at best. For example, is that number counting the full value of capital expenditures (such as GPUs) immediately amortizing that cost over the asset's life? Most accounting methods would say capex should be depreciated over time but in many kinds of purchase transactions NVidia may book the full revenue in the quarter they deliver the card, so in that sense, the money is "in the economy" which may be more appropriate given the context.

And that's just a simple example. It gets much more complex and there are lots of judgement calls about how multi-use assets are booked and employee costs are apportioned across business units. It's likely no one at Meta even has a credible budget number for overall Meta-wide "AI spend over the next three years." If you ask the CFO to come up with a number, they're going to assign a team to make a best estimate under "given assumptions" - and then that team is going to ask you 20 or 30 questions about how you want to count. So... it's understood that numbers cited at a photo opp like this are SWAGs at best. Plus, even if finance penciled out an estimate, that estimate would certainly change substantially during the yearly budget cycle and change meaningfully quarter to quarter. So, such a snapshot in time is pretty worthless in terms of actual predictive value.
by dcminter | 2025-09-06 18:08:47+00:00
But here's the money quote from Mr Lowe's take on the paper: "If you were presented with these data without being told that stirring was the variable under consideration, you’d have to conclude that whatever it was, it wasn’t really that important, honestly."

i.e. it doesn't necessarily speed it up or change the yield. So why do you care if the reactant's still on the bottom of the vessel in that case?
by Zenst | 2025-09-06 18:08:52+00:00
Depends on the model - if you have a sparse model with MoE, then you can divide it up into smaller nodes, your dense 30b models, I do not see them flying anytime soon.

Intel pro B50 in a dumpster PC would do you well better at this model (not enough ram for dense 30b alas) and get close to 20 tokens a second and so much cheaper.
by motorest | 2025-09-06 18:09:18+00:00
> JSON exists (...)

The blog post leads with the personal assertion that "ad-hoc and built by amateurs". Therefore I doubt that JSON, a data serialization language designed by trimming most of JavaScript out and to be parses with eval(), would meet the opinionated high bar.

Also, JSON is a data interchange language, and has no support for types beyond the notoriously ill-defined primitives. In contrast, protobuf is a data serialization language which supports specifying types. This means that for JSON, to start to come close to meet the requirements met by protobuf, would need to be paired with schema validation frameworks and custom configurable parsers. Which it definitely does not cover.
by rockostrich | 2025-09-06 18:09:21+00:00
One pedal driving means you can come to a full stop and start accelerating again with a single pedal. You can certainly come to a full stop in a manual transmission car without touching the brake pedal or clutch but the engine will stall and you won't be able to accelerate again until you restart it and get the car back in gear. AFAIK no ICE cars have one pedal driving although I guess it's possible to implement sans the regenerative braking.
by integralid | 2025-09-06 18:09:34+00:00
Not if only one is the right one in all cases.

In python you can also do

s = set() s.add(1) s.add(2)

and

s = set(x for x in [1, 2])

But I wouldn't call that having three ways to do the same.

Disclaimer: I don't know java well, just commenting based on the comments above and my python knowledge.
by jtbayly | 2025-09-06 18:11:31+00:00
I was open to being convinced, but this is dumb:

> The company has made its shares more valuable while making itself less valuable.

Share value going up doesn’t equate to the value of the company going up, but that’s what is implied by the quote.

Edit to add: the whole article is saying that there is something nonsensical happening to the proves, by implying that the company should be worth less, not more. Well, maybe it should be worth less, or maybe it indicates they make so much cash that they don’t know what to do with it so I want to own it more. Anyway, without an evaluation of what happens to the value of the companies when buybacks happen, there isn’t even a point to this article.
by capitainenemo | 2025-09-06 18:11:36+00:00
IRCv3 is being incrementally adopted, even if it is a bit slow. I think in the case of the /history command, Libera had some concerns about implementation and what channels would prefer not to have a history. ... and actually, checking the spec matrix, chathistory is still a draft.

But Libera does have some other IRCv3 features enabled.

https://ircv3.net/support/networks

There's also a #ircv3 on Libera with implementation discussion