MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-08 17:13:51+00:00
Hadn't heard of acoular before:

> Acoular is a Python module for acoustic beamforming that is distributed under the new BSD license.

> It is aimed at applications in acoustic testing. Multichannel data recorded by a microphone array can be processed and analyzed in order to generate mappings of sound source distributions. The maps (acoustic photographs) can then be used to locate sources of interest and to characterize them using their spectra.

Different domain probably, but I wonder how useful/adaptable something like this would be for immersive audio. I have no idea my use case (where-as beam forming seems so useful for getting clear pickup), but I was blown away by djjules's recent ambisonics microphone build; so cool. They also have the most epic diy 7.1.4 immersive audio build. https://hackaday.com/2025/09/07/maurice-brings-immersive-aud...
by MrGilbert | 2025-09-08 17:13:53+00:00
In 2019, I was part of a research project. One of the meetings took place in Eilat, Israel. A colleague of mine and me myself took a flight from Frankfurt to Eilat. There where 4 people on the Airbus - basically each of us had their own steward. It was wild. I think I'll never be able to recover my ecological footprint from that. From what I remember, the route was initially planned for the Eilat-Ramon Airport by Lufthansa, but wasn't yet open at that time. We landed on a military airport north of Eilat. Being two blokes in their mid- to end-twenties, we got questioned at the airport. He went to some muslim countries before, so… there were some questions to be asked by authorities.

When we left a few days later, we where greeted by a man at the checkout. No name tag, wearing a black suit. Spoke perfect german. Casually talking to us while we checked out. To this day I wonder if he was from Mossad or something. It was strange. It‘s pretty easy to develop some kind of paranoia in this setting.^^ Eilat itself was nice, though. Many Russians where on vacation there back in the days.

On our flight back, we boarded the plane with three other people.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-08 17:13:55+00:00
And at the other extreme, it takes TC39 seven years to bikeshed half of a decent implementation of Python's context managers: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen...

On one extreme, we have standards committees that move glacially, and on the other, we have a chaotic package ecosystem moving faster than is prudent. The two are related.
by austin-cheney | 2025-09-08 17:14:02+00:00
I can provide you with some missing background as I was a prior full time JavaScript/TypeScript developer for 15 years.

Most people writing JavaScript code for employment cannot really program. It is not a result of intellectual impairment, but appears to be more a training and cultural deficit in the work force. The result is extreme anxiety at the mere idea of writing original code, even when trivial in size and scope. The responses vary but often take the form of reused cliches of which some don't even directly apply.

What's weird about this is that it is mostly limited to the employed workforce. Developers who are self-taught or spend as much time writing personal code on side projects don't have this anxiety. This is weird because the resulting hobby projects tend to be substantially more durable than products funded by employment that are otherwise better tested by paid QA staff.

As a proof ask any JavaScript team at your employment to build their next project without a large framework and just observe how they respond both verbally and non-verbally.
by alphazard | 2025-09-08 17:15:02+00:00
There has historically been a lot of flawed research about saturated fat. Sugar and fat together is always fattening, and being obese comes with a lot of risk.

> Summary from GPT

This whole post is filled with bad implicit advice. No one should stop eating meat to make their eyesight better. No one should add canola oil to their diet as a source of Omega 3.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-08 17:15:08+00:00
> Is how they evolved relevant?

Yes. You described a “primitive” legal system that in truth didn’t exist.

Early legal systems didn’t have anything to do with victimhood beyond demonstrating harm. They didn’t have systems for the powerless because they didn’t concern themselves with them, they were a means by which elites peacefully resolved disputes.

> unless it has a mechanism how people can secede legally

What?

> When I meant is that victimhood works when you need to gain support from somebody with more power than you

How would you differentiate that from demonstrating harm?
by chimeracoder | 2025-09-08 17:15:24+00:00
> I'm confused, I've restored Signal from encrypted backups before. I did it like 4 months ago. What's this feature?

Those backups are stored locally, are platform-specific (Android-only), and there is no feasible way to automate their transfer to any other device, which means that either you have to manually manage them regularly, or you risk losing your entire message history if your phone suddenly dies (or is stolen, or broken beyond repair, etc.).

This is a true automated, off-site backup feature.
by amluto | 2025-09-08 17:15:39+00:00
It seems plausible that the protocol could be designed such that the device doesn’t know the recovery key. The key serves three purposes: (a) identifying the backup when a user tries to restore it, (b) authenticating that user to the restore API, and (c) allowing the user to decrypt the backup.

(a) is much simpler if there is a fixed identifier of a user, but that identifier doesn’t need to be the entire key or even part of it — it could be some derived material.

(b) isn’t strictly required but I would be very uneasy about allowing anyone who stole a user’s device to download even the ciphertext of that user’s future chats. Also, there’s an obvious issue that even the ciphertext reveals something about the amount of activity from the user.

(c) requires that the restoring user hold something like a private key, that said key can be derived using the restore code, and that the user’s device does not know the private key.

One straightforward-ish solution would be for the user’s device to generate, once, a key pair, a user ID, and a backup API key. (The ID and API key could be generated server-side.). The restore key is (user ID, private key). The device retains (user ID, API key, public key). To upload backups, the device establishes a secure session, sends the user ID, proves knowledge of the API key, uploads a backup, and receives a new API key. The old API key is revoked.

This means:

1. The device does not retain the ability to download future backups.

2. A clone of a device (say id the device leaks its secrets somehow) cannot be used to upload new backups on an ongoing basis without being noticed because of the API key rotation.
by jcranmer | 2025-09-08 17:16:01+00:00
> imagine the board member saying the same thing about the PC, the internet, mobile computing, cloud computing…

For the deployment of the PC, I think the vast majority of companies start from an environment where there were already terminal systems or shared workstations available, and the adoption of PCs happened as they became powerful enough to accomplish the tasks that were already being done on the larger computers. It wasn't really a "thou must use PCs, though I know not how they are useful" mandate.

A better example of such a mandate can be found in education, and most of my personal experience with such thou-must-use-technology mandates has been that they've been similarly ineffective as the AI mandate.
by variadix | 2025-09-08 17:16:02+00:00
Instruction decode for variable length ISAs is inherently going to be more complex, and thus require more transistors = more power, than fixed length instruction decode, especially parallel decode. AFAIK modern x86 cores have to speculatively decode instructions to achieve this, compared to RISC ISAs where you know where all the instruction boundaries are and decoding N in parallel is a matter of instantiating N decoders that work in parallel. How much this determines the x86 vs ARM power gap, I don’t know, what’s much more likely is x86 designs have not been hyper optimized for power as much ARM designs have been over the last two decades. Memory order is another non-negligible factor, but again the difference is probably more attributable to the difference in goals between the two architectures for the vast majority of their lifespan, and the expertise and knowledge of the engineers working at each company.
by martin-t | 2025-09-08 17:16:22+00:00
Yes, I won't pretend it's clear cut or that the numbers without context mean much.

How I see it:

- Victimhood works when there is somebody to appeal to or other people to gain support from. - Violence works when there's no higher power or when you already have the most popular support you ever will.

Getting more people to join you and openly protest is a lot of implied/potential violence. Meaning you can use victimhood (see how the police are beating us) to gain more potential violence for use later. Either the people in power see this and back down (e.g. Velvet revolution) before the violence materializes, or not. They can also see how successful materialized violence can become and flee (e.g. Syria) or they can try to win a civil war (e.g. Myanmar).

I haven't read much about India yet but my guess is victimhood worked in the case of India because essentially they were getting the support of citizens in the UK (a higher power) to pressure their government into giving it independence. It was costly for the politicians to be oppressors and also get reelected.

Victimhood failed in China and recently Belarus because 1) there was nobody to appeal to 2) the oppressors didn't back down 3) the protesters failed to materialize the violence and were defeated by the government's violence.
by idatum | 2025-09-08 17:17:03+00:00
In order to give Ente a try I self hosted it. It's working great. The initial interest was also E2E encryption.

The backing Minio store is on a VPS to keep it off-prem. The rest (front end UI etc) I host in my home and use the same VPS as a reverse proxy.

Right now I don't share with anyone else, but use it to get photos sync'd off my phone and shared with my own desktop/tablets.

I'm sticking with it and my family is interested in using as part of degoogle'ing. So I eventually will pay for it for a way to better share photo albums (i.e. too many photos to just share over Signal).
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-09-08 17:17:28+00:00
> It's the only serious candidate for being a ski-nation in all of mainland Asia

Indian Himalayas have ski resorts.

> If Nepal wanted, it could transform itself into a Bali style tourist destination and ascend towards being a middle economy.

Landlocked country with little natural resources. Who's funding this project? Watch a YouTube about the Kathmandu-Pokhara road. Infrastructure is not easy there.

> Nepal's refusal to leverage the (few) advantages of its geography is baffling.

They grow rice on hills, have a thriving mountaineering ecosystem, and build dense cities in the valleys large enough to support them. How are they not leveraging them?

> As a communist-adjacent nation, it has a closed off economy with deep suspicion towards free markets.

The county to their south went this way after the Raj, for what I believe are fair reasons. I can see how that influenced Nepal's hesitancy to open up more to international brands.

> Yet, the national messaging alternates between blaming India or China for all their problems.

They aren't wrong! India had "interstate entry taxes" up until 2017 - taxes that cargo had to pay in each state on the way to the ports. It wasn't even the just the national governments making life harder to Nepali, it was individual states!

> However, do the protesters have an outcome in mind

Their anger is justification enough. It's tough for college graduates in the region to find a career that matches their education level.

> But, will they be okay with opening Nepal up to free markets?

Nepal isn't as closed to free markets as you keep insinuating. There are malls with Asian brands where people can go shop. Not having as many American brands makes sense given the logistics problems. There are western restaurants. There are western hotel brands. There are Indian hotel brands.

> This may mean selling resort building contracts to major western ski companies.

Taj, Oberoi, Leela (Indian resort brands) could probably build a wonderful one. And they haven't, I presume they have the numbers demonstrating this doesn't work economically.

> It may mean opening unsafe sweatshops for Adidas to make shoes there.

There's no world where that makes sense economically. See my note about India previous state tariffs/state taxes. Just presume there's all sorts of hidden middlemen between KTM and ports.

> It may mean resource exploration by foreign mining companies.

China would be there already if it was viable (read more about the few roads north to China)

> with steep political costs (Farm Bill, GST) to the the incumbent.

Your wording makes me think you are Indian. If I'm correct, The best thing you can do is encourage more Indians to go enjoy what Nepal has to offer now, so they can afford to invest in some of the improvements you propose :)
Show HN: Self-maintenance app, Maintain U
by RDenise1 | 2025-09-08 17:17:43+00:00
As a former healthcare worker I launched the Maintain U app, a smartphone application designed to empower users with effective self-maintenance scheduling. While some apps focus on one particular area of maintenance, I designed the app so that it would cover a variety of areas such as personal care, mental health, medical activity, exercise, relaxation, spirituality, and entertainment.

The purpose of the app is to manage and coordinate the task of scheduling self-maintenance activities and keeping up with the appointments.For example, I once had a complex med schedule that was made simpified by scheduling my doses on the Maintain U app. The app allowed me to keep my med doses on schedule.

My inspiration for creating the Maintain U app stems from a deeply rooted belief that it is just as important to maintain one's self as it is to maintain one's house or vehicle to preserve them. Go to the the following link to try the Maintain U app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.myapp.main...
by everdrive | 2025-09-08 17:17:51+00:00
I'm deeply confused by a lot of the privacy discourse here. There seems to be opposing goals between preventing the fingerprinting mechanisms and just preventing uniqueness. Under the "preventing uniqueness" model, my Linux computer with custom Firefox and no fonts, and no js, etc. is the "most fingerprint-able" because it's the most unique. Whereas grandma on Windows and Chrome is "less unique," and therefore in some sense less fingerprint-able.

I think there are a few potential problems with this view that I never see discussed:

- Firefox sends some dummy data when making use of privacy.resistFingerprinting, and so you should get a unique fingerprint _every time_ you visit a site, so the fact alone that you're unique might potentially not matter if you're _differently_ unique every time you visit the site. Is there a flaw in this line of thinking?

- My understanding is that the primary utility of browser fingerprinting is for advertising / tracking. In other words, the bulk of the population an advertiser would actually care about would be the huge middle of the bell curve on Chrome using Windows, not the privacy nuts on Linux with a custom browser config. In other words, if "blending in with the crowd" really worked I would think that tracking companies would fail against the most important and largest part of the user pool. If anything, it's more important to target grandma as she will actually click on ads and buy stuff online compulsively.

Can anyone speak to these points? I often feel like the pro-privacy people are just crawling in the dark and not really aware of that real-world tracking is actually occurring vs. what might be possible in a research paper. Maybe I'm just the one that's confused?
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-08 17:17:54+00:00
Related:

95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 - Aug 2025 (415 comments)

95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 - Aug 2025 (167 comments)
by withinboredom | 2025-09-08 17:18:00+00:00
This isn’t exactly true. My password manager fails to recognise the domain I’m on, all the time. I have to go search for it and then copy/paste it in.

That being said, if you’re making login pages: please, for the love of god, test them with multiple password managers. Oh, and make sure they also work correctly with the browser’s autotranslation. Don’t rely on the label to make form submission decisions ... please.
by kube-system | 2025-09-08 17:18:17+00:00
> But then, why not just sell straight out fakes?

Because the price, availability, demand, and expertise required to source and/or manufacturer the different components of a phone are different, depending on the part. Third-party refurbishers derive their margin from exploiting these differences. That's why this market exists.

For example, manufacturing the mainboard for a phone is quite expensive and requires components that only a few companies in the world can manufacture. A third-party refurbisher can source mainboards for phones much more cheaply and easily by buying phones that people have dropped and broken.

It's the same reason junkyards exist for cars. The capital require required to manufacture an engine or transmission is quite high. However, removing one from a discarded vehicle is extremely easy and cheap.

> Harvesting is only worth it if genuine parts are difficult to obtain legitimately.

That doesn't make any sense. New and genuine parts are the most expensive components that can be used to repair phones. Third-party and used parts are almost universally cheaper than new original parts. If a refurbisher uses these parts, they can make more money, which is why they do it.

> Also realize that we are not just talking about an iPhone refusing to work with fake parts. We are talking about genuine parts from iPhone A not working with iPhone B of the exact same model.

Yeah, that's the second problem. Even cheaper than low quality third-party parts, are used genuine parts from stolen phones. That market has problems for two group groups. The people buying the phones are still getting Frankenstein phones consisting of used parts, and the people who bought the actual new phones from the manufacturer are now targeted by thieves.
by igouy | 2025-09-08 17:19:39+00:00
Not ignored!

doesNotUnderstand: aMessage "Handle the fact that there was an attempt to send the given message to the receiver but the receiver does not understand this message (typically sent from the machine when a message is sent to the receiver and no method is defined for that selector). Raise the MessageNotUnderstood signal. If it is caught, answer the result supplied by the exception handler. If it is not caught, answer the result of resending the message within a guard for infinite recursion. This allows, for example, the programmer to implement the method and continue."
by tracker1 | 2025-09-08 17:20:03+00:00
There are a few more things I didn't like about DVD, I don't like the blocky artifacts that you often see in the background (doors, bookcases, etc). Some of the earlier scenes in The Matrix are particularly bad. Fire/explosions are also very poor.

Beyond this, is when they bake a 16:9 movie into the 4:3 format losing significant fidelity. Batman Begins was nearly unwatchable.

This of course doesn't get into the sound quality/mixing issues you mention... I wish they had something closer to h.265 at that time, as I don't mind a blurry background nearly as much as blotchy/blocky artifacts for similar sizes or smaller. A 2gb h.265 movie from blueray looks dramatically better than a 4+gb DVD movie.
by jwr | 2025-09-08 17:20:11+00:00
This is so incredibly important! I am very happy to see this, the fact that you could not do a backup on iOS and you would lose everything in case your device dies is the biggest drawback of Signal.

I still do not quite understand why I can't have the option to just back things up to iCloud (I do understand the security implications and I'm fine with it), but ANY backup solution is better than "your data is gone, tough".

Oh, now having reread the article I do understand why I can't have any other backup options. Paid subscription. Of course.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-08 17:20:49+00:00
The so-called "algae" are not algae.

"Algae oil" is a marketing term that has been chosen for sounding better, especially to vegans, than "Schizochytrium oil" or "oil from stramenopiles".

Schizochytrium is an organism somewhat similar to a fungus, but which is not a fungus and it is distantly related to brown algae and diatoms (but unlike those, it is not an alga; it never had chloroplasts acquired by symbiosis).

The first cultivated strains of Schizochytrium produced only DHA, but now there are strains that also produce EPA. At least in Europe, you can easily find Schizochytrium oil that contains DHA + EPA in a 2:1 proportion. For most humans, especially for most males, both DHA and EPA are needed, because the capacity of interconversion between them is typically insufficient in comparison with what is needed.

However, even if it has become cheaper in recent years, Schizochytrium oil remains about 3 times more expensive than fish oil, per its fatty acid content. There are also many vendors that try to deceive their customers by selling diluted oil at about the same price as the decent vendors, therefore at a price many times higher per the fatty acid content.

In Europe, in recent years I have preferred Möller's Pure Cod Liver Oil, which is quite tasty, either alone or added to food. Using bottled oil is much better than using capsules. Besides being cheaper and not ingesting garbage capsules, tasting the oil makes certain that it neither is rancid nor has any suspect content. This is also true for Schizochytrium oil. Many decades ago, cod liver oil had a reputation of something that children were forced to eat, despite its bad taste. This is completely untrue nowadays, when the oil is made either immediately after catching or from fish that have been frozen immediately after catching, so the oil has not degraded and it retains a pleasant taste.

If Schizochytrium oil will become cheaper, i.e. with a price not more than double in comparison with pure cod liver oil, then I will switch to it, removing from my diet the only ingredient that is obtained by killing animals.
by DaveZale | 2025-09-08 17:21:22+00:00
https://archive.is/20250908164913/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

Good article. Clearly, the assault on higher ed free speech originated from the same lobbying forces that ponied up several hundred million dollars to influence US foreign (and, in the case of free speech on campuses, domestic) policy.

Single issue, wealthy and powerful lobbying groups are capable of extraordinary damage. We are witnessing this in horrifying detail on a daily basis. At least those of us who read uncensored news from overseas.
by lordhumphrey | 2025-09-08 17:21:34+00:00
> It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic.

My curiosity is piqued by this. Do you mean to say you've moved there from somewhere place? And what do you mean, why is it the only country for which you're politically optimistic?

I don't mean to pry, and have no ulterior motive or point in asking. It just seems like a strong statement, and I cannot guess what you mean, or if I'm missing some cultural insinuation here or something. Taiwan does sound like a very interesting place to me, generally, though.