MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spectraldrift | 2025-09-06 01:13:01+00:00
I'm not sure why this post gets boosted every few years- and unfortunately (as many have pointed out) the author demonstrates here that they do not understand distributed system design, nor how to use protocol buffers. I have found them to be one of the most useful tools in modern software development when used correctly. Not only are they much faster than JSON, they prevent the inevitable redefinition of nearly identical code across a large number of repos (which is what i've seen in 95% of corporate codebases that eschew tooling such as this). Sure, there are alternatives to protocol buffers, but I have not seen them gain widespread adoption yet.
Ask HN: What if teachers invested in students instead of charging tuition?
by koopuluri | 2025-09-06 01:13:19+00:00
Imagine if teachers and mentors could invest in their students by giving them capital and teaching them in exchange for equity in their future outcomes (not income, but future equities in companies).

For ex: Alice, a great designer, could give each of her students capital that the students can use to pay rent, food, products and services to help them design, explore, or whatever (it’s their money!).

But what exactly would Alice get in return? Let’s say we create a “personal token”, an instrument that represents an individual’s potential, with transactable shares, grounded in their equities in companies and other personal tokens (via dividends on capital gains).

So Alice would get shares (equity) in each student’s personal token in exchange for her training + capital.

This would mean:

1. Students don't take on debt. In fact they get paid to learn!

2. Alice is held accountable. If she fails to meaningfully improve her students' outcomes, she loses her investment. This means Alice is forced to adapt her training to what is actually relevant to the world.

3. Teacher-student relationships last years / decades, not semesters. Alice is strongly incentivized to help her students whenever they need it, because she has equity in their long-term success.

But why? AI is making outcomes extreme (power law distribution). We can already feel this in software engineering: AI makes the best engineers far better than the median. As the gap between the best and rest grows, it becomes too risky to finance education with debt for the same reason it’s too risky to finance startups or content creation with debt.

Paul Graham was one of the earliest examples of this model. He didn’t need to guard his knowledge or put it behind a paywall because he had a much more powerful way to capture value: by investing in the founders his essays attracted. If teachers could invest in students, knowledge would spread more freely because sharing knowledge itself would become a funnel for investing. Even students who never raise would still benefit from the higher-quality knowledge that becomes available.

Thoughts?
by fn-mote | 2025-09-06 01:13:32+00:00
> Whereas an established company like Honeywell is [...] going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest

A Nest is ~$150, so I'm curious where these $750-1500 thermostats are...

Seems like you get a Honeywell thermostat for almost exactly the same price, if you don't care about cloud connectivity.
by amradio1989 | 2025-09-06 01:13:39+00:00
An adult content provider is legally bound to not distribute to minors. Its not even debatable.

Your local adult video store can't sell to minors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor buys some goods, the store is liable.

Your local strip club can't let minors into their doors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor gains entry, the club is liable.

The same applies to all age-restricted products everywhere, online or offline. I can't buy liquor on doordash without showing ID for crying out loud.

But for some (probably nefarious) reason, online adult content providers want to pretend the rule doesn't apply to them. Device-level controls? Hilarious. What... are we going to add device-controls to a teenager's car to prevent them from driving to liquor stores too?

Don't get me wrong, there's some shady stuff behind AV. But I strongly disagree with the notion that an adult content provider isn't responsible for restricting their content in a way that works.
by worik | 2025-09-06 01:14:45+00:00
This is a bit hard to bear

So many errors. The recommendations from electrical design are ones we all (should/do) actually follow. Type checking is in addition. We developed it because it helps

So many errors. This one repeated many times...

> grep | sort | uniq, you’re not doing type checking at the transport layer.

Maybe not checking, but definitely assuming! Try that on a binary file, go on!
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-06 01:15:24+00:00
"Elimination of witnesses" makes sense for a cable-tapping mission. You can't let the country know that you tapped their cable. It would ruin the whole point.

On the other hand, if you leave a bunch of dead bodies with bullets in them, a reasonably-competent government is going to figure out that something happened there, and if the cable is near there, it's a reasonably likely candidate...
by numlocked | 2025-09-06 01:16:01+00:00
I hear you, but the article is talking specifically about "embeddings as a product" -- not the embeddings that are within an LLM architecture. It starts:

> As a quick review, embeddings are compressed numerical representations of a variety of features (text, images, audio) that we can use for machine learning tasks like search, recommendations, RAG, and classification.

Current standalone embedding models are not intrinsically connected to SotA LLM architectures (e.g. the Qwen reference) -- right? The article seems to mix the two ideas together.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-09-06 01:20:53+00:00
Because ISC DHCP was discontinued, I switched to dnsmasq, which also caused me to switch my home DNS server from unbound to dnsmasq so that local dhcp hostname registration would continue to work.

I always thought of dnsmasq as a bit of a toy, but I have to admit I've been impressed. So far it's worked flawlessly, and I'm especially impressed that you can reconfigure it without restarting the process.

My only complaint is not specific to dnsmasq, and that's with ipv6. Devices assign themselves essentially random addresses, so it's impossible to correlate DNS lookups from those addresses with what actual device is making the request. The obvious solution to this, a fully managed DHCP6 setup, does not seem to be well supported by dnsmasq, but it wouldn't matter even if it was because so many devices don't support DHCP6, only slaac. So the whole thing is a bit of a mess.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-09-06 01:21:02+00:00
When the Fermi Paradox was first posited, scientists and engineers seemed to believe that interstellar travel was soon to be technologically achievable, a few decades, maybe centuries for the less optimistic. Progress around space propulsion has kind of stalled since then and we should maybe question the possibility of interstellar travel as this would give an easy but unpleasant answer to the famous paradox.
by addaon | 2025-09-06 01:21:29+00:00
> How do I make a mechanical thing happen at a random time with a lava lamp?

Use a heat lamp interrupted by the lava globules to activate a wax motor. If you get the angles right you can probably do this with the same light that runs the lamp itself, or you can put another lamp at a 90° angle (but will have to adjust the main lamp to keep the total heat at the level you want).

Or do similar with muscle wire; more temperature needed to trigger the actuator, but you can get them much smaller so the total heat can be smaller, if you run e.g. a collimated infrared laser as your heater across the lamp.
by mleonhard | 2025-09-06 01:21:32+00:00
According to IIHS insurance loss data, https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/auto-insurance/insurance... , here's the chance of being injured while riding in one of these cars (and filing an insurance claim) relative to the average US vehicle:

- Nissan Leaf -15% (Select "Small" & "4-door Cars" on the page) - Chevy Bolt -34% - Subaru Crosstrek -28% ("Station wagons" & "Small") - Tesla Model 3 +26% ("Luxury cars" & "Midsize")

So the choice of Nissan Leaf was OK from a safety perspective, but the Chevy Bolt is better. The Tesla is much worse.
by mcswell | 2025-09-06 01:21:37+00:00
There are many existing transliteration systems for Arabic, among them SATTS (developed to allow for transmission of Arabic text over telegraphs), the Buckwalter system (developed by Tim Buckwalter), Arabic chat alphabets (used in electronic communications before Arabic script could be easily rendered on electronic devices like phones), and numerous others listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Arabic. There's also the Maltese alphabet, a Roman script used for Maltese (which is an Arabic language).

There are some linguistic oddities in the article, like this: "Emphatic Letters: These letters are pronounced from the back of the throat..." With the exception of heth (a voiceless pharyngeal fricative), the emphatic letters are actually pronounced with the tongue near the roof of the mouth (similar to English t, d, s etc.), but with a secondary articulation that varies across "dialects" (actually distinct Arabic languages). In some dialects the emphatics differ from the non-emphatics only in causing a slightly different articulation of the following vowel.
by koopuluri | 2025-09-06 01:22:33+00:00
This also applies to people who join companies and receive equity as part of their compensation. So initially, it’s most applicable to those who are likely to earn equity in the future — whether by starting a company or joining one.

Over time, though, I see it spreading to more domains as venture-backed models expand. For example, more researchers now get equity upside because more companies are being built around various kinds of research.
by al_borland | 2025-09-06 01:22:43+00:00
This is the explanation from the White House:

> The Founders chose this name to signal our strength and resolve to the world. The name “Department of War,” more than the current “Department of Defense,” ensures peace through strength, as it demonstrates our ability and willingness to fight and win wars on behalf of our Nation at a moment’s notice, not just to defend. This name sharpens the Department’s focus on our own national interest and our adversaries’ focus on our willingness and availability to wage war to secure what is ours.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
by rramadass | 2025-09-06 01:24:07+00:00
Most people know nothing about "Waterfall Model" which if you think about it, is just commonsense meta framework using which you can implement any SDLC methodology. Pair it with "Spiral Model" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model) and you are golden.

This excellent writeup by David Olson gives both the history and the correct understanding; The Myth of the 'Waterfall' SDLC - http://www.bawiki.com/wiki/Waterfall.html
by realz | 2025-09-06 01:25:29+00:00
Might I add that Facebook has also proven time and time again that they believe in zero ethics. They will happily boost a dictator’s post. They’ll happily assist a rapist win elections. They’ll happily let you sell addictive content to kids. Heck they’ll even give you easy ways to target ads to “depressed 14 year old girls” specifically.
by koopuluri | 2025-09-06 01:26:07+00:00
It’s not a pyramid scheme because it’s ultimately grounded in real value: equities in companies, which themselves are grounded in revenue.

If someone becomes a teacher, they would earn equity in their own students’ personal tokens. When those teachers eventually realize gains by selling shares, their own teachers (as shareholders) share in that upside too.

And if the teaching doesn’t actually create value, then everyone in that chain loses, which keeps the system honest.
by WillAdams | 2025-09-06 01:26:55+00:00
EDIT: Just barely mentioned is Axiotron's ModBook --- while not a clone per se (a Mac Laptop was disassembled, keyboard removed, and screen either replaced or reinstalled w/ a digitizer layer), it was a device marketed to folks whom Apple did not have a product for, and until the Apple Pencil, was the best Apple device in between the Newton MessagePad or a Wacom Cintiq for stylus usage.
by noosphr | 2025-09-06 01:27:24+00:00
I found a neat little artist page where they have the local star map, the milky way, the local super cluster and a bunch of other neat laser crystal stuff: https://www.bathsheba.com/crystal/#astro

I'd get one, or for that shipping cost make a better one and send them the data, but current shipping in and out of the US is ... interesting.

A quick google on openscad shows how someone build a model of the solar system: https://www.chrisfinke.com/2016/03/08/animating-the-solar-sy... if anyone else wants to have a go this would be a good place to start generating a model to send to the artist.
by rKarpinski | 2025-09-06 01:27:30+00:00
> (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series)

The Hugo award winning book it's based on is much better.

> FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule

The 'New Deal' saved the US from internal revolution; Huey Long. Nazism was doomed when Hitler invaded Russia, declaring war on America was just the nail in the coffin.
by stingraycharles | 2025-09-06 01:28:09+00:00
Available on OpenRouter as well for those who want to test it: https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.5

I would be interested to know where the claim of the “killer combination” comes from. I would also like to know who the people behind Z.ai are — I haven’t heard of them before. Their plans seem crazy cheap compared to Anthropic, especially if their models actually perform better than Opus.
by nomel | 2025-09-06 01:28:55+00:00
> an aggregate sentiment that hopefully will motivate the right people.

I can't comprehend the thought that polluting this not-bay-area specific forum with complaints will somehow eventually, hopefully, make its way to a politician.

> because I need some platform to say my piece.

This is soap boxing. To affect change, it would be better to do something directly in the real world, rather than hoping for the snark to overflow and leak out of here into the real world.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-09-06 01:29:50+00:00
Apparently their profit is a couple billion, market share is dropping, [1] and they've promised revolutionary products without delivering for a decade now. A multitrillion dollar valuation for a company in decline that fails to deliver innovative or quality products, and a trillion for a dude driving it into the ground, is an interesting quirk of 2010s-2020s economics.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/TSLA-Q2-...
by arjie | 2025-09-06 01:29:52+00:00
Okay, I'm going to try it, but why didn't you link the information on how to integrate it with Claude Code: https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude

Chinese software always has such a design language:

- prepaid and then use credit to subscribe

- strange serif font

- that slider thing for captcha

But I'm going to try it out now.
by ApolloFortyNine | 2025-09-06 01:30:27+00:00
I read this whole article a couple times and don't really u understand what was wrong here.

Google is using their own ad exchange to fill ads? Isn't that... Their entire business model? Does the EU just want more intermediaries to exist? At the end of the day doesn't Google still get to decide how much an ad is worth when someone searches 'car insurance'?

To me this reads like the EU should pass a law describing exactly what they want.

>For example, Google Ads was avoiding competing ad exchanges and mainly placing bids on AdX, thus making it the most attractive ad exchange.

I just don't know why Google couldn't do this. Is this an instance of if they just never used other ad exchanges at all no one would be mad? Like Google getting called a monopoly by requiring the play store to be installed on android phones, while Apple obviously does exactly this just on their own hardware?
by MKuykendall | 2025-09-06 01:30:29+00:00
To use Shimmy (instead of Ollama):

1. Install Shimmy: cargo install shimmy 2. Get GGUF models (same models you'd use with Ollama): # Download to ./models/ directory huggingface-cli download microsoft/Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf --local-dir ./models/ # Or use existing Ollama models from ~/.ollama/models/ 3. Start serving: ./shimmy serve 4. Use with any OpenAI-compatible client at http://localhost:11435
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-06 01:30:35+00:00
Renaming like this is kind of dumb. Historically, Department of War governed the US Army. This rename does an injustice to the US Navy, Air Force and Space Force, lumping them all under "war". It's pretty clearly done on the whim of Trump, which is no way to run a republic.

Admitting that would ruin the facade, so there will be some advanced hermeneutics pushed to justify the rename.
by briHass | 2025-09-06 01:31:22+00:00
I got burned recently by Ecobee in the same way. The problem with 'smart' interfaces for traditionally mechanical devices is that the useable lifetime (support period) of low-end microprocessors and software, especially online APIs, is often far shorter than the mechanical device it's attached to.

Similar to how people that keep cars around for 10+ years are stuck with dated and worthless 'infotainment' systems, Google and Ecobee can't even honor their product for long enough to outlast the HVAC units.

What burns me is that it wouldn't be much of an ask for them to push one final (optional) update that would open LAN-only access to core functionality. I and many others in the HA/ESPHome community have written hardware integrations to devices over RS485/UART with unpublished/black-box protocols, so a simple HTTP API would have an integration within days.

It would maybe cost an engineer at Nest/Ecobee a day or two of work, and the goodwill would make me far more likely to purchase a newer model. As it is, I've committed to avoiding (where possible) devices that aren't local-first.
by shireboy | 2025-09-06 01:32:09+00:00
This is interesting to me because somehow I’ve had in my head that if we develop the ability in the next couple centuries to send probes interstellar it would be a longer list of possible targets. What this makes me realize is the list of places we visit even in the next thousands of years - even with incredible leaps in propulsion - is very finite. Space may be really really big but the part physically accessible even in long timescales is limited.
by astrange | 2025-09-06 01:32:47+00:00
> large scale detail (corresponding to low frequency FFT components)

This isn't true in practice - images are not bandlimited like audio so there aren't really visual elements of images corresponding to low frequency cosine waves. That's why the lowest frequency DCT coefficient in a JPEG image is 16x16 pixels, which is hardly large scale.

But you do quantize all components of the DCT transform, not just the highest ones.

Actually in the default JPEG quantization matrix it's the coefficient to the upper-left of the last one that gets the most quantization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_(image_processing...
by sroerick | 2025-09-06 01:33:02+00:00
OK, I completely agree with this.

That said, I'm not a nix guy, but to me, intuitively NixOS wins for this use case. It seems like you could either

A. Use declarative OS installs across deployments B. Put your app into a container which sometimes deploys it's own kernel and then sometimes doesn't and this gets pushed to a third party cloud registry, or you can set up your own registry, and then this container runs on a random ubuntu container or cloud hosting site where you basically don't administer or do any ops you just kind of use it as an empty vessel which exists to run your Docker container.

I get that in practice, these are basically the same, and I think that's a testament to the massive infrastructure work Docker, Inc has done. But it just doesn't make any sense to me
by hellotheretoday | 2025-09-06 01:34:50+00:00
More significant ones, obviously, that discourage them from engaging in such anticonsumer behavior. One should not have to engage in individual legal action to to get what they paid for

That said I applaud you for taking them to charge. Good for you. I assume you had to return the devices? I wonder how this would work for people who invested 5, 7, 10+ years ago. I would hope the same.
by JimDabell | 2025-09-06 01:35:21+00:00
> Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company.

> The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries

This seems like revisionist history. They called their company Tesla Motors, not Tesla Energy, after all.

This is a blog post from the founder and CEO about their first energy play. It seems clear that their first energy product was an unintended byproduct of the Roadster, they worried about it being a distraction from their core car business, but they decided to go ahead with it because they saw it as a way to strengthen their car business.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090814225814/http://www.teslam...
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-06 01:35:29+00:00
> On an individual level, there's always going to be people whose experiences don't match the average, but I really do believe most Internet conversation isn't particularly productive. I'm not saying I don't have productive Internet conversation, though.

Just wanted to say, as soon as I saw this I clapped my forehead - I'd provided an anecdote as data :(
by nl | 2025-09-06 01:36:13+00:00
By US law, cccording to Author's Guild vs Google[1] on the Google book scanning project, scanning books for indexes is fair use.

Additionally:

> Every human has the right to read those books.

Since when?

I strongly disagree - knowledge should be free.

I don't think the author's arrangement of the words should be free to reproduce (ie, I think some degree of copyright protection is ethical) but if I want to use a tool to help me understand the knowledge in a book then I should be able to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
by zmmmmm | 2025-09-06 01:36:52+00:00
The question is going to be how much human intellectual input there was I think. I don't think it will take much - you can write the crappiest novel on earth that is complete random drivel and you still have copyright on it.

So to me, if you are doing literally any human review, edits, control over the AI then I think you'll retain copyright. There may be a risk that if somebody can show that they could produce exactly the same thing from a generic prompt with no interaction then you may be in trouble, but let's face it should you have copyright at that point?

This is, however, why I favor stopping slightly short of full agentic development at this point. I want the human watching each step and an audit trail of the human interaction in doing it. Sure I might only get to 5x development speed instead of 10x or 20x but that is already such an enormous step up from where we were a year ago that I am quite OK with that for now.
by koopuluri | 2025-09-06 01:37:07+00:00
Students wouldn’t be giving up much: typically no more than 5–10% of their personal token. And importantly, this isn’t tied to income, so nothing in their day-to-day life is taken away.

Dividends only flow to shareholders when the student realizes capital gains (e.g., selling equity in a company), not from salary. Even then, there can be sensible safeguards, like only triggering dividends once total gains exceed $1M.

So students still keep nearly all of their upside, while gaining resources and support they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.