MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Consentless – A minimalist, privacy-preserving traffic counter
by codazoda | 2025-09-12 13:02:37+00:00
Several years ago I started tracking my own website stats using a minimal counter that preserves user privacy. I wrote about that in my article, Private Analytics and the Raspberry Pi in my Bedroom.

The original version was a PHP script. It's been working well for several years, but I had some hardware trouble with the Raspberry Pi. So, this week I took those concepts and wrote Consentless as a Go application to replace that original script and I created some initial documentation.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-12 13:02:39+00:00
The specs for things like microformats were mostly fine. The issue is that search engines mostly obfuscate their behavior and microformats fizzled out in the places that could have benefited from them. This was mainly due to relatively low adoption; not necessarily abuse. This was the kind of thing that techies obsessed about that most other people ignored.

So, search engines couldn't rely on sites properly using microformats on most sites and had to resort to other things to pull out structured information. Browsers removed what little support they had for microformats. And then blogging became more of a niche thing as people moved to social networks and things like substack, tumblr, and similar sites.

Mostly, you can still use microformats. It doesn't hurt anything and there might be some things out there that benefit from having a little bit of extra structure. But otherwise there's just very little point to it (beyond some niche uses); and there never really was. It's the classic chicken egg problem where it would be great if everybody used it but because most people didn't it wasn't all that great. You only get network effects if you get a critical mass of adoption. That just never happened with this stuff. Most developers treated it as a low value, optional thing, that was maybe nice to have but not worth obsessing over.

These days there are related things that are still widely used (e.g. opengraph and similar meta attributes). Also there are new semantic html tags that help tell apart main articles from navigation, footers, etc. that are fairly widely used. That helps things like screen readers, rendering previews of shared links, etc. And it also helps for SEO. And SEO is a great incentive for people to adopt stuff.

XFN and FOAF were indeed mostly relevant in the pre-social network era and became quickly irrelevant. The point with social networks is that they are walled gardens. Standardization was not something that the owners of those actively pursued because they are simply not interested in interoperability. Exclusive ownership of the relationship of the user is the whole point for exploiters of social networks like meta, tik tok, x/twitter, linkedin, etc.
by Findecanor | 2025-09-12 13:02:43+00:00
An alternative numerical notation uses decimals but marks which digits at the end that are repeating. With enough digits, this format can represent all rational numbers that can be written in the standard numerator/denominator format.

It does of course work with base 2 and exponents as well so you could still be using floating-point format, only with additional meta-data indicating the repeating range. When a result degenerates into a number that can't fit within the number of digits, you would be left with a regular floating-point number.

I'd want to write a simple calculator that uses this numerical format but I have only been able to find algorithms for addition and subtraction. Every description I've found of the format has converted to the regular numerator/denominator form before multiplication and division.
by croes | 2025-09-12 13:02:51+00:00
I find it interesting how he tries to dismiss the core message of Christianity with a reference to the old testament.

Seems right wingers know the old testament pretty well but rarely quote the new one and even rarer live by it. It's often that authoritarian god, you know, the one who gave us the rainbow after multiple genocide and who said later on

>Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

Let's see those Christian values in action when they catch the shooter.
by conductr | 2025-09-12 13:03:14+00:00
> Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.

I finished my schooling right as phones were being introduced in the 90s, also in Texas fwiw, but they were so zero-tolerance about any student owned technology all during the 90s (confiscated pagers and cell phones, nobody had laptops yet). Anyways, I never understood how they did a complete 180 only a few years later and students were then allowed to have phones and laptops with them at all times. It seems like they knew this was a bad idea to begin with but somehow lost their will to fight the surge of tech.
by keepamovin | 2025-09-12 13:04:31+00:00
I see. So, when SK perp walks its own illegal migrant arrests on TV, it's "totally fine" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEqFXzeTm5w). But if the US does it to criminal South Koreans? "Propaganda! Propaganda! Propaganda!" Hmm, a racist double standard you'd like to preserve?

So...arresting crims in the US (but not SK) and locking up psychos who dismember young Americans is (for you) 'domestic terrorism', because you're ... fine with rampant crime and bloodshed against Americans? But "terrified" of Americans feeling safe, and society being peaceful? Huh, okay. Are you South Korean and lacking empathy?

Or are you in fact MS-13 or TDA? Or ... I know this dates me a bit, Al-Qaieda or Daesh? If not, maybe apply today. You're already making them proud. Good on you, you've found your purpose!
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-12 13:04:42+00:00
DON'T LET YOUR DREAMS BE DREAMS!

Except it's a bit deeper I think; the author realised at one point they were confirming to a stereotype, maybe even thinking they were playing by the rules and doing what was expected of them by ??? society or something, but then realised they have free will, they can do whatever they want in the privacy of their own home and the cops can't stop them, and they were in bad physical shape.

They realised they were holding themselves back and stopped.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-09-12 13:04:44+00:00
Background:

LLMs take your input, upscale it into a very high dimensional space, and then downscale it back to 1D at the end. This 1D list is interpreted as a list of probabilities -- one for each word in your vocabulary. i.e f(x) = downscale(upscale(x)). Each of downscale() and upscale() are parameterized (billions of params). I see you have a gamedev background, so as an example: bezier curves are parameterized functions where bezier handles are the parameters. During training, these parameters are continuously adjusted so that the output of the overall function gets closer to the expected result. Neural networks are just really flexible functions for which you can choose parameters to get any expected result, provided you have enough of them (similar to bezier curves in this regard).

---

When training, you make an LLM learn that

I use arch = downscale(upscale(I use))

If you want to predict the next word after that, you do next in sequence the following:

I use arch btw = downscale(upscale(I use arch))

Now, multi-token prediction is having two downscale functions, one for each of the next two words, and learning it that way, basically, you have a second downscale2() that learns how to predict the next-to-next word.

i.e in parallel:

I use arch = downscale1(upscale(I use))

I use ____ btw = downscale2(upscale(I use))

However, this way you'll need twice the number of parameters downscale needs. And if you want to predict more tokens ahead you'll need even more parameters.

What Qwen has done, is instead of downscale1 and downscale2 being completely separately parameterized functions, they set downscale1(.) = lightweight1(downscale_common(.)) and downscale2(.) = lightweight2(downscale_common(.)). This is essentially betting that a lot of the logic is common and the difference between predicting the next and next-to-next token can be captured in one lightweight function each. Lightweight here, means less parameters. The bet paid off.

So overall, you save params.

Concretely,

Before: downscale1.params + downscale2.params

After: downscale_common.params + lightweight1.params + lightweight2.params

Edit: its actually downscale_common(lightweight()) and not the other way around as I have written above. Doesn't change the crux of the answer, but just including this for clarity.
by vessenes | 2025-09-12 13:05:04+00:00
Unfortunately, no. The industry is moving super quickly, and spinning up new ideas on the backs of old ones at a fast rate. If you want to understand what's going on, I think the best thing to do is some intro courses, train and design some smaller models directly, get a list of core papers and concepts from Claude/Chat/Gemini, and then as you read something like this, if you don't know the acronym (In this case: MTP = Multi Token Prediction), search it up, and see if you have the basis for understanding what it's about. If not read up on the precursors.

Unlike many disciplines, AI is an arena that doesn't have a lot of intuitive simplified models that are accurate -- most of the simplified models available do not accurately describe what's going on enough to reason about and understand them. So, you just have to start reading!
by evermike | 2025-09-12 13:05:28+00:00
1) I generally agree with the first argument, but I think context matters a lot. There’s always a market price depending on what the product does and what competitors offer. If your pricing is far below or far above that range, it usually won’t work out well. Our add-on was mostly for 1-3 ppl team.

2) As for the second point that’s definitely a lesson I keep bumping into and somehow never fully learn. No matter how clearly you communicate and give advance notice, users still perceive it negatively. And yet, as a user myself, I regularly get emails from services I pay for about price increases or plan changes. Very few companies offer true grandfathering forever.
by ramses0 | 2025-09-12 13:06:02+00:00
Taking out the emotion. Since the genesis of this discussion was "lifting weights", why uselessly lift weights instead of doing useful work like moving sacks of grain from point A to point B?

"If habit is a muscle that can be developed...", then being detached from the simple, useless habit being formed is good practice for being able to apply it to a productive or important situation.
by bilekas | 2025-09-12 13:06:54+00:00
> Also lol for linking the BBC. To me it's like linking Radio Free Asia or the New York Times and pretend those are freedom fighters.

It's not really when the reporting is reporting what was done. But here's some more articles saying the same thing ?

> Most of what you assume to know about Koreans and likely Chinese or Vietnamese people is false.

You are assuming I am making assumptions. But I can see this discussion isn't going anywhere fast.

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/asia-pacific/north-kor...

https://abcnews.go.com/International/north-korea-issues-rare...

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/foreignaffairs/northkorea/20200...

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/25/916807251/kim-jong-un-apologi...
by 8organicbits | 2025-09-12 13:07:49+00:00
There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering.

With a bank you can have anti-money laundering and bank secrecy. Transaction are known by the bank, can be subject to subpoena or automatic reporting, but are non-public.

If you want privacy on Bitcoin you need to do things that look a lot like money laundering. Governments banning money laundering isn't a surprise. The value of Bitcoin, if transactions are fully public and attributable to pseudonyms, is questionable.

In some ways, the problem Bitcoin has is that it is inflexible. Governments want to change the rules in finance from time to time, traditional finance adapts.
by Thorrez | 2025-09-12 13:07:58+00:00
>Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key.

Is there a realistic risk there? If I use an address a million times, how much weaker is it? And how feasible would it be for an attacker to brute for it?
by farmdawgnation | 2025-09-12 13:08:29+00:00
Censys | Senior SRE & Staff Software Engineer Roles | Full Time | Remote US

Hey everyone. I'm a Principal Engineer at Censys. We are the source for Internet Intelligence. We conduct a full internet survey every day and turn that into actionable data for folks to identify risk, research emerging internet threats, and make the internet a safer place. If you also get a bunch of data breach mailers in your mail box every year, you're familiar with the impact of security breaches at tech companies. We're trying to put a stop to that by helping companies understand their risk and mitigate it.

HQ is in Ann Arbor, MI, but we're all over the US. We're looking for a Senior SRE to help improve reliability and developer experience, and a Staff Software Engineer to join our Attack Surface Management product team. If you're a little bit more senior or junior than either of the postings, please do still apply. We care a lot more about getting the right people than we do matching the level exactly to the posting.

Please please apply to these role if:

- You can take ownership of improving a part of the product (Staff SWE) or the application platform we build for product engineers (SRE).

- You're game to navigate the messy middle of a small, nimble company with really high customer expectations. You'll have to navigate some ambiguity to be successful in either of these roles - don't expect pristine PRDs coming down from on high.

Our application stack is primarily Go and TypeScript with some seasoning of Python here and there where appropriate. Our primary cloud is in GCP and we also maintain our own physical servers (prior experience with physical hardware is great, but not required).

The links below will cause you to show up as a social referral from me. Feel free to reach out to me directly on Linked In (https://www.linkedin.com/in/farmdawgnation/) with any questions.

Senior SRE Posting: https://grnh.se/nnk6qmx92us

Staff SWE Posting: https://grnh.se/k1xqqjsl2us
by moduspol | 2025-09-12 13:08:45+00:00
It doesn't look like that explicitly will become illegal, but this part undermines a lot of the value of it:

> creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending [cryptocurrency] through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions

That's the default way Bitcoin wallets work, and it helps a ton to improve privacy. If we were limited to always reusing the same few addresses, it'll be very easy for not just law enforcement but ANYONE to see just how much Bitcoin you have.

If that's a small amount, it's not a risk. If it's a big amount, now you've got a target on your back. For me to accept Bitcoin payments, I need to publish my address, and from that address, you'll be able to see how much Bitcoin I have (and trace other transactions) over time.

Imagine everyone in town knowing that you've got six figures (or more) of money that can undoubtedly be extracted from you by invading your home, taking family members hostage, etc. At that point, you may think it's safer to keep it in an exchange, and you may be right.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-12 13:09:00+00:00
Maddow advocates for universal healthcare. If we get universal healthcare and she dies because she lost private healthcare, that would be deeply ironic and everyone should point that out upon her death, throwing all her words supporting universal healthcare back at her ghost. I would 100% support that.

> The left has become so unhinged that they don't even see republicans as human and don't value their deaths/lives.

Across the left I see calls for gun control. If the left had their way, gun violence wouldn't be the problem that it is in America. The left is just sick of burying dead children with holes in them, there's not sympathy left for literally anyone else, especially Kirk, who advocated for this to continue happening. Thoughts and prayers, whatever. Can we do gun control now? No? Then what are we even talking about, we'll just be here again soon enough.

> This is what 10+ years of calling republicans Nazis does... eventually some mentally ill people are going to take it seriously and start killing people.

Unlike the rest of us, you seem to know who the killer was and why he did what he did. At this stage it's just as likely Kirk was shot by a disillusioned fan based on his reaction to the Epstein files, per Laura Loomer's post. Actually, a priori it's far more likely seeing as the statistics show rightwing shooters are far more frequent than leftwing shooters. So calling out "Nazi rhetoric" as the culprit is premature.
by diggan | 2025-09-12 13:09:06+00:00
> The best benchmark is the community vibe in the weeks following a release.

True, just be careful what community you use as a vibe-check. Most of the mainstream/big ones around AI and LLMs basically have influence campaigns run against them, are made of giant hive-minds that all think alike and you need to carefully asses if anything you're reading is true or not, and votes tend to make it even worse.
by jihadjihad | 2025-09-12 13:09:29+00:00
> [The Patriot Act] contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions. These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015. In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
by vessenes | 2025-09-12 13:09:57+00:00
We are nearly infinitely far away from saturating compute demand for inference.

Case in point; I'd like something that realtime assesses all the sensors and API endpoints of stuff in my home and as needed bubbles up summaries, diaries, and emergency alerts. Right now that's probably a single H200, and well out of my "value range". The number of people in the world that do this now at scale is almost certainly less than 50k.

If that inference cost went to 1%, then a) I'd be willing to pay it, and b) there'd be enough of a market that a company could make money integrating a bunch of tech into a simple deployable stack, and therefore c) a lot more people would want it, likely enough to drive more than 50k H200s worth of inference demand.
by Alex4386 | 2025-09-12 13:11:08+00:00
Anti-american party doing casual "america bad" speeches huh. Btw, its their fault for not filing proper VISAs. I don't get why there is all the nation-wide fiasco about LG Energy Solution incorrectly filing VISAs and asking government for help for their screw ups.

*Note for anyone on Hackernews: hani is well-known as left-wing news outlet in Korea. Think about CNN, and take with grain of salt.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-09-12 13:11:30+00:00
KaTeX and MathJax aren't really the same as (La)TeX at all though---they support the same math syntax, but LaTeX is a complete document processing system while KaTeX is just a math renderer.

KaTeX + Markdown is comparable to LaTeX, in the same way that notepad.exe is comparable to an IDE---they both do the same thing, but one has 1000× as many features as the other. I'm personally biased towards LaTeX, but simpler solutions like Markdown certainly have their place.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-09-12 13:12:02+00:00
> last year

> dense

> 405B model

Llama4 does not match any of these details. Maybe the commenter thinks their comment is about Llama4 (I don't see a reason to believe so) but readers familiar with these details know they are referring to Llama3.1.
by saghm | 2025-09-12 13:12:26+00:00
If they didn't want to keep maintaining it, they could just skip to step 4 and just not maintain it in the first place. The problem is that they do want to, and it's not like they haven't done it successfully for years now . Between "put up with whatever bullshit comes your way" and "give up entirely" is a wide spectrum of "try to find ways to reduce the bullshit to get to focus on the important parts", and most of the ways probably don't boil down to handful of pithy steps that could fit in an (original size) tweet.
by mindcrash | 2025-09-12 13:12:57+00:00
> maybe in part due to DHH promoting it a bit

Try PewDiePie. around 6.7M people now know something like Linux and Hyprland exists, and that in 2025 it might even work better than MacOS or Windows and whatever desktop environments on Linux came before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0
by thevillagechief | 2025-09-12 13:13:07+00:00
My wife had a similar experience. Being the last child, she was just never pushed to do any activities in school, and had really never participated in any physical activities. When we got married, I set a goal to run a marathon, and she thought that was the funniest joke she'd ever heard. Funny story, turns out she was a natural at running, and handily beat me a few years later in our first half marathon, even though I played sports since I was a kid.
by Bender | 2025-09-12 13:13:45+00:00
Brewers are supposed to have really good filtration FWIW. [1] If particles are showing up in beer then something has gone horribly wrong as in, someone is being incredibly cheap. [2]

[1] - https://www.beer-brewing.com/beer_brewing/beer_brewing_water...

[2] - https://www.ewg.org/research/getting-forever-chemicals-out-d...
by crazygringo | 2025-09-12 13:14:09+00:00
The headline is not supported by the article.

The actual list of "suspicious activities" in the article is about pooling, structuring, delaying transactions -- the stuff you do to hide activity, whether for good or bad.

It says nothing whatsoever about self-custody. The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody. But they're totally separate things.

So as far as I can tell, the headline is just false clickbait.

They also claim:

> If enacted, any user who leverages these tools will be flagged as a suspicious... and could potentially be sent to prison.

I don't think that's the case? Having a transaction considered suspicious doesn't send you to prison. At best it seems like traditional banks might not permit a transaction, or it could be used as supporting evidence for separate actual illegal activities like money laundering? But going to prison requires being convicted of an actual crime. Not just activity that is "suspicious".
by jmclnx | 2025-09-12 13:14:29+00:00
Good luck with that. If you are on a 'real' OS like Linux or BSD and have *coins there, I doubt anyone would know. Especially if you have disk encryption and using a trusted VPN or tor or something like that. Remember to enable MAC spoofing too.

If you have your wallet on a Cell Phone, you might as well post a sign outside of your house stating "I am a bitcoin user and trying to keep that use secret" :)