MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-09-25 03:58:05+00:00
Most people know that they could use a little help from society. After all, people voted for gambling bans in the first places. What changed is we went through a libertarian phase as a country where we promoted individual choice as an end in itself and demonized any attempts at social regulation of choices. As we see the effects of that, I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine getting the pendulum to swing back at least partially so people might decide gambling bans were a good idea after all.
by joe_the_user | 2025-09-25 03:59:15+00:00
Police propaganda is serious problem. But this seems like the least appropriate thing to dismiss as "just police propaganda". What's bad about police propaganda is it perpetuates a certain politics by maintain atmosphere of fear as well as pushing certain stereotypes of ethnic groups. But when the police are exaggerating the terrorist potential of actual organized criminals, things seem much muddier. I think people should concerned about organized scammers - their victims are usually the poor, notably. It's true their terrorist potential is overstated but only because they are profit-oriented but it's not like their other activities should be ignored.
by GodelNumbering | 2025-09-25 03:59:41+00:00
I have felt like a perennial browser refugee for a while. For about 20 years now (since OG Firefox was at peak and Chrome was not yet launched), every new browser promises the same things, gets popular enough, then does a full or partial 180.

While I like the pitch of this browser, I find it a little difficult to take it at the face value, especially given there is no info on the founders, or whether it is run as a company or a non-profit etc.

Perhaps someone in this thread could answer: which company/org structure provides best guarantees against gradual, slow, multi-year rot that seems to take over everything?

I would happily pay a small monthly subscription fee for a browser if it has strong legally protected privacy guarantees.
by joegibbs | 2025-09-25 04:01:20+00:00
And it wasn't as good as it's often mythologised to be. Back in the 60s (in Australia) people weren't going on holidays overseas, they lived in houses under half the size of modern builds, they had worse healthcare and lived 13 years less, they had relatively monotonous diets (growing up, my mother's staple food was bread with dripping), they weren't buying new clothes, furniture, knickknacks all the time.

And my grandfather, as a farmer, was up early in the morning and worked all day, never got weekends off. My grandmother was also working all the time - cooking, cleaning, sewing things, gardening. She wasn't employed but that didn't mean she was idle. The kids had to work when they were old enough too.

That was also a pretty decent income for time as well, there were a lot of urban poor living in tiny, crowded little houses.

It's not to say that it's never going to be possible for the mythical postwar boomer lifestyle of leisure (with modern standards of living) to actually available to the bulk of the population but it's going to need a lot more automation and productivity increases (like AI and self-driving cars) to get there, there's no "just tax the billionaires" one-simple-trick or policy that will immediately bring it in.
by defgeneric | 2025-09-25 04:01:29+00:00
Tao is great in lots of ways--obviously as a first-rate mathematician, but also as an educator and an ambassador of mathematics to the general public. It's cool to see him thinking along these lines, but if anyone is really interested in where this line of thinking goes, it's basically the problem of modernity. Just about everyone in the humanities is fully aware of this already. It emerged vaguely around the 1830s and basically became the major subject of the humanities--in one way or another--ever since. Marshall Berman's book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is good intro. I would expect that if you take Tao's specific line of thinking here (society beginning gas-like, interacting particles, then clumping together at various levels of abstraction, and interacting up and down the levels, etc) you get into all sorts of issues that were debated endlessly a very long time ago. But as a quick, temporary prism for looking at the world it's fine I guess. As a symptom, it makes one think something else might be going on when a very famous mathematician is suddenly now rediscovering modernity--perhaps things become more clear the more they break apart. One might even go so far as to say Tao's apparent ignorance of the issue of modernity has something to do with specialization, i.e. is a symptom of modernity itself.

PS--to add one thing as a criticism, the "retreat" into "grassroots groups" has also long been viewed as a false solution to the problem. Politically, this "solution" emerged in various forms: the 19th century's utopian socialism (especially in the US!), late 19th-early 20th century syndicalism, 1960s communes and "turn-on, tune-in, drop-out," up to now with the stubborn idea that communal living is somehow "revolutionary" and various other guises. It's there in less "radical" forms too, like when liberals say we just need to restart the bowling leagues. It's fine as an individual respite, but will never really get at the problem, not least because there are many other (and better!) ways of getting some "relief".
by neilv | 2025-09-25 04:01:53+00:00
Mostly I agree. But I also think that someone who is very good, and in a very good MBA program, can do their share of contributions, iff they're committed fully to the startup upon graduation.

But if the follow-through doesn't happen, then the whole thing was probably a huge waste for non-MBA-student co-founders. (Unless those co-founders weren't really committed themselves.)
by AngryData | 2025-09-25 04:02:17+00:00
I guess the question then is, does H1-B actually make people want to live in the US? Or is it just a good way to earn some money and experience while they are young and then move back home and start their own business with their capital that goes much farther there? Because that is what it seems like it is best setup for since you can be given the boot and deported on short notice by the whim of a corporate manager.
by claw-el | 2025-09-25 04:03:27+00:00
I want to clarify that I am not trying to argue but genuinely curious what is the ‘right solve’ here.

If we create an exception for doctors, what about ‘medical lab technicians’, ‘wastewater treatment professionals’ or ‘air traffic controller’? All these jobs faces shortage in US right now. If we leave it up to the executive branch at the time to determine exceptions, we will just end up in a situation in exceptions going to the industry with the ‘best’ lobbyist.

I am not in a position to decide a policy like this, but I have a wild idea. Why not lower the application fee for H1B (or make it free) or even make it super easy to apply. Right now, the companies that are willing to abuse the H1B system will do so because they know the higher the application fee, the less competition they have to get those 85,000 slots. If every doctor, speech therapist, medical lab technologist is applying for H1B, it would totally crowd out the H1B abusers and it might no longer be worth it for them to try to game the system. Just musing on ideas, not that I can implement any of these.
by JdeBP | 2025-09-25 04:03:46+00:00
I wouldn't thank ChatGPT too enthusiastically. As always for LLMs, it has given you code that is rife with common pitfalls (because, after all, they massively plagiarize sources where people post poor code).

For examples: It does not follow the Linux rules for pathname separators, but mixes in Windows-isms. It doesn't properly check whether std::atomic<bool> is actually signal safe on the target architecture. Its unique filename generation has an all-too-common failure mode. It passes by reference only to then make local value copies anyway. It does not correctly follow the XDG Base Directory Specification.
by bsnnkv | 2025-09-25 04:03:47+00:00
Keep in mind this was over a decade ago -

What happened for me was that the ICRC was so desperate for Pashto speakers in Afghanistan for this sort of work (they weren't allowed to hire people for the war crimes investigation work from Pakistan or Afghanistan due to neutrality stuff) that for a time they ended up accepting people who had learned Dari (ie. demonstrated the ability to learn) and gave them 3 months in-country to work with a Pashto teacher and learn enough to be able to be functional in their jobs

This was right after the financial crisis, I had just graduated with a liberal arts degree and had no other job prospects, and I had an interest in Afghanistan, so being paid to learn Pashto and possibly having a job afterwards seemed like a very lucky break to me at the time
by throw10920 | 2025-09-25 04:05:00+00:00
It's great that we may have two new antibiotics!

Now, it'd be nice to keep those for as long as possible. Is regulation on the use of these feasible? I'd think that if your law just restricts its use on animals (which I believe is where the majority of antibiotic-resistance comes from) that would be easier to pass than if you tried to restrict its use on humans, but I don't know if there's precedent for it.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-25 04:05:15+00:00
> In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations.

That isn't necessarily the case.

Suppose there was only one federal law: It's illegal for any entity to have more than 15% market share in any market. If you do you have 30 days to figure out how to break yourself up so that isn't the case, e.g. by putting half your factories into a separate company and selling it off. You get to figure out how to do it, it's just that if you have more than 15% market share on two days more than 30 days apart in the same 5 year period, you get unconditionally fined into oblivion. You don't even need government prosecutors, just make it a strict liability offense that gives customers the right to sue for 100% of revenue. Companies can start planning to break themselves up ahead of time once they're getting close to the market share threshold if they feel like they want more time to do something about it.

Then the government isn't really doing any kind of central planning, it's just a strict unconditional ban on market concentration and nothing else.
by AngryData | 2025-09-25 04:05:26+00:00
Well it does put a bit more power into the employee's hand so im not sure it is all a bad tradeoff. Usually the company is holding all the cards, but if they just ate $100,000 that they will never get back then their threat of firing someone 3 months in if they don't lick enough boot polish is going to hurt the company too.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-25 04:05:35+00:00
The FTC received an extension of time for discovery, 90 days, and Amazon was ordered to pay attorneys fees and costs for the additional discovery

https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.wawd.323520/gov.us...

Thus, the problem was "fixed"

The court reserved its decision on bad faith and instructed that if the FTC wished to pursue a finding of bad faith, the parties should schedule oral argument

After oral argument, the court found that Amazon's conduct was tantamount to bad faith
by tombert | 2025-09-25 04:07:15+00:00
I have only ever bet on sports once (a fantasy football thing at work that I was required to join), and I was very lucky because I lost and had zero fun in the process. I don't like sports anyway, so the odds were never very high, but the fact that I didn't enjoy losing $50 made it so I've never had the temptation to do it again.

I think about the alternate universe where I won and started betting more a lot; sort of a "there but for the grace of god go I" situation.
by seabrookmx | 2025-09-25 04:07:26+00:00
It depends on how you define brake by wire, but the one I'm referencing is the C8 Corvette and it's "eBoost" system. This isn't a purely electronic system like throttle by wire is, but it does mean there is no longer a linear relationship between pedal pressure and brake pad pressure. And my point about isolating the driver from feedback still holds true.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-09-25 04:07:54+00:00
I really do like the Claude code integration in zed. Conceptually it’s pretty well done. Provides some better visualization over running Claude code in the terminal and really aligns with the close supervisor style I like to work with. I really like the follow feature that brings the editor along with the agent.

My complaints:

No Claude code hooks support at the time of this writing. As someone who leverages this somewhat heavily this is why I don’t really use it all the time. I actually find it to be somewhat of a feature at times because I can simply run the thing through Zed if I want to temporarily run with no hooks.

Performance is noticeably degraded presumably because of the “ACP” protocol they invented. I usually work either directly in Claude terminal window using its edit tools or using repoprompt’s mcp editor tools and both are noticeably faster than running in zed.

What seems to be memory leaks in the agent window causes sluggish performance, especially when scrolling. It’s not bad enough to make it unusable, but for an editor whose main advertisement is speed it feels particularly painful.
by dathinab | 2025-09-25 04:09:58+00:00
> wouldn’t have sufficed?

most times it will suffice and be the recommended solution (less complexity; no ups I though I only need 3bit but at runtime needed 4bits situations; one less dependencies to review for soundness issues / bugs with every update)

while using Vec<u64> with a 3bit number is a pretty strange/misleading example (as you can use a Vec<u8>) my guess is that they used it because many packed vectors operate on u64s internally and allows up-to 64bit values.

anyway while often it doesn't matter sometimes storing a u8 where you only need 3bit numbers or similar makes a huge difference (e.g. if with packaging you application state fits in memory and without it doesn't and start swapping)

you can do similar stuff for non integer values, but things get more complicated as you can't just truncate/mask floats in the same way you can do so for integers. Further complications come from decimal based precision bounds and the question of if you need perfect precision in the whole number range (floats aren't evenly spaced).

A common solution is to use fixed point floats or in general convert your floats to integers. For example, assuming a perfect precision requirement for you range, you could store a number in range [-1e7; 1e7] and by context/in code remember there is a implicit missing div 1e6. Then you can store it in a 25 bit integer and bit package it (log2(1e7).ceil()+1 sign bit).
by tgma | 2025-09-25 04:10:44+00:00
> You can't do this in Iran.

How are you sure about this? What evidence or statistics do you have that there have been enough people who want an alternative that is sufficiently different? It appears the regime is great at persuading people they want some sort of "light reform" and propagandized the populace to hate taking a risk for real change. It appears lots of people talk the talk but are comfortable where they are and in fact resist change when it happens. Otherwise you should have seen some level of unrest given the lack of water and electricity and the regime at its weakest.

Vice versa, how sure are you about it being true in other countries? Looking at various elections in parliamentary systems like Germany, France, or Canada, it does appear that even a strong opposition has a really hard time competing with the status quo in a "democratic" setup. The system resorts to all trickery including importing voters and creating unnatural coalitions to enforce the establishment agenda. And that is not including physical elimination of the opponent which was attempted in the United States.
by tombert | 2025-09-25 04:11:10+00:00
I think crypto became "legal" more in the sense that it "failed to become illegal".

When it was just a goofy project only taken seriously by distributed systems geeks and Ancap libertarians, there wasn't much to regulate and it could slide under the radar for quite awhile. Then pretty rapidly it sort of became so big that it wasn't trivial to do actually ban it.

Then we got a president who used it as a streamlined bribery platform.
by cortesoft | 2025-09-25 04:11:47+00:00
In the US, a business can refuse service to anyone, generally, as long as it isn’t because the person belongs to a protected class (e.g. you can’t ban all black people or all Jewish people). You could refuse to do business with someone because you didn’t like the way they looked at you, or because you were grumpy the day they came in.

Famously, for example, James Dolan bans all sorts of people he doesn’t like from Madison Square Garden and any of the other venues he owns. He notoriously bans all lawyers who work for any firm that sues him (which happens a lot). He even uses facial recognition to catch them, and kicks them out without refunding their tickets. People have tried to sue him for this (many of them are lawyers, after all!) and so far no one has won against him for it, so he keeps doing it.

Here is an article about it: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/45949758/new-york-knicks...
by jacobgkau | 2025-09-25 04:12:22+00:00
> I also did not believe that Biden was ready for four more years, but then again, what choice did I have? I would not have voted for Trump under any circumstances, and sitting it out would be giving my vote away.

Not sure what you mean about it being a Trump, sit out, or Biden choice when Biden wasn't an option in the final election. The choice you had was to vote for someone else in the primary, which did have plenty of other people running (albeit no major names). Of course, the better thing would've been the Democratic establishment putting a better option in front of you for the primary, so that's not directly your fault, but is the fault of "Democrats."

> You're painting with a rather broad brush.

As are you when you call the Democrats' reality "the real reality."
by porridgeraisin | 2025-09-25 04:12:59+00:00
Tokens correspond more to words in text land. The cat-feline etc connection happens when you train the model and not really by the tokenisation algorithm, which only sees text and not concepts. Byte pair encoding and SentencePiece (the two main tokenisation algorithms used by all LLMs) are mostly leetcode-medium-level algorithms. You can check it out and gain a permanent intuition, especially BPE.

For images, you take patches of the image (say 16x16 patches[1]), and then directly pass it into the FFN+transformer machinery[2]. As such, there is no vocabulary of tokens for images[3]. So, the billing happens per image patch. i.e, for large images, your cost will go up[2] Since it will have more px*py patches.

[1] x 3, due to RGB

[2] Upto a point, it gets downsamples to lower quality beyond a certain res. The downsampling happens in many ways... Qwen-VL uses a CNN, GPT iirc stuffs a downsampler after the embedding layer... As well as before. Anyways, they usually just take some average reduction by that downsampler and cut your billed tokens by that much in all these cases. OpenAIs bin-based billing is like this.

[3] Dall-E from way back when did have a discrete set of tokens and it mapped all patches of all images in the world to one from that, IIRC.
by pogue | 2025-09-25 04:14:35+00:00
Here's an archived link for those who can't get the article working. It's through MSN, which aggregates other site's pages, so the layout is kind of goofy & you have to click "continue reading" or "skip to content" which might be hidden behind weird ads/JS if you're not using an ad blocker.

https://archive.ph/kovD3
by int_19h | 2025-09-25 04:15:25+00:00
I agree that social media is exacerbating a lot of problems right now, and I don't have a ready answer as to how to fix that (or if that is even possible at all - it wouldn't be the first time a society is radically disrupted and reshaped by new tech). One thing I'm pretty confident about, though, is that heavy-handed regulation will not only not solve that problem, but will create many others. Maybe if we had some kind of widespread supermajority social consensus on this, it might have worked, but we don't.
by AuthAuth | 2025-09-25 04:15:31+00:00
I have extremely low trust in the methodology of that website. Just seeing the multi threaded benchmarks alone is enough to know they've cooked most of those tests on the snapdragon Elite machines. The Snapdragon chips came out before the M4 to compete vs the M3 which they won in almost every metric except single core. Since the X2 is soon to be released they appear very likely do that again.
by bfg_9k | 2025-09-25 04:15:34+00:00
You know, I think you'll find people being unlike Mormons is better for the taxpayer.

https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Smoking-and-th...

For example, the study above shows that smokers *are actually a net benefit* to the government's bottom line since they pay taxes throughout their lifetime on tobacco and then they die faster (therefore spending less money in the form of healthcare/ aged pensions).
by AngryData | 2025-09-25 04:15:39+00:00
There shouldn't be sports gambling at all. It is so ripe for abuse on so many different levels. Teams, sports organizers and associations, players, referees, and all of those peoples friends and families all have an avenue for trying to set matches. Just look at boxing, it is/was so pervasive and abused that nearly every boxing related movie in existence has people trying to set matches and take falls for fraudulent profit.

And we haven't even gotten into the problems we already have with gambling in general which is just the cherry on top.
by deschutes | 2025-09-25 04:16:08+00:00
You cannot use the rust standard library in environments where arbitrary allocations may fail but neither can you use the STL. The difference is the rust standard library doesn't pretend that it has some reasonable way to deal with allocation failure. std::bad_alloc is mainly a parlor trick used to manufacture the idea that copy and move fallibility are reasonable things.

I wouldn't wager a nickel on someone's life if it depended on embedded STL usage.
Show HN: Bite Genie – Turn restaurant menu photos into cookable recipes with AI
by maezeller | 2025-09-25 04:17:44+00:00
Hey HN! I'm excited to share Bite Genie (https://bitegenie.com), a free recipe app that solves a problem I've had countless times: loving a dish at a restaurant and wishing I could recreate it at home.

What makes it different:

Photo-to-recipe AI: Snap a photo of any menu item and get a detailed, cookable recipe Smart recipe remixing: Transform any saved recipe for dietary needs (vegan, keto, etc.) or experiment with fusion cuisines Universal recipe import: One-click saving from any website, plus powerful search and organization Meal planning & grocery lists: Complete culinary workflow management

The technical approach: Our AI analyzes menu photos using computer vision to identify dishes, then combines this with a deep culinary knowledge base to generate realistic recipes. It's not just OCR—it understands food relationships, cooking techniques, and ingredient substitutions.

Why I built this: Traditional recipe apps are just digital filing cabinets. I wanted something that actively helps you cook better and discover new dishes. The "menu photo to recipe" feature came from my own frustration of forgetting amazing restaurant discoveries. The app is completely free with all AI features included. No freemium model, no subscription walls.

I'd love feedback from the HN community, especially on the AI accuracy and any edge cases you discover. What dishes have you always wanted to recreate at home?

Try it out and let me know what you think!