MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-09-24 16:49:53+00:00
I very much did, and sticking with it was the best choice I made. You will get very very fast at it after a while, and the first verbs are the hardest and most irregular (and you should spend the most time on them.) Throwing in the messy clozes after doing your conjugations is relaxing, and you can do as many of those as you're in the mood for, whereas the conjugations are systematically introduced and you shouldn't speed it up too much. Took me 7 months, but complete mastery. But literally some of the conjugations from the first hard couple months will bother you until the end.

I feel even better than natives sometimes because they learn conjugations in order at school, and when asked to recall them out of order (or hop from form to form) get confused. Once you have conjugations, you can read anything with a dictionary (and the online dle is the best dictionary I've ever used.)

I'm about to start again with KOFI French, but I had to do a lot of work to get my mouth and ears adjusted to hearing French as anything other then murmurs, and to be able to read (luckily for me, French is the opposite of perl and read-only instead of write-only.) There's a lot of stuff in French I want to read; reading all of the stuff translated into Spanish from French (but never into English) has got my beak wet.

Also, Spanish-language comic books will make you forget about English-language comic books. And they are very online, examples: http://columberos.blogspot.com/ and https://comicsmexicanosdejediskater.blogspot.com/

Also lots of other good material for vos: https://ahira.com.ar/ including https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/skorpio/ and https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/hora-cero-suplemento-semanal/ which is a landmark of literature that is too good for us (El Eternauta spans the entire length of the series.)
by MrPowers | 2025-09-24 16:50:01+00:00
SedonaDB builds on libraries in the Rust ecosystem, like Apache DataFusion, to provide users with a nice geospatial DataFrame experience. It has functions like ST_Intersects that are common in spatial libraries, but not standard in most DataFrame implementations.

There are other good alternatives, such as GeoPandas and DuckDB Spatial. SedonaDB has Python/SQL APIs and is very fast. New features like full raster support and compatibility with lakehouse formats are coming soon!
by godelski | 2025-09-24 16:50:17+00:00
I wasn't aware of +commands, thanks. Though I'm not sure this is easier and you can translate mine to bash trivially

Yours isn't technically equivalent though it is functionally. If we have both vim and nvim then we'll alias vi twice.

Also, your program provides less clarity. It saves lines but at a large cost to readability. I tend to share my dotfiles with newbies a lot so readability is very meaningful.

I wrap mine up in functions too because at the end of my alias file I can add something like this

# aliases.zsh main() { alias_ls || echo "ls aliasing failed" alias_vim || echo "vim aliasing vailed" } main

It's a bit overkill and I never expect a simple alias like that to fail but there are three distinct advantages I get for being just a tad more verbose:

1) I have more complicated versions to deal with things like fd and batcat which have different names different operating systems (`fd` vs `fd-find` / `bat` vs `batcat`) and some additional configurations.

2) I can disable the alias by commenting out one line

3) knowing exactly where the alias is being loaded and thus what aliases are loaded.

Bonus) fails loudly but continues (it's an alias, I don't want you fail fail)

A few extra keystrokes are worth this advantage imo. Especially since I'm using vim so it's actually not any additional typing lol

It's style, so the choice is up to you and they'll accomplish the same things, but I'm just explaining why I use this design pattern. I've only given a stripped down snippet of code so I hope this context helps explain the larger pictures and how it can be used for larger needs.
by sdesol | 2025-09-24 16:50:44+00:00
You could instruct the LLM to classify messages with high level tags like for coffee, drinks, etc. always include beverage.

Given how fast interference has become and given current supported context window sizes for most SOTA models, I think summarizing and having the LLM decide what is relevant is not that fragile at all for most use cases. This is what I do with my analyzers which I talk about at https://github.com/gitsense/chat/blob/main/packages/chat/wid...
by EtudusMax | 2025-09-24 16:50:55+00:00
A friend of mine told me about a problem she often runs into when filming a room tour at home: her kids keep running into the frame. She said she felt torn — on one hand, she wanted to record and share her daily life, but on the other hand, she worried about her kids’ faces showing up online with no privacy protection. She even deleted a couple of videos she had already filmed, just because the thought of blurring every single frame manually felt overwhelming.

She described a few situations that really hit home: • Her child suddenly runs into the room, waving happily at the camera. • While filming in the living room, the kids are just playing in the background — natural and sweet, but not something she wants exposed publicly. • Sometimes when shooting a vlog, the camera captures her kids’ friends, and she ends up having to blur each face manually — exhausting and frustrating.

I think a lot of parents can relate: they want to share their lives, but also protect their family’s privacy. Traditional editing methods are just too much work, and not everyone has the time or patience to learn complicated software.

Later she found a super convenient solution: upload the video, and the tool automatically detects and blurs faces — no need to sit through frame-by-frame editing. She told me that the first time she tried it, she literally sighed in relief. Now her kids can still show up naturally on camera, and she doesn’t have to worry about those clips being shared online without protection.

She said she can finally post her room tour videos with peace of mind — even if her kids accidentally appear, it’s just one click to fix it. Honestly, I think that’s the kind of “little trick” a lot of parents would love to know about.
by rooftopzen | 2025-09-24 16:50:57+00:00
I've spent about an hour a week on this since Jan. Traced a large % of bogus news stories this year back to Reuters (fwiw) before they are picked up by other outlets and spread.

I've found legitimate stories also sourced from Reuters, but haven't found illegitimate stories NOT sourced from Reuters (in other words, they seem to originate from the same source, not sure why)
by ajkjk | 2025-09-24 16:50:59+00:00
In fact I remember now that I have had a manager who followed this exact advice: they'd agree with you about what was right and wrong in private, but do nothing, or very little, in public. It was infuriating. I didn't quit over it, although I wish I had in hindsight; instead I stayed uninspired and frustrated and burnt out until the manager eventually cycled out for another. But my guess is the team was half as productive or less than it would have been if the manager had stuck up for them in public. There is really nothing as demoralizing as when none of the people with power stick up for you. Of course, they will say that they don't have power either---but that's the trick. Everyone up the chain says they have no power, they're just following orders; the decision making is abstracted from on high. It is always a lie: everyone has power; just, the power is proportional to the risk you take to use it. I should have threatened to quit over being treated better, and meant it, and the manager should have threatened to quit to their bosses over the same things, and everyone else up the stack.

(Of course, an organization where your only way of getting listened to is threatening to quit is already unimaginably toxic. A healthy organization has a moral code of its own: you should be listened to because you were mistreated, not because you had to threaten something to be heard. But this seems to be increasingly untrue in modern tech companies where everyone seems amoral and just does their job and tries not to rock the boat so they can get to their next stock grant.)
by snickerbockers | 2025-09-24 16:51:26+00:00
>like if the COVID vaccines work or not

Okay, if there is any such thing as objective truth then this (by which i mean your statement that there should not be conflicting narratives, not the statement about the vaccine itself) is objectively false.

The COVID vaccines were pressed into widespread public distribution on an emergency use authorization; any other newly-developed vaccine would have spent years mired in clinical trials and debate. The first COVID vaccines deployed would have taken even longer because they were also the first mRNA vaccines. There was not by any means a consensus that they were safe or effective, only that the risk was justifiable in light of a sudden global health crises.
by dtkav | 2025-09-24 16:51:38+00:00
I have been building a plugin for Obsidian commercially.

I messaged @kepano about being able to support paid plugins. Apparently they can't because of Apple App store rules that forbid third party "stores" (and/or require a cut of the payment). IIRC there was a ruling that walked this back a little bit, but only in the US?

One thing I've appreciated about Obsidian is that they have donated to the top plugins as voted on by users each year. It's a small amount (eg. $25), but it is a nice gesture.

Micropayments could also be a nice gesture, but I don't think they could add up to meaningful income for a developer. There are enough developers that are willing to build great open-source plugins for free. IMO the missing tier is having quality (and vetted) plugins that people can work on full-time.
by UncleMeat | 2025-09-24 16:51:56+00:00
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes.

I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep. Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are interested in these topics, go read the scholarship!

EDIT: With a little more clarity, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage people who are interested in this topic to read the mountains of scholarship on these topics written by experts and I wish that Tao had used his visibility to point readers at these experts. You may find that it complicates things.
by nostrademons | 2025-09-24 16:52:09+00:00
Science relies on our senses too - that's all the data we get. But yes, science is a way of compensating for bias in our individual perception and building durable models that make useful predictions even for phenomena we can't directly perceive.

Be wary of overgeneralizing scientific conclusions, though. Science may say that the measles vaccine is 99.7% effective, but if your kid comes down with a rash 3 days after a high fever and a week after being exposed to a known measles case, it starts from head down, and they've got white spots in their mouth - congratulations, they're probably in the 0.3%. Likewise, science may say that men are on average better in spatial and mathematical reasoning than women, but if you meet a top-notch woman programmer in your job, believe your experience, not the science. That science makes a conclusion about the averages doesn't prevent you from having an outlier right in front of you.
by mvhv | 2025-09-24 16:52:25+00:00
I believe "serverless" in this sense means "like AWS lambda". Theoretically you upload some small scripts and they're executed on-demand out of a big resource pool, rather than you paying for/running an entire server yourself.

It seems like a horrible way to build a system with any significant level of complexity, but idk maybe it makes sense for very rarely used and light routes?
by jeffrallen | 2025-09-24 16:52:30+00:00
I looked into the Swiss version of this, which is documented here: https://swiyu-admin-ch.github.io/

They faced the same question. Here is their answer: https://github.com/orgs/swiyu-admin-ch/discussions/20

The tldr is that they have a legal requirement to bind "verifiable credential shares" with the same human who got the e-ID originally, up to the current best practical technology. On Android, they judge that to be "keep the private key in the HSM and require a local biometric (or PIN) unlock to use it". This is why they argue that proving your age will not be possible without a mobile device.

You can prove your age anonymously, for anonymous account, which can be used on a non-mobile device. It's just that the proving the age part must happen from a mobile device.

À propos of more or less nothing: in the Swiss context, websites requesting the proof will be required to request the least information necessary for their need. They must NOT ask for your name, ID number, or birthdate if the question they are trying to answer is, "is this person old enough for our service?"

This is excellent technology, and the Swiss law on it that we are voting for next weekend is an excellent law, so I urge a OUI/JA/SI vote on it, if you're a Swiss citizen.
by einpoklum | 2025-09-24 16:52:50+00:00
> The small-time independent publishers and creators also want to restrict the web because they don't want their content "stolen".

I'm sure some music creators may have, years ago, been against CD recorders, or platforms like Napster or even IRC-based file transfer for sharing music. Hell, maybe they were even against VCRs back in the day. But they were misguided at best.

People who want to prevent computer users from freely copying data are, in this context at least, part of "them" rather than "us".
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-24 16:53:03+00:00
There is nuance here. What you say is true but big organizations have grown as well.

I think in the big picture I would say overall it’s the big organizations that have grown dominant. The inductive reason is because it is the goal for small organizations to become big so that’s where things head logically speaking.

From an evidence based standpoint, in the end, look at YouTube and Amazon. In the end the big organizations are in control. YouTube for example can cut off their creator and it’s pretty much over for them no matter how popular they once were.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-24 16:53:25+00:00
OT question: if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode? I would like to read this post and others by Tao, but I can't stand light-on-black text.

It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a computer screen.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-09-24 16:53:26+00:00
Living in Silicon Valley, there are MANY self driving cars driving around right now. At the stop light the other day, I was between 3 of them without any humans in them.

It is so weird when people pull self driving cars out as some kind of counter example. Just because something doesn't happen on the most optimistic time scale, doesn't mean it isn't happening. They just happen slowly and then all at once.
by simonw | 2025-09-24 16:53:27+00:00
Confusingly, "Serverless" doesn't mean there's no server. It means that you don't have to manage a server yourself.

My preferred definition of serverless is scale-to-zero - where if your app isn't getting any traffic you pay nothing (as opposed to paying a constant fee for having your own server running that's not actually doing any work), then you pay more as the traffic scales up.

Frustratingly there are some "serverless" offerings out there which DO charge you even for no traffic - "Amazon Aurora Serverless v1" did that, I believe they fixed it in v2.
by riknos314 | 2025-09-24 16:53:59+00:00
Microservices for days.

I worked on lifecycle ~5 years ago and just the Standard -> Glacier transition path involved no fewer than 7 microservices.

Just determining which of the 400 trillion keys are eligible for a lifecycle action (comparing each object's metadata against the lifecycle policy on the bucket) is a massive big data job.

Always was a fun oncall when some bucket added a lifecycle rule that queued 1PB+ of data for transition or deletion on the same day. At the time our queuing had become good enough to handle these queues gracefully but our alarming hadn't figured out how to differentiate between the backlog for a single customer with a huge job and the whole system failing to process quickly enough. IIRC this was being fixed as I left.
by iambateman | 2025-09-24 16:54:10+00:00
This is the best thing I'll read today. Things I want to remember:

1. small organizations have been carved out by a move toward the individual and a move toward large organizations. 2. This provides some comfort in the form of cheap goods while contributing to a sense of meaninglessness or being undifferentiated. 3. Tao thinks we would benefit by seeking and participating in grassroots groups.
by estearum | 2025-09-24 16:54:31+00:00
The government has a well-established right to request companies to do things, and there are good reasons to keep it.

For example, the government has immense resources to detect fraud, CSAM, foreign intelligence attacks, and so on.

It is good, actually, that the government can notify employers that one of their employees is a suspected foreign asset and request they do not work on sensitive technologies.

It is good, actually, that the government can notify a social media platform that there are terrorist cells spreading graphic beheading videos and request they get taken down.

It's also good that in the vast majority cases, the platforms are literally allowed to reply with "go fuck yourself!"

The high firewall is already present, it's called the First Amendment and the platforms' unquestioned right to say "nope," as they do literally hundreds of times per day.
by icyfox | 2025-09-24 16:54:57+00:00
The folks at deno have really done a fantastic job at pushing a JS runtime forward in a way that's more easily plug and play for the community. I've used `denoland/deno_core` and `denoland/rusty_v8` quite a bit in embedded projects where I need full JS support but I can't assume users have node/bun/etc installed locally.

Not surprised to see yt-dlp make a similar choice.
by rglover | 2025-09-24 16:55:02+00:00
This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead.

I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).
by cultofmetatron | 2025-09-24 16:55:08+00:00
>I didn't even consider the possibility that you didn't know the Jews did bad things when you heard that

so to give you context, (and I went to a good school)

In my American education, we spent 2 years covering in great detail teh horrors of the holocaust along with meeting survivors.

We spent exactly 0 days studying or learning about the kumir rouge, the vietnam war, the korean war, the congolese genocide, the Rwandan genocide or the armenian genocide.

I literally didn't learn about any of these till I went to university and was told about this stuff by peers who were more educated on these things. these topics were just not taught. An the idea that jews might the aggressors and not innocent victims? I'm pretty sure you would have gotten politically targeted for simply suggesting the idea.

so to drive the point home, most americans really have no idea.
by tmaly | 2025-09-24 16:55:24+00:00
In terms of collaboration and contributions, I think the contextual search offered by LLMs is significantly underrated.

Recall the second Highlander film that Connor MacLeod was given the gift of telepathic empathy. He is able to hear people's thoughts and feel what they feel. He uses that to help scientists collaborate.

We don't have telepathic empathy in reality, but image using the LLM's contextual search across research projects? We could potentially have some type of approximation.

This would then allow smaller groups to make a significant contribution to society. It would go against the idea in the Mythical Man Month of adding more people, what we see in larger orgs.
by MrPowers | 2025-09-24 16:55:39+00:00
There is a project called GeoPolars: https://github.com/geopolars/geopolars

From the README:

> Update (August 2024): GeoPolars is blocked on Polars supporting Arrow extension types, which would allow GeoPolars to persist geometry type information and coordinate reference system (CRS) metadata. It's not feasible to create a geopolars. GeoDataFrame as a subclass of a polars. DataFrame (similar to how the geopandas. GeoDataFrame is a subclass of pandas.DataFrame) because polars explicitly does not support subclassing of core data types.
by yazaddaruvala | 2025-09-24 16:55:49+00:00
Facts!

I now get to the gym (or some form of exercise) 6 days a week. That was entirely because I made the decision to go to the gym and watch some YouTube.

Then I’d end up staying 90 mins but I’d get my 50 min workout in with a lot of long breaks! Then things started becoming a habit but I still have many days where I just watch YouTube at the gym lol
by dml2135 | 2025-09-24 16:56:27+00:00
I think your observations about tense and mood are very true, but you are undervaluing the extent to which someone can do something automatically and out of habit, especially when their paycheck depends on it.

I absolutely believe that a journalist can present two analogous sets of facts in two completely different ways without even consciously realizing it. These assumptions and biases are baked in deep, especially when you are writing day-in and day-out on short deadlines.
by veqq | 2025-09-24 16:56:32+00:00
With a few hours of applied learning, distinctions between these will collapse. If you work on typing, your reading will naturally improve (because you're identifying letters to input). With stronger reading, you won't see differences between scripts and reading will be the same as listening. That is, improving your knowledge of the language by reading will improve your listening comprehension too. (Reading the wikipedia article on phonology will also unify reading out loud and speaking, Persian is extremely phonemic.)

At minimum, consider a few hours now compared to the time saved by halving the number of flashcards you need.
by karmakurtisaani | 2025-09-24 16:56:45+00:00
> Lie through your teeth, but not so much people quit?

I didn't get this message from the blog post at all. Let me summarize for you: In public toe the company line, if you don't, you will be fired. In private, be honest about your opinions so your team knows you are on their side and understand their plight (and most likely you suffer from the bad leadership as well). Protect the team from bad consequences by not being zealous about the new order.
by f_devd | 2025-09-24 16:57:00+00:00
I don't know the specific ZKP variant if that's what you mean, but the general architecture of the system is best described in the 38C3 talk from earlier this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKtklN8mOo0

There are some choices that are debatable (more on the issuer side iirc), but imho for the goals it has it's a competently made architecture.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-24 16:57:08+00:00
When the higher-ups make a bad decision, sure, push back on it. Push back on it with reckless disregard for your job, even. But when pushing back fails, your people either have to accept it or leave, and not all of them want to (or can) leave. Your job then is to help them accept the decision. If you can't or won't do that, your only moral option left is to leave yourself.