MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perihelions | 2025-09-09 20:05:59+00:00
I don't know why you'd trust a checksum structure your adversary has complete control over.

That Merkle tree prevents the naive case where the adversary tries to serve a version of a repo, to a client who already has an older version, differing in a part the client already has. (The part the client has local checksums for). They shouldn't do that. The git client tells the server what commits it doesn't have, so this is simple to check.

Code signing could be a safeguard if people did it, but here they don't so it's moot. I found no mention of a signing key in this repo's docs.

The checksum tree could be a useful audit if there were a transparency log somewhere that git tools automatically checked against, but there isn't so it's moot. We put full trust in Microsoft's versions.

Lots of things could be helpful, but here and now in front of us is a source tree fully in Microsoft's control, with no visible safeguards against Microsoft doing something evil to it. Just like countless others. It's the default state of trust today.
Show HN: Real time visual saliency detection
by big-nacho | 2025-09-09 20:06:11+00:00
I've just made public a library to perform real time visual saliency detection on videos (but static images are also supported).

This started a couple months ago when, while working on another project, I ended up side-tracking and overkilling as usual. I'm pretty happy with the result and I think it could prove to be a useful piece of software.

It should work on both Linux and macOS, but I'm yet to test Linux cause I only have a mac at hand. Windows may be doable through WSL.

GitHub: https://github.com/big-nacho/dosage Showcase: https://big-nacho.github.io/dosage-docs/showcase.html
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-09-09 20:07:24+00:00
> I'd get D >= X >= C+, where X is my grade

Mostly as a curiosity, what you've written here is impossible, lol. I think you mean your grade would range from a D to a C+, inclusive. But you have written that your grade would be greater-or-equal to a C+, yet less-than-or-equal to a D, which would be.... impressive :D

edit: Closed intervals are great for communicating this kind of thing in general. You could say your grade is in the interval [D, C+], where the brackets indicate that D and C+ are included in the options. Compare to the open interval, which would indicate that D and C+ are excluded -- ie (D,C+) includes only the entries D+, C-, C.
by doom2 | 2025-09-09 20:07:39+00:00
I live about 100 miles from NYC, which is 2-2.5 hours by car but only 1.5 hours by train. I think that that would be considered an acceptable commute time for companies with a hybrid work plan. However, every time I ask recruiters from NYC-based companies if their commute subsidy would cover the train, I get told employees have to live within a 50 mile radius of the office. Like you said, that could be 2 hours by car! For the right salary and benefits, I'd happily spend 3 hours a day on a train. At least I wouldn't be driving.
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-09 20:08:12+00:00
MS Teams for video teleconferencing...good. On a Windows PC, and using MS365, by far the easiest to set up (or change) a meeting and fewest issues with cameras across multiple devices. (Webex and Zoom are close seconds, Google Meet is a distant last due to constant camera issues.)

MS Teams for IM...okay. Too much white space and too hard to find conversations that I know I've had recently. Very much prefer Slack.

MS Teams for any of that other stuff...rage inducing. Especially the file sharing and other "team" features which break with every minor update. Somehow, even worse than using Sharepoint directly. Went back to email and using network drives to share/store team documents.
by mschaef | 2025-09-09 20:08:16+00:00
I have a couple DSLR's and a large frame compact, and I wholly get your point. The image quality on even an older DSLR is better, mainly due to the physics of the optics - there's nothing like a high quality lens dumping a bunch of light on a large sensor.

However.... it's really hard to overstate the workflow and convenience aspects of shooting with a phone. (Particularly as a parent, and even moreso when I was a new parent of a small child.) The phone has the twin benefits of 1) being present almost always and 2) being immediately able to process and transmit an image to the people you might want to see it. For the 99% case, that's far more useful than even a very significant improvement in image quality. For the 1% where it matters, I can and do either hire a professional (with better equipment than my own) or make the production of dragging out my DSLR and all that it entails. This is like so many other cases where inarguable technical excellence of a sort gives way to convenience and cost issues. IOW, "Better" is not just about Image Quality.
by runjake | 2025-09-09 20:08:19+00:00
Movie people don't normally care about the finish of the iPhone they are using. And the ones that do, use a case.

I've seen all sorts of non-black (let alone matte black) iPhone rigs used for motion pictures, including white and natural titanium colors. Eg. 28 Years Later used a variety of iPhone configurations and colors.

But yeah, I'm surprised there's no black/space gray option this year. Some consumers won't buy any other color.
by tossandthrow | 2025-09-09 20:08:21+00:00
> The Fed lowers rates by buying assets ...

Ahh yeah, the planned economy that we intellectually dress as something else. Is it the real estate sector that should be prioritized this time? Maybe corperate bonds? or the government?

QE is an incredibly new instrument - we are still experimenting and it is not given that it is a success.
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-09 20:08:37+00:00
Very interesting. I do have a bit of a "vids or it didn't happen" feeling about this.

Cool idea to use your own kernel though it does sound like you could find yourself in perpetual development hell. And, don't forget all the sufficiently powerful SoCs are super closed. You won't be able to leverage any of their existing driver work and you will need some serious clout to get access to their documentation, with some really scary NDAs attached. However I'm sure you know this and took it into account. Very cool. I hope you will manage to get it to market!
by layer8 | 2025-09-09 20:09:21+00:00
The limiting factor for that is currently the more recent iPhone SE 3 (2022), so that argument isn't convincing. Regarding screen size, the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro Max is the same as the iPhone mini resolution, and the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro is the same as the Display Zoom resolution of the mini [0], so dropping the mini didn't actually remove any supported resolution. What's true is that the hardware design and layout is more constrained for the mini size, mostly regarding battery capacity, but I don't really see a limitation for the software. Even regarding battery capacity, the 16e has really great battery life, so a mini using similar tech should still be acceptable.

[0] https://www.ricsantos.net/2021/01/21/ios-device-resolution-g...
by r0fl | 2025-09-09 20:09:45+00:00
I see many comments screaming "WE NEED MORE BATTERY LIFE!"

I'm curious who needs more battery life than the iPhone air will provide? Every single person I know of commutes to and from work daily either in a car where they can charge their phone or to a desk that has a charger (wired or wireless).

The iPhone Air is rated for 27 hours of videoplayback. Let's say it works for a QUARTER of that, its still 7 hours of playback.

What kind of people are away from a charger for more than 7 hours who also only consume content for those 7 hours on a regular basis?

What kind of individuals are these? Please explain
by tzs | 2025-09-09 20:09:51+00:00
The payments are deposited monthly or semiweekly (for employers with large payroll) but that's a lump sum. If you are looking at that from the government side all you can tell is whether total payroll has gone up or down. That won't tell if any change is due to a change in number of employees or a change in pay rates or some combination of that.

It isn't until the employer files their quarterly Form 941 that you'd see employment numbers. Form 941 includes the number of employees and total wages and withholding.

It isn't until the annual W-2 filings that you would see a breakdown that includes number of employees and the individual pay.
Show HN: Vicinae – A native, Raycast-compatible launcher for Linux
by aurellius | 2025-09-09 20:10:00+00:00
Hi HN!

I’ve always been a fan of application launchers, and I was impressed by the approach the Raycast team took — especially their extension system. About six months ago I started building something similar for Linux, aiming to integrate deeply at the OS level and give extensions a lot of power.

Vicinae is written in C++ with Qt Widgets. I chose Widgets over QML for more imperative control of the UI, especially around extension handling. So far that’s worked well — modern C++ is great.

To support my goals I built a number of custom widgets, including a fully virtualized list that can efficiently render tens of thousands of items. That gave me a lot of respect for Qt — it’s a powerful framework that mostly stayed out of my way.

A key feature is support for Raycast extensions (React + TypeScript), most of which can be installed and used directly inside the launcher (though not all features are implemented yet). There’s also a native API package (@vicinae/api) for writing Vicinae-specific extensions with additional capabilities. This required writing a custom React reconciler — surprisingly straightforward, though still unpolished.

Like Raycast, Vicinae ships with powerful built-in modules, but the goal isn’t to make a clone. I want it to grow into its own project that fits the FOSS model better, while staying compatible with the Raycast ecosystem. I also plan to bring it to other OSes eventually.

I’d love feedback on the technical approach, and suggestions for what would make this useful to you. Contributions are very welcome — I’ve already been pleasantly surprised by how quickly people started helping.

Docs: https://docs.vicinae.com Repo: https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae
by bluGill | 2025-09-09 20:10:04+00:00
I know people who do that. They pay the same interest rates as if the house was in perfect shape, not higher interest rates, and they are getting loans for most (if not all) the value. Their local banker knows them well (since they get loans for this all the time), and knows they are good for paying back the loan and so they are willing to extend them a loan for a low rate. If the bank forecloses on a house and their inspection decides it is in bad shape the bank will call this person first and it will never go on the market. (they have a list of people who do this work - different people specialize in different problems)

If I was to try to do the same I'd pay a higher rate, and have to put a lot of money down. However once you do it a few times the banks realizes you know how to run this type of business and so is willing to lend you money to do it. (which is to say if you want to get into it you almost have to live in the first 2-3 houses while you fix it up, but after that you can just buy something with their money to fix up)
by kragen | 2025-09-09 20:10:20+00:00
Hmm, I think that ought to be pretty doable with the callgrind output actually. I'm using amd64 rather than a modern ISA, so the calls do necessarily touch "memory", but leaf functions are still especially cheap—they can use temporary registers for local variables. In the case of Emacs most of the functions are compiled Lisp, and I doubt the Lisp compiler is smart enough to exploit leafness in its register allocator.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-09 20:11:01+00:00
This is really impressive.

It’s my understanding that this won’t protect you in the case where the attacker has a chance to try multiple times.

The approach would be something like: go out of bounds far enough to skip the directly adjacent object, or do a use after free with a lot of grooming, so that you get a a chance of getting a matching tag. The probability of getting a matching tag is 1/16.

But this post doesn’t provide enough details for me to be super confident about what I’m saying. Time will tell! If this is successful then the remaining exploit chains will have to rely on logic bugs, which would be super painful for the bad guys
by reissbaker | 2025-09-09 20:11:12+00:00
Selling a game whose assets were made with a pirated copy of Photoshop does not extend Adobe's copyright to cover your game itself. They can sue you for using the pirated copy of Photoshop, but they can't extend copyright vampirically in that manner — at least, not in the United States.

(They can still sue for damages, but they can't claim copyright over your game itself.)
by numpad0 | 2025-09-09 20:11:13+00:00
You might be onto something. Anecdotally, I just came across some armchair economist lamenting lack of aptitude among Japanese startups for foreign currency acquisition, and I could only agree - I can't recall many Japanese startups or corporate business expansions primarily focusing on foreign sales. The mental model is always to get rich quick within Japan and/or South Asia and retire. "The world" outside is treated like tiny separate bonus rooms.

Thinking about Japanese economy in general and how it hadn't grown in 30-40 years: 40 years is technically two generations, but life in Japan hadn't deteriorated meaningfully during that period. Substantial socio-political improvements were made, university entrance had rose somewhat absurdly high, some new infrastructures were built, convenience store sandwich prices hasn't doubled, overtimes and harassments at workplaces are way more strictly scrutinized. There's the problem of employment ice age, but it's not as bad as the collapse of the Soviet Union; not at "Vladimir Putin was laid off KGB and drove taxi to make ends meet" levels, only "PhDs drove trucks". So "Japan still using FAX" narratives only partially make sense. Overall, it does feel that there is something strange is going on in this country, something like effective isolationism.

I guess my point is... it's unfortunate that these efforts and costs spent goes to waste, and we don't know why it's only built to be recycled.
by rkagerer | 2025-09-09 20:11:23+00:00
Good. I wish they'd stop adding new "apps" I don't want, and focus on being a handy little file sync and sharing solution. Some of my own pet peeves they did:

- got rid of Public folder support, in spite of user outcry (https://www.dropboxforum.com/discussions/101001014/ending-su...)

- re-wrote the software in such a way that files are temporarily locked right after they get written / modified (intermittently breaking utilities like VSO Image Resizer)

- made it increasingly difficult or impossible to deliberately remove the green checkmark overlay icons (used to be an easy Windows registry hack, now the software goes through all kinds of hoops to fight you and restore the way they want it)

- IIRC for a while they introduced AI feature default settings that would hoover up your document contents without consent (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/dropb...)
by sylware | 2025-09-09 20:11:31+00:00
IP lock, my bad (in my native language it is the other way around).

Intellectual Property lock. ARM, x86(intel), x86_64(amd) have such extremely strong locks in countries where those are legal to be enforced.

It is said they literaly deny anybody else to use their ISAs unless there is a super strong power struggle and/or a giga-enormous amount of $$$ in the bargain.
by Kon5ole | 2025-09-09 20:11:38+00:00
>Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events.

Not at all.

Fukushima costs 7 billion per year now, after 15 years, with no end in sight. Boar with meat measuring over 30 000 bq/kg was shot 30 years after Chernobyl in areas over 1000 miles away.

The things that have already happened were not acute, immediate or local, they were wide-spread and long-lasting.

And they were far from the worst that could have happened. Imagine if the fire at Chernobyl was not put out, for example.

Financially and technically nuclear makes little sense since solar and batteries are faster to deploy and much cheaper.

Nuclear power is very interesting for nations and companies that want to extract money from the taxpaying population. Microsoft gets cheap electricity now, and when the US discovers that its promise to handle the waste and liability is crazy expensive, taxpayers will have to pay for it. Not Microsoft.

Politicians and corps generally want to start multi-billion dollar projects to deliver comparatively tiny amounts of electricity 10 years from now, because it's about the money today, not about the electricity tomorrow.

Don't fall for it. We want to build cheap, distributed, uncomplicated electricity ourselves, controlled by the people who consume it.

Even if nobody gets rich from selling electricity in that scenario, there's plenty of money to be made from consuming almost free electricity.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-09-09 20:11:41+00:00
> Inflation is here to stay.

Well sure it is, we aim for some inflation on purpose.

If you mean inflation above 2% is here to stay, maybe, but 2% was an arbitrary target anyway. It doesn't make much difference whether it's around 2% or hovering between 2% and 3%.

If you think it's going to go much higher I'd like to hear why.
by program_whiz | 2025-09-09 20:11:41+00:00
In training, the model is trained to predict the exact sequence of words of a text. In other words, it is reproducing the text repeatedly for its own trainings. The by-product of this training is that it influences model weights to make the text more likely to be produced by the model -- that is its explicit goal. A perfect model would be able to reproduce the text perfectly (0 loss).

Real-world absurd example: A company hires a bunch of workers. They then give them access to millions of books and have the workers reading the books all day. The workers copy the books word by word, but after each word try to guess the next word that will appear. Eventually, they collectively become quite good at guessing the next word given a prompt text, even reproducing large swaths of text almost verbatim. The owner of company Y claims they owe nothing to the book owners, because it doesn't count as reading the book, and any reproduction is "coincidental" (even though this is the explicit task of the readers). They then use these workers to produce works to compete with the authors of the books, which they never paid for.

It seems many people feel this is "fair use" when it happens on a computer, but would call it "stealing" if I pirated all the books of JK Rowling to train myself to be a better mimicker of her style. If you feel this is still fair use, then you should agree all books should be free to everyone (as well as art, code, music, and any other training material).
by franktankbank | 2025-09-09 20:11:54+00:00
Fair, maybe redefine is not the right word? Rework the incentive structure. From my point of view there is a lot of effort being expended for negative return for the average citizen. Its going to be interesting to see what happens now that China is out as long as these tariffs hold (stay in law and are actually abided). I hope the end result isn't running back and begging for mercy.
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-09 20:12:05+00:00
It really doesn’t take a lawyer to know what “at will employment” means.

A case for what unless it’s discriminatory. Your employer doesn’t have to justify letting you go - at all.

Even looking at your citation, it shows that constructive dismissal is only actionable if you can show that they made working conditions harder and they were targeting you under a law meant to protect you against discrimination

Companies have been giving employees an ultimatum between “relocate or quit” forever.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-09-09 20:12:07+00:00
The article is oddly written. It's not the e-ink display panels that are different; they're off-the-shelf modules from E-Ink that their controller is driving at 75 Hz. Presumably E-Ink themselves know that the panel can be driven at that rate.

And pixel-level addressing isn't innovative either. If you've written on an e-ink tablet and observed that the screen doesn't refresh with every pixel change under the stylus, that is surely because pixels are being toggled individually instead of doing a full screen refresh.

So perhaps the only difference is that it's an open source controller that's competitive with commercial e-ink display controllers? That's no small achievement and worth celebrating in and of itself. But it's not at all made clear by the article.
by K0nserv | 2025-09-09 20:12:30+00:00
I agree the UX challenge is much more challenging for decentralised services. I don't know enough about Bluesky to really comment on whether it is centralised or not.

Regardless, I think there's another thing that helped Bluesky: VC capital. In particular, to hire people to work on UX. It's a bit of a pet-peeve of mine, but I find it strange that designer don't contribute more to projects like Mastodon, which definitely need it. Even from the selfish angle of building a portfolio, helping solve Mastodon's UX challenges is much more impressive and realistic, than doing the millionth redesign of Gmail that will never get implemented.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-09 20:12:32+00:00
> the planned economy that we intellectually dress as something else

The price of a bond, mathematically, moves inversely with its yield. If you want to raise or lower the yield, i.e. rate, you have to move the price. This isn't a policy option, it's literally the definition of a rate (coupon over price).

> QE is an incredibly new instrument

QE means buying assets that are not Treasuries. Most of the Fed's balance sheet is Treasuries, i.e. not QE.

You can't reduce the balance sheet and lower rates. You can pretend. You could sell bonds and then immediately "borrow" them back. Or start up a bunch of swap lines to banks or whatnot, so they run out and buy the bonds for you.
by bluGill | 2025-09-09 20:12:48+00:00
> Otherwise you're just throwing money away on rent, you'll never see those rent payments again.

This propaganda is not the whole truth. Renting almost always means you live in a smaller/cheaper place (or perhaps in a more expensive place but you don't own a car) after maintenance costs are accounted for. People who take that different and invest it well end up just as rich as people who invest in houses - it isn't hard to find investments that have a much better long-term returns than real estate.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-09 20:13:16+00:00
Citroen DS, Jaguar e-type, Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale, MB Gullwing, BMW 507 and a whole raft of other 50's, 60's and 70's cars look much better than anything that I even remember designed in the 80's. Of course that's just my opinion, but those cars are so iconic, do you have any particular cars in mind for that period which you really liked?
by like_any_other | 2025-09-09 20:13:19+00:00
> He believed that was the case because the former cartel boss, whose lawyer said in January he had entered negotiations with U.S. authorities, had been pointing fingers at members of other criminal organizations likely as part of a cooperation agreement.

> “It is evident that his family is going to the U.S. because of a negotiation or an offer that the Department of Justice is giving him,” Garcia Harfuch said.

Looks like they're getting protection in exchange for testimony against other cartels.