MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-09-25 20:34:06+00:00
Not much detail on the method? Like what data it takes from iNaturalist - for example if it's taking in GPS coordinates of observations of brambles then it's not clear what there is for the ML model to do.

What detail was in the satellite images, was it taking signals of the type of spaces brambles are in, or was it just visually identifying bramble patches?

In the UK you get brambles in pretty much every non-cultivated green space. I wonder how well the classifier did?

Interesting project.
by Gormo | 2025-09-25 20:34:43+00:00
To make sure I understand, your position is that anything vitally important to the internet should not be under the control of a plurality of institutions subject to heterogenous incentive structures, but instead should be under the centralized, monopolistic control of a single institution that is perpetually compromised by perverse incentives and ulterior motives, whose mechanisms of accountability are mostly performative and demonstrably broken?

I'm not sure that sounds like a good idea, if that's what you're saying.
by Zak | 2025-09-25 20:34:50+00:00
Blackmail, formally extortion or coercion is a crime only when specific kinds of threats (which may vary by jurisdiction) are used to compel someone's behavior.

Threatening to stop offering certain products or services in jurisdictions with unfavorable regulatory environments doesn't meet those criteria in any jurisdiction I'm aware of. European car companies often have models that can't profitably be brought into compliance with USA regulations, and they're just not sold in the USA.

Apple can almost certainly comply with EU regulations while remaining profitable in that market; they're just making a fuss because they don't like the regulations and they hope to get the public on their side.
by Ancapistani | 2025-09-25 20:34:51+00:00
I understand there's no direct way to answer this, but does this image appear the same as the live page to you?

https://imgur.com/a/nZnr0BN

If so... wow. That's not good at all; it's almost as hard to distinguish the minimum value from the maximum value as it is the two in the center.
by Waterluvian | 2025-09-25 20:35:03+00:00
I haven’t done this kind of thing since undergrad, but hyperspectral data is really frickin cool this way. Not only can you use spectral signatures to identify specific things, but also figure out what those things are made out of by unmixing the spectra.

For example, figure out what crop someone’s growing and decide how healthy it is. With sufficient temporal resolution, you can understand when things are planted and how well they’re growing, how weedy or infiltrated they are by pest plants, how long the soil remains wet or if rainwater runs off and leaves the crop dry earlier than desired. Etc.

If you’re a good guy, you’d leverage this data to empower farmers. If you’re an asshole, you’re looking to see who has planted your crop illegally, or who is breaking your insurance fine print, etc.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-25 20:35:18+00:00
Nice:

> Having just migrated to Kysely from TypeORM, we were already seeing massive improvements with regard to speed and memory usage in other parts of the application as we migrated queries to use the streaming interface (see #16600, #16666, #16700, #16706, etc.).

I would generally suggest folks look at something like ElectricSQL Postgres Sync Engine. There's a pretty good ShapeStream HTTP API for shipping shape logs across to the client. It can do so much of the heavy lifting for shipping updates for you, & will be reliable! https://electric-sql.com/docs/api/clients/typescript#shapest...

ElectricSQL are also authors of pglite, a wasm postgres, for running a sync-ed to mini postgres on the client (via wasm). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37584049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224689
by TrackerFF | 2025-09-25 20:35:35+00:00
Should be obvious. If you want a smaller government, you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide. Venture capital / private equity / etc. owned companies will stand in line to get those contracts.

And with deregulations, "move fast and break things" startups can move even faster.

What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd. They enjoy social freedoms which the current gov. would rather see go away...so, talk about selling their soul to the devil.
by tomhow | 2025-09-25 20:35:41+00:00
Please don't comment like this on HN. These guidelines in particular, ask us to avoid commenting like this:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Please don't post shallow dismissals...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by eszed | 2025-09-25 20:35:59+00:00
I can anecdotally confirm this, based on my father's experience in a private-equity owned facility in California. It was astonishing how under-staffed they were for the amount of care the patients needed. (I'm sure they were at least nominally in compliance with whatever the regulations said, but that doesn't mean they were adequately staffed.)

Thing is, I loved those nurses. I watched them walk in with the look I remember from my restaurant days when you knew you'd be in the weeds all shift - call it a hundred-yard stare, if you like. They were all completely burnt out, and openly and cheerfully cynical and contemptuous towards the owners and administrators, but for the sake of the patients they just got on with it, as best they could. I don't think I ever saw the head nurse sit down.

There weren't enough supplies, because the laundry service was late, so I went back to my dad's house and brought him an extra blanket. The next day I got another for his neighbor.

There weren't really any rules, because nobody had time for that. The blanket thing? Shouldn't have been allowed, especially giving one to someone else. I asked about visiting hours, and just got a raised eyebrow, and "just put 8pm on the signout sheet". I said "well, then, I'll come back with a six-pack and stay until midnight!" She laughed at me, because I was (half) joking, but I'm pretty sure that would have been fine.

More substantively, when my dad needed the heavy-duty painkillers - prescribed by his doctor, mind - the administration (reached by phone) wouldn't allow them to be dispensed - supposedly because of the liability of having that kind of controlled substance on site; we sorted it out, but it took a couple of of days - when that happened, I said I'd bring in the bottle he had at home and give them to him myself. The nurse said pretty much "we can't do that - but if I didn't see it, it didn't happen," so I did. Then she made sure to give him his other medications herself, so she could check on how much I'd given him, and that it wouldn't cause a problem with the other pain-killers he was on.

I'm sure all of those things were wildly "wrong", from someone's point of view - ethically, or legally, or fiscally, or something. But I viewed the whole situation as so morally appalling - people live there for months, waiting to die - that I can't view those nurses' ethical commitment to whatever it takes to make their patients' lives more tolerable as anything but admirable.

Thing is, we're eating our societal seed-corn. The more awful those jobs are made, the more quickly people burn out of them, and the worse the care provided will become. Those folks were dying on their feet, and there was no help coming, and I don't know how much longer that facility - let alone the whole medical system - can stay afloat on those admirable people's dwindling store of compassion.

But hey, some folks got a little richer by owning that place. All the rest of it's a small price to pay for living in such a land of glorious opportunity, right?
by frizlab | 2025-09-25 20:36:21+00:00
> Competitors are shipping those features without an issue.

Actually not the ones I care about (for instance idgaf about live translation).

> Apple made a decision to shoot itself in the foot and you are a collateral damage.

Also not really true. Apple has always been straightforward about what they were doing, and suddenly the EU decided it was not good. But I truly and wholeheartedly disagree, and I actively want iOS the way it was.

Let the market decide! As long as they do not deceive the users it’s ok/good, even, IMHO.
by xp84 | 2025-09-25 20:36:38+00:00
> How do you think predators get in contact with children?

I thought it was pretty common knowledge that the vast, vast majority of the perpetrators of these offenses are either family members, or known and trusted people to the family, such as the friends of an older sibling, friends of parents, stepparents, teachers, priests, etc. The bogeyman of the evil stranger paedo lurking on social media cold-calling random kids is an edge case.
by 1-more | 2025-09-25 20:36:58+00:00
> nobody reads intermediate commit messages one by one on a PR, period.

Very common practice at my old company, and one I continue in my current role.

> “every commit must compile”

sucks ass for anyone else trying to rebase your branch onto the update main/master when they don't. Once your PR is out of "working on the feature" and into the "getting it merged" phase, do a little `git rebase -i` and squash your really intermediate commits into ones that compile. Ignore this if you have real grown up CI where your PRs never stay open for more than a day.
by Herring | 2025-09-25 20:37:10+00:00
China can turn on a dime. And they smell blood.

https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC8f1qs3TGs

Give it 5-10 years and the situation could look very different. If they decide to pour tons of money into it, they could dominate like with trains or solar.
by araes | 2025-09-25 20:37:25+00:00
Because it gets a lot of response, there's a lot of traction, many with positive sentiment, support, and "take me with you" equivalents.

Because its a sign significant numbers of people, institutions, disciplines, and demographics are thinking that way. In stock market terminology it would be a signal to investors.

Thread on Reddit 1mo ago about biotechnologist Wali Malik leaving his lab in Boston developing mass testing of active ingredients for pharmaceuticals got a decent amount of visibility. Also mentions the APART-USA grants. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1mzlk04/us_rese...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-25 20:37:26+00:00
> Does that "literature" include history itself?

Literally how these things are studied.

> can't think of a single movement for good in history that accomplished its goals without pissing people off

Disruptive protest takes the form of interrupting ordinary peoples' lives. (In contrast with targeted protest, which seeks to directly disrupt the problematic conduct.)

They are effective at raising awareness of an issue and rallying the base. Among those who are already aware and have not yet committed to a side, however, they tend (broadly) to decrease sympathy.

> Resisting any form of power tends to result in that power - and the many supporting it - getting quite upset by definition

Of course. I'm talking about broader views.

Sympathy for Israel went up after the Columbia protests because (a) nobody was surprised that there was a war in Gaza and (b) folks breaking into a building and disrupting public spaces doesn't naturally elicit sympathy from undecideds. (It also crowds out coverage of the actual war.)
by nick__m | 2025-09-25 20:37:47+00:00
You practice in Québec ? If so I am quite surprised, because my wife had a lot of scans and we never met a radiologists who wasn't a radio-oncologist. And her oncologist never talked with the radiologists either. The communication between them was always through written demands and reports. And the situation is similar between her neurologist and the radiologists.

By the way, even if I sound dismissive I have great respect for the skills required by your profession. Reading an IRM is really hard when you have the radiologist report in hand and to my untrained eyes it's impossible without it!

And since you talk to patients frequently, I have an even greater respect of you as a radiologist.
by sadiq | 2025-09-25 20:38:04+00:00
Hi! You can find a bit more about Gabriel's model through some of his posts over the last few weeks: https://gabrielmahler.org/posts/

When it comes to the satellite images, the model actually used TESSERA (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20380) which is a model we trained to produce embeddings for every point on earth that encodes the temporal-spectral properties over a year.

Think of it like a compression of potentially fifty or a hundred observations of a particular point in earth down to a single 128 dimension vector.

Happy to answer any other questions.
by acdha | 2025-09-25 20:38:07+00:00
The problem was that they didn’t want the extra hassle of verifying that senders owned the numbers they were announcing. In the earlier SS7 era that was manageable because all of the parties were major phone companies but VoIP opened up a wave of small fly-by-night players. Porting the system forward without recognizing that change in the security assumptions was recognized as a mistake in the early 2000s but the telephone companies saw preventing it as a cost which would also reduce their revenue from delivering all of that spam.
by BearOso | 2025-09-25 20:38:26+00:00
> “The vibe they gave was ‘So, what is it that you do here?’ and ‘Why can’t AI do that?’” —TTS worker

From what I've read, this particular group of children naively thinks "AI" can and should do everything. As in, they think it's literally magic and have no clue how it or computing works. I remember reading about how one was asking on twitter how to use AI to convert word processor documents between formats, when that's a simple classic computing task. I'm afraid the next generation is going to think the only tool they need is a sledgehammer.
by epistasis | 2025-09-25 20:38:36+00:00
From the bug report:

> It turns out Electron was overriding a private AppKit API (_cornerMask) to apply custom corner masks to vibrant views.

> ...

> By removing the custom _cornerMask override and associated logic, we allow AppKit to handle shadows with its default pipeline. This resolves the GPU spike while retaining shadows as expected.

I'd say that most often usage of private APIs is because:

4. it probably shouldn't be done at all
by Ancapistani | 2025-09-25 20:38:46+00:00
Ohhh, that's a great tool that I didn't know existed. I've used GPU-based filters in the past for this.

For others - this panel is shown at the bottom, alongside the "Console" panel (not the "Console" tab at the top!) that's sometimes shown. You can open it by clicking the three vertical dots at the top right of the devtools panel, "More tools", then "Rendering".

The setting you're looking for is "Emulate vision deficiencies".
by ip26 | 2025-09-25 20:38:53+00:00
Argue with it. Criticize it. Nitpick the questions it asked. Tell it what you just said:

you just gave me a generic summary of the top 5 articles you'd get if you googled "how to fix depression, social anxiety" or something

When you open the prompt the first time it has zero context on you. I'm not an LLM-utopist, but just like with a human therapist you need to give it more context. Even arguing with it is context.
by johnfn | 2025-09-25 20:39:03+00:00
> Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.

I’m really surprised anyone could say that. To my view, “Thoughts on Flash killed Flash” is about as true as “the sky is blue”. It’s fairly clear to me that without a strong stance, a less principled mobile OS (like Android) would have supported it, and probably Flash would still be around today. Apple’s stance gave Google the path to do the same thing, and this domino effect led to Flash being discontinued 7 years later. You say 7 years as if it’s a long time from cause to effect, but how long would you estimate it would take a single action to fully kill something as pervasive as Flash, which was installed on virtually every machine (Im sure it was 99%+)? You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
by nailer | 2025-09-25 20:39:26+00:00
Arab colonisation being many years ago doesn’t mean it didn’t happen and doesn’t make arabs native. Here’s the Hamas leader talking about how they’re Arabs: https://x.com/eyakoby/status/1971056308939092028

> any chance at deviation from that plan has been met with violence of an unsurpassed level

Really? I thought it was because Arab leaders keep trying to destroy Israel. I think I got that impression from Arab leaders continuously saying they were going to destroy Israel, and 'the Jews' in the time between the writing of the Koran and the creation of the modern state (also still 'the jews' if you listen to Arab media).

Syria used to be Christian. Lebanon had a significant Christian population. Egypt was Egyptian and Iran was Zoroastrian. All fell after arab colonisation.
by antognini | 2025-09-25 20:40:04+00:00
The Bach Cello Suites are deservedly famous, but if you are looking to branch out to other solo cello music I recommend listening to Zoltan Kodály's Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello. After the Bach Cello Suites it is probably the most important piece in the solo cello repertoire. One of the unusual features of the piece is that it calls for the bottom two strings to be tuned down half a step which gives the cello a darker timbre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phygv_Et9sQ
by runako | 2025-09-25 20:40:17+00:00
One reason those programs are not means tested is because it means that everyone can depend on them. Once they are means-tested to only apply to poor/middle class people, they will begin to be aggressively cut like the other means-tested programs.

Also worth noting net worth "over a million dollars" is not extravagant for a Medicare-age person who did not have a pension, for example. This is basically a median home and $600k in savings. Not poor, but also not likely to be able to pay anything close to rack rate for health insurance for an older person.
by joe_the_user | 2025-09-25 20:40:21+00:00
My impression is a lot of US health care problems are caused in part by a sort of unholy combination of restricted competition and access, together with profit driven market participants.

That is not wrong, literally stated. But know a lot of hn people imagine that this means making things completely unregulated might be one reasonable alternative. The obvious problem in this case is scams and unsafely/deadly treatments. Here, one can point countries with functioning, lightly regulated systems. The problem is that these countries depend on cultural and institutional factors keeping people honest, keeping fake medicine at bay, and etc.

But the US has a cultural of religious irrationality coupled with huge, profitable and predatory organizations (the ones soaking health care dollars as well as alternative medicine cults and scammers). Before the last hundred years of regulation, 1910 or so, unregulated US medicine was a deadly, heroin soaked shit show and if you back to that, all the "alternative" scammers along with Stackler types are ready to jump in to try to equal that situation.
by bigyabai | 2025-09-25 20:40:28+00:00
How we literally "got here" was Section 230. You can easily stifle free speech by holding Facebook and X accountable for every single post ever made on their platforms. But that would capsize the American investment economy, so we have to protect them just a little bit. It creates a perverse, bipartisan incentive to export the most reprehensible opinions that still qualify as legal.

European citizens (and soon, American ones too) are discovering that they never held the cards. When you ask your OEMs, cloud providers and DNS resolver who's side they're really on, it's not yours. You, the customer, hold no guillotine over their head.
by NaOH | 2025-09-25 20:41:37+00:00
I think the bigger issue is that someone thought this post was worthy of HN discussion. It's more concerning to me than lapcat writing for an audience that knows his priors and him then choosing to forego an in-depth critique of what Apple has done here. The fact this piece lacks the substance and depth which can make for a good HN conversation is not lapcat's fault.
by rolph | 2025-09-25 20:41:42+00:00
ad nauseum, unless google plans on deleting youtube, they have the impossible task of letting people watch videos, but also preventing that.

streaming is downloading by another name. once you download data into an other machines buffer, the only real obstacle to treating it like any other structure is, trust me bro, i wont copy it and concatenate it to a persistent file.
by nixosbestos | 2025-09-25 20:41:46+00:00
It's not an odd sentiment at all, you would be ridiculed widely for running an unsupported, out of date Linux distribution too.

You can do whatever you want, I left my true thoughts out, and kept it as impersonal as possible. As someone who ships and supports products and has to deal with curmudgeons like you, I would literally pay to not have you as a customer or user. People like you are a constant drain on attention, time, and focus. You know, like you basically expecting folks to bend over backwards, in this very thread, to support you, when there's a perfectly viable supported solution.

> perfectly reasonable preference

Whatever you say, friend.
by JdeBP | 2025-09-25 20:41:50+00:00
The actual report text identifies the uploaded database as "NUMIDENT".

A quick shufti turned up https://aad.archives.gov/aad/series-description.jsp?s=5057 which states that "NUMIDENT" includes things like "mother's maiden name". Other sources imply that the signatures from SSN application forms (form SS-5) are stored here.

Normal methods of access to this database seem to include "NOVU" (https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/numident-online-verificatio...).
by whalesalad | 2025-09-25 20:41:58+00:00
FarmLogs (YC 12) did exactly this. We used sat imagery in the near-infrared spectrum to determine crop health remotely. Modern farming utilizes a practice called precision ag - where your machine essentially has a map of zones on the field for where treatments are or aren't needed and controllers that can turn spray nozzles on/off depending on boundaries. We used sat imagery as the base for an automated prescription system, too. So a farmer can reduce waste by only applying fertilizer or herbicide in specific areas that need it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-25 20:42:07+00:00
> We need more indexes

Not particularly. Indexes are sort of like railroads. They're costly to build and maintain. They have significant external costs. (For railroads, in land use. For indexes, in crawler pressure on hosting costs.)

If you build an index, you should be entitled to a return on your investment. But you should also be required to share that investment with others (at a cost to them, of course).
by demosito666 | 2025-09-25 20:42:24+00:00
What exactly did those people taste that it got them upset so much and who exactly those "people" are? Last time I checked these laws are pushed through as covertly and sneaky as possible and no "people" asked for them. I can't recall any demonstrations with protesters asking to violate their privacy to keep them safe for those evil internet trolls that want to have a sexual intercourse with their relatives.

You're trying to frame the classic authoritarian power grab and desire to fully control the plebs as push from the society. This doesn't sound convincing.