MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whitehexagon | 2025-09-24 14:27:53+00:00
As more people move away from spyPhone devices, how is this going to work. Especially having BigTech being able to hold the EU ransom over access to basic government services.

A phone should not be a requirement to partake in society, and I´d even argue the same for a bank account. But I see this month another strong push towards a digital Euro. Is that the true purpose behind this push for .eu ID Apps?
by lxgr | 2025-09-24 14:27:55+00:00
> the public train operating companies refuse to do the same for trains. We need to have some of those same protection and transparency requirements for train companies as well.

Huh? We do!

There are very similar EU regulations for train travel: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...

On a completely unrelated note, I recently noticed that Deutsche Bahn seems to have some of their train schedules staggered by 58 minutes instead of one hour – which means that the 25% refund for a delayed arrival due to a missed connection that didn't wait will usually not kick in :)
by sweetheart | 2025-09-24 14:27:59+00:00
I think the point remains, though, that making it harder to ensure a young child is sitting next to their guardian benefits _no one_. Having learned over the last year what flying with a 2 year old is like, an increase in the amount of toddlers who fly without sitting next to their parents is just going to be a nightmare for the kids, the parents, the other passengers, and the crew. No one should want this, in my opinion. Besides, the parents have the leverage in this situation I think, in the form of feral toddlers hell bent on maximizing chaos (and I mean that lovingly and empathetically, but still vaguely as a threat lol)
by philwelch | 2025-09-24 14:28:59+00:00
There’s something hypocritical about a person who thinks it’s an injustice for them to be fired for expressing their opinions, when that opinion is that they are glad Charlie Kirk was murdered for expressing his opinions.

Karl Popper said,

“But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-09-24 14:29:00+00:00
Once JavaScript is running, it can perform complex fingerprinting operations that are difficult to circumvent effectively.

I have a little experience with Selenium headless on Facebook. Facebook tests fonts, SVG rendering, CSS support, screen resolution, clock and geographical settings, and hundreds of other things that give it a very good idea of whether it's a normal client or Selenium headless. Since it picks a certain number of checks more or less at random and they can modify the JS each time it loads, it is very, very complicated to simulate.

Facebook and Instagram know this and allow it below a certain limit because it is more about bot protection than content protection.

This is the case when you have a real web browser running in the background. Here we are talking about standalone software written in Python.
by realusername | 2025-09-24 14:29:08+00:00
I don't see the value of remote attestation period. Especially when we talk about the mobile world which is a jungle where even the manufacturer itself doesn't have the full picture of all the code running on the device.

Yeah sure it's guarantees that the device is more or less similar as from the factory... and then what? What am I supposed to do with that information?
by jamiecurle | 2025-09-24 14:29:26+00:00
I love the phrase "It's because that's why". For anyone interested in this kind of subject I've benefited a lot from Vanessa Van Edwards books which essentially boil down to signalling warmth and competence in the right ways for a given context. Of course, it's a giant field and no one person has all the answers, but for me it's yielded some wins.
by otterley | 2025-09-24 14:29:48+00:00
I’m not pretending not to understand anything. I absolutely get that it is a possibility that the Secret Service got it wrong. And it’s no surprise that there will be many opinions that challenge their narrative. But those other commentators have the same problem in that they may lack crucial context that might make the government’s narrative true. And the fact that several people agree is irrelevant; more than one person thinks Tylenol causes autism.

And it’s not sealioning; I'm not making a bad-faith argument to wear you down. I’m saying something really simple: unless you know something with absolute certainty, especially about a situation that doesn’t involve you, expect to be challenged when you claim you do. We have qualifying vocabulary for this very purpose. It’s why reporters use the word “alleged” when referring to criminal defendants who haven’t been convicted. It’s a pretty straightforward principle, and there are plenty of responsible people out there who formulate their doubts with the requisite nuanced writing. If I can do it, anyone can.

And no, it’s not unreasonable to demand that someone support their unqualified claims of certainty. It will be the Secret Service’s responsibility to eventually substantiate their claims, too.
by pkphilip | 2025-09-24 14:30:31+00:00
Reminds me of the time when I consulted with a very large newspaper chain in the US which owned a lot of papers - both left leaning and right leaning. we used to get feeds from all of the usual sources.

But the news articles themselves were "massaged" in various ways by some of the same editorial teams to suit the left-leaning or the right-leaning newspapers. The idea that completely different spin can be put to the same news - and by the same editorial teams, was a big eye opener for me.

What this taught me is that the media's primary role is to polarise people to either the left or the right so that they can be herded to vote along or act along prescribed lines. What the media and the establishment hates are people who are not either left or right leaning and who are capable of picking and choosing the narrative depending on what makes the most sense - that is, the so called centrists.

But here we are more than 2 decades later from that time and I see that the spin doctors are busier than ever and the "centrists" have almost completely disappeared.
by LatteLazy | 2025-09-24 14:30:32+00:00
Chiming in as a Brit: I m generally opposed to this.

I already have a passport and that is digitalised and universal. Why not just use that?

The UK has a bad habit of launching these programs and not being able to deliver on them.

We have had National Insurance numbers for a long time, these are used to track income tax payments and benefits. But that doesn’t work apparently. So I had to set up a Unique Tax Reference number. Just to do my tax return. This involved several letters back and forth. Actual paper sent in the post over several weeks. The government already have all the tax information they just need me to do 20h of work because they can’t keep their files straight.

They made a mess of that. So I now have an additional Unique Tax Reference number. 2 unique IDs…

And they are still getting my taxes wrong. And writing to me about other peoples taxes/benefits payments because they have similar names and live in the same municipality.

Also, I’ve never had any difficulty proving who I am online when I want to. And I should not need to do so anymore than I already chose to.
by nabeel27 | 2025-09-24 14:30:52+00:00
Building an AI virtual staging and interior design app. Improve listing images with virtual furnishing, clean-up messy images, replace cloudy skies, and generate walkthrough videos from images.

Interior designers, landscapers, and architects can also remodel building exteriors or interiors, generate new landscaping, or create photorealistic renders of floorplans or architectural sketches.

check it out AIStagerPro!
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-24 14:30:56+00:00
Well, I started in 1983, so things have, indeed, changed, since then. In the field I was in (defense electronics, then, financial hosting, etc.), it was definitely "nerdy white males." Probably for the first eight years or so of my career.

We also had a lot of ties, back then. Sucked. I did learn to tie a Windsor, though, so I guess it's not a total loss.
by goranmoomin | 2025-09-24 14:31:04+00:00
From the case that the article is presenting, I think LLMs are acting as a validation step – the average person who doesn't know how to code creates a minimal, LLM-spaghetti system (e.g. a restaurant menu website) with ChatGPT, validate if this is something that they need, iterate on it, create a specification, and then bring in an actual (costly) engineer that can fix and improve the system.

There's a lot of LLM byproducts that leave us in bad taste (hate all of the LLM slop on the internet), but I don't think this is one of them.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-24 14:31:07+00:00
Good to see the mice are still winning the cat-and-mouse game. Selfishly, I kind of want the cat to start to win, to satisfy my curiosity. I predict that if YouTube ever actually blocked downloading, a YouTube competitor that supports downloading would start to immediately gain popularity. I want to know if I'm right about that, and there's no way to test unless Google actually starts to win. Go, Google, go! I believe in you!
by imadbkr | 2025-09-24 14:31:25+00:00
as a tech solopreneur, i spent way too much time setting up stripe and testing different pricing models (one-time vs subscription, trials, etc.).

i was getting stuck in infrastructure setup instead of focusing on the core value of my previous indie tools, which made me loose time and motivation.

so i built a solution to solve this problem for myself. right now, the MVP is all about setting up one-time product paywall buttons to validate the idea.

i've got many more features in mind if there is enough traction.

i’m looking for beta testers! First 25 users get the tool for a lifetime access for free. just sign up and use the stripe test card "4242 4242 4242 4242" during onboarding.

if you're tired of wasting time on stripe, and want to save yourself time when you try a new SaaS idea, join me in testing this out!
by gaoshan | 2025-09-24 14:31:40+00:00
There is so much to address in this post but I want to look at just this part: "One of the reasons we know this story is bogus is because of the New York Times story which cites anonymous officials, “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”. That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official leaks”, disseminating propaganda without being held accountable."

It is not accurate to claim "that's not a thing". Citing anonymous sources is a long established practice (in particular when it comes to law enforcement activities or potentially sensitive political reporting). The NYT has formal editorial standards around the identity of anonymous sources that require editors to assess the justification for applying it. It doesn't mean the information is reliable, that's where an editorial eye comes into play, but it does fall under the category of normal journalistic practice.

Next the "Washington Game": there’s a grain of truth here, but it is overstated. Yes, leaks can be part of a strategic move by politicians and it can be a source of exploitation by political operators but to equate all anonymous sourcing with propaganda is misleading. Plenty of such reporting has resulted in significant truths being revealed and powerful people being held accountable (Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, Abu Ghraib). Responsible reporting involves weighing a source's motivations as well as corroborating and contextualizing that information as accurately and truthfully as possible.

The author's dismissiveness oversimplifies (or mischaracterizes, if I am being less generous) the reason and function of anonymity here. They overstate the issue with propaganda and anonymous sources. Accurate in the sense that anonymity can enable propaganda (it has happened), it is inaccurate in its absolutism.

I feel like this sort of tone, with the absolutism, the attempt to reduce the complexity and nuance of reporting to the point where it can be dismissed is pretty typical of what passes for commentary in today's blog/tweet/commentary culture but it really plays more into the hands of those that would sow confusion and mistrust than it does into that of the truth and accuracy.
by feoren | 2025-09-24 14:32:00+00:00
A "measurement" in the general sense (not quantum) is about amplifying or isolating some signal out of all the noise. I simply don't agree that all measurements boil down to relative displacements. Did a chemical reaction occur or not? Is it red or is it blue? Sure, in many of these measurements, something tangentially related to distance (like light wavelength) is involved, but lots of things are involved: measurements are inherently "macro" phenomena, which means many processes will be involved, not the least of which is electrochemical signaling in the brain of the measurer. It's just far too reductive to say that every quantity we measure is actually relative displacement. I could just as justifiably (or more so) say that every measurement is actually just measuring the strength of an electromagnetic field. Why is this helping? What does this have to do with which numbers "truly exist" or not?
by superkuh | 2025-09-24 14:32:19+00:00
There have been plenty of free distributed hosting services for the web that worked perfectly (popcorn time, etc, etc). It's just that every time they become popular they are attacked legally and shut down. The problem is not technical, or even resource based, the problem is legal. Only a mega-corp can withstand the legal attacks.

And even if the legal attacks could be mitigated most people would still use youtube because they're there for the money (or for people who are there for the money). They are not there for a video host. Youtube enables distribution of money and there's no way that any government would let any free system distribute money without even more intense legal, and indeed physically violent, attacks.
by mattkrause | 2025-09-24 14:32:55+00:00
Surgery can be slow, and brain surgery doubly so.

The brain is slightly elastic, so you'd want to advance a needle glacially slowly (microns/second) into it so it ends up at the right position. The injection itself is also done slowly (microliters/minute) so you don't cause pressure damage.

They might also do some intraoperative imaging (some ORs have MRI or CT machines), which slows things down, and of course there's tons of cleaning and repair work afterward.
by hattmall | 2025-09-24 14:33:06+00:00
Interesting perspective but with all of that experience are you not able to communicate with them in their way? This seems a bit like missing the forest for the trees, people are no less thoughtful or complex based on where they've lived or what they've done. The experiences you are learning from came at a cost of the experiences like those of your parents, those experiences shape their communication. There is absolutely a multitude of wisdom only age and their experiences can create but you have to learn to bridge the gap.
by wat10000 | 2025-09-24 14:33:06+00:00
What a bizarre example. Gas in the US is priced about as transparently as it is possible to be. There isn't even the thing where you have to add sales taxes on to the posted price, like there is with most other things in the US. Every single station has the total price per gallon, inclusive of all taxes, on a giant sign. The amount you pay is literally the number of gallons you pumped multiplied by that number.

If you're going to make up stories, at least do five seconds of research first to make it vaguely plausible.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-24 14:33:17+00:00
> non-political government office holders ought to not weigh in on politics

They have the clear First Amendment right to do so on their own time.

I mean, I hold the opinion that people "ought not to" be fans of Charlie Kirk. But you'd correctly object if I enforced that opinion with government power.

> Before your ilk became dominant in public discourse…

Yikes.
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-24 14:33:18+00:00
Take any group of a hundred tech people (devs, analysts, architects, etc.), and 95 of them will do everything with their stock Android or IOS smartphone. Maybe 3 will consciously limit their use of that device, and the remaining 2 reluctantly use something sane like GrapheneOS. Those two might pipe up and take a stand for people without smartphones (which includes a very varied swath of people, from Luddites to people with disabilities), but they'll get drowned out by sighs, sheepish looks, and the chorus of 'let's just start with those two smartphone OSes, and if after a year or two people still really need something else, a new project can be started to address that'.

It's not an insane question, it just doesn't get asked.
by catapart | 2025-09-24 14:33:33+00:00
As a web dev, I fully agree with this, but with a huge exception: clickable text.

Anything that is meant to be read as content should absolutely, without fail, be selectable and copyable (assuming appropriate permissions).

But stuff like tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles - things meant for the user to click on - can, and usually should, prevent text selection. It is super annoying to be clicking back and forth through tabs only to have some text erroneously highlight and then stay that way.

Exceptions to every rule, and to every exception of that rule, of course. But for the most part, allowing text highlighting in those clickable areas is a rough UX.

* note that I did not include anchor links; those are meant to be inline within text content and should therefore be selectable.
by bayindirh | 2025-09-24 14:33:36+00:00
> Now everybody on the globe wants to try to make a dollar, and likewise, they feel dollars are being stolen from them.

I'm not in it for the dollar. I just want the licenses I put on my content/code to be respected, that's all. IOW, I don't what I put out there to be free forever (as in speech and beer) to be twisted and monetized by the people who re in this for the dollar.
"All you need" is all you need
by AmazingTurtle | 2025-09-24 14:33:37+00:00
It's uncanny how often posts with "All you need" in the title outperform the substance underneath.

It all started with the famous "Attention is all you need" paper. In the meantime, people have come up with

"Spreadsheets are all you need" "Claude Code is all you need" "Cheating is All You Need" "Tools: Code Is All You Need" "Text Is All You Need"

People see it and immediately assume someone has boiled down a universe of complexity into one neat takeaway - no matter how vacuous the content is.

This post is here to prove the point. It has no real secret. The secret is the title. And if you're reading this far, the experiment already worked.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-24 14:33:38+00:00
Everything trends towards centralization on a long enough period.

I laugh at people who think ActivityPub or Mastodon or BlueSky will save us. We already had that, it was called e-mail, look what happened once everyone started using it.

If we couldn't stop the centralization effects that occurred on e-mail, any attempt to stop centralization in general is honestly a utopian fool's errand. Regulation is easier.
by glenstein | 2025-09-24 14:33:51+00:00
One of the more sober assessments in this entire thread, and closely aligned with how I experienced it. It's not nothing to stress the fact that it was pretty far away from the UN and that it's not obvious why a case of SIM cards would enable surveillance (seems more like it would anonymize an individual bad actor). But a large part of this is completely unsubstantiated speculation that people are nodding along with, which, in my opinion, is showing a breakdown in the ability to comprehend logical or evidence-based arguments.
by zubiaur | 2025-09-24 14:33:58+00:00
Deniability and having a response for different lines of criticism. It derails the critic who operates under the assumption of a consistent narrative and meaningful arguments. It gives the believer something to hold on under most scenarios. It removes truth and reality grounding from equation. Its diabolically effective.

Edit after down votes: The paragraph above was meant on why would one expect conflicting narratives not from different sources, as the Parent Comment stated, but rather from supposedly official sources or propaganda outlets. My bad, must have read the comment on a hurry.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-24 14:34:17+00:00
The "growth every quarter" is a disease that is going to destroy our civilization, said without an ounce of hyperbole.

Air travel is a solved problem and there's no innovation really to be done; the planes are packed like cans of sardines most of the time, the food is awful, and the travel itself is expensive, cumbersome, and a miserable experience overall but they are STILL trying to find ways to juice revenue, up to and including separating children from parents and charging them to be put back together.
by blixt | 2025-09-24 14:34:39+00:00
They reference a paper using initial noisy data as a key, mapping to a "jump-ahead" value of a previous example. I think this is very cool and clever, and does use a diffusion model.

But I don't see how this Deep Researcher actually uses diffusion at all. So it seems wrong to say "test-time diffusion" just because you liken an early text draft with noise in a diffusion model, then use RAG to retrieve a potential polished version of said text draft?
by geff82 | 2025-09-24 14:34:42+00:00
Book trips from European websites in the future. Prices here need to include everything upfront. Which might lead to situations where you reserve a hotel room in the USA for 1500, but then only pay 1200 at checkout because the remaining 300 are the "resort fee" that will be paid at the hotel. Or take car rental: the cheaper, more complete packages for the USA are often booked in the EU at at better price.
by codedokode | 2025-09-24 14:34:42+00:00
> Like Google?

Like Google competitors obviously.

> Like Google has been doing to the entire internet, including people’s movement, conversations, and habits… for decades?

Yes, but if you allowed to index your site (companies even spent money to make site better indexable), Google used to bring customers and AI companies bring back nothing. They are just freeloaders.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-24 14:34:45+00:00
Of course it's rude. But we don't criminalize behavior that is merely rude. It's rude to swear at someone or fart in their direction too.

In public, US courts have established you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Because you're in public. Someone can take photos or videos of you, whether you're in the background or whether they're zooming in on your face.

Obviously if you're getting right up in their face and refusing to go away, that turns into harassment and you can call the cops. But it doesn't matter if you're using a camera or not.
by lxgr | 2025-09-24 14:34:50+00:00
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: I could imagine airlines wanting to not allow for a full refund if passengers can be booked on a "reasonably similar" connection. (I've done this myself in the past, as far as I remember; changes of a few minutes in either direction often make an entire booking refundable.)

The problem here of course would be the definition of "reasonably similar". Arriving a few hours later can be entirely fine or completely ruin a trip, depending on the circumstances.