MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hollerith | 2025-10-20 14:00:35+00:00
>I don't speak Swedish and I'm perfectly fine living and working here. The level of English speaking in Malmö often exceeds the ability to speak English in places in the UK.

That is interesting. I should explain that I edited out the part of my comment about language (because it is not relevant to my point).

I haven't been to Malmo, but I doubt that visiting a place for a short time tells a person much about what it is like to live and work there. I've read hundreds of comments from people who have lived and worked in both the US and Europe. I believe that life in Europe tends to be more orderly and pleasant than life in the US. A good example of "more orderly" is that deaths from automobile accidents are several times higher in the US than they are in most places in Europe -- and not just because Americans spend more time in cars: in the US, deaths per mile of travel in automobiles are several times higher.

>Why would you rather live in Orlando?

Because income is a massive factor in quality of life, and for any level of income, it is significantly easier to earn that level of income in the US than in Europe provided that the person in question is healthy enough to hold a job.
by adityaathalye | 2025-10-20 14:00:46+00:00
Post author here. I'm following the global #AWS outage. #HugOps to the people there, and everywhere restoring service.

Complexity is what it is...

However, I feel we as software people---executive, product, design, engineering, the whole nine yards---ought to think systematically in terms of Software Debt, as software organisations.

No more "technical" debt, as in "bad code" debt.
by scaryclam | 2025-10-20 14:01:01+00:00
It really depends on the decision, what was done, and the overall impact. If the decision is to migrate to microservices, a year in it may be reviewed and decided that the work has been far more than anticipated, and is too much for EVERYTHING to be migrated, and the decision changed.

Or it might be an architectural decision to change the hierarchy of some organisational structure. Again, it could be the correct call for the time, but as things evolve over a year, it may not be sufficiant a year later.

A year isn't a bad time to review, and if the decision is just a "yeah, duh, of course we'll continue", then it's a really quick conversation, but at least you're thinking about things.
by grafmax | 2025-10-20 14:01:04+00:00
Our society prioritizes the narrow interests of rentier capitalists over the working class. Unfortunately this means the US is losing international competitiveness across more and more industries. For one thing rent extraction ultimately gets financed by employers through higher wages, thus productive business loses out to business from a region like China where costs of employment are lower. Rather than making economies more efficient like productive business is supposed to do, rentier capitalism means cash flows from the debtor to the creditor class, which forms a feedback loop as the creditor class is able to use this cash to buy more assets and extract more rent simply by expanding its circle of ownership.
by SEXUAL-FRAUD | 2025-10-20 14:01:15+00:00
Why fatty foods are fraudulent and where the fraud lies:

The two differences between fatty foods and organic foods are that organic foods are made with water, while fraudulent foods are made with fat. Water contains no harmful substances, and fat contains harmful substances that cause disease. Fat penetrates the supposedly rich foods, and the internal fat reaches the bloodstream and remains circulating, slowly poisoning people, causing cancer and occasionally getting sick.
by AHatLikeThat | 2025-10-20 14:01:52+00:00
>While it is hard to quantify the prevalence of the AI-generated images, Alenichev and others say their use is on the rise, driven by concerns over consent and cost.

Although I agree that using AI-generated poverty porn is repulsive on many levels, I think there is a valid consent and privacy issue if using actual photos of real people in these circumstances.

A picture of a real person, especially a child who is being victimized by poverty and/or abuse is now being victimized twice.

In this case, AI could be used judiciously to alter the persons face/body and other identifiers to protect their identity, in the same way that print journalism changes names and other identifiers in text. I think this would be ethical as long as properly marked as having been altered and why.

Of course this does not address the motives of the company behind the ad, but it would at least provide increased transparency and privacy protections.
by myrmidon | 2025-10-20 14:02:20+00:00
Do you similarly think that switching "impaired driving" legislation from a regulatory to a pure punishment based (you only pay on accidents) approach would be an improvement? Because I think not, for following reaons:

- You create invariably numerous cases where culprits can't pay (post harm) because they are bankrupt at that point or possibly already dead themselves. This is unsatisfactory.

- You reward reckless behavior as long as nothing happens. I think that "recklessness", specifically, should be punished regardless of actual outcome (same for industry/corporations).
by anenefan | 2025-10-20 14:03:05+00:00
Smart phones probably allowed a greater saturation of a person's time with the internet, esp social media areas purposely stoking engagement with the user. I personally know too many people in real life practically married to their phone who recite any number of things from someone they absolutely believe, wholeheartedly accept the person has some apparent title of expertise, rather than the facts as per a well accepted book or area of printed knowledge. It's perplexing but I know the same ... er ... tool with their apparent title were saying the same in an area back in 2004 for instance, they'd be rubbished via a fairly active discussion vetting most of their inaccuracies - some people used to just have nothing better to do at nights than fix up BS.

I wish I could find more and clearer discussions in regard to when this came in and why. ( I lament the lack of a decent search engine present time - there were at least in 2007 numerous discussions in regard to the changes made in the US at the time, the follow though with software updates in regard to terms of service etc.)

Turns out it started in 2006 [1] [2 - is a bit fuzzy but] ... I though should recall the time as I was following the proceedings and when the decision was announced I was frankly appalled and ranted numerous times when the subject came up at various discussion boards lamenting Facebook seemed to have buttered up the legal areas to save them a lot of money on real live moderators to manage disagreements.

But 2007 seems stuck in my head though, as to me it was 2007 when the real fallout started when it started to roll various discussion sites that engaged in freer speech with robust discussions, occasional flames - to the point forum admins and staff of various message boards, forums using software such as phpbb had to decide the best approach to keep everyone happy and not end up dealing with legal threats.

Now getting back to noted decline in common knowledge and people more readily believing BS and why this law changed how dynamics of how fact challenges worked in Facebook. Once the anonymous common intelligence fighter might have posted factual informative links on someone's facebook wall that's ignorantly alleging total BS ... or maybe by purpose running a scam ... and factual challenges generally irritated them and blocking didn't generally work in the long run as it wouldn't be long before someone else was offended by their sheer lack of fact checking ... but after the rule change - the honestly deluded, the scammer or the bullshitter merely had to hit the report button on the anonymous users comment ... and that anonymous account was more or less gone, not a threat to challenge any BS on Facebook until they legitimised their account. Again it was 2007/8 I recall a number of former Facebook users expressing their dismay they'd lost their anonymous Facebook account, given they preferred their relative anonymity.

[1] https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=84680

[2] https://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.sh...
by tw04 | 2025-10-20 14:03:29+00:00
> what really is the show stopper for business.

The show stopper is explaining to your CEO that you don’t have 24/7 support on a piece of software that’s core to the business.

You can explain away horrible 24/7 support and keep your job. Not so much if you buy something that doesn’t even offer it and you have a hard outage at 5pm on a Friday.
by dathinab | 2025-10-20 14:03:42+00:00
> if media starts portraying everything via fictitious dramatization

let me do one nit picky correction

"does so in a a way even more efficient at manipulating our brains"

because a lot of media, especially social media, already do so. Just currently by using unrelated stock photos, photos from different "incididents" etc.

e.g. even on supposedly reputable news channels it's not rare to find the background images of completely unrelated incidents when they don't have any fitting "correct" images, and then maybe some small *note in some corner. Or not because didn't even notice.
by AppleBananaPie | 2025-10-20 14:05:28+00:00
I'm probably misunderstanding because this seems bad faith.

Isn't it obvious the government isn't an all seeing god?

All regulations are imperfectly written and imperfectly enforced but many seem to have impact.

I'm not sure if regulating this is feasible or not but it's not immediately obvious it's impossible to some extent.
by dijit | 2025-10-20 14:06:08+00:00
Apologies, it's frustrating watching my comment go from +5 to -2 in a handful of seconds.

Not that I'm into karma farming (or that it even means anything), but it irritates me to think that people are gaming the discourse here.

There's an implicit groupthink when it comes to seeing greyed out comments; to the point that people may (and do) think that the comment is non-factual or at the very least unpopular. This is especially true in subjects that are critical of Signal.
by ajross | 2025-10-20 14:06:23+00:00
First, I'm an atheist. I'm on your side.

But as a practical matter, I'll point out that trying to ban the interpretation held by the three billion or whatever practicing christians on the planet is a better way to end up as a sacrifice on that altar than to improve the world.

Look, this whole idea is dumb. No, F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of denying religion to make a bunch of intemperate nerds like us happy. Are we really having this fight?
by tromp | 2025-10-20 14:06:35+00:00
Expressed in Haskell:

import Data.Char card = "4024 6072 3695 0748" cardDigits = map digitToInt . filter (not . isSpace) doubleDigitSum d = 2 * d - if d<5 then 0 else 9 doubleEveryOther = reverse . zipWith ($) (cycle [doubleDigitSum,id]) . reverse main = let cd = cardDigits $ card sd = sum . doubleEveryOther . init $ cd checkDigit = (- (sd + last cd)) `mod` 10 in print checkDigit
by jnovek | 2025-10-20 14:06:48+00:00
I wouldn’t describe it as the correct response, more like “the best one we can think of right now.”

Living this way is that it’s really exhausting, saps quite a lot of joy out of life and makes people more lonely. It’s far from optimal and a more sustainable option would be to work our way back to the community trust we used to enjoy just ~30 years ago.
by joegibbs | 2025-10-20 14:06:49+00:00
How does that help though, if a charity uses an entirely raw unedited photo that is still totally fabricated or misleading?

I think that’s the real problem - it’s not really any better if a charity uses a paid actor on a set, or finds the absolute poorest person in the worst street in the country and uses their photos as if they’re representative of an entire country for the purpose of soliciting donations. If the AI pictures were actually representative of the situation then I wouldn’t think it’s all that bad.
by throwdbaaway | 2025-10-20 14:07:08+00:00
Actually I am keen to know how Roblox got impacted. Following the terrible Halloween Outage in 2021, they posted 2 years ago about migrating to a cell based architecture in https://corp.roblox.com/newsroom/2023/12/making-robloxs-infr...

Perhaps some parts of the migration haven't been completed, or there is still a central database in us-east1
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-20 14:07:18+00:00
> History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

It's worked for a very long time for aircraft.

China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline.

If for no technical reasons and purely political, COMAC may still be decades away from being able to fly to most of the world.

Likewise, in ~5 years, China may be able to build Chips that are as good as Nvidia after Nvidia's 90% profit margin - i.e. they are 1/10th as good for the price - but since they can buy them for cost - they're they same price for performance and good enough.

If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.
by metabagel | 2025-10-20 14:07:26+00:00
Intermittent fasting can help with appetite suppression and blood sugar spikes. Our bodies didn’t evolve to snack all day long. More likely, we gorged and fasted depending on what was available.

There’s a book called “The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet” which promotes intermittent fasting to lose weight, and I think it’s on the right track, although the book recommends taking in calories only during a one hour period each day, which for me was too extreme.

I do think it’s beneficial to fast for at least 6 hours once a day, if possible. It’s good for your blood sugar as well as your gut. It can give you more energy and help you feel more like exercising.
by constructive | 2025-10-20 14:07:46+00:00
gleam would be taken more seriously if they didnt plaster their strong political opinions on the project page..i do not understand why they need to talk about politics on a tech project page..this is not about agreeing or disagreeing with the viewpoints..just keep it out of your professional discourse if you want people to take you or your work seriously...otherwise it just deviates the discourse unnecessarily
by ferranverdes | 2025-10-20 14:08:00+00:00
Thinking about security in terms of vulnerabilities is an outdated mindset.

"Are we vulnerable?" is a wrong question. The one that leads to real protection is "Are we exploitable?".

Risk isn't about how many CVEs you have. It's about what attackers can leverage to cause damage.

In the cloud era, attackers can harm a company without taking advantage of a single CVE.

They can simply drain your cloud budget by abusing storage, bandwidth, or compute resources, for instance.

Take file uploads as a good illustration of this. When there are no resource limits, the feature itself becomes a risk.

Scalability is great. But unlimited is not.

Many times, a few clear boundaries make all the difference, and every developer should be aware of them.

Let's dive into the technical side of this post. Just make sure they read it carefully.
by utopiah | 2025-10-20 14:08:38+00:00
Indeed, seems the default benchmark is LLM/VLM based alternatives as if they somehow "solved" the problem but IMHO even if it goes from (totally made up numbers) 80% with tesseract to 95% with this or Qwen or whatever but it takes 100x harddisk with containers or a CUDA stack, dedicated hardware, e.g. GPU with 16GB or VRAM, etc then it's such a trade of it should be considered.
by avi_vallarapu | 2025-10-20 14:08:52+00:00
This is the reason why it is important to plan Disaster recovery and also plan Multi-Cloud architectures.

Our applications and databases must have ultra high availability. It can be achieved with applications and data platforms hosted on different regions for failover.

Critical businesses should also plan for replication across multiple cloud platforms. You may use some of the existing solutions out there that can help with such implementations for data platforms.

- Qlik replicate - HexaRocket

and some more.

Or rather implement native replication solutions available with data platforms.
by Igrom | 2025-10-20 14:09:10+00:00
Well said. I have always tried to understand Baudrillard's process of formation of the simulacrum. Only it's a pity that we are no longer content with reimagining mint chocolate or pumpkin spice, now it's time to stereotypize real destitution and sorrow.

Anyway, who will want to continue to fork out money over fraudulent images of victims? How can I know that this or that agency represents actual people in need?

In Zurich, an Oktoberfest-related festival (Zuri-Wiesn) held inside a large tent-like structure put up within the main train station's main hall has recently concluded. On the outside, on both sides, the tent was adorned with large-format prints of vaguely Germanic rural folk in celebratory garments holding up their pint. All generated! Blurry facial features, malformed metal buttons. I'd argue that already damaged the joviality and earnestness of the event. And that's just beer...
Show HN: EchoKit – An open-source, ESP32-based AI voice agent with a Rust server
by 3Sophons | 2025-10-20 14:09:45+00:00
Have you wanted a voice AI agent that you could fully control, customize, and understand from the ground up—not just a black box.

EchoKit is a DIY, open-source voice agent running on an ESP32-S3. The fun part is the server backend, which I wrote entirely in Rust to handle the AI pipeline (ASR, LLM, TTS).

The stack is:

Hardware: EchoKit board (ESP32-S3)

Firmware: ESP-IDF

Server: Rust (Actix Web/Tungstenite)

AI: Customizable pipeline. The tutorial uses Groq for the Whisper, Llama 3, and TTS models, which makes the response time incredibly fast (usually just a few seconds for the full ASR->LLM->TTS roundtrip).

It's designed to be easy for makers, students, or anyone curious about AI to build in just a few minutes. You can modify the system prompts, swap out models, or even add custom actions (Step 6 in the guide).

The tutorial (linked) walks through assembly, flashing, and setting up the server. The server code is on GitHub (also linked).

Happy to answer any questions. Would love to hear your thoughts and what you think we could build with this!

Server Repo:https://github.com/second-state/echokit_server
by froobius | 2025-10-20 14:10:13+00:00
That's inverted, it would be:

If: P(1 more minute | 1 minute so far) = x

Then: P(1 more minute | 2 minutes so far) > x

The curve is:

P(survival) = t_obs / (t_obs + t_more)

(t_obs is time observed to have survived, t_more how long to survive)

Case 1 (x): It has lasted 1 minute (t_obs=1). The probability of it lasting 1 more minute is: 1 / (1 + 1) = 1/2 = 50%

Case 2: It has lasted 2 minutes (t_obs=2). The probability of it lasting 1 more minute is: 2 / (2 + 1) = 2/3 ≈ 67%

I.e. the curve is a decaying curve, but the shape / height of it changes based on t_obs.

That gets to the whole point of this, which is that the length of time something has survived is useful / provides some information on how long it is likely to survive.
by fschuett | 2025-10-20 14:10:22+00:00
You would end up simply with Electron 2.0. I tried de-entangling the Servo CSS / JS / Layout engine some years ago, to see if it would be more lightweight, it wasn't: https://github.com/fschutt/servo_gui_test (62 MB binary size, several hundred MB RAM usage IIRC)

I am currently working on getting https://azul.rs/reftest ready, which uses some of the underlying technologies as Servo (taffy-layout, webrender) but uses no JavaScript and also has a C / Python API. Azul is basically that, except it's not usable yet.
by brokenodo | 2025-10-20 14:10:58+00:00
Claude and I (mostly Claude) built a web app for lawyers that uses Gemini to extract (and calculate, where necessary) court dates and deadlines from a PDF scheduling order and output them in a structured format. The user can then select which ones they want to add to their calendar and generate an ICS file to add all case dates/deadlines at once.

https://www.courtsynccalendar.com/
by commandersaki | 2025-10-20 14:11:10+00:00
There many laptops with top CPUs, top GPUs (for that weight) and top display panels.

Which ones come consistently with excellent battery life/speakers/webcam/display/trackpad/keyboard and are quiet? As for cpu/gpu can you beat performance per watt?

With a PC laptop I often see people optimise for something like a top cpu/gpu/ssd/memory specs but the keyboard (feel & layout)/trackpad/speakers/display/etc. are always variable and many times trash.

The other issue is there's no consistent design team for each model, and a lot of the times you get a half-baked design which manifest into reliability issues. Then compound that with uncooperative vendors which gets their users to troubleshoot/diagnose/and fix their flaws (see [asus]).

PC laptops just do not undergo the same amount of rigour in design, testing, and QA that Apple does with their macbook/powerbook/ibook lines (we never talk about the butterfly era).

At least for laptops, vertical integration will always beat modular/fragmented integration.

[asus]: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive
by daemonologist | 2025-10-20 14:11:21+00:00
My base expectation is that the proprietary OCR models will continue to win on real-world documents, and my guess is that this is because they have access to a lot of good private training data. These public models are trained on arxiv and e-books and stuff, which doesn't necessarily translate to typical business documents.

As mentioned though, the LLMs are usually better at avoiding character substitutions, but worse at consistency across the entire page. (Just like a non-OCR LLM, they can and will go completely off the rails.)
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-20 14:11:31+00:00
Personally I think it's a meaningful distinction between "Can extract text" VS "Can extract text and structure". It is true that some OCR systems can handle trying to replicate the structure, but still today I think that's the exception, not the norm.

Not to mention it's helpful to separate the two because there is such a big difference in the difficulty of the tasks.
by a96 | 2025-10-20 14:12:03+00:00
I had to have a peek if it's all just web. Apparently, no.

https://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Factor/UI

> The Factor UI is a GUI toolkit together with a set of developer tools, written entirely in Factor, implemented on top of a combination of OpenGL and native platform APIs: X11, Win32 and Cocoa.

> UI gadgets are rendered using the cross-platform OpenGL API, while native platform APIs are used to create windows and receive events. The platform bindings can be also used independently; X11 binding has also been used in a Factor window manager, Factory, which is no longer maintained. The Cocoa binding is used directly by the webkit-demo vocabulary in Factor.

Fascinating. Probably dead and no mention of Wayland, but fascinating.
by t_sawyer | 2025-10-20 14:12:19+00:00
Yes it's hypocritical to push customers to pay you more money with best practices for uptime when you yourself don't follow them and your choices to not follow them actually make the best practices you pushed your customers to pay you more money for not fully work.

Hey! Pay us more money so when us-east-1 goes down you're not down (actually you'll still go down because us-east-1 is a single point of failure even for our other regions).