MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UncleMeat | 2025-10-01 12:06:31+00:00
Now do cops.

It is a pretty remarkable strategy to be able to spend decades shitting all over the federal bureaucracy as a party, obviously discouraging conservatives from joining the bureaucracy, and then using party affiliation (obviously further skewed by the fact that federal workers tend to have college degrees, tend to be more racially diverse, and tend to live in the DC metro area) to decide that the whole thing needs to be destroyed.

What happened to merit as a hiring preference?
by heliographe | 2025-10-01 12:06:57+00:00
Cheers! Got an update coming out soon for that one, it's actually the one that makes the least money haha. I think it's way too nerdy and weird to ever hope to reach a broad audience even amongst photographers, unlike the others that are more approachable.

But I still use it on a weekly basis myself so I just can't stop refining it. I've been obsessed with the trichromatic process for 10+ years, ever since I discovered the work of Prokudin Gorsky (even built a website about the process and history: https://trichromy.com, due for a refresh some time). Such a clever approach to color photography that results in such a unique aesthetic.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-10-01 12:07:23+00:00
... which is totally different from attaching strings to ToS'es or employment contracts.

Gosh, i hope some sweet day all those libertarians would realize, that government is not by definition bad but instead required for everything free markets cannot achieve (tragedy of commons, responsibility diffusion). And similarly, you to realize that you only critized goverments, without a UBI-unique spin or a constructive solution.

What if governments are 100% transparent and democratic in the most ideal sense?

Careful, whatever you want to reply here, i am going to project it onto large private corporations immediately ... something you seem to be unable to.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-10-01 12:07:41+00:00
IDK, this makes very little sense to me. You used to rely on but trust, and now you can't ... because government? You have to trust and it doesn't work? So maybe don't do that and you'd be back where you were?

The "mostly due to lack of government involvement" part that you abruptly pivot to in the second para is completely unsupported and does not tell a compelling story about how we got here. Try Cory Doctorow on "Enshitification" which does, and it's all about consolidation and large company leverage. The only way that government is involved is as a bystander who could have done something but did not.
by data-ottawa | 2025-10-01 12:08:20+00:00
Huggingface has a series on Tiny Agents[1] where they go into a minimal version of the loop with tools.

I’ve been working on a weekend project building one of these and the tools you provide are what makes the agent suitable for the task.

Even small models and non tool models can use MCP with correct prompting, but you have to edit what tools they can use.

Context is the big bottleneck to manage. Programming agents benefit from knowing shell commands, but generic agents you have to teach/trick into the right interactions, which burns context. Then out of the box an agent will want to read everything, so I have to comment which commands are expensive or cheap context wise.

My project is almost ready to explore context management methods: things like removing old files from memory, warning the agent about limits, using a second agent that does compaction.

It would be cool to eventually RLHF the agents too, but that’s unlikely with my weekend project budget.

[1] https://huggingface.co/learn/mcp-course/en/unit2/tiny-agents
by WhereIsTheTruth | 2025-10-01 12:09:17+00:00
Bitcoin and the whole blockchain technology is weird to me

Launched by an anonymous author, it was almost immediately hailed as "the future of money, free from institutions"

That alone feels odd, Washington constaltly punishes anyone who threatens the USD/petrodollar system, yet over the years, and still today, no serious censorship was ever directed at Bitcoin

Stranger still, US startups rushed to adopt it (Coinbase), China too.. (Binance), yet any attempts from other countries would be met with heavy FUD, often times with arrests and murders, as if it would self control itself, and ownership would be guaranteed to whoever orchestrated it all

To me, it has always looked like a bait-and-switch, the promise of easy profit lures greedy actors whose capital finances blockchain R&D, while constant attacks force the technology to harden, exactly the stress testing you would want if your end goal were a resilient infrastructure for an official CBDC and government issued digital wallet/ID

Today, we are kinda getting the confirmation..
by adjajadikerta | 2025-10-01 12:09:26+00:00
Building Evidentia – platform for scientific knowledge that never gets published

Science's most valuable output never gets published. Negative results, failed replications, protocol details etc. all vanish into the file drawer. This means that the public body of knowledge is slow and also often wrong.

The cost: 70% of researchers can't reproduce published findings. Only 6 of 53 landmark cancer studies replicated. Industry wastes $28B annually re-validating work that doesn't hold up.

We're building a platform to capture what gets lost. Scientists share the details papers omit: failed antibodies, critical protocol tweaks, replication attempts. AI + a graph DB structures it into queryable data. Contributors get DOIs so it counts as real academic credit.

Been testing with beta users for 2 weeks. Opening up waitlist now: https://evidentia.bio/

Key challenge: will scientists share without traditional publication incentives? Early signal says yes (especially younger researchers), but needs to scale.

Feedback welcome, especially on keeping it alive (avoiding the "data graveyard" problem) and monetization.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-01 12:09:35+00:00
>it's neglected enough that the bro generation of programmers doesn't even understand it, or the difference between it and Free software, and what those differences materially mean to developers and the public at large.

I concur, there's clearly been a generational shift away from the idea of making a cool thing and sharing it. Part of it is economic: even programmers can struggle with bills these days, and the last thing someone paycheck to paycheck (or laid off) can do it take time to volunteer their talents to FOSS.

And the lack of investment seems to be creeping up slowly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849640
by skydhash | 2025-10-01 12:10:36+00:00
I started on computers because I wanted to do stuff (photo manipulation and 3d modelling) and then I was fascinated by how to get the computers to do stuff (games and scripts). But just like you, I want things to be done correctly and efficiently.

Coding for me is more reading than typing, because any time I'm not exactly clear on the code I want to write, it's because there's some aspects of the problem or the tools to solve it that I do not grasp well. So, I usually have a lot of documentations around me for the stuff I'm working on. And that means I don't like LLM for that, because there's no clear signal for wrongness.

And when I'm clear on the code to write and I find it tedious, that usually means that it's time to abstract away the tediousness. LLMs won't help with that, because it's more of a perspective shift than a clear methodology.

LLMs, in its current forms of offering, is like asking a random stranger in a bar. They may know the answer or not. They may give you an incoherent answer even if they know or fabricate stuff when they don't know. But there's still a plus, is that you may still get "I don't know" or silence instead of a wrong answer. Like getting an empty list when making a web search. Which is a good signal by itself.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-01 12:12:00+00:00
I mean, you can be just as callous and say that those who remained in Germany after the country legally revoked their citizenship[1] had, in fact, done something illegal by remaining there. They were just as illegal as a kid who has lived here since she was 3 months old.

Yours is also the same argument that was made for years about not including LGBT people among the victims of the Holocaust, since they had in fact broken the law by existing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws#Reich_Citizensh...
by Aachen | 2025-10-01 12:13:01+00:00
I keep telling people to make backups of "cloud" services ever since Grooveshark died from one day to the next

Maybe Spotify won't be taken down overnight, but they can lock me out for various reasons such as misdetecting an IP address (Google wouldn't let me log in at all when they thought I was in Russia, when I was at 31C3 in Hamburg, Germany, a conference where they afaik use some temporary IP space — I don't know what consequences that would have nowadays)

Hacker News also: if there are things here you want to keep, store them yourself

Facebook chats, Signal, etc.: download the data in a format you can decode if there's anything you want to keep. Make sure you can decode this Signal backup format if your phone dies
by BoorishBears | 2025-10-01 12:13:06+00:00
> is that of lowering the bar of acceptability

Yes.

> counterbalancing that with the (potential) savings

No. It's all about personalization. Even with all the money in the world you couldn't sit a filming crew, VFX specialist, foley artist, and voice actors next to every user of your app, ready to produce new content in 60 seconds.

I don't get why this keeps being framed as a labor thing, it's unlocking genuinely new forms of interactive media.
Show HN: TimeTracker – A self-hosted, time tracker with timers and billing
by DRYTRIX | 2025-10-01 12:13:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I built *[TimeTracker](https://github.com/DRYTRIX/TimeTracker)*, an open-source, self-hosted time tracking app for freelancers and small teams who want full control of their data.

Most time trackers I tried either:

* lose your running timer if the browser closes, or * lock you into cloud services.

I wanted something simple, reliable, and offline-friendly — so I built TimeTracker.

### Key Features

* *Persistent timers* (server-side, survive browser closes/reboots) * *Team support* (multi-user, roles, projects/clients, billing) * *Reporting & exports* (project/user breakdowns, CSV) * *Self-hosted* (Docker, Raspberry Pi friendly) * *Responsive interface* (Flask + HTMX + WebSockets for live updates)

### What’s New in the Latest Release

* Improved reporting and exports * Cleaner UI/UX, faster navigation * Optimized performance & stability * Better Docker configs and documentation

### Try It

```bash git clone https://github.com/DRYTRIX/TimeTracker.git cd TimeTracker cp .env.example .env docker-compose up -d ```

Then visit `http://localhost:8080` and start tracking.

### Who It’s For

* Freelancers who want full control of billable hours * Small teams who prefer LAN or Pi-based solutions * Anyone who wants to own their data without SaaS dependency

### What’s Next

Mobile apps, integrations (Zapier, Slack), richer analytics, and internationalization.

I’d love feedback from the HN community — especially around usability, reporting, and team workflows.

Repo: [https://github.com/DRYTRIX/TimeTracker](https://github.com/DRYTRIX/TimeTracker)
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-10-01 12:13:30+00:00
> The invasion of normal people onto the internet was the seed for handing the web to a small selection of companies,

I would argue that consolidation is the natural outcome of capitalism and growth, it will happen if there is no intervention. The fact that the growth came from "normal people" is not the most relevant thing. It merely reflects the thing going mainstream, no longer only used by nerdy early adopters. It's in inevitable consequence of growth past a certain point. Consolidation requires only that government is hands-off on a lucrative market, e.g. allowing mergers and acquisitions.

Further, I would say that these large companies use their power and influence to avoid meaningful regulation. And that they are largely unregulated now.

It is absurd to blame this current state of affairs on "government red tape".
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-01 12:13:30+00:00
> No version control

You can use version control with Excel spreadsheets, though it's not very good. It's called "track changes" and even has a limited capacity to approve/reject changes from other people.

Very few people uses that feature, especially not the people who have built a Rube Goldberg machine to run their business processes, but you could do it if you wanted to.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-10-01 12:13:43+00:00
I setup dmarc and immediately had to drop ruf/rua tag from it. For a domain I barely use to send emails, others are sure trying a lot. I was getting too many/much reports and I could do nothing about those shady senders. So I chose to be not dmarc-spammed and set p=reject. Screw it.

Also — I use a mail host provider and I would even think about hosting my mail from “scratch”. And I am never using my domain as a disposable address domain or email per service kinda way ever again. Hell, I might even disable catch-all. Then stick to disposable and privacy email providers like SimpleLogin for the rest.
by graemep | 2025-10-01 12:13:51+00:00
The internet is an extremely useful educational resource. It provides ways of communicating with people you want your kids to communicate with. it needs management by parents.

My kids have learned a huge amount from the internet. I have guided them, discussed what are credible resources, the harms possible etc, who they talk to and what they tell them....

There are solutions that would make it easier for parents - people need tools to manage this. Require that children use child safe SIM cards in their phones (they are available already - EE advertisers them). Home internet connections should be by filtered by default that can then be turned off (or off for particular devices in the ISP supplied router that most people have).
by summarity | 2025-10-01 12:14:14+00:00
For sure, some common ground is needed. Madrigal's is a famous example of LT that almost exclusively focuses on transfer itself, because English and Spanish are reasonably similar.

LT's method goes a bit further though, hence why there are courses on Arabic, Swahili and (upcoming) Japanese. Chinese might be even further removed, but the LT courses are about learning to _think_ about how the language works, and the format of the course (teacher + median student + you) goes a long way to encourage this. Beyond Madrigal's "look how similar these words are".
by maybewhenthesun | 2025-10-01 12:14:51+00:00
At a certain point you need to identify yourself somewhere. If I need to identify myself using a governmental certificate, that still means there's a database somewhere (which can be leaked/abused) coupling my cert to me personally.

I work in software (for way too long, since the 90s) and as far as i can tell any system which can prove your age is at best pseudonymous and needs 3d parties to verify.

Sure, you could create a scheme where only a 'trusted' 3d party has the link between you and your cert. But these days 'trusted' and government is not really a given, sadly. See trump.
by cardanome | 2025-10-01 12:17:33+00:00
Then again Israel is annexing land and actively committing genocide and voicing any anger is seen a deeply antisemitic and completely taboo. You will see a reflexive assurance that you can not equate the people with the government and so on.

My point is not Whataboutism. I don't want to relativate any war crimes done by anyone. I don't criticize people that lost relatives in Ukraine for using dehumanizing language like calling Russian soldiers orks. For the growing racist rhetoric that says the Russian culture were inherently imperialistic.

You might reflexively try to figure out whose narrative I am trying to push. What is my angle? I am not sure if this works or is even possible but maybe try to reflect on why you do this. Isn't it because it clashes with your own narrative? Which is not something you are allowed to notice because the West has no narrative, you are the one who is objectively right, only other people have a narrative.

So why is Russia and Israel seen so differently? Because there is Western geopolitical interest that people do so.
by ysleepy | 2025-10-01 12:17:36+00:00
Would it not have been easier to just mount the destroyed old pool or recovering the dataset from the history ring buffer?

zpool import -D

https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/master/8/zpool-im...

I haven't tried this, but I gather from the blog post that it would have been much simpler as it didn't require any of the encryption stuff.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-01 12:18:12+00:00
> I sometimes wonder if using AI would've made any difference or would it have even mattered because I didn't want to use AI and that's why I went to stackoverflow lol

AI is trained on stackoverflow and much, much worse support forums. At least SO has the comments below bad advice to warn others, AI will just say "Oops, you're entirely right, I made a mistake and now your data is permanently gone".
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-01 12:18:14+00:00
>maybe a rebirth of FOSS that targets our base instincts can arise.

doesn't soud like an environment worth rebirthing if we need to surrender to the very dark arts FOSS rejected. If something is free but still trying to stroke "base instinctincts", it's basically propoganda. When you're not winning dollars, you're winning mindshare.

I just wanted to make video games, man. And maybe help others make even better video games. I'm not trying to start a cult.
by timschmidt | 2025-10-01 12:18:30+00:00
I ran support groups for a while, and met folks of all walks of life. One of them told me that when they smoked a specific strain of cannabis, they found that they needed far less insulin than normal to maintain their blood sugar levels. My aunt was a life long diabetic, so I have some idea of how much testing is involved, and so this meant more to me than most anecdotes.

I decided to look up the gene regulatory network of the pancreatic islet cells involved in manufacturing insulin. Sure enough, smack in the middle, a G-protein-coupled receptor. The Mythbusters "PLAUSIBLE" sequence played in my mind.

I'm of the opinion that we should probably be paying special attention to any substance with known activity on human cell signalling pathways. Cannabis is capable of targeting so many, spread across such a variety of organ systems, that it seems obviously useful. Wild how we've avoided studying all but the least useful strains.
by tsukikage | 2025-10-01 12:18:40+00:00
Interestingly, I've not had a problem delivering directly to those (except the time I switched to an IP block with a bad rep and couldn't deliver anything anywhere directly at all); it's just the ones on the list above that don't like me.

Mysterious and ineffable are the ways of Microsoft.

(note that their MX record is usually a *.protection.outlook.com entry regardless of the custom domain, so I'd use that to bootstrap a rule if I had a more general problem with Microsoft)
by positron26 | 2025-10-01 12:19:37+00:00
> has been since the nineties

There's still not a lot of ceramic fiber in use in the engines. That's a pure weight reduction and fuel efficiency increase, up to the point that NOx emissions can't be controlled.

Given the rapidly advancing VTOL autonomous drone tech, harbor tug concepts may yet make an appearance. The funding for this could be driven from rescue aircraft, short range powerful VTOLs optimized to go pluck a struggling aircraft out of the sky and put it on the ground. The obvious evolution of that is ditching a lot of the landing weight. Reinforced undercarriage, landing gears, high-lift devices almost all exist to be used in a very short segment of the flight. Unlike roads, automation in the air has quite a bit less variability to deal with. Would you rather pilots try to put a plane with a mechanical issue on the ground by skillfully manipulating throttles or let an overgrown DJI take a swing?
by torginus | 2025-10-01 12:19:46+00:00
Dunno I remember reading an article about one of the first Snapdragon PCs - they concluded that while the CPU side was pretty good (including, surprisingly availablity of native ARM ports, and x86 emulation), the GPU was far behind typical PC offerings in sophistication, and was unable to run the complex and compute shader heavy workloads required by modern games, shader compilers were buggy, and advanced features were missing or poorly implemented, which made it an expensive word processing machine.

I'm not sure if they fixed their newer GPUs but they really ought to.
by tolerance | 2025-10-01 12:19:48+00:00
I reckon that shame was once an effective method of communal correction and accountability. But it wasn’t my intent to affect it.

So no, I agree, don’t shame people for being hurt by the whims of business. But I would say, encourage the newcomers to this experience (who I suspect are exceptional in their sociopolitical status compared to their predecessors) to re-envision themselves and the ways that they render their service beyond prior cushiony contexts.

Businesses may not need you, you may make much less than before. But society sorely does need you in some capacity and the unfortunate case is that, to be frank, not too many people are going to be quick to boo-hoo with you over your loss because they’ve gone through something like it before already. Them or a loved one.

This is an American phenomenon. Join and be of aid to your countrymen. But don’t get SaaSy.
by sjw987 | 2025-10-01 12:19:51+00:00
I can't tell whether I'm being super paranoid but I've been burned by Google so many times on product sunsets that I've just removed all of my data from them.

I managed to set up private self-hosted versions of an email client, photo viewing app, and barebones alternative to Docs and Sheets. Switched from Google to Kagi, and Chrome to Brave, but generally keep my own bookmarks of sites to use rather than using search engines.

I still run a skeleton Pixel, but the storage is almost exclusively just a very limited range of apps I use. I managed to get Google One storage from about 700GB to about 700Mb over the course of the last month or so.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-01 12:20:27+00:00
> which exist in every tissue of the body, and of which there are at least a half dozen varieties, probably more

This is exactly the reason it's often a less than ideal solution. When you need a safe, reliable, and predictable medication, you don't want something that interacts with every cell in the body. Let alone something that might be interacting with those cells in multiple conflicting ways.

Don't get me wrong, if it helps you and doesnt negatively impact your health I'm in favor of it. However, it would be nice to see more research done to develop synthetics and extracts that work in a more targeted, predictable, and well understood manor.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-01 12:20:50+00:00
Online people have this redditism that it's some American weirdness that people "live to work", while in Europe people "work to live" and stretch this too far. People (especially men) throughout the ages and regions have seen their work as a critical component of their identity, whether it be a craft or farming. The honor in completing the day's work, being valued for having a skill, honing that skill over the years, etc. It's not by itself a symptom of a workaholic. This can leave space for family and friends and neighbors too. But the idea that your job is supposed to be purely superficial is way overblown. It's a symptom of the generic alienated work that is full of useless meetings and business-buzzword-bingo-lingo and you can't coherently formulate in words to an outsider what even that job is, or how it concretely contributes to the betterment of the community/world/people (aka bullshit job).