MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jwald33 | 2025-10-27 14:17:42+00:00
In all reality, I've eaten larger purchases as losses than some dumb $20 steam game or ebook or whatever. I just don't think that people are terribly unreasonable if they feel burnt badly enough to press for a refund. It's never been easier to do the old "if I can get x number of people to give me $5 each..." bit
by anonymous908213 | 2025-10-27 14:18:12+00:00
This is a solved problem. It's called a "demo". What it entails is giving a small sample of your product completely for free, with no monetization at all, in order to entice a prospective buyer for more. It may be less lucrative than selling microtransactions to literal children, but it is something that people won't complain about, if you are genuinely in the market for a solution and not just trying to farm money off of scamming kids into swiping their parents' credit card because they have no idea what it's worth.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-27 14:18:15+00:00
> This is a lazy argument, as I can safely say that 80% or more of HN has the same political bent, and every community ever has said “but not everyone.”

I disagree, but even if you were correct: like, what’s your point? Are you grouping me in with them because I happen to be posting here? I reject that characterization.

Edit: I feel like this is an attempt at some kind of “gotcha” based on the example you provided. No, I don’t believe access to tech should be gated based on politics. IMHO everyone should have access to private and secure systems, as part of their human rights regarding speech, thought, and personal privacy. I attempted to raise this point in several venues during the “deplatforming” fad and explained how the political pendulum made it a bad idea. The mob remained unconvinced.

> I’m looking at history and noticing that 99.9% of revolutions did not have the internet required to be successful.

You tell me how people are going to protest effectively in the face of:

- Ubiquitous visual surveillance and facial recognition

- Ubiquitous audio surveillance via pocket spies and things like Flock/ShotSpotter/other competing systems

- Ubiquitous ALPR systems and GPS-enabled “digital plates” being trialed in some areas

- Data mining coupled with AI behavioral analysis (sloppy but likely good enough)

- An increasing percentage of cars with remote shutdown capabilities

- The replacement of cash with digital currency that can be remotely disabled

The future looks a lot like China, but without their “economic miracle” that has kept the population satisfied.
by kragen | 2025-10-27 14:18:56+00:00
Oh, well, it turns out that keyboard sounds leak enough entropy to make it easy to attack even very strong passwords.

Microphones on devices such as Ring doorbell cameras are explicitly exfiltrating audio data out of your control whenever they're activated. Features like Alexa and Siri require, in some sense, 24/7 microphone activation, although normally that data isn't transmitted off-device except on explicit (vocal) user request. But that control is imposed by non-user-auditable device firmware that can be remotely updated at any time.

Finally, for a variety of reasons, it's becoming increasingly common to have a microphone active and transmitting data intentionally, often to public contexts like livestreaming video.

With the proliferation of such potentially vulnerable microphones in our daily lives, we should not rely too heavily on the secrecy of short strings that can easily leak through the audio channel.
by getnormality | 2025-10-27 14:19:24+00:00
Okay, so, leaving the shame thing behind us, the two gaps that I see:

1. If someone thinks the human self is essentially good and society makes it bad, they could still be concerned with how people can behave well in society. So the fact that Rousseau wrote about that in The Social Contract doesn't seem to contradict OP.

2. If it's possible to unite intent and action in a model of a good person, there could still be philosophies that are incompatible by virtue of how they overemphasize one or the other. So again, I don't see how this contradicts the OP.

I agree that the OP is probably full of hot air, but it's a common gloss on Rousseau I think. And definitely supported by the Discourse on Inequality, which says that people have good animal instincts, but their natural expression of these is inhibited by social constructs like language-based reasoning and property.
by jahongirsobirov | 2025-10-27 14:20:13+00:00
I built auth-verify, a lightweight Node.js auth utility that bundles:

secure OTP generation + resend/cooldown/attempt limits

flexible sender plugins (email, SMS providers, Telegram, or custom senders)

JWT helper with optional memory/Redis storage and cookie auto-set/verify helpers

session manager (memory or Redis) and small dev-mode features (register custom senders, test bots)

It’s aimed at devs who want a pragmatic, pluggable auth building block (not a full auth service). Key design goals:

minimal API: auth.otp.generate().set().message() and auth.jwt.sign(payload, '1h', { res })

allow devs to plug in their own senders (auth.register.sender() / auth.use(name).send(...)) or use built-in email/telegram/sms helpers

non-opinionated about frameworks — works with Express or custom servers

If you’ve built authentication plumbing before you know how much boilerplate this removes. I’d love feedback on API ergonomics, security concerns I missed, or integrations you’d like (e.g., WebAuthn, passwordless magic links, TOTP).

Repo: https://github.com/jahongir2007/auth-verify

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/auth-verify
by rpdillon | 2025-10-27 14:22:16+00:00
This would be an interesting discussion, but I don't think this article, or HN, are the right place. In short, the paper boils down to "sex sells" but wraps it in so much linguistic and semantic psychoanalytic sophistry that it's barely intelligible, and hardly actionable. Psychoanalysis is on very unstable foundations (see Popper's critiques), and this attempts to build on that, which doesn't compel belief, at least with me.
by evilduck | 2025-10-27 14:22:49+00:00
It's impossible to look at a Stimulus based site (or any similar SSR/hypermedia app) and learn anything useful beyond superficial web design from them because all of the meaningful work is being done on the other side of the network calls. Seeing a "data-action" or a "hx-swap" in the author's original text doesn't really help anyone learn anything without server code in hand. That basically means the point is moot because if it's an internal team member or open source wanting to learn from it, the original source vs. minified source would also be available.

It's also more complex to do JS builds in Ruby when Ruby isn't up to the task of doing builds performantly and the only good option is calling out to other binaries. That can also be viewed from the outside as "we painted ourselves into a corner, and now we will discuss the virtues of standing in corners". Compared to Bun, this feels like a dated perspective.

DHH has had a lot of opinions, he's not wrong on many things but he's also not universally right for all scenarios either and the world moved past him back in like 2010.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-10-27 14:23:00+00:00
The Tesla is very close. The Renault Scenic EV, which is a popular kind of car here, weighs 1842 kg according to Wikipedia. Not sure if it's considered an SUV, but it's taller and this model used to be considered a "family car".

The limit is very low, 1800 kg (4000 lbs) initially and it's lowered gradually to 1500 kgs (3300 lbs).

My 2005 gasoline-powered mercedes c coupé weighed 1600 kg. My dad's hybrid corolla weighs over 1500 kgs.

References: https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F3...
Ask HN: Dealing with "blocked" emails after DNS issue
by nvahalik | 2025-10-27 14:23:19+00:00
A couple of weeks ago, my root DNS server for my personal domain went offline (due to my own fault).

It took me a couple of days to figure out... and now I'm getting messaging that my email is "broken" across a number of sites a few that even refusing to email me even though my DNS is fixed.

Is there any recourse here?

It sounds like the answer is "no, there isn't any recourse because this is sender-specific". In my case (e.g.) SendGrid needs me to be whitelisted again.
by umjunsik132 | 2025-10-27 14:23:30+00:00
Hi HN Author here.

I built FactorizedAttention - a new attention mechanism based on the GWO framework. Instead of simple QK^T dot products, it uses factorized quadratic forms to model higher-order token interactions.

Testing on GPT-2 small + LoRA fine-tuning:

Math reasoning: 3.4% PPL improvement

Competitive programming: 3.2%

Python code: 1.9%

The bigger gains on reasoning tasks suggest the approach helps with complex relationships. Still early stage (only GPT-2 small), but the results are encouraging. Happy to answer questions! Code + repro steps in the repo.
Show HN: ISS in Real Time – 25 Years Aboard the International Space Station
by bfeist | 2025-10-27 14:25:00+00:00
Today my collaborator and I are releasing issinrealtime.org, a multimedia project that plays back every day onboard the ISS. Feedback welcomed.

Here's an article that was just released about it: https://www.collectspace.com/news/news-102725a-iss-in-real-t...

I also wrote a "making of" post about it here: https://benfeist.com/posts/iss-in-real-time/
by andsoitis | 2025-10-27 14:25:08+00:00
> I did mean "I can write/maintain a UI rich/polished

FWIW, you wrote that you actually HAVE done so, not just that you think you could:

"but I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today."

Unless one has actually done so, and maintained/extended over a period of time, and not solo but with others, I don't know that one can be certain that a UI toolkit is good enough; certainly, it would be hard to know what surprising edges and ergonomics there are to consider in one's evaluation.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-27 14:25:11+00:00
> I can't begin to count the number of times I've encountered someone who holds an ontological belief for why AGI cannot exist and then for some reason formulates it as a behavioralist criteria.

Unclear to me what you mean. I would certainly reject an ontological possibility of intelligent computers, where computation is defined by the Church-Turing thesis. It's not rocket science, but something difficult for some people to see without a sound and basic grasp of metaphysics and the foundations of CS. Magical thinking and superstition comes more easily then. (I've already given an explanation of this in other posts ad nauseam. In a number of cases, people get argumentative out of ignorance and misunderstanding.)

However, I don't reject out of hand the possibility of computers doing a pretty good job of simulating the appearance of intelligence. There's no robust reason to think that passing the Turing test implies intelligence. A good scarecrow looks human enough to many birds, but that doesn't mean it is human.

But the Turing test is not an especially rigorous test anyway. It appeals to the discernment of the observer, which is variable, and then there's the question of how much conversation or behavior, and in what range of circumstances, you need before you can make the call. Even in some unrealistic and idealized thought experiment, if a conversation with an AI were completely indiscernible with perfect discernment from a conversation with a human being, it would nonetheless lack a causal account of what was observed. You would have only shown a perfect correlation, at best.
by Lanedo | 2025-10-27 14:25:17+00:00
> Find the (minimal) AI prompt that lead to the generation of this article: [...]

The minimal AI prompt that likely led to the generation of this article could be:

"Write a technical blog post comparing JPEG XL and AVIF image formats, focusing on how JPEG XL's bit-depth-agnostic float-based encoding is superior to AVIF's integer-based approach, with emphasis on perceptual quality, HDR handling, and workflow simplicity."

This prompt captures the core elements:

- Technical comparison between two image formats

- Focus on JPEG XL's unique "ignoring bit depth" design

- Emphasis on perceptual vs. numerical quality

- Discussion of HDR and workflow benefits

- Tone and structure matching the published article

The prompt would have guided the AI to produce content that:

1. Explains the technical difference in encoding approaches

2. Demonstrates why JPEG XL's method is better

3. Provides real-world implications for users

4. Maintains the author's voice and technical depth

5. Follows the article's structure and emphasis on "perceptual intent" over bit precision
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-27 14:25:22+00:00
> As long as it's stored and processed locally

If it was any other company than Microsoft, I might have agreed with you that it's fine as long as those things happen.

But if history is any indication of the future, as soon as the tool gets popular, Microsoft will try to claw back whatever data it can about it's users, or add Pro features only available to signed up Microsoft users who pay, or something similar.

I think many of us have been burned by these companies doing bait-and-switch so many times, that it's almost impossible to not see the writing on the wall here and even spend five minutes trying it out.

I much rather wait for the inevitable (serious) FOSS clone that will be safer to use instead.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-27 14:25:29+00:00
> we're required to run a test

What do you mean with "we're required to"? Isn't that something you do with all libraries and something you as an engineer want to do, at the very least to prove correctness? Personally I couldn't imagine using a 3rd party library without at least have some basic tests to confirm correctness, even when I use PyTorch I do the same.
by kflansburg | 2025-10-27 14:25:43+00:00
> an if let expression over an RWLock assumed (reasonably, but incorrectly) in its else branch that the lock had been released. Instant and virulently contagious deadlock.

I believe this behavior is changing in the 2024 edition: https://doc.rust-lang.org/edition-guide/rust-2024/temporary-...
by samiv | 2025-10-27 14:25:54+00:00
Do these "modern" UI toolkits not have visual editors for knocking up the UI anymore?

One of the strengths of Qt based UIs is that the framework has IDE like tools where creating UIs is just a matter of drag and dropping the UI widgets into a layout. No need to write code by hand. Both QtCreator and QtDesigner can support this workflow.

Secondarily this comparison table has several problems when it comes to Qt.

* Their license is dual license LGPL *and* commercial. * Minimum binary size is definitely not 20MB but less. In general your apps distribution size depends on which features of the toolkit you're using. * Comparing "Syntax Highlighting" makes no sense... QSyntaxHighligther is an interface by which you can add your own syntax highlighting to any QDocument. You're welcome to use reg exps, parsers (such as tree-sitter) or whatever you want there. * QRichText supports markdown such as HTML.
by amluto | 2025-10-27 14:26:16+00:00
Hmm. Yesterday I stuck a >100 page PDF into a Claude Project and asked Claude to reference a table in the middle of it (I gave page numbers) to generate machine readable text. I watched with some bafflement as Claude convinced itself that the PDF wasn’t a PDF, but then it managed to recover all on its own and generated 100% correct output. (Well, 100% correct in terms of reading the PDF - it did get a bit confused a few times following my instructions.)
Show HN: Free Online Video Editor Powered by FFmpeg (Runs in the Browser)
by bingbing123 | 2025-10-27 14:26:21+00:00
I built a simple, free online video editor that runs entirely in your browser using FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly.

No installs, no uploads, no server load — the processing happens locally, so your videos never leave your machine.

Currently supported: • Trim/cut clips • Adjust playback speed • Export locally (MP4) • Privacy-safe (client-side only)

It’s surprisingly fast, and works well for: • Social video edits • Quick meme/training clips • Micro-content workflows • When you don’t want to open Premiere/FCP
by ksec | 2025-10-27 14:26:58+00:00
>but in my subjective testing with image sizes you would typically see on the web, avif wins every single time.

What is that in terms of bpp? Because according to Google Chrome 80-85% of we deliver images with bpp of 1.0 or above. I don't think most people realise that.

And in most if not all circumstances, jpeg XL performs better than AVIF at bpp 1.0 and above tested by professionals.
by yojo | 2025-10-27 14:27:01+00:00
A sustainable business has the capacity to help a lot more kids than an unfinished open source project that never gets released on iOS because no one wants to pay the developer fee.

This isn’t “HackVille by Zynga,” it’s an indie dev trying to make a product they believe in. I hope it succeeds and inspires more high quality edutainment.
by simiones | 2025-10-27 14:27:02+00:00
> You are just saying "well ackshually". I dare you to build a cabinet using the Hamiltonian. I double-dog-dare you.

The Hamiltoninan (and Lagrangian) are much more amenable to actual physical calculations, at least on a computer, than the Newtonian formulations of classical mechanics - but otherwise they are perfectly equivalent mathematically. I'm not sure where you'd need any kind of dynamical laws in the building of a cabinet, on the other hand. Are you trying to arrange for a system of inclined planes and pullies to slot the pieces into place?

> Perhaps more accurately, our senses mostly believe pre-Newtonion approximations, which is why it took until Newton to realize how inaccurate they were.

This is a bit of misnomer. Our senses and intuitions are in fact remarkably accurate for a certain range of values, and quite equivalent to what Newton's laws of motion say about these. To some extent, Newton "only" found a simple formalism to represent our existing intuitions. Our intuitions of course break down in other places, such as at very high speeds, or very high altitudes , where relativistic corrections start to become significant.

QM however is a paradigm shift in how the world is described, and it is completely non-intuitive, even in regimes where its predictions are fully aligned with our intuitions and senses. You can use QM to compute the collision of two ideal balls on an ideal plane, and the results will exactly match your intuitions. But the computation and even the representation of the system will not, in any way.
by ceejayoz | 2025-10-27 14:28:21+00:00
It is like hitting a bullet with a bullet. That's become feasible recently, for the same reasons SpaceX is able to land a spacecraft now; computers and sensors got better.

Unlike SpaceX's scenario, though, you've got an enemy involved, with a vested interest in defeating the system. SpaceX would have substantially more trouble landing if the landing ships had decoys and evasive maneuvers. It's probably viable against current North Korea, or "whoops we launched just one". It's probably not ever viable against Russia or China doing a full-on attack.

(In other words, it's like hitting a bullet capable of hiding and making evasive maneuvers with a bullet.)

Iran's attacks on Israel demonstrated this pretty well; some missiles still got through. Interceptors are expensive, often more so than the rounds they're intercepting.
by Melvyn-RR | 2025-10-27 14:29:39+00:00
I have been following the whole Digital Product Passport discussion in the EU, and the more I read about it, the less convinced I am that it will do what policymakers expect. The idea is that every product will have a scannable record with details like materials, repairs, and ownership history. Supposedly this will help resale and circularity. But if we are being honest, most people do not scan anything, and brands are already treating this like a box they have to tick before the deadline. From what I have seen, resale platforms already have their own ways of verifying and listing items, and they actually work. I am not sure why any of them would bother integrating with a new, untested system that adds another layer of bureaucracy.

Has anyone seen a real example of a traceability or passport system that consumers actually used, or that marketplaces found useful? I am trying to figure out if this is genuinely practical or just another compliance loop that will fade once the press releases stop.
by finalarbiter | 2025-10-27 14:29:45+00:00
Judging from your comment, you may find it intriguing to take a peek at the authors and books listed in Appendix N (Inspirational and Educational Reading[0]) from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide (1979). If you have any interest in the fantasy roleplaying sphere, this list should be all the more interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_N

On your latter question, I don't see much discussion surrounding The Magus by John Fowles (1965), which is one of my favorite fiction novels of all time.
by haskellshill | 2025-10-27 14:30:33+00:00
> They introduce zero ambiguity to the language

Well, to parsing it for machines yes, but for humans writing and reading it they are helpful. For example, if you have

<p> foo <p> bar

and change it to

<div> foo <div> bar

suddenly you've got a syntax error (or some quirks mode rendering with nested divs).

The "redundancy" of closing the tags acts basically like a checksum protecting against the "background radiation" of human editing. And if you're writing raw HTML without an editor that can autocomplete the closing tags then you're doing it wrong anyway. Yes that used to be common before and yes it's a useful backwards compatibility / newbie friendly feature for the language, but that doesn't mean you should use it if you know what you're doing.
by vlan121 | 2025-10-27 14:30:59+00:00
> I mostly lucked out. 2-3 accounts surfaced over the many things I saw and they seemed to prove they knew things. For example, one of these accounts posted things 2-4 years before an event would occur that ended up coming true. As if they knew ahead of time what would happen, as if they were part of intelligence or government or who knows what. A different account created software that predicted the future and many of the things they posted ended up coming true too.

We have to be cautious here, it's drifting towards conspiracy theories, my post is not innocent in this regard. But apart from that, I have to agree with you.

> In many areas, I don't fully understand. I use a simple trick that worked well: I evaluate each sentence to see if its true. Intellectually honest people who aren't trying to trick anyone speak the truth. They also speak it with simple words so there's no possibility of misinterpretation.

So not taking a look at the chain of thoughs but treating each sentence differently, makes sense.

> This might be the most effective trick. Many times I caught people say something which is their opinion, and which is false based on data I have, that is actually an attempt to express a fact they know in a way that will make them seem more important, or give them more attention, or I don't know what.

Seems like philosophical razor

>On the other hand, a social credit system may be a distraction from an actual credit system already in place: a money system.

That is very true.
Show HN: Pinpam, TPM2-backed pin authentication for Linux
by razighter777 | 2025-10-27 14:31:05+00:00
I made pinpam, a PAM module and utility to enable authentication on Linux with a brute-force resistant, TPM2-backed pin, intended to supplement (not replace) traditional password based Unix authentication. I created this because I wanted the convenience of a phone-like PIN unlock for my Linux device, with improved security over existing solutions like simply setting your password to a number. Generally a pin is less secure than a strong password, but they can be more convenient and easier for users to embrace. Please carefully consider your threat model when implementing any authentication service.